Tonight’s sermon is in dialogue with my column in this week’s AdKan, where I asked what some may find to be a provocative question: What if the Exodus never happened?
In that piece, I summarised what most contemporary archaeologists tell us: that there is no direct evidence of a mass Israelite presence in ancient Egypt, no archaeological trace of hundreds of thousands of people travelling through the wilderness, no record of Pharaoh’s armies drowning in the sea. This is not news in academic circles, but it still challenges many of us who grew up believing that the Exodus was not only sacred, but historically verifiable.
I mentioned how, in 2001, a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles gave a Pesach sermon in which he openly raised that question. He told his congregation that the Exodus, in the way it is described in the Torah, probably did not happen. And the reaction was intense—some were deeply appreciative of his intellectual honesty, while others were shaken. The discussion went so far as to land on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.
And I also mentioned the work of Richard Elliott Friedman, whose book The Exodus offers a nuanced and respectful suggestion: that while the large-scale Exodus may not have occurred, a smaller group—perhaps the Levites—did leave Egypt, and brought with them a memory of slavery and divine liberation. Over time, that memory was adopted by the wider Israelite community, becoming the foundational story we now tell each year.
But as I wrote in the column, and as I want to explore more deeply tonight, the question that really matters is not about historical certainty. It’s about how we understand truth.
Elie Wiesel once wrote, “Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.” It’s a striking sentence—and one that I believe every religious person should sit with for a while.
Wiesel’s words remind us that there are different kinds of truth. Some truths can be weighed, measured, confirmed by excavation or DNA. But others live in stories, in rituals, in values that shape our lives. The Exodus, whether it happened as written or not, is one of those stories. It has shaped Jewish identity, Jewish ethics, and Jewish theology for more than three thousand years.
But how do we hold onto a story like that—lovingly, meaningfully—once we know that it may not have happened in the way we were first taught?
Here I want to turn to the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and his idea of the second naïveté.
Ricoeur describes three stages in our relationship with sacred stories. The first is what he calls first naïveté—a stage of uncritical belief. As children, or even as adults entering a religious tradition, we accept the stories at face value. The sea split. The manna fell. The bush burned. No questions asked.
Then comes the critical stage. We grow older. We study. We ask hard questions. We read biblical scholarship. We encounter contradictions. We learn that many cultures have flood stories. We discover that the Torah may have been written by multiple hands across generations. For many, this critical stage is painful. Some try to retreat to the certainty of literalism. Others walk away from religion altogether, believing that if the stories aren’t factually true, they must be meaningless.
But Ricoeur offers a third possibility: the second naïveté. This is not a return to innocence, but a movement forward. After the struggle, after the questions, we learn to read the stories again—not as newspaper reports, but as carriers of profound symbolic and ethical truth. We are no longer asking, Did this happen? We are asking, What does this mean? What does it teach me?
This is a religious maturity that does not ask us to lie to ourselves about history, but neither does it allow cynicism to rule. It invites us to re-enter the story with open eyes and full hearts.
This is what allowed us to sit at the Seder table with integrity. We could say, as the Haggadah does, “In every generation, each person must see themselves as if they came out of Egypt”—not because we were pretending, but because we were participating. The “as if” is not a disclaimer; it is the point. Pesach is, essentially, about re-commitment.
The Exodus story becomes a lens through which we see the world. It teaches us to stand with the vulnerable. It teaches us to remember where we came from. It teaches us that redemption is possible, but never easy. These are truths that do not need to be excavated. They need to be lived.
And that brings us to our current religious moment. I believe that Judaism today must be built not on first naïveté—not on insisting that every word of the Torah is literal truth—but on the kind of faith that has walked through the desert of doubt and come out the other side. A Judaism that is not afraid of scholarship, but also not paralysed by it. A Judaism that reads critically, but prays with heart. A Judaism that tells its stories not to make us feel superior, but to make us more compassionate.
We are not commanded to prove the Exodus. We are commanded to remember it. Not to win arguments, but to build character. Not to be archaeologists, but to be just.
So tonight, I invite each of us to take that step toward second naïveté. Let the story live in you—not as a fact to be verified, but as a calling to be answered. Even if we were not there, the story is still ours. Even if it did not happen, it can still be true.
Because, as Wiesel taught us, some events do take place but are not true—and others are, although they never occurred.
Shabbat shalom and chag sameach.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário