Every people of antiquity made great efforts to trace its ancestry back to heroes and gods. The Jewish people are different. We devote a whole book of our Torah, and a good part of the Seder evening, to describing our origins in slavery and oppression, a fact that other nations would have covered with silence as an unspeakable shame. We fully believe that the Almighty destined this slave interlude to teach Israel as intensively as possible the meaning of slavery and the significance of redemption.. Remembering our own slavery places us under the ethic of protecting and supporting the stranger, the slave, and the oppressed, and requires us to fight the inhuman and anti-human wherever we find it. To the Torah the oppression of the defenseless is a heinous evil. It is up to the Jewish people, who have experienced it in their selves, to extirpate it. 


haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story
Source: The Passover Haggadah by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin