Exodus and the Illusion of Unchecked Power

The Torah’s foundational political insight is simple and unsettling: power cannot be allowed to police itself.

That insight emerges most clearly in the Exodus narrative. Pharaoh is not portrayed as chaotic or irrational. He believes he is moral. He believes order depends on him. He believes his authority is necessary and therefore justified. The Torah introduces Pharaoh not as a monster, but as a ruler who has confused power with righteousness (Exodus 1–6).

God’s response is not merely to free slaves. It is to challenge a worldview. When God declares, “I am the Lord,” it is not theology for its own sake. It is a rejection of the idea that any human authority stands beyond accountability (Exodus 6:2).

That tension between power and moral restraint is not ancient history. It is the question pressing on us now.

The Torah describes the Israelites’ condition with piercing psychological clarity: “They could not listen to Moses because of shortness of spirit and crushing labor” (Exodus 6:9). This is not defiance. It is despair. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains that Egypt’s deepest cruelty was not physical exhaustion alone, but the destruction of inner freedom — shelilat cherut ha-ruach (Hirsch, Commentary to Exodus). When the human spirit is constricted, even the promise of redemption feels unbearable.

Pharaoh does not merely enslave bodies. He enslaves imagination. And when imagination dies, oppression no longer needs chains.

That is how unrestrained power works.

This week, in a New York Times interview, President Donald Trump said that “the only check on me is my own morality” (New York Times interview). Those words should give us pause — not because of who said them, but because of what they claim. The Torah’s answer is unequivocal: power may never be self-policing.

Pharaoh also believed himself moral. He believed order depended on him alone. The Exodus story exists to dismantle that idea. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned that the greatest danger of power is not wickedness but certainty — the belief that one’s own judgment requires no restraint (Sacks, Covenant & Conversation). The Torah insists that no human being is the final judge of their own righteousness.

That is why Moses must return to Pharaoh again and again — not to persuade him, but to name limits.

Many biblical scholars, joined by classical Jewish commentators, understand the plagues not merely as punishments, but as a sustained confrontation with Egypt’s gods. The Nile turning to blood is a judgment on Hapi, god of the river. Darkness overwhelms Ra, god of the sun. Livestock perish, undermining sacred animal cults.

Ramban (Nachmanides) makes this explicit: the plagues are meant levatel elohei Mitzrayim — to nullify Egypt’s false gods and expose the lie that power sanctifies itself (Ramban, Commentary to Exodus 7).

God is not only freeing slaves. God is dismantling a theology. Tyranny always cloaks itself in righteousness. It always claims inevitability. It always insists there is no higher court of appeal. The Torah answers: there is.

This is not abstract. In recent weeks, events in Minneapolis have made this painfully concrete. An ICE operation ended in the killing of Renee Nicole Good, z”l. Legal investigations will determine responsibility, but the Torah presses a deeper question: what happens when enforcement loses moral restraint?

ICE exists to uphold the law. Pharaoh also believed he upheld order. The Torah does not reject authority, but it limits it. Ramban teaches that Pharaoh’s defining sin was refusal — siruv lehakir bigvulot hakoach — refusal to recognize any authority above himself (Ramban, Exodus 5–7). When power answers only to itself, violence follows.

When communities live in fear of the state, when schools close to protect children from government action, when force instills terror rather than safety, the Torah hears an echo of Egypt. And God says: “I hear the cry” (Exodus 6:5).

A colleague of mine, Rabbi Harold Kravitz of Minnesota, recently stood at the site of Good’s killing with other clergy. Reflecting on the Exodus story, he reminded us that it begins not with Moses, but with Shifra and Puah — midwives who refused to comply with an immoral decree (Exodus 1:15–17). They did not overthrow Pharaoh. They did not control the system. They simply refused to cooperate with evil.

Today, some Jews in Minnesota are training to be nonviolent, protective witnesses to ICE activity — standing present, documenting, holding power accountable without violence. This is not radical. It is Torah.

“You must love the stranger,” Deuteronomy commands, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:19). Not sentiment. Obligation.

At the same time, in Iran, citizens — especially women — are risking their lives to protest a regime that polices bodies, speech, and conscience. Many are beaten, imprisoned, or executed. What is most haunting is not only the brutality, but the silence of those who claim to champion human rights. The Torah will not allow selective outrage. “God heard their groaning,” it says (Exodus 2:24). Hearing is a moral act. Silence is also a moral act.

And closer to home, antisemitism again targets Jewish memory. A synagogue in Mississippi was attacked; a Torah scroll damaged yet surviving. Antisemitism is never random. It is an attempt to erase a people’s story. Pharaoh understood that. That is why he targeted Hebrew children (Exodus 1:22). But Torah survives because covenant outlasts fire. “I will take you to be My people” (Exodus 6:7). That promise has outlived empires.

The Exodus narrative teaches that redemption does not begin with miracles. It begins with limits — with the insistence that power is accountable, that authority is not self-justifying, and that morality is not self-declared.

Moses does not control outcomes. He controls faithfulness. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously described the prophets as disturbers of complacency — those who refuse to let power fall asleep morally (The Prophets).

For communities like ours, that means refusing silence when power hardens, refusing despair when spirits are crushed, and refusing the fantasy that morality polices itself. We may not stop every injustice. But we need not normalize fear.

That is not ancient history.
That is our work — now.