The Universal Story | Passover haggadah by Cynthia Janower

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The Universal Story: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah

…no story has had greater impact on the political developments in the West….’Since the Exodus,’ said Heinrich Heine, ‘Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.’ …it taught that each individual had dignity as God’s image and was entitled to freedom from tyranny, and to equality before the law. It told of how prophets criticized kings and that unjust rulers could be overthrown….[it] taught the fundamental difference between might and right, power and justice, rule and authority. It introduced an ethical dimension into the politics of power…the great political theorists of the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, cite it constantly in their works.

…America was the great attempt to construct a society on biblical lines, following in the footsteps of Moses…Already in 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers, seeing themselves as a ‘continuation and extension of the Jewish church’, pledged themselves in covenant to create a body politic, inspired by the example of biblical Israel, and frame ‘just and equal laws’. In 1776, in Philadelphia itself, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson met to design a seal for the new United States. Franklin proposed that it should bear a picture of Moses lifting his staff to divide the Red Sea, together with the motto, ‘Rebellion to tryrants is obedience to God.’ Jefferson preferred a less aggressive design: the Israelites in the wilderness… “Our American Israel” [was] a term frequently used…[Thomas] Jefferson’s ‘truths’ [in the Declaration of Independence] were self-evident only to a culture steeped in the Hebrew Bible, from its opening declaration that the human individual is ‘the image of God’, to its enactment in history in the Exodus and the covenant at Mt. Sinai…

…[American presidents] refer to covenant and the moral bonds by which societies are sustained. The liberty of which they speak is biblical rather than libertarian: a matter less of rights than responsibilities, not the freedom to do what one likes, but the freedom to do what is correct and thus contribute to the common good. They invoke an essentially Mosaic narrative of America as the promised land to which successive generations of immigrants have come to find freedom from oppression and build, in John Winthrop’s famous phrase, ‘a city upon a hill’…The great American political addresses are the most sustained attempt in the modern world to place the themes of exodus, redemption and the presence of God in history at the centre of public life. (quotes John Winthrop, George Washington, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and George W. Bush.....Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s [noted] “in France, I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. In America, I found they were intimately united and they reigned in common over the same country.”

In a strange way civil religion has the same relationship to the United States as Pesach does to the Jewish people. It is, first and foremost, not a philosophy but a story. It tells of a persecuted group escaped from the old world and made a hazardous journey to an unknown land, there to construct a new society, in Abraham Lincoln’s famous words, ‘conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ Like the Pesach story, it must be told repeatedly, as it is in every inaugural address….

There have been four revolutions in the West in modern times: the British and American and the French and the Russian. In Britain and America, the source of inspiration was the Hebrew Bible. In France and Russia, the great alternative to the Bible, namely philosophy. The theorist of the French revolution was Jean-Jacques Rousseau; of the Russian, Karl Marx. The contrast between them is vivid. Britain and America succeeded in creating a free society, not without civil war, but at least without tyranny and terror. The French and Russian revolutions began with dreams of utopia and ended with a nightmare of bloodshed and the suppression of human rights...the explanation [largely] turns on how a society answers the question: who is the ultimate sovereign, God or man? …Democracy, in and of itself, is not enough…it merely replaces the tyranny of a minority with the tyranny of the majority. From ancient Athens to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, no political system that vested absolute power in its rulers, however elected, has resisted corruption…That is why the Exodus narrative remains the canonical text of liberty. It is only when society acknowledges God that man is protected from his fellow man….

The Exodus is the inexhaustible source of inspiration to all those who long for freedom. It taught that right was sovereign over might; that freedom and justice must belong to all, not some; that, under God, all human beings are equal; and that over all earthly powers is the supreme power…who hears the cry of the oppressed and who intervenes in history to liberate slaves. It took many centuries for this vision to become the shared property of the liberal democracies of the West; and there is no guarantee it will remain so. Freedom is a moral achievement, and without a constant effort of education, it atrophies and must be fought for again.

haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story

Source: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's Haggadah, 2006