What If the Exodus Never Happened?
Last week, I watched & Juliet at the Aronoff Theater. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the show, here’s how the musical’s website describes it: “This hilarious new musical flips the script on the greatest love story ever told. & Juliet asks: what would happen next if Juliet didn’t end it all over Romeo? Get whisked away on a fabulous journey as she ditches her famous ending for a fresh beginning and a second chance at life and love—her way.”
My wife and I had different takes on the musical itself (read: she loved it, me not so much!), but I was intrigued by certain questions the show’s premise implicitly raises, chiefly: What does it mean to creatively reinterpret an historical text? After all, this is a question of merit to Jews too; folkloric Midrash has been occupied with similar matters for nearly two thousand years.
I, admittedly something of a textual purist, can tolerate midrashim–especially the ancient ones–but I wasn’t in love with & Juliet. After all, it wasn’t the “real” story, so, how could it be as meaningful as the original? This, instead of the music, is what my mind focused on as I watched.
To engage in some retrospective self-criticism, I admit that my thought pattern wasn’t wrong, per se, but it also wasn’t right. It is reminiscent of a strain of biblical and archaeological scholarship that was common in the late-19th and early/mid-20th centuries, which asked: Is the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt true? For many who asked such questions, the subtext often was as follows: If the Exodus didn’t happen, then doesn’t that fundamentally change (or undermine) Jews’ identity?
These questions about the Exodus do have real answers–the Exodus either did or didn’t occur, and that truth is buried somewhere in the mists of history. Theoretically, there could come a time when the Exodus is either definitively proved or disproved. However, much like my questioning of & Juliet, the better answer is not the one that I (or some historians) putatively seek: The answer is that the answer doesn’t matter, because the best stories have meaning that extends well beyond their mere factuality.
Here are a few questions better than “are they true?” we might ask of such narratives, both contemporary musicals and biblical texts:
“What truths do they contain?”
“When do such stories most move us?
“Why do they have meaning?”
To the extent such issues pertain to our religious and ethnic experiences, grappling with these latter questions is a much better use of our time–and likely will lead to more rewarding results.
An added bonus in this approach is that we can ask such questions of a story regardless of its veracity; that makes the endeavor of questioning our stories far more worthwhile, since we usually don’t have the ability to learn whether our ancient stories a “true.”
The freedom we gain here is also what allows us room for the creative reimagining of stories. After all, too rigid a commitment to the (“capital T”) Truth–what the great historian Leopold von Ranke called wie es eigentlich gewesen, “how it really was”–can actually mislead us in our quest for knowledge. Loosening our grip on stories gives us room for innovation, which Jewish texts undoubtedly demand.
The next time I go watch a contemporary riff on an old classic–whether it’s & Juliet, Fat Ham, or Wicked–I’ll hopefully lean into this more open spirit; and I hope we each can take it with us this Passover too!