Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai offered his own parable to explain the same prophecy from Jeremiah — that a future redemption would overshadow the memory of the Exodus. His version is sharper, more visceral, and rooted in the experience of danger rather than the experience of love.
A man was traveling on the road when a wolf attacked him. He fought the animal off and survived. From that day forward, he told everyone about his encounter with the wolf. It became his signature story — the time he faced death and walked away. The wolf defined him.
Then, later, a lion attacked him. He survived again. And from that moment, he stopped telling the wolf story entirely. Now he only spoke about the lion. The greater danger erased the memory of the lesser one.
Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai's parable reframes the relationship between the Exodus and the future redemption in terms of magnitude. Egypt was the wolf — terrifying, life-threatening, unforgettable. But the sufferings of later exiles, and the eventual final redemption from them, would be the lion. Not because the Exodus was insignificant, but because the scale of what came after would be so much greater that the earlier deliverance would pale by comparison.
There is something bracing about this teaching. Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai does not sugarcoat the implication: Israel's future suffering would be worse than Egypt. But the redemption from it would be proportionally more glorious. The worse the lion, the more astonishing the survival — and the more completely the old wolf story fades from memory.