On seder night, we will tell a story. Our story. The story of our Exodus from Egypt. We will tell it in order to be reminded, and to remember. We, like other peoples, have a common language and a culture and history and a territory, but we are the only one who has a single story we repeat in the same form, in every home, in every community, on a set date, for thousands of years already. Only we, the Jews, have a story whose first chapters were written by our ancestors, and whose later chapters, we write ourselves.
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This unique night demands that once a year, we leave the here and now, our little every day joys and troubles โ from the election mess and COVID to making a living โ to connect to "the Jewish people through the generations" and understand that we are part of a those generations. These terms are a little grandiose for most of us, but the Passover Haggada simplifies them with the wisdom of the ancients. We have an obligation to the past โ our history is not devoid of meaning โ and to the future, because we have a destiny. That is how identity is created.
Try for a moment to imagine what our history would have been like without that memory โ year after year, generation after generation, in the old Haggada language, that none of the updates and renewals could replace. Try and imagine what things would look like today if it hadn't been for that challenge to exile, without the pleading for and faith in "next year in Jerusalem," without Hillel the Elder or without other chapters from different parts of our history that found a place in the Passover Haggada. How would our lives look today โ if they would look like anything at all โ without the great journey of liberation that began when the Red Sea was parted, continued with 40 years of wandering in the desert, and finally, brought us to the Promised Land?
We have returned to our land, to some extent inspired by the Exodus. That huge drama has inspired a spirt of revolution and hope in other peoples and societies, too, but only for us is it genetic code. We are the only ones who see ourselves in this ancient and contemporary story. We are the only ones commanded to feel it in every generation, to see ourselves and show ourselves as if we were the ones leaving Egypt now.
When David Ben-Gurion spoke at the UN General Assembly in 1947 and tried to convince the nations of the world that the State of Israel was a necessity, he asked the English and the Americans, who could remember exactly when the Mayflower embarked from England some 300 years earlier? Did anyone remember how many people were on board? What bread they ate? In contrast, Ben-Gurion said, 3,300 years before the Mayflower set sail for America, the Jews left Egypt, and every Jew in the world knew exactly on what day, what bread they ate, how they left, and who brought them out.
Our creation story, which began with Abraham and reached slavery and then liberation from Egypt and redemption, is a story the Jewish people remind themselves of every year, in all conditions and in every situation. Under the threat of the Inquisition and amid the horrors of the Holocaust, in exiles and pogroms, in days of peace and times of war and plague, because we know that this is our story.
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