Exodus repeatedly commands us to remember–indeed, the great Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi takes this as the most fundamental Jewish relationship to our history–the Hebrew root for “remember,” zayin-kof-resh, in the imperative: zakhor! “thou shalt remember!” But on Passover we are commanded to remember not an escape from oppression into safety but into uncertainty.
As the book of Exodus narrates, we did not go from Egypt to the Promised land but into the Wilderness, and this is where we became a Jewish people with a decisive choice. It was in this terrifying unknown place where a whole generation perished that it became possible for the Israelites to approach God’s holy mountain, trembling in fear, meet God and accept the Covenant. And it was this holy contract, not the brute physical fact of genetics or bloodline, that turned us from a mere ethnic group, a people like any other, into the Jewish people, the kindred of God. The point of Mount Zion, the holy mountain, is that it is in an unsettled, in-between place, not anyone’s homeland or comfortable home.
For American Jews Passover is typically celebrated in safety. and comfort, something we ritually lament at Passover. Despite a regular cycle of attempts to stoke fear of violence, whether by undocumented immigrants, masked Antifascists, Mexican drug cartels, or violent Islamists like ISIS or Al-Qaeda, for people in most middle or upper-class areas violent crime is low. Yet there is the impulse to default to the old role of underdog, beleaguered minority.
It has been some 40 years since my colleague David Biale brilliantly unravelled the way that Jews have failed to grapple with their own power, what he called “the myth of Jewish political passivity.” Since then our power–and weird lack of self-awareness about it–has only grown, part of what historians have described as the “White Ethnic Revival.” That is the story that Jews who most often read as white, despite their success in the white-majority power structure of the United States, are a perpetually disparaged minority. It is despite Israel’s impressive global power with the largest military in the Middle East, despite Jews achieving such a key political role in the US that almost every member of congress (even–as Congressman Jerry Nadler points out–ones with little apparent knowledge of Judaism as a religion) votes on legislation to protect Judaism, and as the New Yorker writes, “it’s a rarity when someone undertakes a campaign for the House or the Senate today without hearing from AIPAC”
What, then, in this relative comfort and power, does it mean to cosplay being refugees, fleeing Egypt with only the clothes on our back, gobbling scraps of the “bread of affliction,” food barely fit for animals? We are commanded to remember, as the Haggadah says, “Even if we are all wise, all understanding, all knowing the Torah, it is incumbent upon us to tell of the Exodus from Egypt.” How can this be an authentic or natural thing?
It is the most authentic and natural thing in the world and it could not be otherwise according to the great Polish Hasidic commentator the Sfat Emet. He writes of how the ancient Hebrews, knowing nothing of the traditions or obligations of Judaism, nonetheless rushed into the wilderness after God:
All we long for is redemption! Of this we say: “Draw me after you, let us run!” (Song of Songs. 1:4), just as we were drawn after God in that unsown land, knowing nothing of Torah or mitzvot.But now
that “the king has [already] brought me into his chambers”
(ibid.), certainly “we will delight and rejoice in you” (ibid.).
The Exodus, for him, is a tale of risking it all for love. Here he echoes the language of a spiritual romance between God and the Jewish people, in the words of Jeremiah 2:2, “I remember your devotion, your love when you were a bride, how you followed me into the wilderness, in an unsown land!”As surely as we did it once, we will take this risk over and over out a passionate spiritual drive for God, a kind of devotion that necessitates risk, that is meaningless without it:
Surely we will now follow You into the unsown land; “as in
the days when you came forth from Egypt will I show him
wonders” (Mic. 7:15). So the redemption of the future will also
be followed by a sojourn into an unsown land, for a new path
will be created. Of this, Scripture says: “A new teaching will
come forth from Me” (cf. Is. 51:4).
This drive for liberation from Egypt occurs in every generation, and requires a new teaching in every generation. Here the retelling of the story of the Exodus is not a comfortable trip down “memory lane,” a wallowing in nostalgia, but its opposite, a smashing of idols.
But once you see yourself as though having come forth from
Egypt, knowing that the awareness you have could not have
come to you without your leaving Egypt, you begin to under-
stand how that “leaving” really happens.That is why the haggadah says: “Even if we are all wise, all
understanding, all knowing the Torah, it is incumbent upon
us to tell of the Exodus from Egypt.” Even a wise person, one
attached to the living God, has to realize that this has come
about because they have left Egypt. This is the truth, but we need
to make it clear to ourselves by means of faith. “Telling” (sippur) of the Exodus can also mean “making pure” or “shining.”
The experience of Exodus from modern restrictions, from today’s Pharoah-like powers, has the force of a revelation. When Arthur Green first published his own comments on the Sfat Emet’s message, he thought of him as a predecessor of the revolutionary Nationalist Rabbi Kook, whose idea of transforming Jewish tradition marked a true break with the past. But what was revolutionary in the 1930s has long since become institutionalized; the breaks occurring today instead echo those of the antiwar protest movements of 1968 or the city of Davis’ own student-inspired revolutionary anti-apartheid resolution of 1978.
We reveal with absolute clarity that there is an Exodus in every generation, according to the need of that generation. All this was there at the moment of the [first] Exodus from Egypt. The more you have faith that you are as one redeemed from Egypt, the more this redemption is actually revealed. Then you will feel the present redemption, each one coming forth from their own straits.
sethlsanders 