EXODUS AND THE AMERICAN MONUMENTS

The Haggadah famously says: “And even if we were all wise, filled with understanding, and all knowledgeable in the Torah, we would still be obligated to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt...”

Why? If we were all so deeply learned, what possible need would there be to tell a story every year over and over again?

To answer this question, let's travel to Washington DC and visit the great monuments. Let’s consider the Lincoln Memorial, gaze up at the immense stone figure of Abraham Lincoln. Then look around him: inscribed into the walls of the memorial are the texts of two of the greatest speeches in American history, the Gettysburg address: “This nation, under G-d, shall have a new birth of freedom...” and his second inaugural, “With malice toward none, with charity for all...”

Walk along the Potomac and visit the Jefferson Memorial. If you look around the chamber, you will find four large panels on the walls filled with quotations from Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal”; “G-d who gave us life gave us liberty...”

Now let us take a stroll through London. There are many monumental statues but they have no quotations. The bases of the statues will tell you who they represent, when they lived and died, but with no narrative, no quotation, no defining words. Even Churchill, who is one of the greatest orators of all time, whose wartime speeches arguably saved his nation, is memorialized only by a statue.

Why does The United States of America tell a story on its monuments?

Because it is a society born not out of territorial disputes, but out of an ideal, a moral commitment. If you want to hand on a moral commitment to successive generations, you need to tell them the story of how we got here and the values that are the key to sustaining liberty, equality and freedom. So, too, it is with Jewish history. In order to pass on our values, we must tell the stories of how we acquired them and how we have lived them through the centuries. We must connect our present with our past so that we may build an equally strong future.

Now we understand the deep wisdom of our sages who said:

“Even if we were all wise and full of understanding it is still a mitzvah for us to tell the story of the Exodus. And the more and the longer one expounds on the story, the more commendable it is.”

It is utterly astonishing that the mere act of telling the story, annually, as a mitzvah, as a religious obligation, sustained Jewish identity across the centuries, even in the absence of all the normal accompaniments of nationhood – land, geographical proximity, independence.

The story we tell on this magical night never allowed the Jewish people to forget its ideals, its aspirations, its collective mission of constructing a world that would be the opposite of Egypt, a place of freedom and justice, human nobility and G-dliness.

One of the most profound truths the Haggadah tells us is: If you want to sustain freedom and hand on Jewish values to the next generation, never stop telling the story.

Shabbat Shalom and a happy and sweet Pessach,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky