Every year, on one night in spring, the Jewish people sit down to tell a very old story. Not a swaggering epic of conquest, but a stubborn memory of servitude: of a small, stiff‑necked people enduring the whims of an empire that regarded them as a sort of ambulant brick‑laying apparatus. Pharaoh, in the book of Exodus, is less a villain than a system in human form – a man who looks at human beings and sees only quotas. Pesach, the festival of Passover, is the annual refusal to accept that arrangement as the default setting of the universe.

Once you see it that way, the parallels with our own age come alarmingly into focus. We flatter ourselves that slavery is over; we sign declarations, pass resolutions, and applaud one another in comfortable conference halls. Yet the spirit of Egypt – that cold conviction that some people are properly objects to be arranged rather than subjects to be heard – is not only alive, it is positively networking. It manifests in totalitarian ideologies of the left, the right, and the fanatically religious; in regimes that patrol thought as eagerly as they patrol borders; in movements which purr the word “liberation” while quietly tightening the manacles.

Radicalism, in its modern guises, is very fond of the language of emancipation. It is an acquisitive borrower of fine words. But beneath the rhetoric one finds the same old blueprint: declare that this group, this sect, this nation is the problem; declare that their presence is the obstacle to harmony; instruct the world that peace will bloom the moment these troublesome people efface themselves. The tools have changed – social media campaigns instead of stone tablets, drones rather than chariots – but the plot is drearily familiar. Decide that certain lives are negotiable and then persuade everyone else that morality demands their negotiation.

Pesach insists, quite impolitely, that this is intolerable. It drags us back to the memory of chains and forces us to admit that the first step out of bondage is the decision not to internalise the logic of the oppressor. You are not, in fact, born for the brick pit. You are not condemned to live out somebody else’s narrative about your proper place. The Israelites do something outrageous: they walk. They step out into the wilderness with no guarantee beyond a promise and a stubborn refusal to be accessories in their own........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)