Exodus Story | Passover haggadah by Dinah Winnick

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According to the Torah, our ancestor Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and became valuable to Pharaoh for his astute economic predictions and ability to administer before and during severe famine. Because of his skills, his people were welcomed.

When new rulers came to power the Jewish people fell out of favor and were enslaved. Their vineyards and fields were confiscated, work quotas were increased, families were separated. Despite these hardships, the Jewish people survived and grew in numbers.

The new Pharaoh became concerned that the Jewish people were too numerous and powerful, and could unite with Mitzrayim’s enemies to rise against them. He decreed that all of the sons of the Jewish people should be drowned in the Nile, but not all followed his cruel decree. The midwives Shifrah and Puah defied his order and helped Jewish women safely deliver their babies.

A year after the Pharaoh’s decree, a Jewish woman named Yochevet gave birth to a baby boy. The next morning, to save her new baby’s life, Yochevet placed him in a basket and gave the basket to his sister Miriam to take the river. While Miriam hid in the tall grasses, the river floated her new brother downstream past the very place the Pharaoh’s daughter went swimming every morning.

Pharaoh’s daughter, Batya, found the child, drew him from the water and said, “I will raise you but who will feed you?” Miriam emerged from her hiding place and said, “I know a good woman, Yochevet, who will nurse him.” Batya agreed and said, “Bring him to me when he is weaned; he will be as my own son for I have no other. I will call him Moshe because I brought him from the river’s water.”

Growing up, Moshe was restless, not at ease in his palace home and not at peace with the Pharaoh. He would often go out walking—watching and listening. He was a lonely boy with no peers, heir to the Pharaoh, honest and compassionate.

Moshe was troubled by what he saw around him and tried to ease the burdens of the workers. He questioned, “Who are these Jews to me? Who are these workers, these slaves? Why must we be so brutal?”

One day—in fury confusion—the young, idealistic, impulsive Moshe killed a taskmaster who beat a slave. He fled in pain to the desert, through barren hills and over-dried riverbeds, beyond the Jordan River.

Moshe arrived at and stayed many years in Midian. He married Tzeporah and had children. He tended flocks in the wilderness. Life there was good, and yet he never forgot Mitzrayim and the people enslaved there.

One day, while grazing his flock and gazing out on the vastness of the desert, he envisioned a bush that burned and burned, but did not burn up. And he heard a voice, saying to him what he knew to be true—that the people in his memories were his own people; that he should return to them and together they would find a way to be free.

Moshe left his life and family in Midian and returned to Mitzrayim. There, the Jews were hungry, tired, angry and beginning to organize, talking of rebellion and escape. Moshe went to Pharaoh and asked him to free the Jews, warning that otherwise great suffering would come to the land of Mitzrayim.

Pharaoh refused and plagues were brought on the land, one at a time. Each time Moses said, “Let my people go!” but the Pharaoh wouldn’t listen. Finally, after the 10th plague, which killed the first-born in each family of Pharaoh’s kingdom, Pharaoh ordered the Jews to leave. And they did, very quickly, taking only their journey food, matzah.

Yet Pharaoh had a change of heart and mobilized his forces to recapture the fleeing slaves. The chariots reached the Jews when they were nearing the shores of the Red Sea. They turned around to see the army of the Egyptians bearing down on them and they were filled with fear.

They turned on Moshe for bringing them to this impasse. But, it is said that one man, Nachson, took a risk and walked into the sea, and the waters divided. In doing this he acted as a free person. Only after Nakhzon and those who followed him had made their first break with slavery, did the waters divide, let the fleeing people through, and then drown the army of the Pharaoh.

We remember the message of Psalm 114: When the Jewish people went out of Egypt, they sought a new place, as people of a foreign language. As they fled, the sea saw their plight and parted. The mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs. Why do you flee, oh sea? Mountains, why do you skip like rams, and you hills like lambs? The power of this moment was enough to turn stone into a spring of water.

haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story

Source: Adapted from Silverman and Bazant's "Love and Justice in Times of War Hagaddah" (2003)