Itch: 

Passover has a message for the conscience and the heart of all mankind.  For what does it commemorate?  It commemorates the deliverance of a people from degrading slavery, from most foul and cruel tyranny.  And so, it is Israel's---nay, God's protest against unrighteousness, whether individual or national.  Wrong, it declares, may triumph for a time, but even though it be perpetrated by the strong on the weak, it will meet with its inevitable retribution at last.  

Although we, who mouth the words and recite the ritual, are reliving an epoch which is peculiar to Jewish history, the drama that is Passover is no longer ours alone.  Its enactment is not confined only to the dining rooms of our own homes; it has been embraced by the world at large, and is continuallly being reenacted on the stage of mankind by all who seek avenues to assert their condemnation of oppression and tyranny, by all who labor in the vineyard of the Lord searching for freedom and peace.

Althoug it is the Pharaoh of old who is the tyrant of the Haggadah, it is not he alone of whom we speak tonight.  We speak this evening of other tyrants and other tyrannies as well. We speak:

Maria: 

Of the tyranny of poverty...and the tyranny of privation,

Of the tyranny of wealth...and the tyranny of war,

Of the tyranny of power...and the tyranny of despair,

Of the tyranny of disease...and the tyranny of time,

Of the tyranny of ignorance...and the tyranny of color.

To all of these tyrannies do we address ourselves this evening.  Passover brands them all as abominations in the sight of God.

As Abraham Lincoln once said:  "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.   This expesses my idea of democracy.  Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."

The spirit of Passover, although created of the flesh and sinew of Judaism, belongs to all mankind. "Since the Exodus," said Heinrich Heine, "freedom has spoken with a Hebrew accent." Today it speaks in the language of all men.  And women, I may add, too. 


haggadah Section: Introduction