House of Study

The most theologically shocking moment in Exodus is not when God appears in the burning bush, or splits the Sea of Reeds, or even when he gives the Ten Commandments at Sinai. It is when God remembers his covenant with Israel.

How can a God who was so close at hand in Genesis that he spoke directly to Abraham, overheard Sarah laughing, and wrestled with Jacob "face to face, " be so far away when their descendants are enslaved in Egypt? The "peshat," or plain sense, of Exodus suggests an answer that is both simple and horrifying: God, who spent the better part of Genesis cultivating the people of Israel, has, by only the second chapter of Exodus, forgotten that they are His nation and, therefore, His responsibility. Here, stripped bare, lies the theological root of one of the deepest fears in the collective Jewish psyche, the fear of forgetting and being forgotten.

And yet, according to the Haggadah, there is a remedy for God's amnesia: Israel's voice, our voice. Just as, later in  Exodus, Moses commands Israel to "remember this day on which you departed from Egypt, from the house of bondage, for with a strong hand God removed you from here," so too, if we want a relationship with God, we must remind Him, with wails if necessary, to remember His covenant with us. 

But what would those wails look like today?  And how would we know if God heard them?


haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story
Source: New American Haggadah