Remember the earliest of days; grasp the years of generations that have been. Ask your father – he will tell you all; ask the elders of your kin and they will say. (Deut. 32:7)
The seder service on Pesaḥ is the oldest surviving ritual in the Western world, dating back some 3,300 years to the night, possibly in the reign of Ramses II, when the Israelites ate their last meal in Egypt, preparing for their journey to freedom. Certain features still remain from biblical times: the matza and maror, the reminder of the Paschal offering (a mere reminder until the rebuilding of the Temple), the questions asked by a child, and the explanations given by an adult. In some communities, especially Oriental ones, it is still the custom to dress as the Israelites did then, “your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand” (Ex. 12:11).
The seder is, of course, more than a ritual. It is an act of remembering, the telling of a story – the Haggada – and none has been more lovingly sustained. Each age has added something of its own. In the course of a single night, we encounter, as well as biblical passages, Hillel in the days of the Second Temple, the second-century sages at their seder in Benei Brak, the teachings of the Amora’im of the third and later centuries, poems by Yannai and Kalir from the post-talmudic period, an addition from Ashkenaz provoked by the terrible sufferings of the First Crusade, and children’s songs from medieval Germany. Every word we say has a history. Even the Ma Nishtana, the questions asked by a child, go back some two thousand years. The weaving together of these many contributions into a single narrative is the achievement of no ordinary author. It is the collective voice of the Jewish people through centuries and continents as it has encountered and responded to the word of God.
Through the Haggada more than a hundred generations of Jews have handed on their story to their children. The word haggada means “relate,” “tell,” “expound.” But it is closely related to another Hebrew root that means “bind,” “join,” “connect.” By reciting the Haggada, Jews give their children a sense of connectedness to Jews throughout the world and to the Jewish people through time. It joins them to a past and future, a history and destiny, and makes them characters in its drama. Every other nation known to mankind has been united because its members lived in the same place, spoke the same language, were part of the same culture. Jews alone, dispersed across continents, speaking different languages and participating in different cultures, have been bound together by a narrative, the Pesaḥ narrative, which they told in the same way on the same night. More than the Haggada was the story of a people, Jews were the people of a story.
During Israel’s early history – the biblical era – the Exodus narrative embodied their collective memory as a nation, forged in slavery and led miraculously to freedom. Not only was it the record of their past; it was their template of ideals for the future, their aspiration to create a society dedicated to liberty under the sovereignty of God. But its influence did not end with the collapse of Jewish sovereignty in Israel. If anything, during the long centuries when Jews were scattered throughout the world, its effect was more remarkable still. It sustained Jewish identity, linking one generation to the next through the bonds of shared memory. In times of suffering – and there were many – it kept hope alive, the hope expressed at the very beginning of the Haggada that though “now [we are] slaves, next year we shall be free; now we are here; next year in the land of Israel.” In ages of prosperity, it became a tutorial in mutual responsibility. It taught the great lesson of human solidarity, that we cannot enjoy the food of affluence while others eat the bread of oppression. We are not fully free if others are oppressed.
Nor was its influence confined to Jews. Through a long and circuitous route, the story of the Exodus eventually came to influence not only Jews but Western civilization as a whole. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through such figures as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, it gave rise to a new vision of freedom. It told of how a people might liberate itself from oppressive governments and construct a society in which “all men are created equal,” possessing inalienable dignity and collective freedom. It set forth a narrative, never surpassed, of the human drama as the long journey to redemption, not in heaven but on earth, in the structures of our common life. No story has had greater influence in inspiring revolution or evolution toward a just and humane society. It is the West’s great meta-narrative of liberty.
More remarkably still, in the nineteenth century it inspired a series of figures, some religious, others secular but moved nonetheless by the power of the ancient narrative, to set in motion a new exodus and homecoming of the Jewish people. It began with a new Egypt – the rise of racial anti-Semitism, followed by the Russian pogroms, then the anti-Jewish program of the Nazis, which moved inexorably to the Final Solution, the worst recorded crime of man against man. It culminated in a redemption more astonishing than any other in post-biblical history: the only time a people dispersed for two thousand years has returned to its land to begin its history again as a sovereign power. Speaking in the United Nations in 1947, David Ben-Gurion argued the case for the creation of the State of Israel and did so by referring to Pesaḥ and the Haggada:
Three hundred years ago a ship called the Mayflower set sail to the New World. This was a great event in the history of England. Yet I wonder if there is one Englishman who knows at what time the ship set sail? Do the English know how many people embarked on this voyage? What quality of bread did they eat? Yet more than three thousand three hundred years ago, before the Mayflower set sail, the Jews left Egypt. Every Jew in the world, even in America or Soviet Russia, knows on exactly what date they left – the fifteenth of the month of Nisan. Everyone knows what kind of bread they ate. Even today the Jews worldwide eat matza on the fifteenth of Nisan. They retell the story of the Exodus and all the troubles Jews have endured since being exiled. They conclude this evening with two statements: This year, slaves. Next year, free men. This year here. Next year in Jerusalem, in Zion, in Eretz Yisrael. That is the nature of the Jews.
Thus history repeated itself, and a new chapter was written in the Jewish story of exile and homecoming more than three thousand years after the first. The story of the modern State of Israel, with its restoration of Jewish sovereignty; the ingathering of exiles from 103 countries, speaking eighty-two languages; the rebirth of Hebrew, the language of the Bible; and the rebuilding of Jerusalem, Israel’s ancient capital, exemplifies one of Judaism’s most hope-creating truths: that a vision can shape the destiny of a people. Ideas, if we live them, have the power to change the world.
The great message of Pesaḥ is that history is not what Joseph Heller once called it: “a trash bag of random coincidences blown open by the wind” (Good as Gold). It is, or can become, a journey toward a place where people are valued not for the wealth they own or the power they wield, but for who they are – a trace of God in a world that so often seems to deny His presence. In ways that remain obscure yet still majestic, a whole series of individuals – beginning with Abraham, culminating in Moses, and continuing through an almost unending sequence of prophets, visionaries, sages, saints, philosophers, poets, jurists, and commentators – was inspired by a vision of society in which simple acts, relationships, and lives could become vehicles of the Divine Presence.
As we sit around the seder table on Pesaḥ, rehearsing the journey from the bread of oppression to the wine of freedom, we commit ourselves to a momentous proposition: that history has meaning. We are not condemned endlessly to repeat the tragedies of the past. Not everywhere is an Egypt; not all politics are the exploitation of the many by the few; life is potentially something other and more gracious than the pursuit of power. Though we have not yet constructed the perfect social order, and though the messianic age with its reign of peace remains over the horizon, we are not wrong to travel in that direction, however long it may take before we reach our destination. In his A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson expressed as well as anyone has the nature of the Jewish journey:
No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At a very early stage of their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot. They worked out their role in immense detail. They clung to it with heroic persistence in the face of savage suffering…. The Jewish vision became the prototype for many similar grand designs for humanity, both divine and man-made. The Jews, therefore, stand right at the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.
“The dignity of a purpose”: that remains, even today, a radical hope. Throughout history there has been no shortage of those who claim that ideals are illusions and hope a form of hubris destined to end in failure. Today that view is as likely to come from science (specifically “scientism,” the belief that science is all there is) as anywhere else. We are, on this view, a mere concatenation of chemicals, cosmic dust on the surface of infinity, living out lives that are no more than infinitesimal disturbances in a blind and purposeless universe that came into being for no reason, and for no reason will, billions of years from now, cease to be.
Judaism is now, as it has been since its earliest days, a protest against such despair in the name of humanity and of God, whose breath we breathe and whose voice, if we listen, we can still hear through the echoes of time. The universe is not blind to our hopes, deaf to our prayers. Somewhere at the core of being is a personal presence, a transcendental Thou, who created the world in love, brought us into being as a parent does a child, who spoke to Abraham and Sarah, asking them and their descendants to undertake a long and momentous journey, and who is with us on the way. Pesaḥ is the festival of faith, the faith of our ancestors, who followed that voice across the wilderness of space and time, in search of a freedom that honors the presence of God in the affairs of mankind.
Few texts have received more attention than the Haggada. There are thousands of commentaries, and more are published each year. Anyone who contemplates adding to this number must ask not “Why is this night different?” but “Why is this edition different?” My answer is that I wrote this commentary because, among all the many I have read, I could not find one that explained in their full richness and scope the fundamental themes of the Pesaḥ story: the Jewish concept of a free society, the role of memory in shaping Jewish identity, and the unique connection that exists in Judaism between spirituality and society, giving rise to what I have called elsewhere “the politics of hope.” Nor could I find a Haggada that told me in detail about the role of Pesaḥ in shaping Jewish identity through the millennia, or its influence on Western thought as a whole.
Traditional commentaries are usually close readings of individual words and phrases rather than reflections on the meaning of the whole. That is a classic Jewish response, and I have not hesitated (in the latter essays, and in the commentary on the text) to do likewise. In some of the essays (“The Sages in Benei Brak” is my personal favorite) I have tried to say things I have not heard before. That is the imperative of ḥiddush, finding the new in the old. But it is the great themes, the overarching principles, that are often neglected or taken for granted, and it is worth saying why.
Pesaḥ is an intensely political festival. It is about the central Jewish project: constructing a society radically unlike any that had existed before and most that have come into being since. It poses a fundamental question: can we make, on earth, a social order based not on transactions of power but on respect for the human person – each person – as “the image of God”? Pesaḥ, like Judaism generally, is not about salvation, a private drama of the soul, but about redemption, the life we share as fellow citizens under the sovereignty of God. It is about freedom, justice, equity, the ethics of the marketplace, and the responsible use of power to secure the common good. Before Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Rousseau’s The Social Contract, the Exodus story pioneered a path to a just and gracious society. I believe that it embodies not only a more religious vision than these other works, but also a more humane one. At its heart is a never-surpassed idea: that the free God seeks the free worship of free human beings, and invites those who heed His call to become His coarchitects in creating what Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein calls “societal beatitude.”
Much of the Hebrew Bible, spanning a period of almost two thousand years, is about how the people of the covenant wrestled with this challenge, sometimes succeeding, often failing, but never losing sight of the task, the call, the dream. The challenge, however, presupposed that Jews had political power – a land, a nation, a state, within which they could construct a free society that honored its members and served as an example and inspiration to others. That was never easy. Israel was a small country in a strategic location surrounded by great powers. It experienced many wars, internal tensions, and eventually a fateful split into two nations. In the sixth century bce the Babylonians conquered the remaining southern kingdom of Judah, destroyed the Temple, and took many of the people into exile. A generation later, some returned, and eventually the Temple was rebuilt. But after two disastrous rebellions against the Romans, in 66 and 132 ce, the Temple was destroyed again, Jerusalem lay in ruins, and the Jews faced their longest exile.
For eighteen centuries, between the destruction of the Second Temple and European emancipation, they were exiled, dispersed, and without political organization. Wherever they went, they ran their own communities, built impressive educational and welfare infrastructures, and adjudicated internal disputes, but they lacked sovereignty and civil rights. They had local autonomy, but as far as the politics of nations were concerned, they had neither vote nor voice. In neither Christian nor Islamic lands were they citizens. Until recently, therefore, the Pesaḥ story was a memory and a hope: a memory of one journey to freedom in the distant past, and the hope that it would happen again. “Now [we are] slaves; [but] next year….”
That prayer has begun to be answered. In Israel, Jews have recovered sovereignty and reentered the mainstream of history. In the Diaspora, wherever they live in pluralist, liberal democracies, they have both a vote and a voice. Inescapably, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, Jews have reentered the political arena. They can do so in two ways: by defending Jewish interests, or by articulating Judaic principles. With regard to the first, there is no essential difference between Jews and any other religious or ethnic group. Each fights for its rights and defends its space. With regard to the second, however, there is a very great difference. Jews have something distinctive to contribute to the public domain. They are the bearers of the oldest, and in many ways most remarkable, political vision in the West. In that sense, every Jew is heir to the ideals of Moses and the prophets. The Pesaḥ story is no longer – as it was for so many centuries – primarily about a distant past and an equally distant future. It is about the present and the values by which we should strive to live.
It is fair to say that Jewish religious thought has not fully caught up with this development. That is hardly surprising. Modernity confronted Jews as a series of traumatic onslaughts – first, the assimilatory demands of European emancipation, then the rising tide of racial anti-Semitism, then the nightmare of the Holocaust, and finally the challenge of forging a new nation in Israel under pressures, internal and external, that might easily have defeated a less hardy people. Distress, said the sages and Maimonides, inhibits prophecy, because it makes people turn in on themselves, rather than outward to the world and to God. But we must now begin to study Torah, and the Pesaḥ story in particular, in a new way, as shapers, rather than victims, of history. That means going back to first principles and a fresh encounter with the biblical narrative.
For the past few years I have been trying to study, teach, and write Torah in an old-new way. I call it Torah veḥokhma, “Torah and wisdom,” in contradistinction to certain other approaches. In nineteenth century Germany the favored phrase among disciples of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch was Torah im derekh eretz, “Torah and general culture.” In the United States, the preferred principle was Torah umada, “Torah and science.” Neither of these rubrics is particularly helpful. Torah im derekh eretz is a quotation from the teachings of Rabban Gamliel III (third century ce), who used it to mean something else, “Torah together with a worldly occupation.” Torah umada is a modern coinage with no source in tradition. Ḥokhma, by contrast, is a biblical category. One book, Proverbs, is devoted to it, and several others – notably Job and Ecclesiastes – belong to what is generally known as the “wisdom literature.” Ḥokhma is a concept with many shades of meaning, but its primary sense is human wisdom as such: the universals of mankind’s intellectual quest.
Ḥokhma is the truth we discover; Torah is the truth we inherit. Ḥokhma is the shared heritage of mankind; Torah is the particular heritage of the Jewish people. Ḥokhma is the world of “is,” of fact; Torah is the world of “ought,” of command. Ḥokhma is where we encounter God through creation; Torah is how we hear God through revelation. The two are not equal in their significance to Jews – Torah is holy in a way ḥokhma cannot be – yet both are significant, for if we are to apply Torah to the world, we must understand the world to which it applies. Because the God of creation is also the God of revelation, there is ultimate harmony between them, even though, given the imperfections in our understanding of both, it may not be evident at any given moment. There must, I believe, be an ongoing conversation between them, for otherwise Torah will remain a closed system with no grip, no purchase, no influence on the world outside its walls. That was inevitable during the long centuries in which Jews and Judaism had no dialogue with the world outside, but it is neither inevitable nor desirable now. If we have reentered the political arena, as a nation-state in Israel and as citizens of liberal democracies elsewhere, we need the confidence and the language to recover our voice in the conversation of mankind, bringing our own distinctive truths to the public domain. Once we do so, we discover new strata of meaning in Torah itself. We also discover that Torah especially the Exodus narrative – has played a larger role than we suspected in guiding the West to create its own versions of a free society. –
The essays can be divided into three sections. The first is about the relationship between Pesaḥ, Jewish identity, and Jewish history – about the part the story has played in sustaining a people through the vicissitudes of time. The second is about Pesaḥ and its place in the Western political imagination. Most histories of political thought begin with the great thinkers of ancient Greece. It is my argument, however, that ancient Israel was where the idea of freedom was born, and in many respects it remains a surer guide to liberty than the short-lived democracy of Athens. In the third section I offer some new interpretations of the ancient texts.
I begin, however, with a personal reminiscence of an occasion when I had an unusual opportunity to say what the story of Pesaḥ meant to Jews and why it is, for me, the story of stories. It took place in Windsor Castle, home of Britain’s kings and queens and the oldest continuously inhabited castle in the world. In 2000 I was invited to deliver the St. George’s Lecture, an annual address in the presence of Prince Philip. As the first Jew to be accorded this honor, I thought hard about what to say. I thought of the history of Jews in Europe, driven for so many centuries from country to country without rights, power, or a home. I found myself thinking back across the centuries to an earlier and painful age in British history: the first blood libel in Norwich in 1144, the massacre in York in 1190, and the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290. Those events set a pattern that was to be followed in one European country after another during the following two hundred years. What would our ancestors, harried and afflicted, have said had they been able to foresee that one day one of their number would be invited back to the home of the king who had sent them into exile? I remembered a verse in the Book of Psalms, “I will speak of Your statutes before kings and not be ashamed” (119:46), and I was determined to be faithful to it.
I wanted to honor the memory of those Jews of an earlier age, to tell of their courage and tenacity and thus say something of what it meant and still means to be a Jew. In the course of my remarks I said this: “I try to imagine what it must be like to inherit a building like Windsor Castle. To live in such a place, so steeped in history, is to want to know that history – how this building came to be, and why. In the course of asking the question, I would learn about how it began, in the days of William the Conqueror, on the legendary site of King Arthur’s Round Table. I would discover that it had been added to, rebuilt, extended, and changed many times in the course of the ensuing centuries, by Henry II, Henry III, Edward III and their successors.
“Learning this history would be more than simply discovering facts. Because I had inherited the building it would be my history. I would not have chosen it. It would have chosen me. Inescapably, though, I would have entered into a set of obligations, a moral relationship with the past and future. I would be part of the story of the castle and its heirs. The very fact that it was still here, still dominating the landscape, part of the historic legacy of Britain, would tell me something of great significance to my life. I would slowly realize that generation after generation of the kings and queens of England had endeavored to preserve the castle and hand it on intact to future generations. They had vested their hopes in those who would come after them, that they too would do the same. And now that it had come to me, I would know beyond doubt that I too was morally bound to protect it, and that if I failed to do so I would have betrayed the trust of those earlier generations, as well as failing to honor my responsibility to England as a whole. The result would be that when disaster struck – as it did in the great fire of 1992 – I would know that I had to restore the damaged buildings, not necessarily exactly as before, but at least in keeping with the whole. That is what it is to live in the context of history.
“Jews,” I said, “will never own buildings like Windsor Castle. We are not that kind of people. But we own something that is, in its way, no less majestic and even more consecrated by time. The Jewish castle is built not of bricks or stone, but of words. But it too has been preserved across the centuries, handed on by one generation to the next, added to and enhanced in age after age, lovingly cherished and sustained. As a child I knew that one day I would inherit it from my parents, as they had inherited it from theirs. It is not a building but it is, nonetheless, a home, a place in which to live. More than it belongs to us, we belong to it; and it too is part of the heritage of mankind. What we have is not a physical construction but something else – a story.
“It was given to me by my parents when I was a child. I received it on the festival of Passover. It is an exceptionally moving story. It tells of how our ancestors were once slaves who, through a succession of wondrous events, were given their freedom. They then began a journey across the desert for forty years, and later through a wilderness of dispersion for two thousand years, in search of a home, a promised land, a place of grace and justice and freedom and dignity. Though at times the destination seemed to lie beyond the furthest horizon of hope, they did not give up. They never ceased to travel. And I am part of that journey. I did not choose to be, any more than the member of a royal family chooses to be born into royalty; but this is my legacy, my heritage. It defines who I am.
“I know, just as does the heir to a castle, that I am a link in the chain of generations, and that I owe a duty of loyalty to the past and to the future. That is what Edmund Burke had in mind when he called society a partnership ‘not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ I am part of a story whose earlier chapters were written by my ancestors and whose next chapter I am now called on to write. And when the time comes, I must hand it on to my children, and they to theirs, so that the Jewish story, no less than Windsor Castle, can live on.”
That was the story I told that night, and it is the story each of us tells on the night of the seder. Its message, undiminished through the years, still has the capacity to inspire. It suggests that to be a Jew is to be part of a history touched, in a mysterious yet unmistakable way, by the hand of Providence. Jewry is not a mere secular people, an ethnic group, one of the myriad cultures in the anthropological lexicon of mankind. Had that been all there is to Jewish identity, there would be no Jews today. No culture or ethnicity has survived two thousand years of dispersion and minority status. Had the Israelites of ancient times not been moved by a religious vision, they would have assimilated among the Egyptians. Had they not carried the Torah with them into Israel, they may have won their independence, but they would today be numbered along with the Canaanites, Jebusites, Perizites, and the other peoples of the ancient Near East, now remembered, if at all, as exhibits in museums. We are who and what we are because of a momentous faith, the faith of which the Haggada is a supreme expression. We are a people touched by the Divine Presence.
Often, we are too little aware of the majesty and uniqueness of the Jewish heritage. Moses once said, in words of great wisdom, “It is not up in heaven…. Nor is it beyond the sea…. The word is very close to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, waiting to be done” (Deut. 30:12–14). One of Judaism’s great insights is that religious truth is not exotic. It does not need to be sought far away in an ashram in India, or in a private ecstasy of the soul. No faith has worshipped a more transcendental God, but no faith has brought God so close. The Shekhina, the Divine Presence, lives in the very texture of everyday acts and relationships if we train ourselves to hear their music and open our eyes to their radiance. It is there in the beauty of the Jewish home, the resonance of our rituals, the drama and sweep of Jewish history, the sheer persistence of our people, and the determination of generation after generation of Jews to live their faith and hand it on to their children when they might so easily have done otherwise. And it began on Pesaḥ, when a much-afflicted people began its long journey across space and time in response to a divine call.
We are Jews to show ourselves and others what it is to bring the Divine Presence into ordinary lives, human relationships, marriage, the family, homes, and communities, and thus begin to build a society that honors the “image of God” in mankind, a society free in the deepest and most generous sense of the word. On Pesaḥ, as we trace our own route from the bread of oppression to the wine of freedom, we become part of that journey. Making it our own, we are drawn into a narrative at once intimate and vast, just like the seder service itself. This is our people and our story. Challenging then, it is no less challenging now.