The Big Apple of its day, Egypt was a consummate civilization in terms of technology, art, architecture, literature, wealth, and organized bureaucracy. It had been so for centuries by the time a family of 70 Semitic herdsmen arrived there 3,528 years ago.

The second and third generations of that immigrant Semitic family may have been enthralled by Egypt’s cosmopolitan grandeur.

Imagine a Hebrew youth looking up at the towering pyramids that started at the Nile Delta and extended 1,500 miles southward. The largest, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, stood 481 feet high; its base covered 13 acres. The monumental structure contained 2.3 million blocks of limestone, each averaging 2 tons.

Gazing at this centuries-old pyramid, the immigrant youth would not have known–perhaps not have cared–that its construction took 100,000 laborers 20 years of toil. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a society that produced such wonders?

It is a syndrome that Jews have experienced in many civilizations throughout many eras: we become infatuated with the culturally advanced host society.

We associate the Israelite experience in Egypt with slavery and oppression, but out of the 210 years that our ancestors lived in Egypt, they enjoyed freedom and acceptance for 130 years -about as long as Jews have flourished in America.

The Egyptian-born generations of Israelites may have gravitated to the majority culture, and even worshipped its gods.

Yet these proto-Jews were caught in an identity crisis. While attracted by the successful society surrounding them, they also felt a fealty to their progenitors, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, and their unique worldview. The Talmud tells us that the Israelites in Egypt retained their distinctive Hebrew names, language, and dress. They longed to assimilate, but their souls clung to the outer vestiges of their ancestral identity.

IDENTITY
For over a century, the free and prosperous Israelites in Egypt were poised tenuously between two opposing worldviews with divergent concepts of human identity.

Animals, humans, and gods of ancient Egypt shared a fluid identity, with no definite distinctions. Egyptian gods bore the heads of animals, while sphinxes had the bodies of lions and human heads. Animals were venerated; bulls, cats, and crocodiles lived luxuriously in certain temples, and were mummified when they died. Pharaoh was a god in human form, simultaneously Horus, the falcon god, and the son of Re, the sun god.

How different from the worldview of the patriarch Abraham! Abraham had believed in a Divine soul that distinguished humans from animals.

Abraham taught that G-d was a single, transcendent, non-corporeal Being Who created human beings "in God's image," that humans similarly had a transcendent, non-corporeal essence - their Divine soul. Lacking this higher order of soul, animals, while not to be mistreated, were essentially different than humans. Bestiality was practiced in the ancient Near East, but the Torah categorically forbade it.

Identity determines what we expect of ourselves, to what we devote our energies, and in what direction we seek fulfillment.

Animals are ruled by instinct. A bear can learn to dance if you give it enough treats or whip it hard enough, but its attraction to the treats and aversion to the whip are merely an extension of its instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

In the Jewish view, human beings, endowed with Divine souls, can override instinct with moral choices. This is the definitive human characteristic: To choose between right and wrong -even when the right alternative is painful and the wrong alternative beckons with pleasure.

People who define themselves as animals relinquish the possibility of transcendence and its accompanying joys: selfless love, altruistic giving, moral heroism, and spiritual growth.

For all its cultic religiosity, Ancient Egypt had no concept of a transcendent soul separate from the body. Their elaborate tombs were equipped with food and clothing for the deceased in the after-life. Some Second Dynasty tombs were even equipped with bathrooms. The lengthy process of mummification was necessary because, devoid of a transcendent soul, if the body decayed, it would be as if the person had never existed.

The Jewish concept of humans as essentially different from animals also meant that human sexuality was holy and exclusively in the context of marriage. Contrast this to ancient Egyptian promiscuity and incest, where temple prostitutes were a fixture of society. Erotic pictures adorn Egyptian tombs to revive the male tomb occupant in his next life. The disdain the Sages would later reserve for Egyptian society was the result of this licentiousness.

THE TURNING POINT
While the G-d of Abraham demanded a definite standard of right and wrong, Egyptian society was essentially amoral. Pharaoh's arbitrary judgments were the law of the land. Egyptian courts were merely the vicarious arm of Pharaoh's whims.

Morality was a novel concept introduced into antiquity by the Jews.

While, unlike Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia produced legal codes, these were utilitarian rather than ethical. Their aim was to protect property rights and preserve the efficacious functioning of society.

According to such codes, murder was forbidden because a murderous society degenerates into chaos. According to the Torah, murder is forbidden because humans are created in G-d’s image and human life therefore has inherent value.

"The discovery of monotheism," writes historian Paul Johnson, "of a sole, omnipotent G-d actuated by ethical principles and seeking methodically to impose them on human beings, is one of the greatest turning-points in history." [A History of the Jews, p. 30]

CHAMPIONS OF CIVIC DUTY
The Israelite wavering between the two warring identities ended 130 years into their Egyptian experience. The reigning Pharaoh decided that the Israelites were too numerous and gradually impounded them into slavery.

The Midrash relates that Pharaoh initially played on their loyalty by inviting them to volunteer in a national construction enterprise. All Israel except the Levites rallied to their civic duty. The volunteerism gradually turned into conscription, and finally slavery.

The slavery exposed the dark side of Egyptian civilization. The grand monuments that the Israelites themselves had admired were built by human exploitation and torture. Worried by astrological predictions of an Israelite redeemer, Pharaoh had male babies thrown into the waiting jaws of Nile crocodiles. Unconstrained by ethical imperative, the taskmasters were cruel and sadistic.

Yet the Israelite infatuation for their adopted society was so tenacious that even during the ninth of the Ten Plagues, some 80% of the Israelites declined to leave Egypt.

They preferred being a slave in the world's greatest civilization to an uncertain journey back to their archaic ancestral homeland. Even in the desert after their liberation, some of the former slaves pined for the amenities of Egypt. As the quip goes, G-d could take the Jews out of Egypt, but He couldn't take Egypt out of the Jews.

EXILE OF IDENTITY
Jewish history is a recurring process of exile and redemption. Exile is not only expulsion from our land; it is also an exile from our identity as Jews. When identities conflict, only one will ultimately prevail.

Two millennia ago, there were as many Jews in the world as Chinese.

Today, the Chinese number one billion and Jews less than 14 million. This is due not only to repeated persecution and massacre, but also to the opting out of Jews in favor of the majority culture.

Every Jew reading this essay is the descendant of Jews who repeatedly chose to identify as Jews rather than as Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Christians, Muslims, or secularists.

One of the mitzvot incumbent on every Jew is to remember daily "the Exodus from Egypt." On the simplest level this means remembering the historic Exodus, the dramatic evidence that G-d intervenes in history for our collective and personal redemption. On a metaphorical level, however, "going out from Egypt" refers to our emerging from our "Egyptian" self-definition as an instinct-driven animal to our Jewish definition as a Divine soul making moral choices and achieving transcendence.

The brilliant light of redemption, which first flashed into the world at the Exodus, shines again every Passover. All we have to do is clarify who we really are.