You Can Take Moses Out of Egypt, but…: Shemot
Shemot: Exodus 1:1-6:1
This week marks the beginning of the Exodus story with Moses as its central character. At its core, this story is one of liberation. And beneath its literal level, it is about the inner spiritual journey of liberation told through a character named Moses; a stand-in for all our spiritual journeys.
Moses is raised as an Egyptian in Pharaoh’s court. His privileged elitist upbringing reflects an egocentric narrow level of consciousness—the Hebrew word for Egypt being understood here to mean “narrow” or “constricted.” Many midrashic stories paint Moses as a deeply spiritual and exceedingly bright youth, growing up in a place that was too constricting for his soaring spirit. As he matures, he begins to wrestle with his inner egotistic Egyptian taskmaster that keeps his spiritual being in shackles, brutalizing it and beating it into submission. But as Torah relates, one day, “Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen,” [Exod. 2:11] and killed him. The rabbis of the Midrash tell us that Moses kills the Egyptian by pronouncing God’s Name. In a first brief flash of awakening, and through Divine Grace, Moses temporarily transcends his ego (though the biblical image is that of killing). But the inner voices of fear soon take over again, and though Moses is now aware that—after such an experience—he will never be able to go back to Pharaoh’s court, he is also afraid of facing the consequences of his awakening, so he flees in an attempt to hide away from his uncovered higher Self.
Now you can run, but you can’t hide. When fear drives him to run away, Torah describes Moses ending up in the land of Midian (when Midian means “striving” in Hebrew) and sitting down by a well: the life-giving inner Source. In Midian he meets Jethro (whose name means “Preeminent One,”) a priest who fathered seven daughters. Kabbalists understand Jethro to represent the Divine Masculine transcendent principle, and his seven lower Sefirot (stages of Divine emanation as the manifest universe) as representing the Divine feminine principles. And so Moses begins a time of spiritual initiation, striving to uncover the deeper Truth of his being, while shepherding the inner flock of the Preeminent One; his mentor.
And this leads up to the story of the burning bush. On that day, Moses comes to the mountain of God called Horeb, which can be understood to mean “solitude,” and describes the state of consciousness one reaches prior to experiencing revelation. There, Moses is startled by a great Light awakening within him that transcends human rational understanding. He realizes that the burning Light that calls his name is the Light that he is, and he exclaims “Hineni! – Here, I am!” – this blazing Light of Being! In that moment Moses awakens to the nondual Light that is all, the “I AM” that is Is-ness itself yet transcends it at the same time. The very next verse, however, God tells him to go back and free the parts of self that are still stuck in his Egypt, to liberate those shadow parts of his being still repressed, still denied; for enlightenment doesn’t deal with healing the conditioned self. But Moses resists. He argues with God that he doesn’t want to go back to Egypt; that he won’t be able to free those parts of self forever enslaved to fear and to the entrenched patterns of ego. Why not stay in this blissful state of consciousness instead? The spiritual path, however, does not end with enlightenment. In a way, it begins there. But now, with the Light of Nondual Understanding one is called to do the work that will illuminate the darkest corners of one’s psyche. And as we will see, it will take Moses the rest of his life, after having taken himself out of Egypt, to take Egypt out of himself.