There's a really interesting, if meandering, Op-Ed today at the JPost. About Sigmund Freud's research and analysis of Moses, and the Exodus. His thoughts on the Jewish people.
To me, it feels dated, as all things psychoanalytical feel dated. Simplified. Boxed in.
But it also feels smart, and curious, and it's not something I've thought much about:
So what was the essence of Judaism that Freud held on to? He believed in the chain of tradition which has to have an anchor, what he would call a collective repressed memory. The repression was due to the fact that the Children of Israel, according to Freud, eventually rose up and killed Moses, their harsh tormentor, and then regretted the act, but necessarily repressed the memory of it. Freud related that to the case of the first humans, who lived in small groups where the sons were totally subservient to the one dominant father, who alone has all the females and against whom the sons eventually rise up to kill and consume his flesh.
The question then remains as to how to focus on this whole drama of Moses and the Israelites. This is where Freud insists on the centrality of the Exodus. It is the one over-arching piece of folk history that binds all the sons of Israel together. It is the story of the coming out of Egypt that binds us to the story of Moses, and the belief in the one and only God that Moses, the giver of harsh laws, discovered for us.
It is the essential piece of mnemo-history that we believe and repeat together each year, and throughout the year – the going out of Egypt, when God and the Children of Israel had the purest of relationships in the desert, before the death of Moses and the temporary reversion to other cults.
And it resonates for me. Because it's true that the Exodus (however historically acurate it may or may not be) resonates for me. Such a narrative– a story about freedom from tyranny, the breaking of one's own chains, and also the assistance of a greater force–seems to me to be necessary. We need it.
We need to believe in our own ability to free ourselves, to speak truth to power, to shout down Pharoah… and the same time we need to believe that we won't HAVE to free ourselves. We want to think someone is watching over us, parting the sea at our feet.
But I also find myself ruminating about Freud's desire to believe in Moses. About how Freud might have seen himself as a Moses-figure… setting his people free from a tradition he believed to be a falsehood. A liberator in his own right. Living (as Moses lived) in a time of tyranny, fiercely aware of how much his people were tied to their myths…. how much they needed them.
Too complicated for me to unpack this minute. Go read the story!