The Intellect and the Exodus

Many have the custom to buy a new Haggadah every year. That may not be possible this year, but I’d still like to commend The Intellect and the Exodus: Authentic Emuna for a Complex Age by Rabbi Jeremy Kagan, a friend of more than forty years. It is not a quick read, but those who make the effort will be amply rewarded with both deep insights on nearly every page and a new framework for understanding the plagues in Egypt.

The Intellect and the Exodus is at once a profoundly erudite work – Rabbi Kagan’s previous book, The Choice to Be: A Jewish Path to Self and Spirituality, was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for Modern Jewish Thought – and a deeply personal one.

Rabbi Kagan writes movingly of his struggle as a ba’al teshuvah to come to authentic emunah. By the time he arrived at Yale as a math and physics major, he already had an intuition that the materialistic explanations in which he was thoroughly schooled did not fully explain the wonderous complexity and diversity of the world. Furthermore, his strong moral intuition that it is not just “nice to be nice,” lacked foundation in a purely materialistic universe.

Though he was open to Torah, as a child of Western culture, he still found it hard to believe in miracles. Neither he nor anyone else for millennia has witnessed a complete suspension of the laws of nature. Yet the miracles in Egypt form the basis of our recognition of a transcendent G-d.