The Exodus—the story of the Israelites’ freedom from Egyptian slavery 3,000 years ago—is the ultimate story of freedom. And not just for Jews. But for people seeking liberation from subjugation in so many other times and places. Including here in America.
From the founding fathers, to abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, to presidents like Lincoln and leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, the themes and symbols and moral truths of the Exodus story have been at the core of how Americans seeking freedom from tyranny have seen themselves. One could argue that without the Exodus there might be no America.
To make that case last Passover—and to take us on a tour of the way the Exodus has been used throughout American history—we talked to Rabbi Meir Soloviechik, who teaches at Yeshiva University and helms the oldest synagogue in the United States. We loved the conversation so much that we wanted to share it again this year.
You don’t need to be a believer to love this episode. You just need to be concerned with how divided we have become, how we have lost a shared sense of reality, a shared sense of ethics, and shared stories from which we can draw universal meaning and inspiration.
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An excellent episode. I remember the original from last year.
The last time I remember a clear allusion to the Hebrew Bible in American political culture was Reagan's speech about "tear down this wall" ("let my people go," in other words) at the Berlin Wall in 1987, thirty-one years after The Ten Commandments movie. Clinton made reference to a "new convenant" with the American people -- an allusion to both the Bible and the New Deal -- but many ministers objected to it.
The 1990s saw the rise of belief in technocracy, neoliberalism, and money-making among America's elite, which is still with us. They've tried to fill the void with fake substitutes, like environmentalism and "woke," moving us at the same time from science to pseudo-science to anti-science. These developments have stripped Americans of the ability to talk about politics in terms of moral agency and self-government. AI and video games may do the rest and kill off democratic self-government completely.
Antisemitism certainly draws from the notion of active divine involvement in history and the specialness of Israel ("am segulah" -- "a treasured people," roughly). There's more to it, though. About hidden, occult forces in nefarious control, there's a conspiratorial paranoia as well (whose distant ancestry can be found among the ancient gnostics of Alexandria, who also resented the Jews and their god -- they believed a lower god and its minions, the astrological bodies and other lower elements, enslaved the body and entombed the soul there -- "soma sema" -- it's a pun in Greek).
Bari, absolutely loved this episode. I'm Latter-day Saint and Brigham young is constantly referred to as the American Moses among our people and our crossing the plains to escape religious persecution as our Exodus. And, related but different, in June 1979, National Geographic wrote an article about the similarities between the holy land and Salt Lake City. All this to say, the imagery of the Exodus is constantly referred to our church, in more than just our study of the Old Testament.