{"id":72208,"date":"2020-03-22T23:33:03","date_gmt":"2020-03-22T21:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=72208"},"modified":"2020-03-22T23:33:04","modified_gmt":"2020-03-22T21:33:04","slug":"mitzri-vs-ivri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/mitzri-vs-ivri\/","title":{"rendered":"Mitzri vs. Ivri"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"72208","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":67893,"related_cahpter":"442","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Jeremiah squares off against his own Korah\r\n\r\n","content":"

Judah has been crushed and conquered by Babylon. The people have failed to make peace with their new situation. They have failed to recognize that this is a divine punishment for their sins. They flail about, blaming the messenger and attacking the symptoms of their defeat, not the cause. Instead of repentance and contrition, they are rebellious and petulant. Instead of recognising Babylon as the heaven-sent punishment that Jeremiah had long predicted, they fight among themselves and imagine that killing Gedaliah will restore their fortunes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the fulfillment of Jeremiah\u2019s doom-prophecies they fail to learn the moral message.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We now see the aptly-named Yohanan ben Kerach try to take the people back to Egypt. His name is deliberately resonant of a previous character who had pretensions of leadership – Korach. Indeed, in Hebrew the names are the same, only differing in the vocalisation. The allusion to the previous Kerach\/Korach contrasts with Jeremiah, who is presented as a new Moses.<\/span><\/p>\n

The desire to flee Babylonian rule echoes Jonah\u2019s futile attempt to override God\u2019s will, Egypt will soon fall. However, when seen in the context of what Egypt and Babylon, the two great powers of the time, symbolized to the Judeans, we see how this fits into the Bible\u2019s overarching message.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Much to the chagrin of many over millennia, the Torah is virtually devoid of afterlife mythology of the sort that was universal at the time it was received. Moses, prince of Egypt, led the people from a land where he was destined to be buried in a great pyramid to having no known burial place at all. Egypt was the old order, the land of mystery and death worship. It was the bounded womb in which Israel was formed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Torah presents two types of people – the Egyptain (<\/span>Mitzri<\/span><\/i>) and the Hebrew (<\/span>Ivri<\/span><\/i>) – the Hebrew words resonate the deeper meaning, those who are \u201cbounded\u201d and those who \u201ccross over.\u201d The Ivri crosses over across the earth, with symbolic river and sea crossings marking their literal \u201crites of passage\u201d, but also crosses the divide between heaven and earth in life, Jacob\u2019s ladder being the prototypical image of this. Egyptians, in contrast, dedicated their lives fruitlessly to the storage of their useless corpses, having failed to break the mental shackles that no longer confined the <\/span>Ivri<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

We all get to choose – are we a <\/span>Mitzri <\/span><\/i>or an <\/span>Ivri<\/span><\/i>? Moses became the ultimate leader of Hebrews because he was the first to make that choice, as a prince of both. Ben Kerach and Korach exemplify the other choice. It’s not just that they pine for the safety of Egypt, on a deeper level they crave the comforts of the old order before free-agency, where eternal life was a matter of reciting the correct incantations and collecting the ideal grave goods. God\u2019s plan was that they would face in the opposite direction towards the new world of Babylon and soon Persia, from where the theology that underpins the Tanakh would begin to enlighten the world.\u00a0 <\/span>
\n<\/span>
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