To Appreciate Freedom, Remember Slavery Echoes of Exodus in the rise of modern Israel from the Holocaust’s ashes. Ruth Wisse
https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-appreciate-freedom-remember-slavery-1522364402
Re-enacting slavery is not everyone’s idea of a good time, but this is how Jews celebrate Passover. Eating matzo—the bread of affliction—and horseradish, Jews gather at the ceremonial Seder to recall their enslavement under Pharaoh in ancient Egypt. Every family and household recreates the text of the Haggada, the narration, in its own way, to ensure that each participant experiences the national ordeal.
It might seem strange that people who prepare challah for the Sabbath and welcome the New Year with apples and honey choose to mark the low point of their history. Slavery is emotionally humiliating, physically harmful and psychologically degrading. It includes having sons killed at birth and daughters at the mercy of rapists, eating only bitterness and providing sweetness for slaveholders.
And many families need no reminder national enslavement recurs for the Jewish people. Benjamin Ferencz, who helped prosecute the major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, named his 1979 book about Jewish forced labor “Less Than Slaves.” Whereas slaves are generally well-maintained to ensure they remain productive, concentration-camp inmates were worked to death as another means of annihilation. The Haggada is mild compared with the Jewish experience under Hitler. Why commemorate a repetitive history of bondage?
The answer lies in the prescribed rhythm of the Seder, which passes from slavery through stages of gratitude to the Almighty to songs of liberation. Jews tell the hard truth about their past because they might otherwise take freedom for granted. Like athletes who know they must train for the marathon, Jews rehearse the Exodus to practice overcoming slavery.
There is no ambiguity in Passover about the object of freedom. After the carefully prescribed order of meal and celebration, the Seder concludes with prayer asking the Holy One “to lead the offshoots of Thy stock, redeemed, to Zion.” The Seder ends with the vow, “Next year in Jerusalem!”
That oath is why the scholar Zelig Kalmanovich, who was incarcerated with tens of thousands of fellow Jews in the Vilna Ghetto, could say of the Nazi executioners: “I laugh at you. I am not afraid of you. I have a son in Eretz Isroel!” Knowing that his son had reached the Land of Israel made him confident that Jewish civilization would rise from the ashes. Kalmanovich was deported and worked to death in a slave-labor camp but his son, Shalom Lurie, on a kibbutz in Israel, later edited and published his father’s diary.
The Passover story should never be left half told. Understandably, American Jews felt compelled to commemorate the unprecedented brutality of the Holocaust and its victims. They erected museums and memorials and insisted the subject be taught to schoolchildren. But the 1940s witnessed another event equally unparalleled in human history. Zionism, the Jewish movement for self-liberation, took off in Europe at the same time as German anti-Semitism, too late for the rescue of European Jewry but in time to shelter its survivors. This was not compensation for the slaughters, God forbid, but the people’s fulfillment of an ancient pledge. The assurance that slavery could be overcome inspired Jews to recover sovereignty in their homeland, which had been under foreign domination for two millennia.
The Holocaust records the triumph of anti-Semitism and the failure of Jewish political strategy in Europe. The reclamation of Israel—which began well before Hitler—records the accomplishment of a people against all odds. Telling about the Holocaust as an end in itself hallows the slavery without the Exodus. American and Soviet troops liberated the death camps, but the national resolve of the Jewish people in recovering its freedom dwarfs the miracles that are recorded in the biblical story. This is not triumphalism but quite the opposite—a refusal to stay sunk in fear and trouble, mourning and misery, servitude and dependency.
There is an aching part of America that knows the history of slavery at first hand. “When Israel was in Egypt’s land, let my people go! Oppressed so hard they could not stand, let my people go!” Singing this spiritual, African-Americans anticipated their own genuine emancipation. Highlighting the enslavement at the expense of the Exodus runs the danger of encouraging a culture of victimhood. Jews owe it to fellow Americans to move from the suffering through to the strength, the gratitude and celebration.
Our family Seder follows the traditional Haggada with two addenda—a ceremony commemorating the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto on the first night of Passover 1943, and the singing of the Jewish national anthem “Hatikvah,” along with “America the Beautiful.” Anthems require that we stand upright. We are thankful that for us the complete Passover story corresponds to reality.
Ms. Wisse, a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, is author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007).
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