Why was our status as a nation forged in the horrible forced-labor camp known as Mitzrayim?

As we begin reading Chumash Shemos, we see that the Torah shifts its focus from the individual progenitors of our nation — the Avos and Imahos and the children of Yaakov — and begins the story of Klal Yisrael, the Jewish People as a nation.

And where does our glorious history begin? What was the birthplace of Am Yisrael? A huge forced-labor camp. It was there, in Mitzrayim, that we became a nation.

The Torah describes the radical turnabout that occurred in the land of the Nile, which dragged Bnei Yisrael down from the pinnacle of honor and prestige they had enjoyed during Yosef’s time as viceroy of Egypt, to the abyss of enslavement, humiliation, and oppression:

“And they appointed over them tax collectors to afflict them with their burdens…” (Shemos 1:11).

Nobody is happy when the tax collectors come around, and many of us feel afflicted by the burden of income tax. But from a government’s point of view, tax revenues are an important part of the national treasury. The state needs that money to fund the services it provides for its citizens. Since when does a government employ taxation officials for the express purpose of afflicting the people?

Since Mitzrayim.

The Netziv explains in Ha’amek Davar:

“And these officials would be wicked and deliberately inflict torment on them, not only for the purpose of collecting tax, but in order ‘to afflict them with their burdens,’ thus taxing their strength… through torture, abuse, and beating.”

Pharaoh’s aim was not to fill the royal coffers, but rather to humiliate the Hebrew race and damage its self-image. Crushing their dignity was much more important to him than any benefit to be had from their labor in building the cities of Pisom and Ramses.

In modern times, Auschwitz operated on the same principle.

“For what purpose,” asked French Jewish scholar, Professor Andrè Neher, “does Pharaoh refuse to supply the slaves with straw, without which they cannot make bricks? And moreover, he demands that they meet the same daily production quota as before…. This forced labor for its own sake was meant to oppress the people doing it…. We are entering, therefore, into the dark and murky realm of the concentration camps.”

The sadistic taskmasters of Egypt would have felt quite at home as employees of the Third Reich.

“Drowning the male infants in the Nile clearly evokes an association with modern genocide… the demeaning labor is all a show. The victims are the actors, while the taskmasters are the spectators, looking on gleefully. In Mitzrayim as in Auschwitz, the whip indicates the spectator’s lively attention to the victim’s acting” (Andrè Neher, Moses, p. 104).

But it is precisely here in this Egyptian concentration camp, at their darkest hour, that these beaten, broken slaves are described as “a People”: “And I shall take you to Me a People, and I shall be to you a G-d” (Shemos 6:7).

Now the time is ripe for forming the new nation — a nation unlike any other, a nation born of paradox. A nation that emerged at the lowest point in its life, at a point where any other nation would simply be obliterated. A people that cast off the shackles of Egyptian captivity and went on to display immunity, throughout millennia, to all the laws of history that brought down mighty nations and empires. By its very existence, this people would proclaim its independence of its physical surroundings, proclaim that it could exist as a cohesive nation even when it had no homeland, no structured government, no flag, and no army.

The very fact that their nationhood was proclaimed in that time and place, and under those conditions, was what made them a free nation in the full sense, and not, as Rav Hirsch points out, dependent on the external conditions that had determined the events of world history up until that point. Thus, the Egyptian exile and our liberation from it came to teach something about the Almighty G-d, Maker of all laws, Who imbued this nation with its spiritual freedom. And this is why the commentators compare Yetzias Mitzrayim, the story of the nation’s formation, to the story of Brias Ha’olam, the world’s creation.

The question of why Bnei Yisrael needed to suffer in exile has been addressed by many commentators, but if we look at the side effects of galus Mitzrayim and the subsequent redemption from that horrid place on the 49th level of tumah, we see something else: the contribution of the Jewish People to humanity as a whole. According to Rav Hirsch, “The appearance of Avraham’s nation would reawaken consciousness of liberty and release the whole world from its shackles.”

Today, we know that the Exodus made a deep impression on humanity even at the time, and it is embedded in the consciousness of all nations that received the monotheistic tradition of the Torah, filtered through Christianity and Islam. The glory of Yetzias Mitzrayim shone on the whole world, and most brilliantly on the Western world. Its message kindled the imaginations of freedom fighters everywhere, advanced the ideal of equality for all who are created in G-d’s image, and set the wheels of revolution moving many a time throughout the generations. In the era of slavery in America, the black slaves were inspired by the Biblical story of the Exodus to sing their anthem of freedom, “When Israel was in Egypt-land... let my people go.” And the abolitionists who fought on their behalf were equally inspired by the Bible, as we see in the lyrics to songs such as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

To us, the Jewish People, galus Mitzrayim gave perpetual survival among the peoples of the world. The character of our nation’s birth, which flies in the face of historical logic, is the character of the nation itself. To this day, our nation draws its vitality from the powers it was endowed with in that ancient Auschwitz. A 19th-century French Catholic writer contemplated the Jewish People’s history and was inspired to depict it metaphorically:

“Like the hawk in the clouds, this little nation does not come to life except when it is buffeted by storm winds that would sink mighty ships. It rediscovers its wings and renews its strength, its potency, and its energy, and recovers the strength of its first foundations. It rides the storm winds, holding on tight while great states fall into the depths as they foolishly attack one another. That which is liable to destroy any other human society tends to revitalize this one and restore it to its original form” (Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre).

The secret of our emergence as a people — davka in Mitzrayim — lives in us eternally. Time and again, after every period of descent, that deeply embedded power restores us to our original form as the nation whose everlasting identity crystallized 40 days later when we stood at Har Sinai.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 741)