Before the original Passover offering, the one recorded in Torah, the one that happened before anyone left Egypt, before the last plague, before the rush to leave, before the ritual signifying that the Israelites will have left, before all of that, there was an act of massive civil disobedience. The Israelites were commanded to take an unblemished yearling lamb on the tenth of the first month, which they were to “keep” until the fourteenth when the lamb was to be offered and then eaten—its blood having been splattered on the doorposts of the houses—with matzah and bitter herbs. The lamb, according to the midrash, was a god of the Egyptians. It was chosen to signify that the Israelites were no longer subservient to the Egyptian divine hierarchy at whose head stood the Pharoah. This taking of the yearling and keeping it for four days was a demonstration that the Israelites were claiming their own dignity, their freedom to choose their own worship and their own God. This was a part of the unlearning of enslavement.
The logic of slavery is a logic of supremacy and subservience. It is grounded in a belief on the part of the enslaver that the enslaved person by right was not as fully human, as fully a person as the enslaver. It only works when there is also an acquiescence or even tacit belief on the part of the enslaved that this is right. It is this belief and the acquiescence in this belief that allows all supremacy and oppression to happen. (This is not unique to any one instance. Aristotle argued that slaves have a “different soul” than free persons.) This is, of course, a lie. A lie that was the point of the demonstration of the liberation of the Israelites. From Moses leaving the Pharaoh’s house and identifying with his Israelite siblings and not his royal upbringing, to the final destruction of the Egyptian kingdom, the point of the liberation from Egypt was that oppression will not stand because all oppression is based on falsehood and God is the God of truth and righteousness.
When reading the statement at the heart of the Haggadah “In every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as if they left Egypt,” we must be wary of two different mistaken readings. The first mistake is glossing over the Hebrew word for “person” which is adam meaning any person, not necessarily a Jewish person. In every generation every person is obligated to see themselves is if they left Egypt. Liberation is not a gift that was bestowed exclusively upon the Jews. It is a gift bestowed upon humanity. Every person is obligated, following the exodus story to see through all types of supremacy and liberation as based on a lie.
The second mistake is that people understand that the obligation is to remember that we were slaves; that the point is that since we were enslaved we can empathize with others who were enslaved and that we experienced the pain and suffering as other contemporary and near contemporary enslaved peoples. In fact, the obligation is to see ourselves as having left Egypt, that is as having been liberated. It is not the enslavement that is the important part of our story, but the fact and possibility of liberation. If the Israelites could be liberated, so could all other peoples be liberated from oppression, from supremacy, from enslavement.
Writing this, this year, in this moment when the order of the day is so far from liberation, when in fact my country and my kin are wreaking havoc and death at home and abroad; when screaming and protesting in the streets seems close to helpless; it may be more important than ever to remember that in order to get to liberation we have to liberate ourselves, from the myths of supremacy that still cloud our moral thinking: Jewish supremacy, white supremacy, American exceptionalism. We must leave that bondage.
There is a midrash that says that in the Red Sea every single person was able to just point and say “That is my God, and I will praise God.” May we all glimpse a moment of that clarity.
