A Jew once spent Shabbos with the Maggid and then went on his way. En route, he decided to rest and tied his packages to a nearby tree. When he awoke, his Tallis and Tefillin were gone.

When he heard what had happened, the Maggid instructed his visitor to attend a bris milah (circumcision), in the next town. One of the poor people there, whom the Maggid carefully described, was the culprit. The victim was told to ask for his belongings back, and if the poor man denied taking them, he was to repeat his demand in the name of the Maggid.

These directives worked, but the thief agreed to return the stolen goods only in the presence of the Maggid.

When they came to Mezritch, the poor man said to the Maggid, “I see you are very perceptive, and I can’t deny your claim. But do you have nothing else to do but observe thieves at work?”

“I was in the lavatory at the time. Only there does one see such things,” the Maggid answered.

from The Life and Times of Rebbe Dov Ber The Maggid of Mezritch by Yitzchak Dorfman

Why is Pharaoh so afraid of being caught relieving himself?

Certainly, we think of expelling waste as a lowly and undignified human function. Most of us still intuit what we can no longer explain because our educations were deficient: certain bodily functions are undignified because, if seen by others, they force others to think of us in pure bodily terms. Burping at the table. Picking our nose. And most of all the top two, namely Number One and Number Two. So perhaps Pharaoh thinks it’s undignified to be caught on his morning river run.

But does it really contradict his status as a deity? This is a man who said (Ezekiel 29:3) “The river is mine and I have made it for myself.” On the contrary, many ancient paganisms attribute all bodily functions to their gods, even really unpleasant ones. Could not Pharaoh have argued that his expelling of waste was, too, an occult function, a blessing upon the land, and the like?

But there is no freedom for false gods. Like all klipot, all husks, the worshiped form is defined only by external relationship; its existence is pure superficiality. The Nile is worshiped because it provides life, but if it is also blue and runs north-to-south, these, too, are aspects of its form. These are surely mere secondary qualities, less central to the Nile being the Nile than its life-giving irrigation of the fields. But secondary qualities are still secondary, that is, in some finite relation with primary qualities.

If I worship the Nile because of one of its qualities that my mind comprehends (it gives life) then all its other qualities that my mind comprehends (its color, the direction of its flow) can be and are linked to that first, primary quality. The blueness of the Nile reflects the glory of its life-giving waters, reflecting the great cloudless sky above the Giza Plateau. It finds the great sea wherever the sea rests, just as it rushes reliably to feed our crop, etc. etc.

So if I worship Pharaoh in his kingship or his power, but Pharaoh also, it turns out, uses the bathroom…

Pharaoh’s power is inextricably linked to the rest of his form. Although he may have created the river, that creation must somehow be explained in terms of relieving himself in it. There is, to the idol, no immutable core identity, no power or majesty that exists unto itself, without a form, without a defined relationship to the context of the idol. Pharaoh is great because of his claimed relationship to the world. Any other way he relates to the world, even the way he expels waste into it, must necessarily contextualize that greatness.

Not so, the G-d of Israel. Not so, His laws and His will, concerned intimately with the process of human waste expulsion. Not so, his Tzaddikim and sages who represent Him on earth, who are unafraid to admit they have bodies.

The callsign of G-d, the one of the four-letter Name that Pharaoh does not recognize, is the way he relates to finite things: He creates them yesh mi’ayin, ex nihilo, something from nothing. This is a relationship unlike any found in our universe; it may be called a non-relationship relationship. That is, He causes things by remaining completely separate from them, completely apart. They simply POOF! into existence with no rational explanation, and the ancient philosophers understood the explanation to be the cause. G-d is not entangled in the web of the things He does or creates or affects; on the contrary, he only does or creates or affects them by remaining apart from them. He creates a bathroom and yet is utterly and entirely undefined by what He has created; let’s see Pharaoh try that.

Thinking like an idolator is to find the relationships between finite forms. Thinking like a child of Abraham is to see that no such relationship can be the ultimate truth, that the Ultimate Truth stands beyond that web.

And so, a wondrous thing: The ancient idol worshipers, from Egypt to Greece to Sumeria, are obsessed with intermediaries and hierarchies, the chain of being, causes and effects, abstract and immanent forms. They know that excrement is lowly and kingship is lofty. And yet, kingship may never be so lofty as to make excrement purely lofty, too. Reduction to the lowest is not a modern invention.

G-d and G-dliness, however, fears nothing and embraces everything, because none of its relationships are defining relationships. Everything may move relative to G-d, but G-d does not move relative to them. And not as Aristotle would limit Him, to being an unmoved mover, an uninvolved abstraction, a non-creator. On the contrary, the mystery of something from nothing is that He is intimately involved, constantly creating, constantly “moving”, and yet he still does not move. Constantly burning, never consuming. Creating the dregs, yet ever remaining their Creator.

The fact that the king has to visit the river in the morning makes him less a king. The fact that the Maggid sat in an outhouse does not make him less the Maggid. It makes the outhouse a G-dly place.

The same way the Jew is not called to practice Judaism as some aspect of his or her life, but as an all-consuming full-time occupation. This does not call us to a monastery or a mountain, but to everywhere the non-Jew is called. Because G-d creates it all from nothing, all of it is part of being a Jew.

The same way even those of us who are, alas, imperfect, who have strayed from the righteous path, are undefined by our sins even as we commit them. Because G-d creates it all from nothing, none of it can deny Him. None of it raises a single echo when He declares, “I am the Lord Your G-d who has brought you out from Egypt.”

ex nihilo idolatry Pharaoh philosophy