"Freedom from Idols"

by Douglas Rushkoff

The Exodus is a myth about gaining freedom from idols. It's a story celebrating a people who see through the false icons of the Egyptian civilization, and come to understand the way that attention to such idols leads to inhumanity towards people. This is why Egyptthe first-born civilizationhad to be put down. By sacrificing a lamb, the mythic Israelites were not saving their children from a plague-happy God, but blaspheming the highest god of the state religionprecisely during the Egyptian New Year festival during which they were supposed to worship him.

In revolutionary zeal, they put the blood of this god on their doors, at once betraying the nation of which they were a part, and liberating themselves of allegiance to a god they very likely would have prayed to themselves. These were the workers of Goshen, after all, and most likely had nothing to do with the Hebrew immigration four mythic centuries earlier. (I like to think of the plagues not as attack on our Egyptian captors, but as desecrations of Egyptian godsblood desecrating the Nile, locusts desecrating the corn, darkness desecrating the sun. To me, those drops of spilled wine at the Seder seem much more like mourning our own smashed idols than the pain and suffering of our captors.)

Excerpt from "Rally 'Round the Flag" one of many essays Wrestling with Zion, Grove Press 2003.