Parashat Eikev
Were We Living in Egypt?
This week, my husband and I stole a few hours in Manhattan to do the thing we love best: wandering familiar places with no agenda. We drifted through the Met, past the Astor Chinese Garden Court and the Impressionist galleries, and landed, as we always do, in the Egyptian wing.
I had just reread this week’s parasha, Eikev, where Moses draws a pointed contrast between Egypt and the land his people are about to enter.
Maybe that’s why the wing hit differently this time. I’ve always been awed by the power on display there, but now I kept thinking about the sheer abundance of it: hall after hall of relics, and this just one museum among many.
The Pharaohs left us their statues and their temples. Moses left us no artifacts. We don’t even know where he is buried.
But standing by the Temple of Dendur, I watched the rainy-day crowds and wondered aloud: how many of these people belong to a faith shaped by Moses? Half? More?
And how many are disciples of ancient Egypt? Not one.
This isn’t an accident. Moses knew something about eternity that the Pharaohs, with all their attempts to conquer death, never grasped.
This week’s parasha helps us understand what Moses knew. And it’s a teaching we need right now.
At a moment when we Jews crave safety and certainty more than we have in generations, Moses teaches us that chasing certainty is how great empires end up in museums.
If you handed any of us a pen and asked us to list everything wrong with ancient Egypt, we’d fill the page quickly. A society built on slave labor. Contempt for human dignity. God-kings who ruled absolutely. The tyranny of empire.
Moses names all of it. We are in the middle of the last speech of his life, and he keeps circling back, warning the people not to become Egypt.
Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s palace; he knows how seductive that world can be. He warns about power and opulence, about nations so intoxicated with themselves that they say the words he dreads most: “My power and the might of my hand have made me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17).
But then Moses names a flaw of Egypt most of us would never think to put on our list:
“For the land that you are about to enter is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come.
There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own foot, like a vegetable garden; but the land you are about to cross into... drinks its water from the rains of heaven.” (Deut. 11:10-11)
Moses is contrasting the water systems of Egypt and the land of Israel.
Egypt has almost no rainfall. Instead, it was organized around the Nile: a river that flooded on schedule, every single year, so reliably that the Egyptians built their calendar around it.
The land of Israel offers nothing of the kind. Its farmers watch the sky. Rain comes in its season or it doesn’t.
The Talmud would later sharpen this idea, teaching that rain is a key God alone holds, entrusted to no intermediary (Ta’anit 2a). What the rabbis meant is that unlike other systems in nature, rain, and all that depends on it, requires direct divine involvement.
If so, to leave Egypt for Canaan was to trade the most predictable agricultural system in the ancient world for total dependence on heaven.
In other words, Moses tells the Israelites that rejecting Egypt means rejecting economic predictability itself, embracing intentional vulnerability and dependency.
This is deeply counterintuitive. Certainty and security are what every empire promises and what every one of us craves. Peter Berger, one of the great sociologists of how human beings make meaning, argued that we are driven by a deep need to feel the world is ordered and predictable.
But Moses insists that Egypt-like certainty and predictability lead away from covenantal greatness. He believed we could only become our fullest selves in a land where our desperation for rain teaches us the most important skill of all: to look up.
I remember feeling, as a girl, that history had passed me by. I had grown up on stories of heroes tested by war and exile, and I envied them. I believed we lived at the end of history, in a society so stable it had become, in Ross Douthat’s terms, decadent. Nothing great would ever be asked of me.
Then, around 2015 or 2016, as I was becoming a mother, something shifted. (You may date it differently; each of us has our own moment.) The world order we took as a given began to look unstable, and a low hum of anxiety set in that has only grown louder, through COVID, through October 7th.
I have spent years mourning this. But this year, as I’ve read Moses’ final speech, I’ve started wondering if it really was all good back then.
Put differently: were we living in Egypt? I don’t mean the Egypt of slavery; I mean the Egypt of the Nile.
For three generations after the Second World War, American Jews lived inside the most predictable, self-watering system our people has ever known. We assumed we made it. We assumed Jewish history gave way to American Jewish history.
What did all that certainty do to us spiritually? I think we stopped looking up; dependence on God became a metaphor. I think we even stopped needing each other. We became intoxicated with wealth and prestige, hungry for a permanence of our own. And slowly we came to believe the abundance around us was entirely our own making
Let me be honest: I am not so righteous. If the choice were mine, I would take back the Nile.
But we cannot choose the world we live in. We can only choose the people we become in it.
Moses insisted uncertainty could make us humbler, more dependent on God and on one another.
So this is what I am trying to work on, and what I hope we might work on together: recovering the habits that the Nile made unnecessary.
To pray as if our future is not entirely in our hands. To build Jewish communities that assume we will need one another. To hold our success with gratitude instead of entitlement. To raise children who know that security is a blessing, not a birthright.
The Nile built monuments that became museum pieces. Rain built a people that is still here. If Moses was right, perhaps this uncertain season is not only something to survive, but the very ground from which a deeper Jewish future can grow.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
Noam and I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Rabbi Shai Held for a powerful conversation centered on his book, Judaism Is About Love.
Together, we explored big questions: What is love? How does Judaism ask us to balance love for our families, the Jewish people, and humanity as a whole? What does it mean to experience God’s love, and what kind of people does that love call us to become?
I read Shai’s book when it was first published, but this conversation took me into an even deeper engagement with his ideas—and with some of the biggest questions about what it means to be human.
Listen here or watch below!
A very meaningful essay, as usual. Yes, we need to look up, express our gratitude, but also do our part to build a Jewish future.
Thank you that is just beautiful. The whole contemplation and invitation of it.