Pesach, Freud and Jewish identity from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah

           At the end of his life, Sigmund Freud wrote a strange work called Moses and Monotheism…Freud notes that in one respect the Moses narrative is diametrically different from the others. In all the other stories the hero is a person of noble birth who is brought up by a family in humble circumstance and only later discovers that royal blood flows in his veins. In the case of Moses, the opposite is the case. He is brought up as a prince. His true identity is that he belongs to a nation of slaves. 

            …what Freud fails to see…was that the story of Moses is not a myth but an anti-myth, a protest against the social and spiritual assumptions of the mythic age. In myth, people are born to greatness. The universe is hierarchical….That view, common to all pagan cultures and still held by Plato and Aristotle, was what Judaism denied. Heroism is not a fact of birth. It is a matter of moral courage. 

            …We, at least, can see what Freud did not; that in deciding that his destiny lay, not in an Egyptian palace, but with his people, Moses helped write one of the greatest narratives of hope in the literature of mankind.”


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