From Slavery to Freedom: Keeping Israel at the Seder Table

The Seder is the ultimate Jewish celebration of freedom. We sit (or recline) with our families and friends around the table recounting the story, as if each of us was a slave who witnessed the terrible plagues and then suddenly, at midnight, marched upright with clenched fists and unleavened bread on our backs, out of Egypt.  

Different generations and communities celebrate the Seder according to their own customs and interpretations, adding references to the embodiment of Pharaoh as the main tormentor of the Jews of that time. After the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel, these events were interpreted as a strong parallel to the transition from slavery to freedom. 

In recent years, as those memories faded, some politically liberal Jews have shifted the emphasis from the core Jewish experience, first in Egypt and then in subsequent generations, to a universalist version embracing the downtrodden of the world. I first encountered this as a student in Berkeley in 1969, in the form of a “Freedom Haggadah,” which sought to draw comparisons between the events of the exodus and the burning political issues of the day in America—specifically civil rights (as it was known then) and the women’s liberation movement. Egypt, Israelites and slavery were still part of the text, but were no longer the primary or only focus. Armed with my copy of that Haggadah, I went home for our non-liberal particularist family seders.

In the decades since, successors to these activists of the 1960s moved the emphasis further away from Jewish history, culture and identity and towards universalism in the form of identifying with all victims, many real, and but also some that are imagined. (Today’s edition would focus on the war against Ukraine, with Putin in the role of Pharaoh.) 

In the progressive versions of the Haggadah that I have seen, the traditional four cups of wine are reinterpreted—with no mention of the traditional symbolism of the fourth cup, associated with God’s promise to bring the Israelites to the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exodus 6:8). Leaving Egypt was never considered an end in itself, but rather the first step in a complex process of redemption, via Sinai and the commandments, and ending with the arrival (forty years later) in the Land of Israel. 

By deliberately disconnecting the two, the revisionists are deleting this core dimension. In their political spin, this cup, in a paraphrase of the others, is supposed to represent “a world where no one is held in slavery … a world without sweatshop laborers, where all workers are able to make a fair wage” (“A Haggadah for Justice – Truah”). The particularism of Jewish existence—the Promised Land and Land of Israel—are censored out of existence. 

Similarly, in every generation for 2000 years in exile and Diaspora, our ancestors ended the seder by singing “Next year in Jerusalem.” But in another manifestation of intersectionality and self-assimilation, this statement and all mention of Jerusalem and Jewish self-determination are erased from progressive seders. This is part of the wider assault on Jewish history and identity, in which Zionism is presented as a form of “colonialism” and, according to the NGO industry and the United Nations, “apartheid.” To the degree that Israel is presented at all in these versions of the Haggadah, it is through this hostile and distorted filter, envisioned not as the homeland of the Jewish people, but rather as a country of “all its inhabitants”—the catch-phrase for dismantling the Jewish state. Far from the celebration of Jewish freedom and deliverance from oppression, the intersectional Haggadah highlights the need for “grappling with the realities of Jewish power, Palestine solidarity, and the sense of Jewish complicity with Palestinian suffering and white supremacy.”

Like the wicked child in the Haggadah, the radical universalists and inter-sectionalists are excluding themselves, their lost and uninformed followers, and their children from the Jewish community.  

Like the wicked child in the Haggadah, the radical universalists and inter-sectionalists are excluding themselves, their lost and uninformed followers, and their children from the Jewish community.  

These distortions and interpretations go far beyond the student-led “Freedom Haggadah” of 50 years ago. The earlier versions added universal concerns without erasing the traditional Jewish interpretations and themes, including the celebration of our freedom in the Land of Israel, and the right of the Jewish people to determine our own destiny. 

Just as the exodus from Egypt necessarily led to the arrival in the Land of Israel, the founders of Zionism understood that to escape from the oppression of the diaspora, the Jewish people must be anchored in our homeland.

In contrast, the marginal Jews and anti-Zionists of today are marching backwards from freedom into a world of assimilation and slavery.

In contrast, the marginal Jews and anti-Zionists of today are marching backwards from freedom into a world of assimilation and slavery. By prohibiting all particularism, and specifically attacking the centrality of Israel to the Jewish people, they are tearing down our identity. 

For generations upon generations, the texts and collective rituals of the Passover seder were primary expressions of Jewish continuity and the everlasting yearning for our own freedom, which every family taught to their children. This continuity is the essence of our identity as a people and a nation, and the key to our survival. 

Next year in Jerusalem. 

Gerald Steinberg is emeritus Professor of Political Science at Bar Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor. His latest book is “Menachem Begin and the Israel-Egypt Peace Process: Between Ideology and Political Realism” (Indiana University Press).