This Saturday night, Jews around the world will sit with their families and tell the story of their—our—liberation from slavery. As we celebrate our own freedom, we will also pray for those currently enslaved: the 59 hostages trapped in terror tunnels by Hamas.
But the story of the Exodus from Egypt is not just a Jewish story. The journey of the Israelites through the split sea, into the desert, and ultimately, to the Promised Land, has been a touchstone for so many in other places and times seeking freedom from subjugation—including here in America.
From the Founding Fathers to abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, to presidents like Abraham 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.
No one has brought that history alive for me better than Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who helms the oldest synagogue in the United States. (You can listen to him on the subject right here—this early episode of Honestly remains one of my favorites.) Today, and with thanks to our friends at Commentary magazine, Soloveichik writes in our pages about the great Cecil B. DeMille, his classic film The Ten Commandments, and how America owed its greatness to the Jewish Passover story.
Passover is called zman cherutenu: the time of our freedom. May this season bring freedom of all kinds to all of us. And literal freedom, above all, to those languishing in slavery.
—BW
In every generation, one is obligated to see himself as if he had left Egypt.
—The Haggadah
In 1956, millions of Americans flooded cinemas to see the Exodus story brought to life in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Among those moviegoers were American Jews, who could not help but feel that the film spoke to them, personally and profoundly. When Charlton Heston’s Moses is asked whether he is ashamed upon learning he is not a prince of Egypt but rather a son of slaves, he responds: “If there is no shame in me, how can there be shame for the woman who bore me, or the race that bred me?”