From generation to generation, we share the enduring lessons of Passover

As Jewish families gathered at Seder tables, the Exodus message was more relevant than ever.

Frederic Schopin’s The Children of Israel Crossing the Red Sea. Picture: Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives

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At last, the time had come: as they prepared to flee Egypt, the children of Israel’s long-awaited deliverance from bondage was at hand.

But even before their liberation they received a commandment that would echo through the ages.

“This day shall be unto you for a memorial,” said the Lord; “and throughout your generations you shall keep it a feast forever.”

That commandment, made thousands of years ago, was once again respected and renewed this week when Jewish families gathered, as they have for centuries, to celebrate Passover.

Even when surrounded by death, weakened by starvation and racked by disease, the Jews in Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps murmured the ritual’s prayers and wished, with all their heart and soul, for “Next year in Jerusalem”.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men participate in a blessing during the holiday of Passover, at the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray, in the Old City of Jerusalem on Tuesday. Picture: AP

And now, with the scourge of anti-Semitism re-emerging, the Exodus message that injustice and the abuse of power are not inevitable is more relevant than ever.

Central to that message is a momentous fact. The book of Genesis tells us about families; but early in Exodus’s first chapter there appears a word we have not yet encountered – the word Am, which means “a people”.

The exodus is, in other words, about the transformation of individuals into a people, and of a people into nation: a nation that must think of itself and for itself as binding together the generations past, those of the present and those of an unlimited, always to be shaped, future. But that is not the only momentous event the Exodus story heralds. For it is that people, that nation, that will enter into a covenant with the Lord.

As the text twice emphasises, the covenant binds the children of Israel not because it has been accepted by their leader, Moses, but because, in a move that is historically unprecedented, it is agreed to by “all the people”.

Moreover, that agreement requires them to abide by a law – a moral code – that they must “keep in its season from year to year” for all time.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish children watch a fire burning leavened items, in a final preparation before the start at sundown of the Jewish Passover (Pesach) holiday, in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, on April 11. According to biblical narrative, due to the haste with which the Jews left Egypt, the bread they had prepared for the journey did not have time to rise. To commemorate their ancestors' plight, the religious avoid eating leavened food products throughout Passover. Picture: AFP

It is, in that sense, an error to believe the flight was from slavery into unbridled freedom. Indeed, the words for liberty in biblical Hebrew – d’ror and hofesh – are never mentioned in the text. The Israelites will certainly have the power and opportunity to choose; but what they will be invited to choose is not licence but the righteousness that defines freedom under law.

All those things we study every year: the sense of nationhood and of collective responsibility; the necessity of agreement by the people to a moral standard that brings meaning to individual life and peace to social life; the overriding importance of fidelity to law.

But the text also warns of the immense difficulties faithfulness to those imperatives entails.

As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks put it, in his brilliant commentary on Exodus, “the Israelites are portrayed as fickle and shortsighted; they complain; they readily give way to despair” – in short, they are, like all human beings, more than capable of being “capricious, fractious, wayward, hardly able to see tomorrow, let alone the unfolding drama of the centuries”.

That is why we are repeatedly reminded of the three pillars on which a decent society must rest: the family, with its boundless joys and compelling duties; the memory of the blessings we have received and the promises we have made; and above all education, which transmits to the young the wisdom of the ages and bestows the only gift that is truly priceless, which is the love and discipline of learning.

A young Jewish worshipper takes part in the Cohanim prayer (priest's blessing) during the Passover (Pesach) holiday at the Western Wall on April 15. Thousands of Jews annually make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the eight-day Pesach holiday, which according to Jewish tradition commemorates the Israelites' exodus from slavery in Egypt, as they remember their plight by refraining from eating leavened food products. Picture: AFP

It is therefore no accident that Moses, when he addressed the Israelites on the brink of their release, spoke not about the daunting challenges that lay ahead but about teaching the generations as yet unborn – and about how to reply when their children, in celebrating Passover, asked “What does this ceremony mean to you?”

Nor is it an accident that the rabbis would command: “If a city has made no provision for educating the young, its inhabitants are placed under a ban, until teachers have been engaged; and if they persistently neglect this duty, the city is excommunicated, for the world only survives by the merit of the breath of schoolchildren.”

And least of all is it an accident that children play so large a role in the Seder – a word that means order or sequence but has come to stand for the Passover dinner, in which one recites the liturgy, drinks four cups of wine and en­gages with symbolic foods by breaking, dipping, indicating or hiding and seeking them.

There, under the spell of narrative and ritual, with endless questions and lively arguments, cast and audience merge in expressing thanks, in word and song, for God’s graciousness in delivering us from bondage.

“It is,” we say, as if we were there when it happened, “because of what the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt.”

Little wonder, then, that the story of the Exodus has always framed the journey to freedom.

Samaritan worshippers take part in a Passover ceremony on top of Mount Gerizim, near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, early on April 29, 2024. The Samaritans trace their lineage to the ancient Israelites led by the biblical prophet Moses out of Egypt. Picture: AFP

It was at the heart of a brief text by Samuel Sewall, a Puritan judge in Massachusetts, who in 1700 wrote what is generally regarded as the first emancipationist tract in North America.

And it rang through the sermon Martin Luther King delivered the night before his assassination, when he assured his audience: “I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

That was also the fate of Moses, who, having led the children of Israel out of captivity, was not privileged himself to enter the land, flowing with milk and honey, that would become the home of our fathers.

Perhaps that is our fate, too – to always see a better future, to strive for it, yet never to witness, in a necessarily imperfect world, its full realisation. But precisely because a better world is possible, addressing its woes remains our duty.

As Rabbi Tarfon, who lived through the destruction of the Second Temple in AD70, put it: “It is not for you to complete the task; but neither are you free to desist from it.”

There may, God forbid, come a time when children no longer know how to ask, and parents no longer know how to answer.

But for so long as Judaism flourishes – with its love of questions over answers, of debate over conformity and of the power of learning over the curse of ignorance – Passover will teach generation after generation the joy of inquiry, the virtue of wisdom and, most of all, humanity’s inextinguishable quest for freedom from lawlessness and oppression on this earth.