So… G-d tells Abraham to look up into the sky, to see all the stars visible at night. “This will be the future of your offspring,” declareth The Lord. “Jews will live as white minorities in black-dominated cities.”
As with most jokes, this one works because there is more than a grain of truth in it. Judaism flourishes in New York and Chicago and St. Louis, and Baltimore and even Lakewood – all cities that, in terms of the populace, resemble the night sky.
We seem to thrive in those places despite withering in others. Judaism has never succeeded in Seattle and San Francisco. It does not flourish in places that are so physically beautiful that the people who live there find their spiritual needs met by just looking at the Rocky Mountains or the Alps or the Pacific Ocean.
The physical environment can help -or hurt – our ability to grow in spiritual ways. This should not be hard to understand: a person raised on the Las Vegas Strip is quite likely to see the world differently than someone raised in, say, Jerusalem. There are places that are so focused on physicality that breaking free might be practically impossible.
The Torah describes Egypt as that sort of place. Ancient Egypt harmonized with nature, and was so inertial that there was a complete paralysis on innovation. To top it off, the society was obsessed with static death, not dynamic life. Egypt was, in a word, a spiritual wasteland – because it was so completely, utterly, focused on the physical realm and experience. The breathtaking physicality of a Mount Ranier at sunrise leaves no room for subtler spirituality.
The Nile was the center of the Egyptian world. Egypt has, not coincidentally, some of the lowest rainfall on the planet. And in that environment, it is hard to even remember that even physical – let alone spiritual — water can come from above.
So it makes sense that when Moshe meets G-d, he does so outside of Egypt. Indeed, this helps explain why the Exodus had to occur, why Jews could not achieve connection with G-d until after they left the Nile behind. Judaism could not flourish in Egypt, just as it cannot flourish in San Francisco.
I … brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your G-d. (N. 15:41)
We had to leave physical Egypt, because getting into a better environment was a necessary prerequisite before we could connect with and cement a relationship with our spiritual Creator. If that means the places that we move to are unattractive, places where Jews might be a distinct minority, then that is a price well worth paying.