The ancient Jewish holiday’s rebuff of the mores of its day is something we can draw from today as well.
The ancient Jewish holiday’s rebuff of the mores of its day is something we can draw from today as well.
I n Ethics of the Fathers, a 2,000-year-old compendium of rabbinic wisdom, a sage called Akavya Son of Mahalalel instructs us that meditating on three matters will keep a person on the proper path: “Know from where you came, where you are going, and before whom you are destined to be judged.”
One cannot help being put in mind of this teaching on Passover, which begins this Friday night. At Seders around the world, Jews will eat and drink and sing, but most of all they will retell the story of their people’s history, with a special focus on the first link in a millennia-long chain, the Exodus from Egypt. The Torah commands its adherents to tell our children each Passover why we persist in our strange rites. Every year, return to the story of where you came from, and thereby renew your resolve in a world often hostile to people of faith, that mocks, derides, and outright denies the convictions of those who hold on to retrograde beliefs.
What retelling our national origin story reveals — and what accounts for its power to stir national resolve — is that Jewish practice is not retrograde at all. In fact, Passover’s rituals are replete with subtle but powerful rejections of the pagan world from which the Israelites fled, in order to establish their anti-pagan society in the Promised Land.
What’s more, this exercise holds powerful promise for Americans who increasingly find themselves surrounded by similar hostility. A blaze of anti-liberal, anti-American passion has burned through many of our most powerful institutions. Those who fan its flames insist that America, too, is retrograde, built to sustain oppression, cloaked in lofty but empty language about equality and freedom. Remembering from where we came reveals that such critics are inadvertently imitating the pagans of old.
How does Passover polemicize against paganism? As many biblical commentators have noted, the plagues recounted at great length at the Seder targeted Egypt’s gods directly: The Nile turned to blood, showing that the god who granted bountiful harvest was no such thing. Darkness blotted out the sun, showing that the god who granted life-force was in fact powerless. The plagues culminated in the Deaths of the Firstborn, which showed that no man was like God — not even the Pharaoh who held himself out as such.
Crucially, the Israelites played an active role in ensuring their own salvation, smearing blood on their doorposts to show that they had faith in the one God, fearing retribution from neither man nor vengeful deity for slaughtering the Paschal lamb — another object of Egyptian worship. They showed themselves active participants in what would become the covenant between God and every Israelite at Sinai.
The Exodus, then, militates against paganism in an especially important way. It began the radical tradition of belief that humans are not pawns of the gods, merely representing in the corporeal world the battles of deities in another realm. Humans are capable of making choices, and living with the consequences. This represented a profound break from a pagan worldview that saw human affairs as essentially predetermined by the whims of the various warring gods beyond our world.
Ancient Israel was carefully curated to be an anti-pagan society, in which citizens were “free to choose,” as Deuteronomy explains, between good and evil, between life and death, reward and punishment. Its territory was explicitly contrasted to Egypt’s: Rather than a fertile river-valley whose bounty would seem to spring up as if of its own accord, the Israelites would have to depend on rain in their homeland, appealing to heaven with evidence of their righteousness, touting the Torah’s promise of bountiful reward for good behavior. And when ancient Israel would appoint a king, he would not be able to claim divine right, much less divinity, as Pharaoh had. He would be picked “from among your brothers,” limited in power, and required to obey the Torah strictly.
Far from a society marked by caste and stultifying predetermination, ancient Israel was remarkably egalitarian compared with the society from which it fled. The Exodus reminds each and every citizen of the nation to reject the sense that he is powerless to make choices that will improve his lot in life. Every person — and Christianity expanded this view beyond the nation to all of God’s children — is endowed with the dignity of decision as a party to a divine covenant with all its attendant responsibilities.
“In every generation, one must see himself as if he left Egypt,” goes a famous line recited at the Passover Seder. So it is here in America, where we are reminded that Egypt has not quite been shaken from the human psyche. The dominant strain of criticism of America indicts not its people but its “systems” for making people unfree. Liberal-democratic capitalism of the American variety, goes the criticism, does not provide enough for “communities” (individuals are rarely spoken of when reference is available to a vague collective) that suffer from a lack of resources and prestige.
Though these criticisms are often phrased in terms of freedom, such rhetoric is little more than a veneer for the opposite longing. It is the conviction that individuals cannot break free from a “system,” and the call for “equity” to combat perceived systemic problems, that embraces unfreedom. It is redolent of the paganism of the ancient world: Humans are not partners with the divine or intangible, capable of shaping their future through engaging in rewardable behavior; instead, they are objects of ideas and abstractions, bandied about as if they are unwitting foot soldiers in the cosmic battle between good -isms and bad -isms, between Ra and Dagon and Baal.
What these critics miss is that America has always stood in stark if unspoken contrast to the world from which it emerged. In the American tradition, unthinkable power is vested in the people. Ultimately, our Constitution belongs to them — that is, to us, the regular citizens who exercise sovereignty through ordinances, statutes, and constitutional amendments if need be. But beyond politics, we are free to cultivate our little platoons, the civil society that distinguished American culture from the rest of the world. It is there — in our schools, leagues, and houses of worship — that we shape our future.
Even if the rules of the game in various areas of American life are residually unfair, or result in disparate outcomes between groups, we retain remarkable, world-historical power to change them in politics or overcome them in the vast ecosystem that thrives between the individual and the state. Fittingly, the challenge begins with educating each generation about how to be an American citizen, what makes us special, and what work remains before we may say we have achieved our ideals. “It is not your duty to complete the work,” teaches Ethics of the Fathers, “but you are not free to desist from it.”
I would suggest beginning with where we came from.