You can find Ramesses II today in a museum, in a history book, or a college course. There he lies, a perfectly still mummy, long dead and terribly irrelevant.

There is one place, however, where you can find him alive and kicking: At a Passover Seder. So alive, people are still celebrating their escape from his clutches.

Strange as it may sound, the world, culture, civilization, and language of all the Biblical pharaohs are also alive in Jewish schools, yeshivot, synagogues, Chabad Houses, and anywhere where Torah is an integral part of daily life.

Let's start with language. In the books of Exodus and Numbers, linguists count 381 instances of words borrowed from Ancient Egyptian, with 450 more throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Words for such common items as a cup, a pole, a box, linen, as well as standard measurements. The suffixes of several of these words indicate that they could only have been from the era leading up to Ramesses II, precisely where tradition would place the Exodus.1

Tradition is quite candid about these borrowings. The Midrash of Rabbi Tanchuma notes that the first word of the Ten Commandments is an Egyptian loanword: Anochi is a Hebraized adaptation of the Egyptian Anuch, meaning “I.”

R. Nehemiah said: What is anochi? It is an Egyptian word.

A parable will illustrate: A king’s son was captured and was held by his captors for so long that eventually he became accustomed to speak in their language.

When his father had taken vengeance on his enemies and brought back his son, he wanted to converse with him in his native language. But the son no longer knew it.

What did the king do? He began by speaking with him in the language of his captors.

Thus did the Holy One do with Israel. During all those years that Israel had been in Egypt, they had learned the Egyptian language. When the Holy One redeemed them, He came to give them the Torah, but they were unable to understand it.

So the Holy One said, “I shall converse with them in the Egyptian language.”

He began, “Anochi.” In Egypt, when one wants to say "I" to a friend, he says, “Anoch.” Thus the Holy One began in their language and said “Anochi…”2

What about technology and culture?

Well, in their sojourn through the Sinai peninsula, the Israelites were instructed to construct a modular, dismountable, portable tabernacle. The design appears quite ingenious even today—a wooden framework, gold-plated, fitted together with tenons, external and internal rods, grounded and capped with socket joints.

The tapestry was also elaborate: dyed and elaborately decorated cloths, woven goat hairs, dyed ram skins and leather of a creature known as the tachash. The furnishings included a very complex golden table, a highly decorated candelabra of solid gold, and an ark hosting two golden cherubim on its cover.

Obviously, such intricate work required skilled and experienced craftsmanship. But then, what were the Israelites occupied in before leaving Egypt? They were “building storage cities for Pharaoh.”

Indeed, we find in the tombs of Egypt from that period and earlier, but not much later, just such crafts: Modular structures utilizing copper fittings and tenons just as described with the tabernacle

And indeed we find in the tombs of Egypt from that period and earlier, but not much later, just such crafts: Modular structures utilizing copper fittings and tenons just as described with the tabernacle had been in use from times even before the pyramids, while precious metalwork of figures such as falcons and finely embroidered sails and canopies of scarlet cloth richly decorated with circled stars, cartouches, and elaborate patterns were all the rage in the times of Ramesses II and III.

The similarity of these works to the description of the tabernacle is so striking that Kenneth Kitchen, a foremost expert on the period of Ramesses II and the chief architect of Egyptian chronology, finds it to be strong evidence that the Exodus narrative could only have been written during the period it describes.3

So we find “every man whose heart inspired him”4 applying those same skills he learned while crafting the palaces of the pharaohs to fashion a sanctuary for the one invisible G‑d of heaven and earth, while the “wise-hearted women”5 are spinning yarn and goat-hair—and perhaps taking part in the tapestries and embroidery as well.

If It's Good, We’ll Keep It

Yet some will ask: What is ancient Egypt doing in our holy books and sacred spaces? Wouldn't you expect a divine teaching to be taught exclusively within the purity of a divine language? Shouldn’t our tabernacle be void of foreign art forms?

It certainly doesn’t stop there. Look in your Passover Haggadah and you’ll see mention of the “Afikoman.” That’s an Ancient Greek word for “dessert.”6

There is something profound about this discretionary assimilation of language and culture over time and place. Something that relates to the Exodus story and to the very core of what Torah and the Jews are doing in this world.

And every weekday, Jewish men commemorate the Exodus by wrapping tefillin on their arms and head. Only that in the Torah they're not called tefillin—they’re called “totafot.” Rabbi Akiva explained, “Tot means two in the language of Katfi (Coptic?) and fot means two in Afriki.”7

Indeed, the Jewish people have journeyed through history discriminately and judiciously picking up the words, practices, and ideas which they determined could be harmonized with Torah and tradition, while discarding the rest.

“When you come to a place, adopt their customs,” the Talmud tells us. Obviously, that means the customs that do not conflict with Torah. But walk through the streets of Jerusalem, through the marketplace at Mahane Yehudah, and find distinctly Judaized foods, dress, music, and customs from every part of the world.

There is something profound about this discretionary assimilation of language and culture over time and place. Something that relates to the Exodus story and to the very core of what Torah and the Jews are doing in this world.

Signs to Carry Meaning

Two hundred years before Carl Jung and his students composed Man and His Symbols, Rabbi Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritch (18th century Ukraine), delved deep into the mystery of metaphor and the human subconscious. Indeed, Jung is quoted as stating that “the Chasidic Rabbi Ber from Mezritch, whom they called the Great Magid,” anticipated his entire psychology.8

So that when the Magid looked at the Exodus narrative, he saw in it the appropriation of Egyptian culture by none other than G‑d Himself. He saw that especially in these lines:

G‑d said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his servants in order that I may put these signs (“otot”) of Mine within his midst, and in order that you tell into the ears of your child and your child’s child how I made a mockery of the Egyptians, and that you tell of My signs that I placed in them, and you will know that I am G‑d.”9

If you don't see what the Magid sees, that's understandable. It's lost in translation. As we all know, you can’t translate a language into another language and expect to see the same thing because you can’t translate a culture into another culture.

The Hebrew word ot (otot or otiot in plural) is a case in point. Despite the popularity of the above translation, ot does not correspond to sign in English, or to any other word. It has its own meaning within the context of its own language which exists within a certain culture and way of thinking that defines the Jewish people from Ancient Israel until today, in its various permutations.

Two hundred years before Carl Jung and his students composed Man and His Symbols, Rabbi Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritch (18th century Ukraine), delved deep into the mystery of metaphor and the human subconscious.

Which is actually what an ot is all about. An ot is anything that carries and conveys the significant meanings that are rooted within the unique collective consciousness of a society and culture.

For example, the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet are called otiot, because you can assemble them into words and sentences that convey ideas, perspectives, and emotions from one person’s inner self to another’s.

A tradition, a commemoration, or a communal ritual is also an ot, carrying meaning and significance from one generation to the next. An event, an animal, or even a rock might also be an ot, if it carried with itself some reminder from the past or some indication of something beyond.

In English, we call these signs, symbols, or tokens, but none of these words entirely captures the flavor of the word ot. In Hebrew, we say that you, along with every other person on the planet, have your own otiot—meaning roughly, the way you express your inner person. Then there are otiot hamachshavah—the articulations of the emotions and ideas running through our minds. And otiot of music, the phrases and nuances that make up a melody.

There are the otiot of each nation, as it speaks to itself and knows itself. The symbology, the culture, the language, and the nuance of expression that only the insider understands—these are otiot that mysteriously emerge from the collective consciousness of the whole, somewhat as AI imagery emerges today out of the pool of online human creativity, yet by far more obscure means.

The Mysterious Power of Language

Try approaching the wisest member of a clan and asking, “Why do you count using one set of number-words, while the people across the lake with whom you trade use another? Why does your music differ in tone and nuance from the village on the other side of the hill?” It’s unlikely you will receive a satisfactory answer. But then, can you explain why you and your friends dress the way you do, speak the way you do, or enjoy a certain form of music? The function and place of a community’s rituals are clouded in mystery, treated as dogma.

And for a simple reason: No individual conceived them, no tribunal or symposium of elders constructed them. They appear not from the collective of individuals that practice them, but from the invisible lines of interaction that tie together that collective as a single whole.

Otiot by their very nature transcend the individual.10 We are capable of using them only because we are capable of conceiving how the other hears our thoughts within these otiot. One who does not do so, who only speaks words without any thought to someone other than himself listening, can hardly be said to be speaking at all. If we could look inside the brain of an effective communicator, a good teacher, or a skilled writer, we would likely find most of the neuron-power engaged in asking, “What is my audience thinking now?”

It is through the power of our otiot, this ability to hear ourselves through another being’s ears, that we come to recognize that we also exist, to be self-aware, and to recognize that we do not have to be the way we are.

Perhaps what most differentiates human speech from the expressive sounds of animals and birds is that we are not so much expressing ourselves as we are gauging our expressions according to our perceived reactions of those we are speaking to. In our otiot, it is not so much our own self that is found as it is our sense of others.

And yet it is through the power of our otiot, this ability to hear ourselves through another being’s ears, that we come to recognize that we also exist, to be self-aware, and to recognize that we do not have to be the way we are.

It was only after Adam named all the animals that he realized he was alone, and only after he called Eve a woman (isha) that he knew himself as a man (ish).11 So too, it is in this discovery of the other through the medium of language and conversation that we come to construct a concept of self. And then we ask, “If this is who I am, must I be this way?” And we transcend ourselves.

Otiot also allow us to transcend time and space. Without otiot, you would live enveloped entirely within a world of sensations. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for any of us to imagine living in such a world once we have crossed the border into the world of human language. But as a child, before you had otiot, a tree, a rock, the song of a bird, the twinkling of the stars above—all of these were only known by the sensation you received and nothing more.

But otiot are not sensations. They do not occupy space, nor do they obey the laws of physics. The power of otiot is that they are not symbols of objects, but abstractions that express general categories and the relations between things. And as soon as an object has a name, it, too, can transcend itself.

A tree, once labeled as such, becomes a type of being. There are many kinds of trees, some tall, some short, some with needles, some with leaves. So that now you can speak of a tree that is far away, describe it to someone else, and effectively bring it within a space and time in which it does not otherwise exist.

With otiot, especially once made far more mobile by the media of books and recordings, you can travel to the ends of the world and witness the drama of life in some exotic place without even getting out of bed. Yes, in translation and without the context of the natives. Your bed is not made of straw, But you may feel you were actually there, nonetheless.

Otiot even empower you to transcend the limitations of what is and what is not. With the concept of tree in hand, you can now imagine a tree that never was. Having seen an orange tree and an apple tree, you might imagine a strawberry tree, or a tree bearing golden nuggets. You could imagine a rock that flies like a bird. You could look up at the stars and imagine them to be luminous beings similar in some way to yourself but much greater, or perhaps just great rocks that shine and fly.

Small wonder, then, that the ancients called the human being not “the erect being,” not “the toolmaking being,” not even “the sentient, self-aware being,” but “the speaking being.”

It is our otiot that allow us to master our environment to a degree inconceivable for any other creature on the planet. Once we can imagine that which never was, we can assemble all that is and cause it to be. We can collaborate and build a tower to the sky—so long as we hold onto the keys of language and communication. Indeed, there is nothing of the human world that is constructed by any individual alone or without the otiot of language that hold us together. As we build words and sentences, so we build the world we inhabit.

Small wonder, then, that the ancients called the human being not “the erect being,” not “the toolmaking being,” not even “the sentient, self-aware being,” but “the speaking being.” Indeed, when the Genesis narrative describes how G‑d blew into Adam of His own breath “and the human being became a living soul,” the classic translation of Onkelos reads that as “the human being became a speaking spirit.” With otiot, the human being becomes imitatio Dei—in the image of G‑d, a creator and master of his own world.

In the first chapter of his book, Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks tells the story of one of the first and best-known congenitally deaf people taught to use language, Jean Massieu. His teacher, Abbé Sicard, writes of the radical transformation that overcame Massieu when he suddenly “got it.” Massieu became like Adam:

His soul seemed to expand and grow…Massieu’s visits were those of a landowner seeing his rich domain for the first time…

This newcomer to earth was a stranger on his own estates, which were being restored to him as he learned their names.12

Returning Language to Its Origin

From where does this astonishing power of otiot emerge? The narrative of us moderns is that dumb atoms, in a sequence of exceptions to the entropic principle, gradually assemble together and, in response to other forms of matter, adapt to eventually become two-legged animals that begin to speak and transcend themselves.

The traditional narrative, upon which the Maggid bases his commentary, is that the universe, atoms included, is itself generated by a primordial form of otiot, intentional iterations of a wholly transcendent Creator. The complexity of the human network provides a kind of antenna for these primal iterations of sentience to re-emerge on a different plane, inducting them into the context of human life. Only that now they are words in translation, profoundly out of context, and therefore no longer capable of generating actual existence and life.

"What sense can be read into a situation in which villages a few miles apart or valleys divided by low, long eroded hills use tongues incomprehensible to each other and morphologically unrelated?"

Instead, it is upon these otiot that civilizations are built, empires reign, and societies organize themselves into their idiosyncratic structures. Those same articulations of divine energy that brought space-time, physics, and human consciousness into being become the symbols, language, and culture by which the collective consciousness of each society constructs its own world.

And so, despite the inconvenience to commerce and the seemingly unnecessary complications it creates, humanity has divided itself up into some four to five thousand languages. The Philippine Islands alone have some thirty quite distinct, mostly mutually unintelligible languages. As George Steiner asks in his classic investigation of the art of translation, After Babel, “What sense can be read into a situation in which villages a few miles apart or valleys divided by low, long eroded hills use tongues incomprehensible to each other and morphologically unrelated?”13

His answer: Humans seek to be different from one another. The Torah’s answer: G‑d wanted humans to be different from one another. And so, in Babel, “G‑d confused the language of the whole earth, and from there G‑d scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”14

One set of otiot begets a strict hierarchical structure that eventually stifles growth and progress. Another encourages individual expression, originality, and entrepreneurship. Just as you as an individual shine forth within your particular otiot, so the otiot of a society express its soul.

Ancient Egypt, as well, was a construct of its symbols, language, culture…its otiot. It was the seat of esoteric knowledge and hi-tech at its time, a strikingly rich culture and advanced civilization that continues to fascinate and mystify us to this day.

But it was oppressive. If society had remained within the rigid hierarchical structure of ancient Egypt, with its cult of secret knowledge and divine right of its pharaohs, humanity would be enslaved forever, and the notion of progress and a better world would never emerge.

How did such oppression and corruption occur out of divine otiot? Because, as understood from the teachings of the great kabbalist, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (16th century Tzfat), along the route of translation from divine origin to human devices, the otiot lost their original context and rearranged themselves so that their meaning became distorted and lost—somewhat akin to an encrypted file that arrives in your email without its decoding key. Signal becomes noise, and the picture can get ugly. As it did in ancient Egyptian culture.

Here is the teaching of the Magid, as transcribed by his students and in rough translation:

The Holy One desired to extract all the divine sparks that had fallen into Egypt through the primordial shattering. These were all the wasted talk of Pharaoh and of Egypt, their otiot, etc. How would this extraction occur? By bringing these words and these otiot into the Torah and rearranging them in the context of holiness. This would be their purification.

So this is the meaning of “In order that I may place these otiot of Mine.” These are the otiot of the shattering that needed to be arranged within the Torah. To accomplish this, it was necessary to send another three plagues, in order to bring these combinations of otiot into the Torah. If another three plagues had not occurred, many stories would never be written in Torah, and not all the sparks would have been extracted.15

The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, points out that the Magid could not be speaking only of the “wasted words” of Pharaoh and Egypt, but of every aspect of the land including its darkest depravity. From all of this, a great wealth of divine sparks were extracted. And that was the purpose of planting the souls of Israel in Egypt for 210 years–as an investment, a means to rescue these sparks.16

The destiny of these souls was intimately entangled with the redemption of these lost sparks.17 Only once the sparks were released through all ten plagues could the Jewish people become a nation, receive the Torah, and truly be free.

To paraphrase, G‑d said, “These are my otiot, fallen, shattered, and corrupted. And now I will redeem them. I will make signs and wonders so that the otiot of this civilization will be preserved forever within the holiness of My Torah. And once these otiot have been rescued, returned to their place and transformed from darkness into light, then My children can be redeemed.”

G‑d said, “These are my otiot, fallen, shattered, and corrupted. And now I will redeem them. I will make signs and wonders so that the otiot of this civilization will be preserved forever within the holiness of My Torah.

That is what G‑d is telling Moses here, that, yes, it would be simple to force Pharaoh’s hand at this point, and indeed much earlier. But that is not the point. The objective is to rescue these signs, these otot, the “wasted otiot of Egypt,” and induct them into Torah, reconnecting them with their divine origin. Thanks to Pharaoh’s stubborn refusal, bringing upon himself and his nation ten plagues and a catastrophe at the Red Sea, we end up with another three-and-a-half parshiot of otiot in Torah.

We also end up with the gold, silver, bronze, and fine garments of Egypt, along with the skills and crafts we learned while working in their land. That became a mishkan, a sanctuary for the divine presence among the Children of Israel.

Torah to Heal the World

It seems then that our original question bespeaks a misconception of Torah.

Torah is not an alien voice from beyond beckoning us to abandon the suffering of our earthly realm and rise towards a higher, more sublime and divine world. Rather, Torah is a voice of healing, of repair, of reconnection. It says, “There is no need to leave your place, for G‑d is everywhere. Stay where you are, and reveal that it is all truly divine—every culture, every work of art, every beautiful song, every magnificent structure created by humankind contains within it My divine voice.”

The Rebbe added: And so too, in every generation, we are capable of transforming the otiot of each civilization from darkness into light, because it was done for us already in Torah, the blueprint of creation.

In each land where Jews arrive, they assimilate those elements of the local culture that do not conflict with Torah and bring them into Torah. In their everyday activities, in their interactions with the rest of the population, in their study of Torah, in their celebration of its holidays–in all this and more, they return the lost otiot of creation to their original context.18

Each of us has our particular lost otiot which our soul has come to this world to rescue. For one, they may be in the world of commerce, for another in some form of music that can uplift the soul, for another in drama, or technology, or in the sciences, or in some other profession or hobby.

So too, in every generation, we are capable of transforming the otiot of each civilization from darkness into light, because it was done for us already in Torah, the blueprint of creation.

Wherever your soul has taken you, there must be something of profound value that you uncovered there. It must not be left behind. A place on the divine crown awaits its return.

By now, its hard to imagine a land or nation where Torah has not had its impact. We have gathered all the sparks necessary, and now it is time for G‑d to take us out of this final exile along with all His lost sparks, and along with all the inhabitants of the world.

This is the true meaning of the era of Moshiach: Not an apocalypse to clear the ground for heaven to make landing on earth, but a discovery that all the culture of humanity, all our music and art, all our forms of interaction and collaboration, every drama of human life, all those otiot that seemed so vain and temporal–within all of it breathed the most exquisite divine beauty. The outer shell dispensed of, the noise transformed to harmony, we will discover that there is no need for heaven to descend to this place, for it was hiding here all along.

The world will be the way it was meant to be, and we will know we have done our part in its creation.