Question 17: Who are we in the story this year?

As we come out of Pesach, this is a very lightly edited version of the d’var Torah I gave yesterday morning for Shabbat Pesach. I know we’re all more than ready to be done with matzah, but I hope none of us feels done with learning from this story of ours.

Who are we?

Each year at our seder tables we recite the words b’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot atzmo k’ilu hu yatzah mimitzrayim. In every generation one is obligated to see oneself as if one has come out from Egypt.

It is not enough to tell the story, to remember the trials of our ancestors, the miracle of their escape, and the long journey to revelation and the promised future. No— we must see ourselves as having been directly a part of it. We must feel the dread of each plague about to descend, unclear it we’ll escape it. After the 10th plague, when Moses finally secures our freedom, we must feel the rush of packing our meager belongings, making sure to bring even our unbaked bread dough because there is no telling where our food will come from once we leave. We must feel the utter panic at reaching the shores of the sea, seeing Pharaoh and his army in pursuit with nowhere to run but into the depths. We must feel the awe of Nachshon taking those first steps. We must feel all the way down into our toes the miracle of the water’s split. And we must feel the overwhelming relief at reaching the far side of the sea, watching the waters crash down on our enemies, and knowing that we will be enslaved no more. 

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein reminds us, “It is not enough to merely tell the story but we must live inside of it, blur the boundaries of our personal narrative so that we spill outward and include as part of our formative experiences having lived through events that took place millennia before we were born…. We are Jews, insists the tradition, and the identity of an individual Jew is never strictly individual but also collective. By extending our personal narratives to include the formative tale of Jewish identity we appropriate that collective self as part of our own.” 

Of course, placing ourselves in the story isn’t just about appreciating the drama of our collective past but about understanding our own time. This can’t just be a story about then but about now. It’s natural to ask what we are enslaved to today and what the sea may be that we fear crossing. Many a seder table conversation goes in such directions, modernizing the plight of the Israelites and their literal enslavement to exploration of metaphorical servitude whether to our phones, the news, or societal expectations. 

And we go further in taking these questions beyond what we ourselves are metaphorically enslaved to, to the oppressions experienced by others. Dr. Goldstein’s commentary continues: “the tradition also insists on possessing [the Exodus] story in more general moral terms, the Torah reminding us never to oppress the stranger, ‘since you know the soul of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt.’ This story …is meant to grant us knowledge of ‘the soul of the stranger,’ and there is nothing more universal than that soul and our knowledge of it, and it is only the tutored imagination that can lead us to it and to the compassion it yields.”

In other words, by opening ourselves fully to this story, by letting our imaginations take hold, we get the opportunity both to see ourselves as the Israelites escaping enslavement in Egypt, and to see ourselves in the many people fleeing persecution all over the world. In this way, we may see ourselves in the people who have been immorally and at times illegally detained by ICE and deported to the horrific prison camp in El Salvador in recent weeks. We may see ourselves in Venezuelan migrants on street corners and on train cars selling candy, often with their babies, hoping for enough to get by in this strange land. We were strangers, we are told again and again and again in our sacred text, and so we see ourselves in the stranger.

But I don’t believe that this is where the obligation to see ourselves in the story ends. It is entirely appropriate for us to see ourselves as a stranger but what about in the land that many of us have inhabited for generations like this one? What about in a land where many of us Jews remain privileged in some ways, despite the absolutely undeniable and terrifying rise in antisemitism? Are there other characters in the passover story that that might actually be a better match for where we are in society in New York City today? 

This is where the obligation to see ourselves in the story can get uncomfortable. Despite the horrific challenges faced by our ancestors, it’s easiest to put ourselves in their shoes. It is, after all, our story —  a story that we get to be a part of telling because we are their spiritual descendants, the continuation of their people. But I don’t believe that that is the only place within the story where we should see ourselves.

I think that in this time and place, we are also obligated to see ourselves as your everyday Egyptian — not the sort of high powered Egyptian in pharaoh’s Palace, and not necessarily the type of Egyptian who supported the enslavement of the Israelites. But the type of Egyptian who nonetheless benefited from a system in which the Israelites were enslaved and in some cases murdered by pharaoh, because that system was part of what made society function the way that it did. 

I think it can be very difficult for us to cast ourselves in this role of Egyptians. In our story, they’re our captors and enemies — the people hurled horse and driver both into the sea, with not even the animals escaping death beneath the waves. But they are also just people. People who, like the Israelites, had different views about Egypt.

It’s worth remembering that the Israelites escaped not alone but with an erev rav, a mixed multitude of peoples whom the commentators have characterized as everything from converts of various nations (according to Rashi) to the crafters of the golden calf and perpetual grumblers demanding meat during the desert wanderings (Midrash Tanhuma, and various rabbis trying to avoid accusing typical Israelites of less than pious behavior, say to excuse our ancestors) to those Egyptians who supported Israel’s redemption and did not wish to dwell in a society where subjugation like that faced by our ancestors was the law of the land (says Shemot Rabbah).

Shemot Rabbah also tells us that many Israelites chose not to leave either because they had Egyptian patrons making their lives easier or because they were more afraid of the unknown of the wilderness than of the horrors of enslavement.

In other words, everyone had to make choices. Israelites had to choose to follow Moses or to stay behind. Egyptians had to choose whether to actively support pharaoh, actively support the Israelites, or just keep their heads down. 

There must have been many such Egyptians, well-intentioned folk who maybe complained to their neighbors about the harshness of Pharaoh’s edicts, and who maybe wished for a more just society, but who cared more about their own safety than anything else and for that reason largely minded their business as usual while more and more injustice grew around them. These Egyptians didn’t have power individually, it’s true, but if enough of them had stood up, surely they could have done more. Like Shifra and Puah, the two midwives who spared Hebrew babies (and whose identity as Hebrew or Egyptian is left quite vague in our text), Egyptians had the opportunity to stand against what’s wrong in their society even when doing so put them at risk, because it’s the right thing to do. 

Like Perkins Coie refusing to capitulate to unjust demands, like Harvard refusing to abet the government’s cruel attacks on DEI, we each have the opportunity and obligation to acknowledge where we do have power— however limited— and to use it to help those with less.   

On Wednesday evening and Thursday, Jews around the world will commemorate Yom HaShoah, the unfathomable loss of 6 million of our collective ancestors in the Holocaust and the complete destruction of Jewish life in much of Europe for generations. It is horrifying that in living memory our people has faced an attempt at complete annihilation that so many of their gentile neighbors allowed to proceed unchecked— whether because they too were hateful or because they were more worried about their own safety than about standing up for the safety of others. The Jewish community will never be the same— will never be what it was before the 1930s. We have lost too many of our families, too many of our stories, of our heirlooms, even of our gravestones taken by Nazis to pave roads so that not even a record of our ancestors’ resting places remains. 

Thank God things are not that bad here. Not yet. And I pray not ever. If we are to fight this rising tide of authoritarianism, we have no choice but to see ourselves in more than one place in the story this year.

Yes, we are Hebrews. We will always be Hebrews. We are the ones who have been redeemed with an outstretched hand and mighty arm. We know the journey across the sea. 

But in this generation many of us are also the Egyptians. We are the ones comfortable, or comfortable enough, at home. We are the ones benefiting from the system that is exploiting our neighbors. We are the ones not under direct threat until it is too late, until our first borns guilty of no crime but being bystanders to suffering are lost before our very eyes, until our whole society becomes a howl of grief because of the actions of the cruelest and most powerful and most immune to loss. 

Every year, we speak of escape not just from Egypt to the desert but from Mitzrayim— the narrow place— to the Midbar— the expanse. That escape is not only physical but emotional. It is a journey each of us must commit to making each Pesach. We must continue to grow our minds’ ability to look deeply and unflinchingly at what’s holding us too tightly in place. 

As Rabbi Toba Spitzer reminds us, “We are commanded to find ourselves within this story and to make this story our own. Slavery happened to each of us; redemption happened to each of us. The message of hope at the core of the story— the reality of the possibility of liberation in the midst of slavery— is the gift we bring to a world broken by the continual oppressions that human beings inflict upon one another.”

B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot atzmo k’ilu hu yatzah mimitzrayim. In every generation we must see ourselves as having come out of Egypt. In every generation we must see ourselves as those who did what they could do to help the Israelites come out of Egypt, and we must follow their example. May we have the courage and tenacity we need.