Most of us think we know the story of the Exodus. The Israelites who are oppressed and enslaved by Pharaoh are liberated by God through Moses. This story of slavery and freedom is our foundational Jewish story. It not only forms the basis for our holiday of Passover but is an intimate part of daily and Shabbat prayers. And, our entire focus on social justice and repairing the world comes from this story because when the Torah demands that the Israelites take care not to oppress the stranger, they are repeatedly reminded why: “For you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Ex 23:9)
And yet, in many rabbinic sources, the story takes on a different focus. This narrative of slavery and freedom becomes a tale of gratitude and ingratitude. The book of Exodus begins on an ominous note: The text tells us that “a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” (1:8) This is a surprising turn of events because according to the Book of Genesis, Joseph was enormously powerful, second in power only to Pharaoh himself. He effectively controls the Egyptian economy and amasses tremendous wealth for Pharaoh. How is it possible that the new Pharaoh does not even know him?
The midrash, a rabbinic commentary explains that “Pharaoh did know Joseph but did not pay him adequate attention, and was ungrateful to him. And in the end, he was ungrateful to God as well as it says, ‘I do not know Adonai.’ (Midrash HaGadol on Ex 1:8). In other words, when the Torah tells us that Pharaoh did not “know Joseph,” it means to suggest not that Pharaoh was unacquainted with Joseph, but rather that he did not acknowledge Joseph and the great debt that Egypt as a whole, and Pharaoh in particular, owed him.
Pharaoh is ungrateful both to Joseph and to God. The midrash insists that these two types of ingratitude are of one piece, and even that one leads almost inevitably to the other; gratitude and ingratitude are ways of being in the world – the former has the potential to pervade and enrich every corner of our lives, and the latter has the power to metastasize and poison every aspect of our being. Pharaoh’s ingratitude permeates his entire world, and it drives his life in endlessly destructive ways.
What does it mean to be ungrateful? At bottom, ingratitude reflects an inability – or maybe an unwillingness – to acknowledge our dependence on, and our indebtedness to, anything or anyone beyond ourselves. To be ungrateful is to be unable – or again, perhaps just unwilling – to acknowledge other people, past or present, who have made our lives possible, and as traditional Jewish texts add, to be unable or unwilling to acknowledge God as the source of life.
From his profound attitude of ingratitude, it’s not surprising that the prophet Ezekiel imagines Pharaoh insolently declaring, “The River Nile is mine; I made it for myself” (Ez 29:3) While the midrashic Pharaoh is an extreme, even caricatured case, we don’t need to be Pharaoh to struggle with gratitude – we just need to be human. Very few of us are either brazen or delusional enough to claim that we created ourselves, or that we made the world that sustains us. And yet in smaller, less dramatic ways, many of us resist and struggle against admitting just how dependent and vulnerable we really are – against, admitting, in other words, just how much we owe.
On the other hand, Moses provides a striking contrast to Pharaoh. When God tells Moses to free the Israelites from slavery, Moses first returns to his father in law – Yitro for permission. He is given a world-historic task, his people are suffering – why would he make the stop to Yitro? Another midrash teaches that upon hearing God’s demand that he set out for Egypt, Moses responds, “Master of the world, I can’t, because Yitro welcomed me and opened his home to me, and I have become like a son to him. One who opens his home you – you owe your life to him…Yitro welcomed me and treated me with respect. Should I now leave without his permission?!” (Midrash Tanhuma, Shemot 16)
And there are more examples of Moses’s gratitude as the story goes on. So, quietly, subtly, the rabbinic tradition casts the story of the Exodus in a dramatic new light. The clash between Moses and Pharaoh is not just a struggle between the Israelite slaves and their Egyptian lords, nor is it just a battle between God and Pharaoh. The clash between Moses and Pharaoh is also a war between gratitude and ingratitude. Only a person who truly understands and embodies the quality of gratitude can lead the slaves out of Egypt, but also that they will leave behind the culture that makes such oppression possible – and for that, they need a leader who embodies a life oriented by gratitude.
I think there is something very profound about the tradition’s decision to conflate oppression and freedom with gratitude and ingratitude. Pharaoh’s ingratitude and his inhumanity share the same root, namely his refusal to see other people and to acknowledge the ways that he and his people are dependent upon them. One of the tragic – and potentially horrific – consequences of ingratitude is the sense that nothing outside of me makes a claim on me. Since ingratitude is the insistence that “I don’t owe anybody anything,” it can blind me to the reality and dignity of other people. Being ungrateful can thus be both a symptom and a cause of inhumanity, and the two have the potential to feed off of one another in a dangerous downward spiral.
Leaving a place of ingratitude is leaving a place of enslavement in another crucial sense as well. It is not just that those who are devoid of gratitude may feel license to dehumanize others, but also that ingratitude itself constitutes a kind of prison. If we refuse to be grateful, we close ourselves off from the possibility of real relationship with others. To be ungrateful is to be stuck inside ourselves, to be shackled in a prison of our own making; it is like living in a form of solitary confinement. Conversely, to be grateful is a powerful manifestation of freedom – the freedom to live a life infused by mutuality and reciprocity. In allowing ourselves to be grateful, we free ourselves from the prison of our own self-enclosure and become available to meet and be met by others.