Can You Imagine?!
Right at the beginning of the Exodus narrative, we see the story of the rest of the Torah foreshadowed. The Israelites are suffering in Egypt, and God charges Moses to lead them out to freedom and into covenant.
God tells Moses: “Say, therefore, to the Israelite people: I am Adonai. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements. And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. And you shall know that I, Adonai, am your God who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession, I Adonai.” (Exodus 6:6-8)
This is the plan then. God will free the Israelites - this is the Exodus itself. God will take them as God’s people - the commentators teach this refers to Mt. Sinai, where the Ten Commandments were given and the covenant with the whole people really begins. And then God will bring them all back home to the land of promise.
But the next verse subverts God’s plan, and paints a picture of what will ultimately happen. “When Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage” (Exodus 6:9).
The 16th century commentator Sforno writes that they couldn’t hear Moses because they couldn’t “consider deeply all of this, so that they would trust that God could rescue them and give God credit. In this they were different from Abraham [who believed in God’s impossible-sounding promises]. Therefore God’s promise of giving them the land [of Canaan] was not fulfilled for them, but rather it was given to their children.”
The people who cried out for liberation end up limiting their own ability to be free. Their imaginations have been stunted, and therefore their capacity for renewal and transformation withers. This lack of imagination results in fear, complaint, anger, cowardice, and ultimately failure.
I’m struck by the connection Sforno makes between imagination and trust. The Hebrew word he uses for “consider deeply” is hitbonen. It is hard to translate in a simple way. Hitbonen means to make something known within yourself, to contemplate and absorb and internalize and discern and feel its ramifications for your life. Hitbonenut is one of the classic words used for Jewish meditation. Because meditation often involves visualizations, I am translating hitbonen in this context as a form of imagination, being able to see an image of a new reality. Sforno assumes that if people could really imagine their liberation and a meaningful and just life (i.e. the covenant with God), they would trust in its possibility and act with courage and love to make it happen.
In a recent interview on the philosophical legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ezra Klein asked Harvard professor Brandon Terry about the role of faith and trust in King’s thought. Here’s what Terry suggested:
“What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.
“And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.”
To me, that is the potency of hitbonenut! If we can reflect on the past and who we are in the present, if we can imagine a better future, if we trust that something new really can emerge, and then we act in some way or another, then perhaps we can be among the generations that inherit a promised land where justice and compassion are commonplace, and where joy and creativity thrive.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
