27 Mar PESACH WILL FOREVER REMAIN THE SPRING OF CIVILIZATION MOSHE DIDN’T ONLY FREE SLAVES; HE CHANGED THE VOCABULARY OF HUMANITY

What If?
“If the Holy One,
blessed be He, had
not taken our fathers
out of Egypt, then
we, our children and
our children’s
children would have remained enslaved to
Pharaoh in Egypt.” — The Haggadah
Really? We would still be slaves in Egypt? It
seems far-fetched to declare that if G-d had
not taken us out of Egypt 3337 years ago,
we would still have been enslaved to
Pharaoh in Egypt.
The Pharaonic Egyptian dynasty has long
been a relic of history. Between 1313 BCE
and 2011 CE, some water came under the
bridge. David killed Goliath; Plato wrote the
Republic; Julius Caesar was stabbed on the
steps of the Roman senate; Constantine
embraced Christianity; Mohammad decided
he was the last prophet; Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet; George Washington declared
independence; the Wright brothers flew an
airplane; Sergey Brin built Google; Trump
won the election. A few other things
happened as well during the last four
millennia.
Yet, we sit down at the Seder and in complete
seriousness state that if not for the Exodus
we would still be slaves to Pharaoh in
Egypt?
The Soul of Slavery
As much as we commemorate the physical
suffering of our Jewish nation at the hands
of their tyrannical Egyptian oppressors at
the Seder, the true bondage the Jewish
people were subjected to was not only of a
physical nature. To be sure, the physical
suffering was tremendous. Jewish children
were slaughtered. The Egyptian taskmasters
would mercilessly beat down on their
subjects who were tasked with impossible
and useless jobs.
Yet, the slavery ran much deeper. The
physical slavery was a byproduct of the
human spirit lying dormant, concealed
under the natural notion of man at the time
that all of history is cyclical. Egypt was the
superpower of the time, Pharaoh was the
demigod; the concept of a human spark,
which dreams and aspires for a better
tomorrow, did not exist. People did not
know that freedom is enshrined in the
genome of their soul, that they are crafted in
the Divine image, the source of all love and
bliss.
”No slave was able to escape from Egypt,”
says the Midrash (Mechilta Exodus 18:11).

It was not only that the slave was
unsuccessful in staging a rebellion; rather, it
was much more tragic: No slave possessed
the ambition to break out of the shackles.
The very walls that retained the slaves were
also the walls that stunted the human soul.
No man could even entertain the idea of
rising against injustice and exploitation.
There existed no such concept as the inner
wisdom of the soul reflecting the frequency
of infinite oneness, the greatness of each
heart that soars aloft and pushes us to
discover new horizons. The noble idea that
the human person, carved in the image of a
free G-d, was destined to truly be free, lay
dormant in the psyche of men. Despair and
surrender filled the human core.
Symbol of Pyramids
Every country has a symbol which captures
its soul. Egypt was represented by the
Pyramids. They still remain the longstanding
hallmark of Pharaonic Egypt—and are the
only one of the seven wonders of the ancient
world to survive in modern times. In the
pyramid, there is only one stone that stands
alone on top, while all the rest are just rows
that serve the row on top of it. Each row of
stones serves the row above it. All but the
stone at the peak.
The image of pyramids graphically depicts
the prevailing mentality in Egypt and the
rest of civilization: Egyptians saw
themselves as rows of stones subservient to
the stones on top of them. Every person saw
himself as a stone serving the one on top of
him, while the higher stones were merely
serving those on top of them. There was
only one stone on top, the Pharaoh, who
legally had no one above him. He was the
god.
This view of life was a given. Wherever fate
placed you in the hierarchy of the pyramid,
that is where your eternal destiny lay. No
person even dared to dream otherwise. The
soul of humanity was stagnant.
Even nature conceded—the Egyptian Nile
irrigated the land’s entire vegetation without
any dependence on the annual precipitation.
Nothing was dependent on human
investment and creativity. Human labor
would not make it or break it. All was fixed
in its preordained role.
The Language of Freedom
Moshe did not only free slaves; he
introduced a new vocabulary: the vocabulary
of freedom.
Moshe breathed new life into a shackled
world. A new belief that spirit can dominate
matter, that every person is intrinsically a

free spirit with endless horizons, and can
never be completely dominated. That each
person is an end in and of himself; that his or
her existence has infinite value; that each of
us is a temple for the Divine infinite light.
Moshe was the first man to ever stand up to
the tyrant Pharaoh and make demands. It
was not even what he said; it was that he
said something. Demands of a Pharaoh on
behalf of slaves? Unheard of. When Moshe
declared “Let my people go!” a new
consciousness was introduced into
humanity: that man can aspire to change, to
transcend, to go beyond, to transform, to be
free, physically, psychologically, and
spiritually.
If not for the Exodus from Egypt, human
history would have been different. It is not
only that the Jews would have remained
there for the time; rather, all of civilization
would remain in a standstill, with no
development and no progress. We would
still be enslaved descendants of the ancient
Egyptians because the concept of change
would have been nonexistent. Like a person
living under a rock his entire life, that is how
humans experience themselves.
A new language had to be invented. Exodus
was not only a national liberation; it was a
cosmic event that shaped the future of all
humans. It is not only a chapter in Jewish
history but rather the very script of the free
world. It is the redemption of the human
spirit from the shackles of paralysys,
emotional death, despair, and hopelessness.
With the exodus of Israel out of Egypt, the
whole world woke up from a long winter
that was deep and cold. Spring, at last, has
arrived.
Awaking from slumber
This is why the Torah instructs us to observe
Pesach always in springtime. This is no easy
task. Our months are lunar, so naturally
Pesach would fall out at various seasons of
the year. We have to go to great lengths in
order to ensure that Pesach coincides with
spring. Why was that so necessary?
The answer is because the season of spring
embodies the essence of Pesach. Pesach will
forever remain the spring of
civilization. After a frigid winter of
hibernation and deadness, the trees barren,
and the leaves lifeless, the climate dreary
and depressing, spring comes with a new
song on its lips. Nature awakens from its
slumber.
The Fuel behind Revolutions
The story of the Exodus, then, was not a
single event occurring millennia ago. It is an

ongoing story. Throughout the ages, millions
of people, downtrodden and dejected, draw
inspiration from the Exodus story to at least
dream of a better tomorrow and to actively
work for it. Exodus has planted in the human
psyche the seed of liberty, the mentality of
freedom, the vocabulary of emancipation.
Wherever you observe a revolution or a
voice yearning for change to the better, for
justice and truth, for kindness and integrity,
for liberation from anxiety, for an end to
exploitation and abuse, you will see the
imprint of the Exodus story in it.
Do you ever wake up in the morning and say
to yourself (not in words, but energetically
in your heart and nervous system), I will not
be a victim anymore? My trauma will not
define me any longer. Do you ever hear an
inner voice: I will confront my darkness and
utilize it to grow? My insane trauma has
hijacked all of me, but no longer? That is the
Exodus playing itself out again in your life.
It is the voice of Exodus whispering: you
were created to be free.
Nowhere is this truth more evident than in
the story of this country, the United States of
America, From the Pilgrims to the Founding
Fathers, from the Civil War to the Civil
Rights movement, Americans have turned to
one biblical prophet, and his name was
Moses, because his narrative offers a
roadmap of promise in a world of peril.
Most of the pilgrims who settled the “New
England” of America in the early 17th
century were Puritan refugees escaping
religious persecutions in Europe. These
Puritans viewed their emigration from
England as a virtual re-enactment of the
Exodus. To them, England was Egypt, the
king was the Pharaoh, the Atlantic Ocean
was the Red Sea, America was the Land of
Israel, and the Indians were the ancient
Canaanites. The Puritans were the new
Israelites, entering into a new covenant with
G-d in a new Promised Land.
The Pilgrims described their fight for
freedom as being like that of Moses. George

Washington attributed the success of the
Revolution to the same deity who freed the
Israelites. American slaves made “Go Down,
Moses” their national anthem.
Immediately after passing the Declaration of
Independence on July 4, 1776, the
Continental Congress asked Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John
Adams to propose a seal for the United
States. Their recommendation (though it
never materialized): Moses, leading the
Israelites across the Red Sea, while the
pharaoh drowns.
The pharaoh has long represented the
intransigence of power. The Pilgrims called
King James of England the pharaoh; Thomas
Paine called King George the same; Civil
Rights marchers branded Jim Crow the
pharaoh.
At the time of the American Revolution, the
interest in the knowledge of Hebrew was so
widespread as to allow the circulation of the
story that “certain members of Congress
proposed that the use of English be formally
prohibited in the United States, and Hebrew
substituted for it.”
And when the Pennsylvania Assembly

ordered a bell of liberty in 1751, it chose an
inscription from Vayikra: “Proclaim Liberty
thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants
Thereof.”
Lady Moses
Harriet Tubman (1822–1913), that
remarkable lady, the African-American
abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy
during the American Civil War, was
famously nick named Moses. Why? Because
during the horrific era of slavery in the US—
triggering the Civil War –this woman
liberated thousands of slaves.
One day, the then adolescent slave girl
Tubman was sent to a dry-goods store for
some supplies. There, she encountered a
slave owned by a different family, who had
left the fields without permission. His
overseer, furious, demanded that Tubman
help restrain the young man. She refused,
and as the slave ran away. The overseer
threw a two-pound weight at him, but struck
Tubman instead, which she said “broke my
skull.”
Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was
returned to her master’s house and laid on
the seat of a loom, where she remained

without medical care for two days. She was
sent back into the fields, “with blood and
sweat rolling down my face until I couldn’t
see.” Her master said she was “not worth a
sixpence” and returned her to her original
owner, who tried unsuccessfully to sell her.
Tubman took all her pain and turned it into
one of the greatest human acts of courage,
setting free slave after slave after slave.
For this she received the name “Moses!”
Where Would We Be?
Every time your heart moves you to
transcend fear, to identify a paralyzing
coping mechanism, to be a cycle breaker, to
move beyond a barrier, to battle injustice, to
respect your spiritual integrity, to react
differently to a trigger, to transform your life
for the better, to subdue an addiction, to
confront a bad habit or attribute, remember
that it is all because the Lord has sent Moshe
to stand up to Pharaoh and take us out of
Egypt.
“If the Holy One, blessed be He, had not
taken our fathers out of Egypt, then we, our
children and our children’s children would
have remained enslaved to Pharaoh in
Egypt.”

Every time you stand in front of a mirror and
declare: I will not settle for mediocrity any
longer, I will not be a victim any longer to
instinct, to lies, to abuse—that has been
triggered the moment Moshe stood before
the stone atop the pyramid, the Pharaoh, and
declared: “Thus said the Lord! Let My
people go and they will serve Me!”
Pesach gave us the vocabulary of freedom.
Where would we and humanity be without
it? What can your future look like with it?
We remember the Exodus daily. Because
each day I get to choose between living as a
“corpse,” as a tortured, miserable soul, a
shell of myself; or as a living, breathing,
blissful embodiment of a living, infinite and
undefined G-d.