Liberation

Open the gates, that the righteous nation may enter, the one that remains faithful. Isaiah 26:2  NASB

Remains faithful – What is the character of a people (a nation) that remains faithful?  Isaiah’s word choice here (employing the verb šāmar and the derived adjective from ʾāman) tells us that this people, this gôy (nation), is a people who guards, watches, follows with fidelity, with trust.  What does that mean?  In a word—liberation.

How is trusting watchfulness equated with liberation?  That’s the story of the Exodus:

Observing God’s mandate, then, may imply being vigilant, sustaining a sense of trust, keeping faith with a future yet to evolve.  In a word, waiting.  It also evokes a kind of freedom from what Eric Santner calls ‘the repetition compulsions—the Egyptomaniacal labors—that sustain idolatrous attachments.’  Santner argues that the Exodus from Egypt is also—and perhaps most significantly—a liberation from the ‘Egyptian mania’ that underpins the Golden Calf.  Some rigidity, some fixation, keeps the people enslaved, addicted.  In Hasidic thought, this mania is called, simply, idolatry.  Exodus is liberation from this slavery.[1]

Let’s reconsider the Exodus.  Clearly it is more than an historical event in the biblical context.  It is also a symbolic release from a special kind of captivity, a captivity that does more than enslave the body.  Being in Egypt is being held in the power of fantasy.  It is being held in a world that is under control, where routine, even life-threatening routine, holds sway over human actions because slaves prefer the fantasy of control over the freedom of an uncertain future.  In Egypt, knowing what will happen because it has already happened again and again is better than not knowing what will happen next, even if this knowing requires giving up the freedom to choose.  This is not news.  Empire after empire has leveraged the human fear of the unknown as a means to acquire power.  “Tell them that if they follow what we say they will be safe” is all that’s necessary to initiate humanity’s voluntary relinquishing of choice.  The rigidity of guaranteed routine offsets the terror of choosing.

The Bible calls this idolatry.  Why?  Not only because it rejects God’s sovereignty, placing some human or human institution in the position of ultimate power, but also because it denies the essential characteristic of created Man, that is, embracing the nexus of choice in uncertainty.  Wherever humanity attempts to control the future, through whatever means, idolatry lies in the wait.  “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord, and He might have also added, “and so is what will happen next.”  The reason the Exodus is a constant theme of the biblical narrative is that we all must experience an Exodus from our fantasies about control.  The people who remain faithful are not simply those who meticulously adhere to the Torah.  They are those who have been released from their need to control life.  Exodus is liberation from an addiction to be in charge, even if only in our dreams.

Topical Index:  Exodus, idolatry, addiction, control, future, Isaiah 26:2

[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken, 2022), p. 45.