Five Lessons from the Exodus, Minus Happy Endings

This Easter, five political lessons from the Exodus — as seen by Michael Walzer — offer a stark reminder: liberation is just the beginning, not the end, and the road to any promised land is long, collective, and full of contradictions.

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APRIL 16, 2025

Roberta Campani

Communications and Outreach

Dear FO° Reader,

Easter is already here. Children will soon run around looking for eggs hidden in bushes, parents will invite family, and everyone is busy cleaning or cooking. As I was cleaning, I found an old book from the time I was a student.

Exodus and Revolution, 1985

The author, American philosopher and political theorist Michael Walzer, wrote that the Exodus story unfolds in five parts. It's not just about liberation — it's a map of what collective change really looks like.

Let’s take his five lessons and walk them together, one step at a time.

First, the Exodus is a story of deliverance.

A people enslaved for generations cry out. A leader — reluctant, stuttering, disillusioned — steps up. After ten plagues, a sea parts. Pharaoh’s army drowns. The people are free at last.

Except… they’re not, not yet.

They’ve just left the cage. Deliverance, it turns out, is only the first plot twist.

As I recall, it felt somewhat like a revelation when Walzer (and not only him) said that those who begin the struggle for liberation will most likely end their lives before seeing the Promised Land. Those who are born during the struggle will achieve it, but they will possess only memories of the struggle, not the actual experience. This has relevance to our experience of the world today. Many of us live as if we are now subjected to the same dangers and threats as those described in our parents’ and grandparents’ stories. Just as armies often make the mistake of fighting the last war, we may have a distorted view of the tribulations we are now facing.

The second twist: It’s a story about collective deliverance.

Moses didn’t ride solo on a white donkey into Israel’s destiny. He led a ragtag, grumbling, occasionally mutinous crowd dragging their kids, goats and matzah through the wilderness. No unaccompanied miracles in the solitude of Sinai. The crowd would always show up — again and again, day after dusty day.

Change, then and now, requires collective will. You want to leave Egypt? Be ready to walk together. Even if your fellow travelers drive you crazy as they lose sight of the common goal, demand to go back, complain in anticipation of sore feet, grumbling guts, debilitating thirst and inexorable exhaustion. Sometimes, it will be fun.

Sound familiar?

Third, deliverance is the beginning of a journey.

Leaving Egypt wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of forty years of sand in your shoes, battles with giants, food insecurity (manna again?), leadership crises, golden calves, plagues and internal squabbling. Forty years means that the elderly who began the march didn’t make it to the end. Some were born on the way and never experienced the prison except in the tales of their parents. And, we know tales are not reality, they always have an agenda.

This is the bit everyone forgets. Liberation doesn’t drop you into beautiful postcard utopia. It dumps you into reality — complicated, slow, boring, painful reality. Ask anyone who’s tried to change a country, an institution or even just themselves.

Some talk about the end of the world (Ernesto de Martino, 1964) of the end of history (Francis Fukuyama 1992) and the apocalypse (Slavoj Žižek). This last one talks about the apocalypse as the revelation of what lay beyond the end of our world, the one we fear to leave behind.

Ask the post-colonial nations. Ask post-Nazi Germany. Ask post-communist states. Ask post-Brexit Britain.

I’m always surprised when I am reminded that in Italy, many still regret the end of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime. “Quando c’era lui…” (“When he was around…”) they dreamily utter, even if they never lived in those times.

Fourth, the journey is toward a goal.

Ah, yes—the Promised Land. The land of Canaan, where milk and honey flow in rivers. The shining city on the hill. The idea that makes it all worthwhile. It’s just that, an idea, a creation of our minds. Some form of hyperreality, as my colleague Peter Isackson would say. But, it would be just fine if it could be used as a direction without becoming yet another cause for dispute and conflict.

Except everyone has a different version; everyone brandishes a different map.

US President Donald Trump’s goal? Power without responsibility, borders without compassion and nostalgia with a side of merchandising. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s? A high-tech Confucian dynasty where dissent is disloyalty and surveillance is safety. France’s? Perhaps the fantasy of grandeur without sacrifice — republican values draped in haute couture and police batons.

We all walk, but not always in the same direction. And often, the compass is spinning.

We could question human nature or psychology, and some will explain why things are the way they are with great confidence and elaborate models. I don’t trust that approach. Humans, men, women, children, people — we evolve, we grow, and we adapt to our environment just as much as we are capable of modifying it. Think technology: We build a tool, and then our body adapts to the use of the tool. But when we impose on ourselves or each other to conform to some made-up model of the perfect life, we’re in for disaster; at least for some, those who can’t fit. Then we make up new stories to justify that it's their fault if they don't fit; they didn't pray the right god, they didn't eat the right food, they didn't plan and invest for retirement…

Fifth, the goal is a good society.

And here’s where it gets tricky. Everyone wants one — but no one agrees what it means.

To Plato, it was justice through order. To Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it was the general will (even if people had to be “forced to be free”). To Karl Marx, classless equality (ok, I simplify). To Ayn Rand, radical individualism. To many Silicon Valley billionaires, it’s a libertarian bunker with artisanal snacks (organic, of course).

Good societies, we’re told, require sacrifice. But too often, that means someone else makes the sacrifice. Liberal capitalist societies are built on the sacrifice of slaves and displaced people; let’s not forget this.

History is littered with utopias that ended in bloodbaths. Why? Because each side thinks it has THE answer. And everyone else? Obviously wrong. And probably dangerous.

Again, ask the French Revolution; that ended with Napoleon. Or Year Zero Cambodia. Or the algorithmic utopians who now run our lives through terms-of-service agreements you never read.

So here we are. Somewhere between deliverance and disillusionment. Maybe still in the wilderness. Maybe on the cusp of something better — or something worse.

At Fair Observer, we’re not here to sell you a map. We don’t pretend to know where the Promised Land is — or whether it’s real. But we do believe in walking together, asking questions and telling the truth, even when it’s inconvenient.

And that, too, is a kind of collective journey.

See you on the road,

Roberta Campani
Communications and Outreach

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