The Exodus Didn’t Start With Slavery—It Started With a Lie (Passover 5785)

The story of the Exodus begins with conspiracy theories.

More precisely, with a ruler who believes and then spreads conspiracy theories.

This is what the Bible tells us:

“A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them so that they may not increase; otherwise, in the event of war, they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.”

Israelites had been living in Egypt as loyal subjects of Pharaoh. Moreover, Joseph had saved the country from famine by preparing it for the upcoming “seven lean years.” There was no indication that the Israelites would rise against a country that had treated them so generously, and in whose prosperity and stability they were invested. The very idea was preposterous.

And yet, Pharaoh probably had access to what we’d today call an influencer, who late at night in the palace wormed their way into his head, suggesting that the Israelites were plotting to overthrow Egypt.

Once you believe a conspiracy, there’s no escaping from its circular logic. Evidence against the conspiracy becomes more proof of the conspiracy. “But Sire,” one brave Egyptian advisor may have said, “the Hebrews have been loyal; this makes no sense!” The king would then reply, “Of course, if you plan to overthrow us, you’d pretend to be loyal to surprise us!”

Like all conspiracy theories, this one led to policies that, in addition to being cruel, were nonsensical. For example, Pharaoh ordered the killing of all Hebrew male firstborns because the Israelites were becoming “much too numerous.” If the idea was to decrease the number of Israelites fit for fighting, doesn’t it make more sense to kill the girls instead of the boys and erase the possibility of the population growing at all? When the problem you’re trying to solve is an invented one, the “solution” is bound to be both malicious and idiotic.

Did Pharaoh believe the Hebrew uprising conspiracy, or did he cynically use it to accrue power and wealth? The evidence points to the latter.

Ramses II had a vast, self-serving project: the construction of a new capital named for himself, Pi-Ramesses (the massive city, mentioned in the Bible and lost to history for millennia, was discovered by archaeologists in the 1960s.) For his pharaonic project, he needed cheap labor. What’s easier for acquiring a labor force than enslaving a large population that is already within your borders? But how would Pharoah turn the Egyptians against the Israelites? After all, these two peoples knew each other; many of them probably did remember Joseph. The whole idea of enslaving the Israelites would have sounded ludicrous. So how do you make them accept the unacceptable?

Enter the conspiracy. The Torah tells us that Pharaoh “said to his people” what he claimed were the Israelites’ supposed plans. This wasn’t information that the concerned Egyptians brought to their leader. He used his unique position of power to shape the beliefs of his subjects.

The conspiracy caused terrible pain to the Hebrews, but what we suffered is nothing compared to what the Egyptians suffered for the “fake news” of the Pharoah. Their country lay in ruins, every firstborn dead, crops ruined, and the survivors decimated by plague and famine.

Policies based on conspiratorial beliefs and lies often cause suffering to those accused of conspiring, but they also inflict greater harm on the nations that implement them.

Nazi ideology was, above all, a conspiracy theory based on lies. Germans paid for their gullibility with the complete destruction of their country. Hamas sold to – or imposed upon – the Palestinians the lie that Jews are not indigenous to Israel. But it was the Palestinians who paid for that with thousands of deaths and the destruction of Gaza.

If you go through history, you’ll see that all antisemitic policies ever enacted were based on conspiracies of some form. And they all harmed their enactors. For example, the expulsion from Spain was based on the false idea that Jews were “corrupting” the conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity through the efforts of the Spanish Inquisition). This too harmed Spain, which hasn’t recovered the intellectual and cultural glory that it boasted 500 years ago when three religions coexisted there in peace.

Sometimes autocrats truly believe in conspiracies; other times, they know that their conspiracy-based policy will produce a self-serving crisis. Autocrats tend to struggle with genuine crises because they often exceed their control; that’s why they generate crises and then claim credit for resolving them.

As the epistemic chaos of our time accelerates and post-truth becomes the dominant feature of our mediascape, we’ll see more and more policies derived from conspiratorial beliefs cooked up in the dark recesses of the internet. Like in Egypt, they will have catastrophic results because nothing based on lies can succeed in the long term. As John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

The Torah warns us, "You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt…” meaning that the society that we build as free people should be the opposite of the one we saw during our long bondage. We should base it on right, not on might; on law, not on caprice; on freedom, not on slavery; on truth and not on lies. The text is speaking to us, warning us not to believe the Pharaohs of the world —the purveyors of conspiracies and lies, the sellers of smoke, those who blame others for our woes, and those who claim to have a magical solution to all our problems.

I am sure that as darkness descended over Egypt, Ramses’ toadies told an anxious population, “Just trust Pharaoh, he knows what he’s doing.” And I’m sure that many in Egypt believed him. After all, with Berlin in ruins and the Soviet soldiers inside the Reichstag, many Germans believed that Hitler would still deliver them victory. Once you buy a conspiracy theory, you’re trapped. The alternative is to say something that no human can stand to say: “I was a fool, and I was duped.” So you hold on to illusions and magical thinking. You’ll believe the lie to death – in many cases, quite literally, like those people who, while dying of COVID-19, kept repeating that the virus was nothing to worry about.

Freedom is hard and reality is complex, so the allure of sweet surrender to simply “trusting the leader” will always be powerful. We, however, know how that ends.

Humanity will always produce Pharaohs. But it also produces us, a people that has always resisted the mermaid calls of simplistic falsehoods; a people that, having suffered from conspiracies and lies all its existence, understands how dangerous they are. Now, more than ever, we must be the negative image of Egypt.