Sometimes treating yourself to a hefty slice of velvety chocolate chip cheesecake that literally melts its way through your digestive tract has its price. Last night, as I savored my annual portion of grandma Cissy's extraordinary kosher-for-Passover dessert, I learned there may be some exaggeration in the Bible, that there may never have been an exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt.
This would be major exaggeration, mind you. Not just obvious fibs like referring to Cissy as grandma when she's not even related to me by blood or marriage. Certainly not like Cissy's version of a "sliver" of cheesecake, which would be enough to harden the arteries of an entire third world country, or my own dogged insistence that she give me "just a sliver," which is about as heartfelt as an assertion by your basic politician that he wants to reach across the aisle and achieve some bipartisan productivity. All petty bullshit, not unexpected, no harm no foul.
But this business about the Exodus never having happened (and I am not referring to the movie starring Paul Newman), well that's serious stuff, not just an exaggeration but a bold faced lie that strikes at the core of everything I always believed. No seas parting? No burning bushes? No men with long white beards hearing voices and still being looked upon as great leaders and not being subjected to involuntary commitment proceedings? Folks, if the exodus never happened, then maybe we're not the chosen people. Preposterous. Next someone will be telling me that we Jews aren't smarter than everyone else.
I'm hardly a biblical scholar (the flip side of exaggeration would be understatement, and that would be about as under a statement as anything gets), but I think I've always kind of guessed there may be a little bit of poetic license in that large volume of work. Face it, when you write by committee, there's competition for the best story line, and the truth can get lost in the details. If Nora Ephron had been around when they wrote Genesis, the old boy network of misogynists would never have gotten away with blaming all the evil in the world on Eve for biting into an apple. The woman was just trying to watch herself; what was she supposed to eat if she wanted to look good in a loin cloth. Talking snakes? Please. And do I have any doubt that the whole two by two thing on Noah's Ark was not so orderly as they make it out to be? Is there anyone else who isn't certain that more than a few threesomes snuck on board.
I've just always assumed there's a fair share of bullshit in the Bible. It's what makes a good book great, and the Bible is a great book, filled with sex and violence and betrayal and all the stuff that sells. If they have to kill off a main character after almost forty years just because they want some fresh blood, so be it. If some guy has to walk on water to get everyone's attention, let him have the bragging rights. Forty years trudging through the desert or forty minutes in an air conditioned minibus, who cares? How else are we supposed to study persecution and the distinctly human capacity to overcome adversity and make something out of life? Historical fiction, creative nonfiction -- whatever you want to call it, it's a really good story and it gets some good points across. Inspires, even.
To say Exodus never happened is really beside the point. It would be like saying Grandma Cissy is not really a member of our family, when she has baked for us and served us her delicacies for as long as I can remember. Like saying the friends who have welcomed me and my extended family into their homes to celebrate holidays with them for years are not my own relatives just because we share no DNA. These people, my friends and their parents and their children, the people in my life who have become such dependable and treasured pieces of my life, are as much my family as anybody can be, laws of inheritance notwithstanding. You can't pick your real family, but you can pick most of the other special people in your life, and if it entails a bit of exaggeration here and there, even a hefty sliver of poetic license, I'm all for it.
I am about as likely to believe the exodus never happened as I am to mean it when I ask for just a sliver of cheesecake. Yep. Amen to that!
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