A teaching for Noa Kitty’s first Pesach (2021)

Q.  When the Israelites left Egypt, did the cats go too?

A.  The cats went with their people.  They were very brave and very intentional, in a distinctively feline way.

Cats were revered in ancient Egypt; indeed, it is said that they were worshipped as gods.  The cats who joined the Exodus from Egypt renounced their divine status by doing so.  This extraordinary gesture was possible because the cats knew they were not really gods; they were simple folk, devoted to the values of authenticity, loyalty, and napping.  The cats were neither surprised nor disappointed when the God of the Israelites commanded them not to worship anyone or anything other than God; they had had an intuition about this all along.  Leaving Egypt allowed the Israelite cats to embrace their feline nature and live fully as cats.  

But should we say “Israelite cats”?  In those days, social relationships were not as they are now, with every cat having her own dedicated people and every household having its proper cat.  Instead, cats lived on the margins of human settlement, darting in and out of the villages, socializing less with people and more with feral cats than is the custom today.  When the night of the Exodus arrived, many individual cats had to make very quick decisions about whether to go or stay.  Did they identify with the Israelite villages or with the wider landscape of Egypt?  There were also economic considerations that pressed hard upon the cats.  Egypt was a land of many storehouses and good hunting.  The cats who left Egypt with the Israelites would face forty years of no storehouses and scanty hunting, as the benighted people wandered in the Desert.  (I regret to report that some of the pilgrim cats would be of the party that complained about too much manna and lobbied for quail.)

Some cats did stay in Egypt, as was proper, because every people of the world needs its cats.  But other cats made the whisker-splitting decision to leave.  They had come to identify with the Israelites, and they cast their lot with their people in pursuit of a new way of life.  These cats followed their people right into the Red Sea, trusting that the waters would be parted before their paws, and then into the Desert, trusting that their kittens’ kittens’ kittens would someday know a land of storehouses full of grain and mice again.  They chased their dreams like voles.  And so the Israelite cats became Israelite cats, not by virtue of blood relationship, but by virtue of the community they joined and the vision they pursued.  Some people say that cats cannot be Jewish.  This is narrishkeit.  The cats too had their Exodus, and it is part of our common tale.