The ones who walk in freedom

It is possible that Passover is the most important holiday in the development of western civilization.

Why? Because holy scripture tells us that God takes a side in the conflict between slave and master. We learn that God specifically wants his children to be free, and that it is unjust for the Pharaoh to subsume the role of God. If the Israelites are serving every whim of the Pharaoh, then they are not able to freely worship God. “Let my people go so they can worship me in the wilderness” is an immensely powerful and specific decree.

Fast-forward to the founding of our nation. The founding fathers, armed with a phenomenal knowledge of scripture, declared that all men are equal. Jefferson and Franklin proposed a seal for the United States: the Israelites leaving Egypt. They identified with the Israelites as they were separating from Europe. Franklin went so far as to write, “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

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They were inspired by Exodus and believed that government is instituted among men to secure their God-given rights and that “among these are Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They believed that governments should exist to protect our liberties and not infringe upon them. While the blueprints for our nation, conceived in liberty, were truly astounding, the promise of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution were not realized throughout much of our history, as we see today.

Prior to the Civil War, Harriet Tubman, a devout Christian and servant of God, risked her life in order to bring slaves in southern states to the North so that they may know what it is to be free. She was actually nicknamed Moses. There is a self-evident analogy that the American South was Egypt, and that the North was Israel.

If we are to look more closely, there are further echoes of history that resonate to modern times. We learn in the Book of Numbers that after the exodus from Egypt, some Jews actually wanted to return to Egypt as they doubted God’s promise. I mean, after all, even though they were slaves, their meals were provided to them. Maybe this manna I have heard so much about didn’t taste that good after all. And on multiple occasions, slaves whom Harriet Tubman had smuggled to the North had expressed a desire to return to the South, though she knew that a slave who did that would face certain death. She was forced to threaten them with the pistol she kept on her person for such occasions.

Though we might be shocked by these historical examples, they are quite understandable. As people, we are risk-averse. While we tell ourselves we want freedom, oftentimes what we want is to be taken care of, even at the expense of our liberties. To some, the wilderness may sound scarier than the chains of Egypt. A revolution was inherently more dangerous than continuing to exist as a British colony, and continuing to languish as a slave in the American South may have been safer than fleeing a plantation, for capture would mean death. The founding fathers were keenly aware of this aspect of human psychology, going so far as to note it in the Declaration, writing, “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

I think there is a larger lesson here. When Moses stood up to Pharaoh, there was the distinct possibility that his life could have been cut short. When the founding fathers declared to the world their desire to be an independent country, they could have all been rounded up and executed by the British. Each time Harriet Tubman journeyed to the South to free slaves, she could have been captured and killed. However, these people of history did what they did believing that God would protect them. They didn’t keep their heads down. They didn’t retreat to safety. In that sense, it takes tremendous courage to pursue freedom and leave your old life behind. You might find yourself in the wilderness, unaware of how you might get your next meal. That is the gamble. But if history has taught us anything, it is that the gamble of freedom may just change the arc of history. So when we sit down to retell the story of Moses, we should give thanks to those who came before us who had the courage, the bravery, to hold their heads high and to walk in freedom.

Dr. Daniel Radin grew up in Glen Rock, where his family belongs to the Glen Rock Jewish Center, and he graduated from the Academy for Medical Science and Technology in Hackensack. He recently finished his Ph.D. and is now finishing his medical degree at Stony Brook.