I’ve always been fascinated by the power of stories. And given that some of the stories I’ve known all my life come from the torah, those tend to be the ones that fascinate me the most. But even though I can talk about Isaac and Rebekah and their whole mishpocha as if they are my great-great-greats, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am entirely certain that they actually existed. And more importantly, knowing this has never been particularly important to me.

So I was fascinated to read an article in the New York Times this week about an archaeologist who calls the parting of the Red Sea and the Exodus from Egypt “a myth.”

But archaeologists who have worked here have never turned up evidence to support the account in the Bible, and there is only one archaeological find that even suggests the Jews were ever in Egypt. Books have been written on the topic, but the discussion has, for the most part, remained low-key as the empirically minded have tried not to incite the spiritually minded. “Sometimes as archaeologists we have to say that never happened because there is no historical evidence,� Dr. Hawass said, as he led the journalists across a rutted field of stiff and rocky sand.

Intellectually speaking, I can understand and agree with Dr. Hawass, but there’s another part of me that won’t listen. It’s the storyteller, the story-lover, the 8-year-old who needs to believe in the impossible sometimes just to get through the day.

As a child, I lived in books, and had no difficulty befriending the characters in my favorite books and thinking of those worlds as just as real as my own, while at the same time knowing that the stories were just stories, created in the minds of real people, but not real themselves. I never saw any contradiction in these beliefs, but it’s difficult to explain why.

It’s the same reason why I can simultaneously treat the torah as the primary historical document of my ancestors, critique the writing styles of it’s authors, and believe in Charles Darwin and Carl Sagan and dinosaurs. Most fascinating to me these days is studying (and reading about) other peoples’ reactions to these stories. The five books of Moses make people do crazy things, depending on what they believe about it. And I’m curious as to why people believe what they believe about these stories, and what they’re looking for in this troublesome book.

I think we believe in stories when we need to believe them. Just as mini-Marisa needed to sometimes live in different worlds populated by different people than the ones who actually existed in third grade, plenty of adults are still desperate to find lives that are not their own, lives filled with messy, complex relationships, characters who make desicions that are sometimes good, and sometimes not, people who manage to overcome bizarre circumstances to survive into the next generation. Who cares if they’re a myth?

In the midst of the need to believe in the events and people described in the torah, there should be an equal need to live in this world - where our sun is a ball of gases, where the earth created itself many millenia ago, where the descendents of our great-great-greats are not only other humans, but also the chimpanzees and gorillas who resemble us in so many ways.

One of the dangers I see in blind acceptance of “bible truth” is evident in the article: “In Egypt today, visitors to Mount Sinai are sometimes shown a bush by tour guides and told it is the actual bush that burned before Moses.” My first question, if a tour guide said this to me, would be Then why isn’t it still burning? But I’m certain that there are plenty of people every year who believe, and take pictures, and feel that they’ve had a spiritual experience, walking in Moses’ footsteps. Personally, this would diminish the experience for me. It’s one thing to love the site of a story which plays such a prominent role in your life, and take on faith (for lack of a less emotionally-charged word) that this is the location in which the exciting events of the story took place. It’s another thing to cling to shady assertions that a shrub is “evidence” that the story is real. If one believes, why is such tangible confirmation necessary?

In this Passover season, as in every other, I read and re-read the story of the Exodus from Egypt, and work to make it relevant to my life in 5767. And while I recognize that it’s a story, that there is no evidence to confirm the historical “truth” of the text, I still revel in the realness of it as much as I did when I was eight.