Long Story Short: Abram and Sarai's Time in Egypt
Over the last few weeks, I've been enjoying the show Long Story Short on Netflix -- it's probably the Jew-iest cartoon I've ever seen! The show features the many colorful characters in the dysfunctional Schwooper family, delving deep into their relationships with one another, their personal decisions and professional lives. To me, the most compelling and interesting aspect of it is that each episode takes place across two different years, such that the story-arc of every installment follows the characters across the decades from childhood to adulthood, the content tied together thematically. (The New York Times review of the show, published this August, referred to this as "time travel, family style.") This structural frame enables creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg to probe how the themes, tendencies or conflicts that manifest in an early chapter of the characters' lives tie into what's to come later, thus linking the personality quirks and odd (and usually comical) situations that manifest later in adulthood to key developmental moments. My brain has enjoyed the puzzle of trying to figure out how the disparate narrative pieces fit together, and understand what makes this family tick.
This week's Torah portion, Lecha L'cha, does something similar with the story of Abram and Sarai's time in Egypt. Here is the short story in its entirety, from Gen. 12:10-13:1:
There was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. If the Egyptians see you, and think, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me and let you live. Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you.”
When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw how very beautiful the woman was. Pharaoh’s courtiers saw her and praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s palace. And because of her, it went well with Abram; he acquired sheep, oxen, asses, male and female slaves, she-asses, and camels.
But Adonai afflicted Pharaoh and his household with mighty plagues on account of Sarai, the wife of Abram. Pharaoh sent for Abram and said, “What is this you have done to me! Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her as my wife? Now, here is your wife; take her and begone!”
And Pharaoh put agents in charge of him, and they sent him off with his wife and all that he possessed. From Egypt, Abram went up into the Negeb, with his wife and all that he possessed, together with Lot.
This narrative has generated lots of commentary, not least because similar "wife-sister narratives" appear an additional two times in Genesis (see chapters 20 and 26). Classical commentators -- always seeking to smooth out the Torah's text and reconcile inconsistencies -- struggle to understand why Abram, held up as a moral exemplar, would have lied about this relationship; some of them argue that Sarai was, in fact, his half-sister. Using a very different historical-critical lens, scholars have read this text against the backdrop of Ancient Near Eastern mythology; as the Jewish Encyclopedia explains, the purpose of this patterned story "is to extol the heroines as most beautiful and show that the Patriarchs were under the special protection of the Deity." And over more recent decades, feminists like Phyllis Trible (who died this month at the age of 92 - click here to listen to an NPR remembrance) have called these stories "texts of terror," noting that the patriarch makes his wife a mere pawn in negotiations; contemporary feminist midrashim seek to restore Sarai's voice.
For me, as I re-encountered this story about Abram and Sarai this week, the one piece that jumped out at me most is the degree to which the language, details and arc of this narrative prefigures the Exodus story. Some of the specific connections I noticed include:
a famine in the land, which sends Abram down to Egypt (the same will happen in three generations with Joseph and his brothers),
the text's emphasis of a character's great physical attractiveness, and a near-miss sexual encounter (here, between Sarai and Pharaoh; later, with Joseph and Potiphar's wife),
affliction and plagues upon Pharaoh and his house,
the "take her and begone" ending (reminiscent of Pharaoh's ultimate release-under-duress of the enslaved Israelites).
Overall, this text tells a very similar story to the grand Exodus narrative, but in miniature: a quick version of our ancestors going down to Egypt, getting ensnared there, relying on Divine intervention to get out, and ultimately being restored to freedom.
Lest you think it's too much of a stretch to argue that the family narrative of Genesis is aware of the larger national story to come in Exodus and consciously foreshadowing and setting it up, I also present to you two verses from later in this same Torah portion of Lech Lecha -- Gen 15:13-14 -- that come as God reasserts the covenant with Abraham, promising to be his shield (magen) and to make his offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky:
And [God] said to Abram, “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years; but I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end they shall go free with great wealth.
That more explicit reference supports my claim: that the text of our parasha purposefully points the reader towards the Exodus story, drawing a clear parallel between these two chapters of our people's history.
As I shared this idea with Rabbi Jay and asked him why he thought the text was connecting dots in this way, he proposed that "maybe the whole point is to train us to see parallels so we can make different choices."
I think Rabbi Jay is right, and his words prompted me to think about the echoes of history that may be ringing loudly in our ears at this particular moment in time. There are, of course, multiple possible antecedents to any moment, and to some extent, this kind of mapping always exists "in the eyes of the beholder." But, to give a couple of recent examples: at the No Kings Rally a couple weeks ago, I saw a number of signs with sentiments like "We want America, not 1930s Germany"; this week, historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote a piece about how the American economic policies of the 1920s -- tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, rebates and tax abatements worth billions -- led to short-term economic growth followed by an enormous stock market crash in late October 1929. "History does not repeat itself, but it does often rhyme," Mark Twain is reputed to have said. In both of these cases, the mapping of the past onto our present may or may not ultimately ring true, as we are still living inside an unfolding story. There is a possibility that these chapters of history will indeed end up "rhyming," and a possibility that they will not... but that depends on what happens next, which is -- at least in part -- up to us.
I hope that Parashat Lech Lecha's story of Abram and Sarai going down to Egypt can serve as a helpful reminder to us, this week, that we have the ability to see patterns in stories and in history and to act with agency. To that end, I hope that EVERY member of the Kavana community who is eligible to do so will cast a ballot before the 8pm deadline in this coming Tuesday's election. Let's listen for echoes, patterns, and rhymes, and then use the tools at our disposal to shape the stories of our lives in the directions of our choosing.
Shabbat Shalom (and if you do happen to watch an episode of Long Story Short, drop me a line and let me know what you think of it),
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum
