Exodus DNA: The Birth of a People Without Limits

Breaking Systems, Crossing False Boundaries, and Learning to Walk with God

In memory of our holy soldiers who fell sanctifying God’s Name and the Land of Israel: Ephraim son of Liat and Shmuel, Yosef Malachi son of Dina and David, Eliyahu Moshe Shlomo son of Sarah and Shimon, Yosef Chaim son of Rachel and Eliyahu, Netanel son of Revital and Elad, Yakir son of Chaya and Yehoshua.

I didn’t expect to need a full pint of ice cream.

Ran Gvili HY"D, Hero of Israel

When the message came through our chevra kadisha WhatsApp group that our task had finally been completed, with the return of the last hostage,

Ran Gvili HY"D, who, like Nachshon, stepped into danger with complete devotion and became a true hero of Israel, a powerful wave of emotion rose inside me. My energy dropped suddenly, as my body finally registered what my mind had been holding for so long.

Could it really be true? No more #hostages in #Gaza?

For years, our prayers carried a single, focused awareness: as long as even one of our children is held by the enemy, our national heart remains suspended.

Reading the sentence, “For the first time in decades, there are no hostages in Gaza,” felt momentous — because something essential was released. Space opened for grief, for memory, and for life.

Holding a body hostage is a form of calculated psychological warfare. It aims to extend pain beyond the battlefield and into the collective nervous system of a nation. We are a people who carry responsibility for one another. When one of our own is held, the entire nation remains bound.

This week, alongside unbearable loss, a layer of psychological pressure lifted. A shift occurred that allowed us to begin a fuller process of mourning and integration.

ברוך דיין האמת.

What felt especially striking is that this moment arrives during Parashat Beshalach, the Torah’s most detailed account of how God guides a people out of enslavement — and into restored inner freedom.

A Guided Route

At the opening of the parasha, the Torah describes a deliberate and thoughtful journey:

שמות י״ג:י״ז–י״חוַיְהִי בְּשַׁלַּח פַּרְעֹה אֶת־הָעָם וְלֹא נָחָם אֱלֹקִים דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ פְּלִשְׁתִּים כִּי קָרוֹב הוּא, כִּי אָמַר אֱלֹקִים פֶּן־יִנָּחֵם הָעָם בִּרְאֹתָם מִלְחָמָה וְשָׁבוּ מִצְרָיְמָה.וַיַּסֵּב אֱלֹקִים אֶת־הָעָם דֶּרֶךְ הַמִּדְבָּר יַם־סוּף.

When Pharaoh sent the people, God chose a path that would cultivate endurance and readiness. God guided the people through the wilderness toward the Sea of Reeds, shaping them for what lay ahead.

The Torah then specifies the encampment with remarkable care:

שמות י״ד:ב׳דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְיָשֻׁבוּ וְיַחֲנוּ לִפְנֵי פִּי הַחִירֹת… לִפְנֵי בַּעַל צְפֹן

Speak to the children of Israel that they turn and encamp before Pi HaChirot… before Baal Tzefon.

Why guide the people here? What transformation could emerge specifically at this place?

The answer begins by understanding what the Torah means when it speaks about leaving Mitzrayim. Egypt was a way of thinking, a way of organizing life, and a way of defining the human being. Freedom emerged only once that system came into focus and was directly confronted; movement alone could never accomplish that work.

Mitzrayim as a System

Chazal describe Mitzrayim as a comprehensive system that narrows awareness, assigns identity, and defines possibility. Egypt is portrayed as a place that reshapes how a person understands self, time, and future.

זוהר (ח״ב, שמות כ׳ ע"א):מִצְרַיִם אִיהִי מֵיצַר הַדַּעַת

Egypt is a constriction of consciousness.

This constriction is existential. The Zohar describes Egypt as a place where perception itself is narrowed, where awareness cannot expand beyond immediate survival.

מהר"ל, גבורות ה׳ פרק ט׳:הָעֶבֶד אֵין לוֹ צוּרָה מִצַּד עַצְמוֹ, רַק צוּרָתוֹ תְּלוּיָה בַּאֲדוֹן.

The slave has no independent form of his own; his form is dependent upon the master.*\

For the Maharal, Egypt represents a civilization that assigns form and purpose from the outside. A person’s value is measured by function rather than inner essence. Identity becomes externally imposed, and the inner self gradually falls silent.

מדרש תנחומא, שמות ט׳:לֹא הָיוּ מְשַׁעְבְּדִין אוֹתָם אֶלָּא כְּדֵי לְשַׁבֵּר לִבָּם.

They enslaved them for no purpose other than to break their heart.*

Oppression in Egypt was designed to exhaust meaning, erode initiative, and prevent the imagination of change. Within such a system, repetition replaces growth, and survival replaces becoming.

At the heart of any system of mind control lies a single goal: to serve the system itself, not the individual within it. The shaping of consciousness is never neutral. When awareness is narrowed and identity is externally assigned, a person’s inner life is redirected toward maintaining the system’s stability, productivity, and power. The individual becomes valuable insofar as they serve the structure, rather than the structure existing to serve human flourishing.

Liberation, therefore, requires the restoration of inner awareness, the recovery of voice, and the capacity to imagine a future that serves human purpose rather than system preservation.

This idea carries forward into the unfolding story. A people whose task is to carry divine presence into the world must develop an inner steadiness that survives pressure. Identity has to be held from within, even when surrounding structures push hard in another direction.

Pi HaChirot: Entering the Core

Chazal identify Pi HaChirot with Pitom, one of the central cities built through slave labor. This identification reframes the moment entirely. God leads the people straight into the heart of the system that had shaped them most deeply.

רש״י על שמות י״ד:ב׳ (עפ״י המכילתא):פי החירות — הוא פיתום. ולמה נקרא שמו פי החירות? שנעשו שם בני חורין.

Pi HaChirot is Pitom. It is called Pi HaChirot because it became the place of freedom.

Freedom begins precisely at the point of greatest internal confinement. The place where identity had once been reduced to function becomes the place where identity is reclaimed.

At this same site stood Baal Tzefon, the final remaining Egyptian symbol. Egypt’s system preserves a single marker of power to project the illusion that its control remains intact.

מכילתא דרבי ישמעאל, בשלח:מכל אלוהי מצרים לא נשאר אלא בעל צפון כדי להטעות את פרעה

Of all the gods of Egypt, Baal Tzefon alone remained, shaping Pharaoh’s perception.

Pharaoh reads the situation through the only framework he knows — the logic of the system.

שמות י״ד:ג׳נְבֻכִים הֵם בָּאָרֶץ סָגַר עֲלֵיהֶם הַמִּדְבָּר

They are confused in the land; the wilderness surrounds them.

From within this worldview, safety appears to reside inside the known structure. The wilderness feels disorienting. The open path feels threatening. Pi HaChirot functions as a psychological threshold where the system’s story confronts the possibility of freedom.

The 49th Level: A Lens of Compassion

Chazal teach that Bnei Yisrael descended to the 49th level of tumah. I read this teaching as an invitation to understanding rather than judgment.

When a human being lives for generations inside a system that defines identity, safety, and worth from the outside, the system leaves marks on the nervous system, on instinct, and on imagination. Even when the chains loosen, the reflexes remain. At this depth, the repeated cries to return to Egypt can be read as fear shaped by long exposure to danger.

This lens also helps me approach the painful teaching that four-fifths of the nation did not leave Egypt. Rather than seeing this as failure, I understand it as the tragic cost of how deeply a system can train people to equate survival with staying inside it. For many, Egypt had become the place where life, however diminished, still felt predictable and therefore safe.

Chazal do not describe the 50th level explicitly. I want to suggest a way of thinking about it. The danger of that final level is not simply further spiritual descent, but full identification with the system itself. At that point, the system no longer feels external. It feels like the self.

When this happens, leaving feels threatening. Crossing the boundary feels like stepping into harm. Remaining inside the system remains the only way to stay alive, even when the system steadily drains life from within.

Seen this way, the fear at Pi HaChirot reflects the final grip of an internalized structure that once provided safety, order, and continuity. The people stand at the edge of freedom while carrying a body memory that associates survival with remaining exactly where they are.

Transformation Through the Sea

At Pi HaChirot, divine guidance becomes especially active. The path forward opens through the sea, inviting the people into a fundamentally new relationship with reality itself.

The splitting of the sea marks a decisive transformation because it reveals that the world is responsive to God’s will, not locked into fixed order. Egypt’s worldview depended on permanence: stable nature, predictable hierarchy, and unchanging power structures. When the sea splits, that assumption collapses.

רמב"ן על שמות י״ד:כ״א:וַיֵּבָקְעוּ הַמַּיִם — לא כדרך בקיעה בלבד, אלא שנשתנה טבע הים.

The waters were split — not by a simple division alone, but through a change in the very nature of the sea.

According to the Ramban, this was not a localized miracle but a revelation that the fabric of nature itself can shift. The world the people step into on the far side of the sea no longer feels governed by inevitability.

The Zohar describes this moment as a reconfiguration of reality:

זוהר ח״ב קע׳ ע"ב:בְּיַם־סוּף אִתְגְּלֵי תִּקּוּפָא דְּעָלְמָא.

At the Sea of Reeds, the structure of the world was revealed.

With this shift, the people experience that creation itself responds to divine presence. Possibility expands, fear loosens, and orientation changes.

Only then does voice return. Song emerges.

Shirah expresses a people who now experience themselves as participants in reality rather than subjects trapped inside it — capable of direction, relationship, and choice. Chazal note that Pi HaChirot can be read as פי החירות, “the mouth of freedom.” At this moment, the people gain freedom of speech: the capacity to speak from within themselves, to give voice to faith, gratitude, and truth after generations in which speech had been shaped by fear.

Our world continues to offer systems that promise safety through conformity and identity through structure. These systems can feel deeply protective, especially when life seems fragile.

#ParashatBeshalach reveals that God did far more than extract a people from danger. God prepared a nation for a long and demanding journey through history. By leading Am Yisrael through Pi HaChirot, God exposed the danger of moving through the world while thinking inside a system, and implanted something enduring into our spiritual DNA: the capacity to rise above imposed identities, to remember who we are, and to hold onto that truth even in the darkest moments.

I find myself asking whether Jewish history could have unfolded as it did if Pi HaChirot had remained unbreeched. That first collective charge past a barrier that existed primarily in the mind and heart taught us something elemental: boundaries presented as absolute can be crossed. Possibility is far wider than any system allows us to see.

From that moment on, we became a people shaped by boundary‑breaching. We learned to think beyond the box, to reshape the box, and to imagine futures that had never existed before. This chutzpah of spirit — the willingness to reimagine reality in partnership with God — is one of the secrets behind the nearly impossible survival and flourishing of the Jewish people across millennia.

We are a nation that learned, together, that we are not defined by external constraints. When we walk with God toward the Promised Land — toward our higher selves — we carry an inner knowledge that possibility is expansive, life is creative, and growth remains always within reach.