Tomorrow is the first night of my favourite holiday: Passover. For two nights, we will gather together with our family and friends at a special dinner called a “seder” to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Over the following week, we will abstain from eating leavened bread and a handful of other foods to remind us of the suffering of our ancestors as they made their way out from Egypt, out from slavery, because, as Dara Horn so elegantly put it, Jews are the O.G. reenactors. We are commanded every year to re-live the story of the Exodus from Egypt. We are told that we should see ourselves as having come out of Egypt in every generation.
But what does it mean to have come out of Egypt in this generation? What does it mean to us today that we were slaves unto Pharaoh?
The thing that comes to mind most often is a poem by Michael Waltzer that goes:
Standing on the parted shores of history
we still believe what we were taught
before we ever stood at Sinai's foot
that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt
that there is a better place, a promised land;
that the winding way to that promise
passes through the wilderness.
That there is no way to get from here to there
except by joining hands, marching
together.
Egypt is, arguably, the lowest point for the Jews in the Bible. Not only are they enslaved people who are subject to hard labour, but they are also having their children killed as infants to prevent an uprising. And the strangest part of all of it, to me, is they knew this would happen. In Genesis, it is written that Gd said to Abraham, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated for four hundred years”. But even with this information in hand, the Jews go to Egypt and are enslaved. And so they suffered under the hardships of their enslavement for many years, and contrary to the Prince of Egypt, they did not build the pyramids, and then eventually they were freed with signs and with wonders.
The Exodus marks the beginning of the next phase of Judaism. We have been freed from slavery, and Moses will go up Mount Sinai, and when he returns, he will have the ten commandments. It would be so easy to just move on at this point. Put the horrors of slavery and oppression behind us and get on with life. But we don’t. We do not allow ourselves to forget our enslavement or, more importantly, our liberation.
The Hagaddah, the book that we read at the seder which tells the story of the Exodus, is a testament to the importance of not leaving behind the story of our departure from Egypt. This is because the Hagaddah is a revolutionary text. It was written during the Hellenist occupation of Israel, and when it says that the Rabbis sat up all night discussing the story of the Exodus from Egypt, what it means is that they sat up all night plotting revolution. Because in every generation, we should think about the Exodus as though we, ourselves, have come forward from Egypt, and they were ready to come out from under the oppression of the Hellenist occupiers.
This is what always brings me back to Michael Waltzer’s poem.
The past few years have been a low point for our collective humanity. Throughout the pandemic, the forces that separate us have been stronger than the ties that bind us. We have witnessed the precipitous rise of false information, seen protests turn bloody, experienced increasing Antisemitism and other forms of hatred, watched an attempted insurrection, and now are grappling with a war in Ukraine. We are in Egypt. Over the past few months and years, we have witnessed so many things on large and small scales that we had all of the information to prevent and allowed to happen regardless. But there is a better place, if only we are willing to do what we must to free ourselves from where we are right now. We did not come to this place alone, and just like Waltzer writes, the only way forward is marching together.
On Passover, we focus on the personal and the collective. We think about our enslavement in Egypt as something that happened to us as individuals and something that we experienced together. In our divided world, and in these divided times, we should continue to value both of these experiences and apply them to our thinking about what it means for us today to have come out of Egypt and what we will do with our freedom.