Reflections on Passover

Every year, as commanded in the Hebrew Bible, Jews commemorate the ancient exodus from Egypt through a series of observances spread out over the week-long holiday of Passover (Pesach in Hebrew). The first two nights are spent in highly choreographed feasts called seders, which frequently involve a sort of play-acted recounting of the Exodus as laid out in a guidebook known as a Haggadah. The Hebrew Bible is full of commands and observances, almost all of which are comfortably ignored by a large proportion of modern Jews. Many Jews eat pork without remorse, and spend only a handful of days, if any, in synagogue. For all that, the Passover seder is for some reason the most observed Jewish holiday in America, with a majority of even non-religious Jews participating, according to Pew’s surveys on Jewish life in the United States.  

Given how widespread the celebration of Passover is, even among Jews who have very little regular engagement with traditional or Orthodox Jewish observance, it should be no surprise that there is an enormous market for non-traditional Haggadahs designed to guide Jews through seders that match their values more closely than a traditional one might. There are countless—and they continue to proliferate—Haggadahs that reframe the Exodus story through some lens of contemporary progressive pieties. For many modern liberal Jews, discomfited by treating distinction and particularity as virtues, universalizing Judaism is necessary in order to retain its moral value and keep it from being an ugly atavism. The exodus of the Jews from Egypt becomes the story of every people or group whose members have hungered for freedom or liberation from any oppressive regime or institution.  

But why shouldn’t this Bronze Age tale of stiff-necked Israelites be transmuted into something closer to home? Even if one is not compelled to universalize Judaism in order to preserve its moral force, why shouldn’t today’s Jew focus on the particular experiences of Jews in the last hundred or so years, whose cosmic highs and lows seem nearly as miraculous as those of the Exodus and which happened irrefutably within living memory?  

In the twentieth century, the saga of the Jews was biblical in scale, from the most hellish nadir of the Holocaust to the rebirth of Israel as a sovereign, Jewish nation after two thousand years of exile. Jews across the Old World, from Europe to the Middle East, were freed from long years of bondage and humiliation and redeemed as a nation in the land of Zion.  

So, this year, why not read a “Holocaust Haggadah?”  

Such a seder would maintain the particularity of the Jewish narrative but could reframe it to center the experiences of modern Jews, as we’re frequently exhorted to do. Reframing it thus would also ensure that we “never forget” the catastrophes of our time, and would offer us some relevant and necessary political lessons.  

The story of the Exodus may be the story of the birth of the first nation. Today, against the universalizing wave of transnational human rights, the story of the Jews’ return to the community of nations is worth studying. 

While there is no new book of the Bible added for the Second World War and its part in the birth of modern Israel, it has felt for many to be a time of miracles, and a time from which Jews have taken a very different lesson than did much of the West. To the Jews, largely, the lesson of the Holocaust was to reaffirm the necessity of a sovereign, Jewish nation. The argument of the modern Zionists may have been put best by Frederick Douglass: “A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.”   

To the West more generally, the lessons of that war and its European crimes are exemplified by the transnational aspirations of the European Union. Those same traumas that moved Europe away from national sovereignty also moved the emblematic minority victims of those traumas to the opposite conclusion. This is Zionism’s terrible sin: to reaffirm the necessity of political life when Europe wants desperately to believe that the day of enlightened administration has come to replace it. 

The world after politics is a utopian dream; it promises the end of conflict and discrimination through an eschatological vision of a brotherhood of man where all differences and distinctions are dissolved. The end of war and conflict, if it can be done, requires the end of particular societies. For, as long as you have particular societies, which can only exist through discrimination and exclusion, you also have the possibility of war between them. 

But, for human sentiment to have lasting force, it must be concentrated in a particular—a family at the strongest, but extending classically to the city, and in modern times, to the nation. If you universalize that sentiment, if you try to extend it to all of humanity, it may become more just and moral, but it also becomes too weak to sustain human association or justice. As Aristotle noted long ago in his Politics, those attachments are strong because they’re exclusive and particular. We love what is ours in a narrow sense, and neglect what is ours in an extended or abstract sense.  

This logic of impartiality, so appealing to a Europe exhausted and embarrassed by war and politics, presented a different lesson to the Jews as members of a particular society that had lived simultaneously within and outside larger societies. The problem of the Jews, the Jewish Question, can only be truly solved by the removal of the Jews. The humane solution is the post-political one, where all distinctions are removed through the dissolution of the ties and bonds that give meaning to human life. The Europeans were right to see conflict and danger in difference. The Jews were right to see it as their only hope for survival, and to see that a secular, universal brotherhood of man was one in which the Jew was dissolved into the universal citizen. And so, from the ruins of the Ottoman and British empires, the Jews forged their own solution “through blood, through fire” in the creation of a nation state where citizen and Jew need not be in tension.  

But herein lies a different danger. Leo Strauss writes: “The true solution of the Jewish problem requires that the Jews become ‘like all the nations’ (1 Samuel 8), that the Jewish nation assimilate itself to the nations of the world.” That is, that the creation of Israel, the modern redemption of the Jews in their promised land, was itself an act of assimilation. While the political lessons that the Jews pulled from the terrors of the twentieth century—in contrast to those learned by the Europeans—restored their dignity, they also risked the abandonment of Judaism. Strauss goes on, contrasting secular political Zionism to religious Zionism:  

When religious Zionism understands itself, it is in the first place Jewish faith and only secondarily Zionism. It must regard as blasphemous the notion of a human solution to the Jewish problem. It may go so far as to regard the establishment of the state of Israel as the most important event in Jewish history since the completion of the Talmud, but it cannot regard it as the arrival of the messianic age, of the redemption of Israel and of all men. 

We cannot replace the original Exodus with a more recent one. There cannot be a Holocaust Haggadah. 

It’s interesting that the founding father of the state of Israel, the confidently secular David Ben-Gurion, and perhaps the Moses analogue in our twentieth-century exodus story, argued against a written constitution for Israel. In part, according to a speech he gave, this was because the very concept of a written constitution was a violation of democratic principles. If one generation can make special laws more permanent than those of subsequent generations, the men and women of that generation have been elevated unfairly to a status higher than the generations that follow.  

Our own founding fathers in America understood the perils of democracy and the virtues of stability better than Ben-Gurion did. James Madison argued in Federalist No. 49 that precisely this precedence granted to a first generation through a constitution bestows on a government “that veneration which time bestows on every thing, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.” For the Jews, survival across the millennia has depended on elevating the past above the present. 

The egoistical urge to “center your experience” is an attempt to consecrate yourself rather than place yourself as but one more link in a tradition. We must be wary of making Passover relevant by making it too much about ourselves. We risk the tradition, even if we try to make it relevant in a more vigorously particular fashion than the social justice crusaders, who erode the tradition by melting it down into an idol to universal and abstract human ideals. We are asked each year to try to remember what it was like in Egypt for the ones who were there, not to turn our own lives into a new canon.  

In the end, Judaism is not about us. It is about us, our parents, our children, and all of the generations spanning the breadth of time in each direction, in which web we are a single, vital node. To succumb to the very modern impulse to make a telos of ourselves is to cut that web, or to let drop from our hands a torch that has been dutifully carried at great cost from one generation to the next until it was delivered into our care. That story starts with the exodus from Egypt.  

In The Kuzari, Judah Halevi’s twelfth-century philosophical defense of Judaism, a rabbi explains to a Khazar king that the Jews do not pray to the God who created life and the universe, nor the one who saved man from the flood, but to the God who took the Israelites out of Egypt with a mighty, outstretched hand and redeemed them in their promised land. “God commenced His speech to the assembled people of Israel: ‘I am the God whom you worship, who has led you out of the land of Egypt,’ but He did not say: ‘I am the Creator of the world and your Creator.’”  

In contrast to modern ideas of radical autonomy or of the liberated individual freed from custom and convention, there is the observant Jew who replaces some significant amount of choice in his life with adherence to customs and laws set forth well before his birth, and which he teaches to his children. In this way, he remains out of time and out of place, no matter where he finds himself, so long as he holds to the law revealed to the first generation before Sinai. He is an atavism that will outlive the present. When our present generation and its values are atavisms long since forgotten, the Jew will still be walking the earth vital and current and simultaneously ancient, so long as he holds fast to the tradition and allows himself some degree of self-forgetting.  

At the same time, the tradition doesn’t exist through conservatism alone, and it is not static. It is a long-lived tradition, and while there is much coherence from one generation to the next, there have also been great transformations, each the product of numerous revolutions and ruptures. As Machiavelli says in The Prince, “In the antiquity and continuity of the dominion the memories and causes of innovations are eliminated; for one change always leaves a dentation for the building of another.” The traditions we venerate today, like the Constitution, were once themselves great revolutions. How do we thread the needle of keeping reverence and vitality together? 

Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way—the horrors of the Second World War and the political rebirth of the Jewish people are extraordinary events, and they do offer us lessons to carry forward. At the same time, the Jewish people were formed after a much earlier Exodus, though we have found ourselves sovereign once again in the biblically promised land.  

This has happened more than once before, and it will probably have to happen again, unless the day of judgment is nigh. We are not a new national identity defined by the horrors and redemptions of the twentieth century, or even the dozen that preceded it. If Israel forgets that, if Israelis see themselves as simply one more national identity among others, and Hebrew as the language of Israel rather than of the Torah, then the redemption will have been but a beautiful mirage in our long wanderings in the desert. And so, as Passover comes around again, we will read again the same story of our origin, and we will again remind ourselves that we are always still in Egypt.  

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