When We Can No Longer Agree on Who Is Pharaoh

When American Jews gather for Passover this year, we will arrive at our Seders carrying worries about the multitudes of threats facing Jewish life. These worries, shaped by recent war, political anxiety and personal experience, will undoubtedly emerge over the course of the evening. Some may be surprised to discover that those they trust most, their friends and family around the table, interpret the dangers of the present moment in fundamentally different ways. While our disagreements might present as political, in reality they will reflect something deeper about how to understand the Passover story itself, bringing to the fore questions of where we locate Pharaoh today and what kinds of threats the Exodus is meant to prepare us to confront.

The Passover seder is an exercise in Jewish memory. Through the event, we rehearse how to recognize oppression, respond to danger, and imagine redemption. Modeled off the Greek symposium, the Seder is designed to foster a healthy amount of discussion and debate. This year, however, such disagreements will feel unusually intimate, even tense, as they come to reveal that despite a shared liturgy, every one of us has distinct and oftentimes opposing intuitions about how Jews should organize and act politically.

Since the war with Iran began, these disagreements have grown sharper and more urgent. Concerns over threats, Jewish peoplehood and the fragility of democratic norms punctuate personal conversations and communal life, as many of us try to make sense of our competing commitments. For some of us, Pharaoh — the embodiment of evil incarnate — appears as the forces that threatens Jewish survival, one that connects the dangers facing Israel with growing insecurity for Jews in the Diaspora. For others, Pharaoh is found in our own government’s actions that potentially weaken democratic safeguards in the United States.

These may appear as disagreements about policy, but in fact reflect the ways Jews interpret threat differently. The Haggadah itself provides a series of political lessons. Its warning that “in every generation they rise up against us” has long encouraged vigilance against threats towards the Jewish people. At the same time, the memory to “remember the stranger because we were strangers in Egypt” is evoked in concerns over due process violations and the flouting of other democratic norms. These two exhortations are both found in the Haggadah, and in the present moment, we feel them both with unusual force, leading equally committed Jews to reach very different conclusions about what this moment of crisis demands of us.

These differing concerns  have less to do with ideology than with distinct experiences of vulnerability. Experiences of threat are rarely formed through calm calculation alone. Threat is felt viscerally, shaped by memory and identity In the words of theorist Brian Massumi, “Fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future.” For American Jews who view Iran and its regional ambitions as posing a grave danger, the current war may appear a painful but necessary response to a risk that feels both immediate and historically grounded.

From this vantage point, the decision to act without formal congressional authorization, and the absence of clearly and consistently stated goals or purpose from the current administration do not undermine the legitimacy of the war. Rather, they are understood as expressions of what the political philosopher Michael Walzer famously described as the “dirty hands” of politics – the reality that leaders sometimes have to do bad to do good. In such circumstances, these actions can be understood as the price of confronting immediate danger.

Those who see the current situation in this vein note that presidents of both parties have entered military conflicts without clear declarations of war. This perspective takes Iran at its word, pointing to nearly forty years of Iran’s call for the destruction of the United States and Israel. For some, the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, when civic institutions like city councils, public schools, and universities appeared unable to recognize the difference between Hamas and the IDF or clearly respond to antisemitic violence furthers this sense of threat. Since the core institutions of liberal democracy appear to be failing to recognize real danger, how can they be relied on to keep Jews safe?

For other American Jews, however, the present moment evokes a different sense of danger – one focused on the erosion of democratic norms in the U.S. From this perspective, the decision to enter a new military conflict without congressional authorization combined with the shifting and unclear public justifications for the war stokes understandable fear about the erosion of democratic norms.

From this vantage point, launching the war reflects one in a series of repeated departures from democratic procedure. Some see this moment as drawing on the playbook of 20th-century authoritarian regimes who, as the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, were able to come to power and enact their agenda despite the existence of democratic structures. They achieved this by creating a shadow set of policies outside of the law enabled by the extraordinary needs of the moment that Agamben calls “the state of exemption.” The fear in this context is that moments of crisis like this can be used to normalize extraordinary measures, gradually altering the expectations citizens hold about accountability and the rule of law. The deeper threat here is not military but civic: that democratic institutions themselves have lost their resilience. The fear for the loss of democratic norms isn’t merely ideological — it’s grounded in a genuinely felt anxiety that the safeguards we have long relied on to protect us are eroding.

Pharaoh endures as a symbol of oppression – a way of naming the dangers and moral tests that each generation must confront.  The Seder asks us to remain present to the tension between competing fears and obligations. It does not require choosing one lesson over the other, but rather, it creates space for us to articulate our concerns and listen to the fears and hopes that shape others’ views. Doing so enables us to sustain a shared conversation within a common story despite that tension, remaining bound to one another even as our political judgements diverge.

When the seder closes with “Next year in Jerusalem,” it gestures toward a future not yet reached. This year, it may also challenge us to inhabit the imperfect present together, to remain committed to our family, friends, and fellow Jews across deep fault lines, trusting that the path toward redemption is one we must still walk together.

Rabbi Dr. Joshua Ladon is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.