Narrative Distance: Parashat Sh’mot

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Parashat Sh’mot
Exodus 1:1-6:1

With this book we begin speaking about the Jewish people as a nation. Until now we have been speaking about individuals. But now the Children of Israel are called a people “`am” for the first time. So they are called by Pharaoh, by Moses, by taskmasters, by God.

And with this shift we enter, almost imperceptibly, into a change of the nature of the voice of the Biblical Narrator. From the start of the Torah, from The Beginning, we have heard a voice of a storyteller who is not God or any identifiable being. The voice is the voice of an all-knowing narrator who can tell us what God does and thinks and says, and what everyone else says or does or wants. But the narrator is not God, or Laban or Tamar, or any other character in the story. We accept this voice naturally, for it tells us of events and personae – such as Noah or Sarah – long gone.

It takes some close and attentive reading, then, to realize that the Book of Exodus, and the rest of the Torah (- until Deuteronomy) maintains this narrative distancing from the characters of the story – even though this is actually our story – and we are still here, telling the story and hearing it! By maintaining this voice and not changing it, the Torah really changes its nature. It refuses to speak about the Children of Israel in the first person, although that would certainly be a narrative option. Instead of the Torah saying, “And Egypt enslaved the Children of Israel oppressively, and they embittered their lives with hard work…” (Ex. 1:13-14), shouldn’t the Torah have said, “And they embittered our lives with hard work”?

Indeed, this is exactly the way we speak – in the first person – when we tell the story at the Passover seder. And this is exactly the way Moses speaks when he gives his final oration, the Book of Deuteronomy. There we hear him say, “The Eternal, our Almighty God, spoke to us at Horeb…” (Deut. 1:6) In Deuteronomy our story is told as our story. But not in Exodus or the following two books. The narrator’s voice in these other books is thus differentiated from the voice of a human participant in the story. Although we are meant to identify totally with every letter and word and sentence of this text, nevertheless, we are held at a distance from it. We are not given complete ownership of our own story in this sacred text, though we are commanded to subsequently tell the story in our own words and in first person.

What are the implications of this narrative decision? By taking away the ability of the Jewish people to read out their story in first-person, the text opens up at least two possibilities, one inspiring and one terrifying. The inspiring possibility is that the text is now opened for reading by anyone, and not just by the Jewish people. Indeed, this book has become a sacred source of story and guidance for billions of people throughout human history and across the globe. The terrifying possibility is that, with the Jewish people spoken of in third-person, the eternal continuation of the people is not to be taken as assured. Methusalah is a hoary legend by now. Will the Jews also become a distant memory? By detaching herself from the narrative grasp of the Jewish people, the Torah puts a mirror up to our faces and confronts us with a challenge – re-take the Torah for ourselves or lose her and ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Greenstein

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Photo by Frederik Højfeldt Nielsen on Unsplash

Thank you to John Lasiter for suggesting the title and selecting an image for this Torah Sparks – Rabbi Greenstein

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