A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERSHis law to the Jews. In Jewish tradition, the story of the exodus is essentially one of divine
deliverance, but it is also a paradigm for Jewish identity as a reality to be affirmed collec-
tively through testimony and respect for divine law. At the center of this testimonial
affirmation, however, is not only a story of salvation but also one of slavery and strange-
ness. In the words of David Forman, ‘‘Jewish national identity was forged on the anvil of
the Egyptian experience of slavery. It was against the background of collective suffering
that we were born as a people, charged with becoming a ‘‘holy nation.’’ Our wanderings
in the desert were to teach us that the maintenance of our freedom would be dependent
upon the definitive rejection of the social model of power and its abuse, as symbolized by
ancient Egypt. Did we return to our ancestral homeland only to become like the ancient
Egyptians? If so, then we will never be ourselves, as was historically prescribed for us at
the moment of our national birth.’’^49 Forman’s words suggest that ‘‘being ourselves’’ for
Jewish Israelis means taking up the legacy of an experience of trauma and departure
(toward salvation and toward the law). As for the implications of this legacy, the Bible
itself seems to condense them in the call: ‘‘You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him,
for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’’ In other words, the memory of suffering
and injustice born of living as powerless strangers should prevent any temptations Jews
may feel to identify with their former oppressors and reenact the tragedy of victimizing a
people as a sort of retroactive triumph over the past. Instead, Jews must always think and
feel what it was like to be strangers in Egypt, maintaining commemorative practices such
as the eating of matzo bread at Passover and, most importantly, upholding an ethics of
power exercised from a position of ‘‘strangeness’’ to it.
The practical implications of such a position can be drawn in different ways vis-a`-vis
the validity of the Zionist project as an embodiment of Jewish identity claiming to repre-
sent the legacy of Exodus, since the Zionist enterprise includes the building of a state in
which non-Jews would always be strangers, at least to some degree. As a whole, RHR does
not seem to have a definite position on this point. By insisting on the experience of Egypt
in their writings and in the curriculum of their yeshiva program, however, the rabbis
seem to suggest that being authentically Jewish in today’s Israel is not about matching a
set of requirements for Jewish ‘‘purity’’ upheld by the Chief Rabbinate, but rather about
being able to identify with the experience of being ‘‘strangers among strangers.’’ This
understanding of Jewish identity shows a Benjaminian sensitivity to history in its call to
bear testimony to a past that is one simultaneously of ruins and of redemptive possibili-
ties. Those possibilities, moreover, do not appear to be exhausted by the historical event
of a divine intervention that interrupted a certain condition (i.e., slavery) once and for
all, but rather remain as a sort of hidden treasury in the Jewish past, which can continue
‘‘haunting’’ the present, like trauma but differently from the compulsive, potentially self-
destructive relationship between living and dead warned against by Bandel. The historical
fact of liberation from Egypt, which led to ancient Israeli statehood, need not, then, be
seen as the end of the Jewish experience of strangeness, either in historical terms or in
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