But Moses did not stop there. Once awakened, his sense of kinship with his people moved him to take further steps, involving more and more risks to himself. He improved their living conditions. He obtained for them the right to observe Shabbat, he took part in their internal affairs. In effect, he proclaimed himself protector of their interests.

One day, when he saw an Egyptian overseer torturing a slave, he threw himself on the man and killed him. From then on he spent all his time far from the palace, learning the mores and customs of these men and women persecuted by the powerful machinery of the empire. He wanted to understand, to help; to understand in order to be able to help more efficiently. He tried to comprehend the cruelty of the oppressors and that of some of the overseers chosen from the ranks of the slaves. Why did the victims, instead of helping one another, adopt the methods of their enemies? One day he saw two Jews quarreling. When one began to strike the other, he intervened. Rasha, he admonished the culprit, you wicked man, why are you striking your brother? In truth, it hardly seems to have been his business—why should an Egyptian prince care if two Jewish slaves felt like having a fight? But he already felt committed as a Jew and people were beginning to take notice. These two Jews knew. And so the man he had addressed answered insolently: Spare us your sermons; are you planning to kill us too? The man knew Moses’ secret: that he had killed to save a Jew—and that he himself was Jewish. Otherwise he surely would not have dared to speak so rudely to one of the Pharaoh’s favorite princes.

Denounced, betrayed, Moses had to flee. The Talmud tells us that an angel who resembled him like a brother gave himself up in his place, and that while he was facing the executioner, the real Moses escaped outside the country. Another source tells of another miracle: all the men at the royal court were stricken blind, deaf or mute; those who had seen or heard him leave could not speak of it. Another text has it that Moses was arrested by the Pharaoh’s guards and condemned to have his head cut off, but that his neck miraculously resisted the ax.

What is certain is that this was a turning point for Moses, one of the most important in his life. It was not easy for a young man used to a princely life and the friendship of the great of this world to become a helpless fugitive overnight. Nor was it easy to break with his friends and habits and adapt himself to the life of a refugee.

When he accepted his new allegiance, Moses became a stranger in more ways than one: a stranger to the Egyptian people, to the Jewish people and to himself.

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