A Tale of Two Civilizations from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's Haggadah

            “The clash between Moses and Ramses was no ordinary encounter. It deserves to be seen, in retrospect, as one of the defining confrontations of history. Between the most powerful empire of the ancient world and a powerless group of slave labourers, an immense question was being framed. What endures and what wanes?....

            The Israelites were about to go free….[Moses] might have spoken about freedom, or the promised destination…He might have chosen to speak about the arduous journey that lay ahead…Any of these would have been the great speech of a great leader.

            Moses did none of these things. Instead he spoke about the children, and the distant future, and the duty to pass on memory to generations yet unborn….About to gain their freedom, the Israelites were told that they were to become a nation of educators….

            Above all you need memory – the kind of memory that never forgets the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.

            Freedom is more than revolution. The pages of history are littered with peoples who won their freedom only to lose it again….

            So Moses led his people on the least likely path to eternity. The Israelites became builders, but what they constructed was not monuments of stone. Instead it was a way of life inspired by the twin ideals of justice and compassion….

            It is said that God is not the power that enslaves but the power that sets free. Instead of worshipping mighty rulers, it taught that God is to be served by protecting the dignity of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the weak, the vulnerable and the neglected. Holiness is found not in monumental architecture but in words and teachings, above all in the instruction that takes place at home. ‘Call them not your children but your builders,’ said the sages.... No civilization, no faith has been as child-centered as Judaism. As a result, none has stayed so perennially young, so self-renewing through time. On Pesach, telling our story to our children, we relive the secret of Jewish renewal.

            …By telling the Israelites in Egypt to become a nation of educators, Moses turned a group of slaves into people of eternity.”


haggadah Section: -- Four Questions
Source: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's Haggadah, 2006