Jeremy Rosen
Passover: Slavery and Freedom Today

Jeremy Rosen - Passover: Slavery and Freedom Today

- Well, let’s go. Hello everybody and happy almost Passover to you. You know, in this era in which we are living in, which people are being bombed and raped and murdered and oppressed and almost wherever you look, but particularly in Ukraine, you begin to wonder what the heck does freedom mean and who is free and what is Passover all about? So I want to deal with the issue of freedom and indeed, the issue of slavery, which is in itself, a very controversial term, but before I get to that, I’d like a little bit of history to give you the background about what Passover claims to be, is and was. As we know, it’s after Yom Kippur, probably the most celebrated of Jewish events, but everybody has their own different version. The Bible starts off with the story of the Exodus. Do we have any evidence, however hard people try to find, whether it’s archaeological or historical evidence? The straight answer is no, we don’t. And does it matter? No, I don’t believe it does. I think as with all if you like, myths or traditions, the issue is not the historicity, and I’m not saying it didn’t happen, I’m just saying with no proof that it did, but it’s a message that counts. Going back to Marshall McLuhan. So the narrative of the Israelite tradition is that our original families went down to Egypt. Now of course, we know that there is lots of archaeological evidence about invasions of Egypt and people coming from the north to the south and people going out again and coming back again, and we’re going to come to that in a minute. But the Torah simply talks about these people who were enslaved in Egypt. One way well asked how are they enslaved? What kind of slavery was it?

We know about the slavery that the Egyptians used to build the pyramids long before the Jews, but what kind of slavery was it? Because interestingly enough, by and large, it seems that some of the Jews were pretty well integrated into Egyptian society. But anyway, the majority of them wanted to go out. They were let out by Moses and the Torah in the Book of Exodus, talks about this process of going out and it talks about a process in which four days before the Exodus, we’ve gone through all the plagues except the last one. The children of Israel are told to take a sheep and tie it up in their backyards. The sheep, or actually the ram rather than the sheep, was one of the important Egyptian deities and so by taking an animal that they the Egyptians, regarded with great reverence and tying it up in your backyard and saying, this is because we’re going to have a meal out of it, was an act of rebellion in a sense. But it already marks, if you like, the beginning of the collapse of the hard Egyptian hard liners. And so they are commanded to take this sheep and then after three days of preparation, in the evening of the 14th, they gather together and they have this meal, and the meal, what took place in Egypt was an unusual one. First of all, they had to be dressed in their working clothes, with their wallets ready to move, with their cases packed, with their belts tied and their wallets handy. They had to prepare the meal in such a way that you had no plates to wash up afterwards, roasted everything, had to be finished by the end, by midnight and this was going to be a festival of , of rush.

And the rush is reflected to some extent, by the matzo because the Torah is going to say that the matzo was bread, they were having a making, but they expected it to rise because risen food, matzo bread in those days was for the rich and for the free, whereas the matzos were for the poor, but they didn’t have time and that’s why we have matzos. On the other hand, there’s another source which says no, matzos were what they had all the time, the poor slaves when they were in Egypt. But in addition, they had to daub their homes with blood, officially so that the angel of death, the mythical idea not mentioned as such, but would God would pass over their homes, seeing the red signs, and seeing that they were identified as Jews, which means clearly that they were mixing in or living in similar area to the Egyptians at the time, and this was the first assertion of identity that the Jews had to put something on their doors to identify themselves, not unlike the idea of a mezuza that we have nowadays, and they would be part of this process. So the dormant blood with his and blood and dip it in, and that’s mentioned only in the context of the first exodus from Egypt. And then they, midnight, the firstborn of Egypt are killed and then the Egyptians rush them out and they shower them with money and silver, anything. Get out of fear as quickly as you can. And that’s the beginning of the next phase of the 40 years in the wilderness. And then having said that, the Torah then goes on to talk about, okay, what are we going to do for the future?

And then it says, look guys, I want you to have a seven day festival, not the first time, a seven day festival, seven day festival. You’re not going to have anything that rises, causes bread to rise. You are going to eat matzo and you’ve got, in addition to that, to think that this is a day of , a day of remembering. Actually, so is Rosh Hashanah a day of remembering. Remembering is very important. Know your history, know the past, know where you come from or know what your culture is telling you. So this then, is the next phase of this celebration and then as always, the Torah comes in with a bit of a heavy hand and he said, look, I want everybody to celebrate, even those people who amongst you who you’ve acquired from outside or the strangers coming with you,. I just want them, the men, to be circumcised so that they can identify with you. But if they don’t want to identify you, fair enough and in fact, the Torahs says that when they went out of Egypt, they took with them a lot of non-Jews, called them the , all kind of political rebels, all kind of discontents, people who wanted to get out. So they were welcoming everybody from a background. It’s not as though they were saying, you can’t be one of us, they’re just saying, if you want to participate in our religious event, you’ve got to show with action that you are really one of us. So this was the identification of celebrating Passover as a form of identity and that’s why in the book of Exodus twice they say, you know, you’ve got to tell your children there, you’ve got to tell your children about this. And what happens if your children ask you why are you doing this? And of course, that becomes part of much later, the seder night questions that we have.

But the Torahs already concerned on transmitting tradition from one generation to the next and involving everybody, involving the children, even involving strangers. This is all part of it. And then later on in the book of Exodus, you go on to talk about the importance of the firstborn because our firstborn were if you like, saved, whereas others were not and therefore, in a sense, firstborn have an obligation to keep the tradition going as well as everybody else, of course. And then we also get the idea coming through the books of Leviticus and into Deuteronomy, the notion of purity, the biblical notion that we’ve got to take care of ourselves in a physical sense as well as in a spiritual sense. And doing so, we do this by regularly reinventing ourselves, if you like, through the idea of baptism, through the idea of the mikva, constant reaffirmation, and then we have the ideas that begin to come after the biblical period. Interestingly enough, the book of Joshua tells us throughout the 40 years, they didn’t celebrate Passover. Why didn’t they celebrate Passover? Was it because they didn’t have a mikva to purify themselves in? Was it, because we know that you don’t circumcise somebody if there’s any danger to health and if you’re travelling, it’s a dangerous situation? We don’t know why, but we know that they didn’t. And it’s only when the time of Joshua they began to celebrate it altogether. But also because the celebration of Passover was on two levels. One of them was at home, your paschal lamb.

This was the only occasion where everybody had to have, if you like, a little personal sacrifice your own lamb for your table, for your family, and for your guests, so that the idea of home is identified specifically, with the idea of in your family, in your homecoming together and at the same time, there was the sacrifice of the paschal lamb that went on in the temple, for which only those who were able to get to the temple would be part of. But you still had your final celebration, so you’ve got this bifurcation between the home being as important as the sanctuary and both of them being involved in this process. But Joshua celebrates it hundreds of years later, hundreds of years later in the reign of King Josiah of Judea, where the temple and the monarchy had been corrupted into paganism and he brings about a renovation and goes to rebuild the temple and discovers in the temple there is a scroll which says, everybody has to keep the Passover, and he didn’t know about it apparently, and so he calls the priest together and say, what’s this? And we don’t know whether it’s the Passover of the people or the Passover of the temple, but either way, to say that up until this moment, they only thought that this was a temple ceremony and now they know it’s a popular ceremony, doesn’t make sense. But nevertheless, what they did is they celebrated it and it says in the text, they didn’t have a Passover like this since the time of the judges and the early kings. That’s going back hundreds of years. Are you telling me that they didn’t celebrate a Passover?

Maybe what they meant is either the people didn’t or maybe the temple didn’t because it was paganized. Interestingly enough, in the second book of Chronicles, it says something slightly different, that they didn’t have a Passover like this since the time of Samuel, but he was a judge, so maybe that’s covered. The next evidence we have about the Passover in fact, doesn’t come from a Jewish source. It comes in the fifth century before the common era from Darius II, in a letter that we have to the Jewish garrison at Elephantine Island Yeb in the Nile. And remember at this moment, Egypt was part of the Persian empire. And in this garrison there were Jews and these Jews had built a little temple and they were acting on behalf of, they were mercenaries on behalf of Darius. And the local Egyptian priests who were pagan priests, were trying to stop them celebrate the Passover and Darius sends this letter to the Egyptian priest says, “Leave off. "The Jews have to celebrate their Passover. "This is what they have to do.” They’re going to have and goes in detail to Jewish law about the Passover. They’ve got to keep seven days, they’ve got to eat their matzos and so forth and so on. So there we have an external evidence about the Passover coming from Darius.

So we know that it was celebrated all around the place, not just in the temple in Jerusalem or in Babylon or wherever it was at that period. 150 years or so later, there is an Egyptian, a kind of theologian, still pagan called Manotheo and he, this guy or Manetheo, was the first historian of Egypt. And he writes until relatively recently, we only knew about this from the documentation we had from Josephus, who wrote several hundred years afterwards, and quoted Manotheo as an example of antisemitism that he had to combat in his day. And Manotheo says this, Manotheo says this, originally there were the Hyksos. Now we know from other sources, the Hyksos was a group of tribes who invaded Egypt and took over the Egyptian government and palace and country, for roughly speaking, Manotheo says, 500 years. It looks a bit like the 400 years or close to the 400 years of the Jews in slavery in Egypt. They took it over and they got rid of the old system, they got rid of the old gods, they made a mess of everything. And at some stage, one of the pharaohs was able to fight against them and get them kicked off, kicked out of the land of Egypt. And they, the Hyksos, according to Manotheo, went up to Canaan, they built Jerusalem, and that was where they were. And so for many years people have identified the Hyksos with the Jews, but the timing is wrong.

This was much too early to have been them. Might have been the origin of Abraham going down to Egypt, possibly. And so he brings in another story, which he elites alleves, brings both of them together. And this concerns an Egyptian leader called Amenofis and Amenofis had this vision that he had to cleanse the land, cleanse the land of Egypt, of all the lepers and diseased people, which Manotheo then wants to say were the Jews. And so he first of all, brings them into cities and he makes ‘em work hard and he enslaves them and then eventually they find a saviour, a man called Thutmose and Thutmose took all these– Sounds like Moses, right? Moses, Moses Moshare. He took them out and he gave them a whole lot of laws, which sound very much like the laws we have, only worship one God, have certain types of food, keep the Sabbath day holy and so forth and so on. So that is his version, identifying the Jews with a lot of diseased lepers, who finally were kicked out of the country and that’s why they ended up where they ended up. So that’s Manotheo’s version. And since then of course, we have our version. And this raises the whole question of freedom. And as we know from the , the story of Pesa, it’s all about celebrating freedom because the Torah then talks about in the 10 Commandments, two reasons for keeping Shabbat. The first reason is, God created the world six days, and then there was a seventh. So six days should be devoted to work and labour. Seventh should be devoted to spirituality and a different kind of world, and that’s in Exodus why you keep the seventh day. But in Deuteronomy it says, no, you’ve got to keep the seventh day because you were slaves in the land of Egypt.

Now, 36 times the Bible emphasises you were slaves in the land of Egypt. Be nice to other people, be nice to other oppressed people. Remember what it was like to be a slave. That’s the message the Bible keeps on hammering home in its original text. But in the second version of the 10 Commandments, it says, keep the Shabbat because you were slaves of the land of Egypt. But hold on, in Exodus it says, because God created the world in seven days. In fact, the two amount to the same thing, what they’re saying is the whole purpose of work being involved in society is you willingly become a servant. You are, you’re a slave to whichever society or occupation you are in. But for one day in a week, try and free yourself from that, from that slavery, and keep the Shabbat and you do this because that was what the creation of humanity was, to combine the physical with the spiritual. And similarly, a slave is somebody who has no control over his time. He can’t tell when he’s going to take a day off, time off and therefore, to escape from slavery or escaping from regimentation and rule that in a sense, cramps your individuality. And to be a person, you have to be a free person, to be able to be spiritual as well as physical and not dominated by your passions on the physical side.

So really, this is the message that comes from the Torah about Pesach and about freedom. But then there are two words in the story of Pesach and the calendar that talk about freedom. One of them is the idea of . Now, literally in modern Hebrew means free non-religious. I don’t have any bounds on me, I’m free. It also means a holiday, , it’s a holiday. So you have on the one hand the idea of . You also have another idea, a word that’s used and is used of freeing the land, whether it’s the seventh or the jubilee. It means a break in which you can, if you like, a sabbatical, you can renew yourself. But then there’s a word that comes up in the all the time that isn’t in the Bible, it’s called . means freedom, all kinds of freedom. You will know those of you in Israel, that party was an known as and had two meanings. On the one hand, it meant freedom from the diaspora, from oppression, from the mandate, but also meant freedom from communism and Marxism, which was imposing too much of a regimentation. So this new word appears actually, in the Talmudic era and it appears as a pun. And the Torah says that when God gave Moses the tablets of stone, the two tablets of stone, they were , engraved. They were engraved, which is cuneiform, the way he probably tablets at that stage were engraved, and that word is . And the rabbis, as they often do, play puns on words in the Torah and they say, don’t read , read , because the truth is that the only people who are really free are those people who have discipline, who have some moral code.

And that’s what the 10 commandments were supposed to give. So only somebody who lives a life which is a controlled, a disciplined, a ritualised life, where the aim is to get you to think about your action, to bring the spiritual to the physical, that is what we mean, they say, by . And so we talk about in the Haggadah, we say, , I want to be free. What do I mean by being free? Now, if I can move on from that to a more abstract subject, what do we mean by freedom? When I was a young man and I studied philosophy, and one of the issues we were talking about was this notion of freedom, and the question we were given is this, who is free? Robinson Caruso on his desert island, he’s landed on a desert island, he is in charge, he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He can wear clothes and not wear clothes. He has no timetable he has to abide by, he has no rules, no taxation, he is completely free. Now, let’s take somebody in London or New York or Los Angeles or Cape Town, Joberg or Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, look at them. They’re controlled every minute of the day. You get in your car, there are rules where you can go, where you can’t go. There are traffic lights stop and go. They have rules about what you can wear in public. Can you walk naked in public? They have taxation, they have everybody interfering with you from your kindergarten days onwards. Is that really free, where you have all these restrictions and limitations on you?

Well, in one sense, no. If freedom simply means having no restrictions, then they are not free. But on the other hand, suddenly living in a city, look what they can do. They can go to the theatre, they can go to watch sports events, they can go to museums, they can go to libraries. They’ve got opportunities and variations. They can meet people all the time and interact all the time with them. And sure it comes at a price, but isn’t that in a sense greater freedom if you have more options rather than fewer options? And it struck me at the time when we were discussing that, yeah, in a way this explains my attitude to religion. 'Cause it’s funny, when I was a a young man and considering my career, and people would say to me, look, you know, why do you want to go into the rabbi? And I said, as I mentioned before, you know, imagine you’ve got a beautiful girlfriend who you’re madly in love with and everybody says this girl is either stupid or ugly or not worth wasting time on. Well, if you’re an idiot, you’re in love with her, you’re not going to give her up for that. You are going to say, oh, there are benefits and I’m going to look at the benefits and the relationship is the benefit. And that’s what I felt about religion. You know, I look at Judaism, I see a lot’s wrong with it, a lot’s wrong with different people in Judaism, but I see that having a Jewish way of life enables me to have both a secular way of life and a Jewish way of life. So okay, I can’t go to the cinema on a Friday night, but I can go some other time. Certain things I can’t do, certain things I can do. But the benefit I have is a different set of experiences, something that adds rather than subtracts, and that was my argument for freedom. But then look at the society in which we are in today.

Here we have a country, for example, that believes in America, in the notion of freedom to the pursuit of happiness. Now, I’m not certain what, how you define happiness. What is happiness? A warm gun, to quote the Beatles? I don’t know what happiness is. There’s no state of happiness. You know, sort of you open a door and all of a sudden you’re happy. There are actions that make you happy and actions that make you sad. For example, when as a rabbi in a community I had to go and visit people in hospitals or sick or were dying, it was not a pleasant experience. I did not enjoy the experience, but it’s something I knew I had to do and it meant something to me and it was valuable to me. Similarly, giving up money for charity is painful. Don’t only give up money for charity, don’t want to give up money for taxes or anything. And so in a sense, the right thing is not necessarily the thing that makes you happy, it’s the thing that is making you do something of value. So this idea of freedom then, has to be defined in different ways. Let’s take freedom from slavery and we come back to a Hebrew word slavery. What is slavery? In the Bible, slavery the word, is . And is not necessarily a slave as we know it now. Forget the fact that in English, the term slave comes from the Slavs, who were enslaved by and large, by the Romans first, and then the Ottomans afterwards, but no, slavery in the Bible means devotion initially. So Abraham has this , who runs his household, who is his close companion, who he has an intimate relationship with, to whom he’s going to leave his estate if he doesn’t have a child. And so the idea of means somebody who is providing a service, to serve, and in that sense we serve God.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean to say that we are slaves in the way we talk about slavery. Then the Bible talks about Hebrew slaves. Who are Hebrew slaves? Hebrew an , well, he’s not a slave. An has full civil rights. He’s merely somebody who has either committed a crime in which he has to pay off, not by going to prison as we like to do nowadays, but by working it off with a family, or alternatively, he has a skill and he’s prepared to enter into a contract, might be an indentured servant, or alternatively, he’s so poor he can’t support his family so he moves in with a Jewish family and they have to feed him, look after him, and in exchange he does some service, and the Torah says that can only last for seven years at a time. It can’t last for longer than that because we don’t like the idea of Sonny being dependent. We want people to be independent. And so when a Hebrew servant left after the period of time, he had to be given provision so that he could set up in business and throughout the period of his servitude, a family member could redeem him. And meanwhile, he had to keep all the religious obligations and he was committed as anybody else was within this community and within the society at the time. Now, if after a period of seven years he wants to come back and go on into serving and he wants to stay longer, interestingly enough, the Torah says something, which we know from the code of Hammurabi, but I don’t like it very much, but nevertheless, it said he has to pierce his ear and the Torah says, why do you have to pierce his ear?

And the answer is because the ear that heard on Mount Sinai, you are servants of God and not servants of other human beings, that is the ear that if he insists on being a servant a bit longer, we put an earring in, which is one of the reasons why religious Jews don’t like wearing earrings. We don’t want to be identified as permanent slaves. But then there’s another category of slave. The other category of slave was the Canaanite slave. Either somebody who was captured in war, or alternatively, somebody who was put on the market, either by slave dealers or him or herself. And if that person was entered, was bought by a Jew, such a person had to be part of the Jewish family and he had to abide by those laws that were not related to time because he wasn’t completely free with time. And if he was asked to work on a Shabbat, maybe you’d have to do that. But nevertheless, he had certain rules and regulations. If he was injured physically, he would have to go free. There were all kinds of protections, even for this non-Jewish slave, that were not applicable when we talk about slavery on the plantations in North America in relatively recent years, and this is going back more than 3,000 years. So there were very, very strict rules, and although there were slaves during the Roman period, as we know from Rome, very often they had high positions in the families, and very interestingly, when a slave came in and if he was male, he was circumcised, the moment he got his freedom, he was a full Jew and the Talmud records that Rabbi Emnel took his favourite servant who was called Tubbi, I dunno if it means that he was fat, but he took him and they arrive in a synagogue and they’re one short for a minion, and so he frees Tubbi on the spot and there he is, got him for a minion.

So you see the relationship that the Torah has with what we call slavery is very different to the cruelty that’s been existing in slavery for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. There are tremendous documents, documentaries you can see, both in French and in English, on the television about how horrible slavery was thousands of years ago when vast numbers of people were tracked from Central Africa across the Sahara to Egypt, half of them dying on the way and the way they were treated. You look at how Romans treated their slaves, they could abuse them sexually and physically in any way possible. So the idea of slavery has to be differentiated between servitude, which is servitude and it’s not a pleasant state and can be tough, and a situation where you have no control, no control over your body, of your life, or anything like that, which never applied, according to Jewish law. So we have, when we talk about slavery, to redefine slavery in the Torah. So what do we understand of slavery in the Torah? Essentially, somebody who is not using his or her time to the full extent of their capacity. So for example, let us take somebody living in New York, where we are so influenced. Until recently, the influence was fashion, it was ambition, it was making money, it was rising up the ladder, it was hiding your Jewish identity to get a good job, you had to pretend what you were not. And then along comes the internet, where everybody knows what you are doing and everybody’s putting pressure on you and the psychological pressure to do the right thing, to fit in with the right group, whether it’s at school or at university or wherever it is, becomes overwhelming so that people are not free to express their own ideas, they are enslaved.

That is a form of slavery and that is why I believe that whether it is Shabbat, which says, guys, you don’t have to be dependent on society, you don’t have to be dependent on electricity. You can use it, but use it in a different way. Similarly, when we talk about freedom on , we are saying we should be free to be ourselves, free to stand up for ourselves, free to stand up for our nation and to be like any other nation, in a sense of having autonomy. We might not necessarily want to live under an autonomous community, but we should at least have the option of living in an autonomous community, running according to the way we decide. And there of course, if you go to Israel today, which is in theory a Jewish state, you have all these different Jews who are all arguing with each other about how to be different, about how to be Jewish, some on the left, some on the right. We’re busy arguing. Now, in one sense you could say, sure, this is precisely what the Haggadah is talking about. It’s talking about arguing, it’s talking about asking questions, and indeed, as the Talmud says, if you arrive at the Seder and you ask any question, any any question, you don’t actually have to recite the four sons questions. Other people disagree, but that’s what the Talmud says. And not only that, but the Talmud says on , you have to say, . This is our experience now, not just their experience then. We face the challenge. They faced the challenge in Egypt, according to one version. A fifth of the Israelites came out of Egypt, the other fifth wanted to stay.

They were part of Egyptian society, they were very comfortable, they fitted in. They didn’t want to be dragged out to be identified as Jews. And similarly, throughout our history, we’ve had this tendency to want to mix in to the greater society and there’s a lot to be said for it. I have a lot of sympathy with those people, like Madeleine Albright’s parents, who experienced the horrors of antisemitism and said, we don’t want to mention that we are Jewish to Madeleine Albright and we don’t want her to suffer what we suffered. And in fact, until very late in her life, she had no idea that her grandparents had been killed in the Holocaust and she was Jewish. So this challenge of where do we belong and what matters to us is something that depends on questioning, on challenging, on listening to other points of view. Now as you know, we are living now in a society in which unfortunately, if you think the wrong thing or say the wrong thing or if you don’t fit into a group, this society will punish you for it. So in a sense, this is not a free society. It is in one sense, theoretically we have votes and we’re much freer than Ukraine and we’re much freer than most other places in the world, and in that sense it’s a marked improvement. But even so, even here, look how it’s controlled.

Forget about Russia, where you know the Russians can come on and say, no, we never bomb civilians. We never create war crimes. It’s only defending ourselves against these Nazis in Ukraine and people believe it and the Russian people believe it, 'cause they don’t hear anything else, they’re not allowed to hear anything else. And all those lies that are told about Jews and continue to be told about Jews everywhere and the antisemitism that’s going on. And in a sense, this is a problem and it is a blessing that freedom on the one hand, enables us and can enable us, and on the other hand, freedom then also means the other guys are free too, to say what they want to say. And so we end up with laws that are intended to try to protect us. Then of course, as you know, not all the Holocaust museums in the world, not all the laws that are brought in against anti-Semitism, whether it’s in Europe or anywhere else, have any bloody effect. Because humans is humans and some people prefer not to think. And some people prefer to be enslaved to the society or a part of a society they belong to and that’s why people belong to cults. And we have that within our religion, as we do in every other religion in our society, as in every other society. So therefore, when we look back at what we mean by freedom, we are talking about a historical freedom coming out of Egypt where we were enslaved, and in that sense, we can assume that the message is that slavery, the hard labour that was imposed, not the voluntary labour, but the hard labour, , that was oppressive, that was cruel, that was vicious, that threw babies into the river, that was terrible, that kind of oppression still exists today. And had we not been brought out of Egypt, we might still have been there suffering, wherever that might have been.

So there’s the historical message, the importance of history. And I remembered of Lord Allen Bullock, master of St. Catherine’s in Oxford, who wrote a biography of Hitler and he, I heard him, it’s been, I’ve heard it repeated several times at electorate at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem once, say there’s a famous spoke in his his Yorkshire accent 'cause he was a Yorkshire man with a Yorkshire accent. There’s a famous Russian proverb which says, he who looks to the past is in danger of losing an eye. But people should remember there’s a second part to this proverb and it goes like this: He who ignores the past will lose both eyes. So we have this ambiguity with the past. On the one hand, we are rooted in the past. On the other hand, if we’re always looking back to the past and not looking to the future, then we’re going to be stuck, as so many people are, and that’s one of the aspects of religious life that I disapprove of. But on the other hand, we’ve got to look to the future, which is why within Judaism we have this idea of reverence for the past, reverence for history, reverence for our holy documents. But we’re looking forward to the idea of Elijah, the idea that somebody is going to come along and make this world a better place. And in the words of the . Will reconcile people, fathers to sons, children to their fathers and their mothers, there’ll be reconciliation, we’ll get on with each other. We’ll be able to live with each other, despite our differences, despite our differences.

So there’s the historical freedom, then we have the theological freedom, which I’ve just described, and then we have the existential freedom, the freedom that each one of us has to pursue. And we need to be reminded of this when we have all these issues of identity, what identity you are and I believe people have the right to choose their own identity. And so we have to allow people to be different and to be welcomed even if they are different. So that’s another important, the existential freedom of an individual to be an individual. And on that note, I want to just pray for those people who are suffering wherever they’re suffering. For those people who are slaves, whether it’s in India or Africa or wherever it is, all the untouchables, all the downtrodden. And this is why at the seder night, we pray for everybody to be free. So on that note, I will end my harangue, my presentation and start moving to the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

So first question, Shaham, historical background and evidence for Moses. As I suggested, there is no external evidence for Moses. There isn’t. What we have are documents. We have references the children of Israel afterwards. So in the same way, there’s no documentary evidence for so many things of thousands of years ago, when we were not so preoccupied with keeping historical records or the historical records we kept were only the private records of certain kings. I don’t think that whether Moses existed or not should be the issue. The issue should be how do we live our lives? And if we want to live our lives as Jews, what is the Jewish answer to how we should live? In the same way that I don’t know that there’s any objective archaeological evidence that Jesus existed, but Christians follow the teachings of Jesus, whether or not Jesus did or didn’t live. Far too much is made of the Egyptian god being a ram Apis. Akum as well was represented of the bull. That’s also neither precluded eating these animals. Part of the story of invention, of rabbinic folklore, possibly mid rush for some didactic purpose. I’m sure that could be right, so what? So what? It’s the message that counts.

Slavery 430 years, 210 years, Richard Colcoras. Well, there’s another area where the Torah is imprecise. On the one hand, you can talk about 400 years. On the other hand, you can talk about much less. And again, I don’t think that sort of nitpicking really makes much difference. It’s not as though we are treating the text as a purely historical or archaeological document. We are talking about it as a spiritual, if you like, heritage.

Q: Weren’t the Hebrew in Egypt for about 400 years, in the state for 210?

A: Yes, all different versions of how long they were and people still argue, but Darius second son of Queen Esther. Not so surprising he was in favour of building the temple. Well, that’s right Estelle. Some people say that there’s no evidence at all. No evidence at all, either for the who was or Queen Esther was. There’s no record in Persian documents of a Jewish queen. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m just saying there’s no record and you can’t say it’s proven. Thank you very much.

Q: Lois we’re bothered by Egyptian slavery. What was, which was more akin?

A: Well I, you know, I hope I’ve answered that. The Egyptian slavery as the Egyptians carried it out, was akin to the southern plantations, as all the Muslim slaves they acquired from Africa and during the the Muslim empire. They were the biggest, most inhumane slave traders and anybody else. But that’s what everybody did at that time. But the fact is that it’s only Jewish slavery that gave them the rights that they had. Nobody else did.

The pyramids Richard, were not built by Israelite slaves. No they weren’t. Most experts think the pyramids were built some 5,000 years ago, which is long before the Jews were in Egypt. They might have built other pyramids, they might have built other cities, but not the pyramids at Giza.

Q: Did Jewish slave owners in the early years of American history followed Jewish laws pertaining to how they treated their slaves?

A: So that’s a brilliant question. It’s a very good question and I wish I knew the answer. I hope they did. But remember, most of the Jewish slave owners in the early years were not practising Jews. Many of them were muranos. They’d escaped from Spain and Portugal to the Caribbean. They didn’t necessarily, some of them did, they didn’t necessarily adhere to Jewish law, but if they were, then they had to abide by it and if they didn’t, then shame on them. Thank you Richard.

That’s really nice of you and thank you Rose. What do I mean again? Can I ask what you mean by that? Jewish state in theory. Ah, is Jewish, yes, because officially, officially Israel doesn’t say in its declaration that is a Jewish state. It says in its declaration it is a state for Jews to come to, a place where they will have a refuge. But until relatively recently under Netanyahu, it was a state for Jews, as opposed to actually a Jewish state, which is why you can live and practise as a Jew and serve in the Army as a Catholic, as a Christian, as a Muslim, as anything you want to. So it is at this moment and that’s why the Haredi, many in the Haredi world have a problem with Israel 'cause it doesn’t run according to Jewish law. It runs according to a mixture of Ottoman law, mandate law with Jewish law thrown in. And so they consider a Jewish state would have to be a state run along Jewish lines, and although the state makes concessions to Jewish law and ritual days and so forth, it’s as close as you can get. But you can argue about whether it’s really a Jewish state or not. Thank you, Clara.

Q: Is Moses mentioned in the Haggadah?

A: That’s a very good question. He’s not mentioned in our Haggadah, but actually there are some texts of the Haggadah which do mention him, but our text of the Haggadah is relatively late. It’s round about a thousand years ago. And just as in the same way that God’s name isn’t mentioned in the Book of Esther, in our book of Esther it isn’t, but in other versions that we’ve found, it is mentioned. So different texts have different versions. But I think the usual answer given is that Moses is not mentioned in the Haggadah because we don’t want people to think that Moses, shall we say like Mohamed, is God, that Moses was a human being and he made mistakes. And the reason also why he didn’t go into the land of Canaan at the end was also that people shouldn’t say it was Moses who did it.

Q: Why did he put blood on the doorpost? Didn’t the angel know which house was Jewish, which was not?

A:Yes, Hashana, that’s a very good question. Should have known. But it was for the Jews to identify themselves. They were being asked, just as they had to put this goat or sheep or lamb or whatever it was, it doesn’t matter, in the front garden and therefore, they had to show publicly that they were Jewish, as opposed to those who didn’t want to. This was a way of doing it.

Thank you Jennifer. That’s really nice and to you too. Thank you Susan. Rosalind, thank you very much as well. Thank you .

Ralph, many people don’t realise it, in the U.S. today we have enslaved or indentured people. Many turn a blind eye to living conditions of those who work as domestics, sometimes indentured. That’s quite right Ralph. That’s an excellent point, thank you. And there are many people who are brought here by other diplomatic officials, who are treated as slaves and they’ve been cases where they’ve escaped and been given freedom in this country precisely because they were treated this way. And there’s a horrible record in many parts of the world, of people being treated as slaves to this very day, even in this country, and we won’t talk about those people who are sexually abused, who are forced into white slavery. White slavery is one of the biggest sources of prostitution in this country today. What’s greater slavery than that where you have no control over your body?

Thank you very much Barbara, and thank you very much Hazel, and thank you very much Adele.

And so I guess being the case, we will say to everybody happy and we’ll return to the normal series of lectures about Jewish early history afterwards.