Pharaoh offers a compromise. Bring your sacrifices inside the land. Don't go anywhere. Moses's answer, as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 8:22 renders it, is a lesson in cultural sensitivity that later Jewish tradition has never stopped citing: It will not be right to do so; because we shall take sheep, which are the abomination of the Mizraee, and offer them before the Lord our God.
Moses is pointing out something obvious to any anthropologist but inconvenient to any negotiator. Egyptians worshiped certain animals, especially the ram, as divine. To slaughter a sheep in public in front of an Egyptian was to commit what they perceived as a blasphemy. If we offer the abomination of the Mizraee before them, Moses says, they would stone us with stones as an act of justice.
Read that again. Moses is not afraid of martyrdom; he is afraid of inciting a riot that Egyptians would consider morally correct. He understands their theology from the inside. He knows where their sacred lines are. And he refuses to trample those lines even while demanding his own freedom.
This is one of the Torah's most overlooked ethical moments. The liberator who is about to oversee the tenth plague still pauses to protect Egyptian religious sensibilities. That is why Israel must go three days into the wilderness — so that the sacrifice can be carried out without provoking a lynch mob and without any dignity lost to either side.
The takeaway: Jewish worship does not require humiliating our neighbors. A true service of God leaves the neighbor's dignity intact even at the moment we are asserting our own.