Exodus 12:21-51
Numbers 28:16-25
The holiday of Passover is identified in our tradition as “z’man herutenu – the time of our freedom.” We celebrate our liberation from slavery and our birth as a free people of Israel. While some skeptics have questioned whether this event ever really took place, it is undeniable that Israel’s Exodus from Egypt has had actual historical reverberations throughout the generations and across the world. So the historical impact of this event is absolutely indisputable. Our story of liberation has served as an inspiration and catalyst to millions of other people who have striven to replicate that story in their own experience.
What is the nature of this freedom that we celebrate and that serves as an ideal for others? Answering that question is one of the tasks we undertake at the Passover seder. The answers are as numerous and varied as the individuals sitting around the table. And that is the point. We should notice that while we understand that a primary obligation at the seder is that of “haggadah – telling” the story of Passover, the method that the tradition chose for doing so is somewhat surprising.
What would be simpler and more direct than to read through the chapters in the Book of Exodus that tell the story itself? Yet we do not do this. Instead, if we quote Scripture at all, we choose, in various ways, to tell the story by quoting other people who have told the story themselves. That is to say, we don’t quote the “official” version of the Exodus, as canonized in the Book of Exodus. We quote various people down through the ages who have made their own attempts to re-tell the story.
Our freedom is grounded in our owning our story – in knowing it and retelling it in our own way. That is how we express our own freedom and that is how we train our next generation to be free, by making sure they hear the way we tell the story, with the special quirks each of us displays, the unique style each of us has, the difference in selection and emphasis from one of us to the other and between this year’s version and last year’s.
The Exodus from Egypt did not become a world-changing event because it happened. It changed the world because every year we engage in retelling – and thereby reliving – it. May we embrace this challenge and opportunity to grasp our freedom and to tell it into being.
Wishing everyone a Sweet Pesah
Rabbi David Greenstein
Photo by Nick Levitin
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Looks like Pharaoh’s heart has not yet hardened!
Nicely cuts through a lot of twaddle about the facticity of the Exodus. As the late Ken Kesey memorably put it, “some things are true even if they never happened, and some things are not true evenif they happened.” Go and learn….