What Passover Means to America
A special dispatch for Erev Pesach.
Mah nishtanah halaylah hazeh mikol halaylot? Why is this night different from all other nights?
Tonight, Passover begins. From Brooklyn to Los Angeles, London to Melbourne, Tel Aviv to Timbuktu, Jews will gather to remember the Exodus from Egypt. The old stories will be told anew, the agonies of slavery relived, and matzoh eaten, and traditions carried on. Each Jew will strive to feel as if he, himself, had been one of the enslaved Israelites freed from bondage by a strong hand and outstretched arm.
Israel’s dramatic tale of escape has served as an evocative metaphor for freedom fighters since; the Founders, struggling to dissolve colonial bonds to the crown of England, felt its significance as such. But besides sheer drama of the Exodus, and its status as a founding religious story for the Christian West, something more recommends it as an essential thread in the tapestry of the history and consciousness of our civilization.
The Jews were not freed simply to be free, but for a higher purpose. God instructs Moses, “Come to Pharaoh and speak to him, ‘So said the Lord, God of the Hebrews, “Send out My people so that they may serve Me”’” (emphasis mine). The slaves left Egypt to undertake life under a new law, a higher law, a law that guarantees certain freedoms and enjoins certain duties. They ventured into the desert to pursue and attain all the things that make up a good, virtuous life.
The tenets of this code are simple: Love the Lord your God, love your neighbor as yourself,1 love the stranger. When asked to summarize the Torah while his questioner stood on one foot, Rabbi Hillel famously responded, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Without freedom, a sine qua non of virtue, the requirements law cannot be fulfilled. Slaves, subject to the dictates of a capricious master, cannot become good citizens of the City of God.
The law of the Torah binds all, the humblest shtetl shoemakers and the most glorious Davidic kings alike. Justice gives to every man his due, favoring neither the rich nor the poor. Politics, the state, and positive law are subjects to requirements of a transcendent code — the laws of nature and nature’s God. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of this end, it sheds its legitimacy. Saul dies, heirless, and David becomes king.
Governments and the laws of men operated subjected to review under this higher standard. The constraints of human mind render it difficult to refer directly to an unwritten law in the hurly burly of practical politics and the courtroom, as the British repeated failure to protect the natural rights of Britons evidence.2 Therefore, the Americans wrote what parts of the higher law they deemed operative in national politics into first a written constitution and then a Bill of Rights. This gave citizens and statesmen — and judges — quicker and more definite access to the higher law, and gave the higher law far greater political and legal force.
Lord Acton wrote this of the Israelites:
In the midst of an invincible despotism [of the ancient world], among paternal, military, and sacerdotal monarchies, the dawn rises with the deliverance of Israel out of bondage, and with the covenant which began their political life. The tribes broke up into smaller communities, administering their own affairs under the law they had sworn to observe, but which there was no civil power to enforce. They governed themselves without a central authority, a legislature, or a dominant priesthood; and this polity, which, under the forms of primitive society, realised some aspirations of developed democracy, resisted for above three hundred years the constant peril of anarchy and subjugation. The monarchy itself was limited by the same absence of a legislative power, by the submission of the king to the law that bound his subjects, by the perpetual appeal of prophets to the conscience of the people as its appointed guardian, and by the ready resource of deposition.
This revolution — the notion that society and government are, and ought to be, bound by a higher, abstract constitution — laid a cornerstone of the West;3 the natural law tradition — best manifested by the American patriots of ‘76 and ‘87 — developed therefrom. Good law aims not at the fulfillment of men’s plans or systems or ambitions but a reflection, and application, of something higher to the particulars of the political community it governs.
As Acton notes, the opinion of the crowd means little if the individual standing athwart it has the law on his side. The heroes of the Old Testament are the Jeremiahs and Isaiahs, the men who risk all, suffer greatly, and flout the kings and conventions of their day in defense of the true and good. As Pirkei Avot (a tractate of the Talmud) puts it, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.” This sentiment, too, became quintessentially American.
In the year called 5785 by the Jewish calendar and 2025 by the Gregorian, dawn has fully risen, and the midday sun shines brightly on a free Jewish people and on a free America. The troubles now faced require a recovery of, and conservatively tempered improvement upon, the traditions of this civilization, not a spirit of hubristic innovation that seeks to raise new alters and pyramids to false gods and false kings.
Chag sameach.
Though not, as John Adams noted, more than yourself.
Madison argued as much as much as he advocated a written bill of rights in the first Congress.
As Acton also relates, however, the Greeks blundered their way towards the same principle. Besides the Judeo-Christian contributions, Greco-Roman thought (Aristotle, Cicero, etc.) added immeasurably to the natural-law tradition.