Building a Society of Freedom, from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah

           In antiquity, the gods were on the side of the established power. Rulers ruled because they were gods, or children of the gods, or prime intermediaries between the gods and mankind. They held sway on earth for the same reason as did the sun in the sky: there was an order on earth as in heaven, by which the strong ruled the weak, and power was the guarantor of order. That God, creator of heaven and earth, might intervene in history to liberate slaves was ultimately unthinkable. Thus a paradox was born, which ever since has had the power to inspire men and women to break the chains of their oppression; that true power is distinguished by its concern for the powerless, that greatness is measured by the ability to hear the cry of the otherwise unheard…and that freedom is not worthy of its name unless it is freedom for all. 

            ….For the first time it became possible to conceive that every human life has sanctity; that we all carry within us fragments of the divine.

            The religious passion of the ancient world was, above all, for order in the midst of an ever-threatening chaos… The mindset of myth is profoundly conservative, seeking to canonize the status quo…. For the first time, God is associated with change, transformation, revolution. Nothing is fixed in the human landscape except the rules of ethics themselves – God’s eternal word, calling for justice, equity and compassion, and constantly challenging, through a succession of prophets, the corruptions of power and the exploitations of the weak.

            [The Exodus] was a standing reminder of what a society can become when people forget God and instead worship human constructs, such as power itself… Through reflection on the experience of their ancestors in Egypt, the Israelites would remember what it feels like to be on the receiving end of persecution, and thus develop a sense of solidarity with the poor. Their task in the promised land was to build a counter-Egypt an antithesis of empire.


haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story
Source: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's Haggadah, 2006