Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Purchase the book at penguinrandomhouse.com.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE first commandment (“I am the Lord your God who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slaves”) comes the second commandment—almost as though after a colon: “You shall have no other gods in My presence.” The Exodus represents a break for freedom, and the construction of a new identity based on that freedom. An important aspect of freedom is the separation not just from Egypt but from the fascination with Egypt’s gods. The Exodus is an iconoclastic project; entering a covenant with the One God is an attempt to break the idolatrous spell.
Eric Santner offers a psychoanalytic understanding of what he calls Egyptomania. His concept of Egyptomania can be connected with the rabbinic wordplay on Mitzraim/meitzarim—Egypt/straits. In this symbolic world, Egypt becomes a Jewish cultural memory, the site of constraint, of constriction, angst, anguish. This rigidity is associated with the practice of idolatry. Freedom would mean loosening the grip of the fascinations and defense mechanisms of a hindered life. …
The biblical law is clear: “They shall no longer offer their sacrifices to the goat demons after whom they stray. This shall be to them a law, for all time, throughout the ages” (Lev. 17:7). But the very force of this taboo indicates the counterpressure of reality. For, in fact, the fascination and the struggle with the goats and bulls of the past will linger. Idolatry will return periodically, in repressed form, to create perpetual unease.
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