There is a difference between drawing meaning from a story and rewriting it to fit your own. At the Seder table, that difference is not trivial. It defines whether we are preserving a tradition or slowly replacing it.

We begin with הא לחמא עניא (“this is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt”). It is not even written in Hebrew, but in Aramaic, the vernacular of its time, so that it could be understood not only by scholars, but by the wider communities among whom Jews lived. This passage also includes an invitation: “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” It is a moment of openness, an expression of generosity and shared humanity.

But even that openness is not abstract. It is rooted in memory. We invite others in precisely because we remember being outsiders and having nothing.

And the passage does not stop there. It turns immediately from past to future: “This year we are here; next year in the land of Israel. This year we are slaves; next year we will be free.” From the very opening lines, the structure is unmistakable. A people enslaved in one place, moving toward freedom in another. Not a metaphor or a universal abstraction, but a story tied to land, identity, and return. Long before modern political language existed, the Seder articulated a simple idea: that for the Jewish people, freedom was never meant to remain abstract, but to take shape in a return to and sustained life in their own land.

If we need a modern term for that idea, we already have one. The Passover story is not adjacent to Zionism. It is its original expression.

The story of Egypt is not a metaphor for oppression in general. It is not a symbolic template waiting to be updated with each new cause. It is a concrete account of a people who were enslaved, dehumanized, and stripped of agency, and who were freed not through persuasion, but through a series of escalating acts that made continued oppression impossible. The plagues were not abstract lessons. They were acts of force.

This may not be the version of history we are most comfortable with today. We prefer narratives of dialogue, of moral persuasion, of change achieved through consensus. But the Exodus offers a different truth. There are moments when oppression does not yield to reason, when power does not respond to appeals, and when freedom requires something more decisive.

The Jews of Egypt had none of the mechanisms we now take for granted. They had no political representation, no access to international institutions, no NGOs or humanitarian agencies, no international courts, no sympathetic press, no global advocacy networks, and no social media or platforms through which to broadcast their condition beyond the reach of their oppressors. They had no opportunities for negotiation or peaceful exit routes. They could not appeal to public opinion, organize protests, mobilize allies, or shape a narrative beyond Pharaoh’s control. They had no weapons, no capacity for organized resistance, no autonomy, no agency, and no meaningful leverage of any kind.

That reality stands in stark contrast to the way modern conflicts are often framed. Today, even populations that are described as oppressed operate within a world of international visibility, political advocacy, media amplification, humanitarian infrastructure, and, in many cases, armed capacity. They are seen, heard, funded, debated, and represented on the global stage in ways that were entirely unavailable to the Jews in Egypt.

The Exodus story is not one of competing narratives. It is one of absolute powerlessness on one side and absolute control on the other. And still, they were freed, not because Pharaoh was convinced, but because he was compelled. That distinction is not incidental. It is the core of the story.

There is, of course, a way to bring contemporary meaning into traditional text without distorting it.

On Yom Kippur, during the וידוי (“confession”), I have attended services where the service leader reads aloud personal confessions submitted by members of the congregation in advance. Alongside the traditional על חטא (“for the sin we have committed”), you might hear something like, “for the sins we have committed by not taking care of our health,” or “by neglecting our responsibilities to those closest to us.” These additions are modern. They are relatable. They bring the themes of the day closer to lived experience.

But they do not replace the original text. They sit alongside it. They derive their meaning from it. They assume its authority rather than rewriting it. The structure remains intact, and the tradition remains recognizable.

That is what it looks like to expand a ritual.

What is happening in many contemporary Seders is something completely different.

To be clear, this is not the mainstream. It is being driven by small but highly visible fringe groups whose voices are amplified far beyond their numbers. In some cases, the approach borders on the performative. So-called “anti-Zionist Seders” and similar reinterpretations recast Passover less as a story to be told and more as a platform for moral self-indictment, a kind of ritualized discomfort in which Jews are encouraged to reinterpret their own foundational narrative through a one-sided contemporary political lens.

One occasionally encounters formulations so detached from the original structure of the Seder that they are hard to take seriously on their own terms. The tone shifts from memory to accusation, from identity to disavowal, as if the purpose of the night were not to remember what happened to the Jewish people, but to reinterpret it as a cautionary tale about them.

It would be easy to dismiss this outright, and in many cases it deserves little more than a quiet eye roll. But these ideas do not remain isolated. Through social media, institutional platforms, and curated public Seders, they are presented with a confidence and reach that can make them appear representative.

And so the distortion spreads.

Seders begin to include readings about climate change alongside the plagues. Additional cups are introduced for contemporary causes. The Four Questions are rewritten to reflect modern political struggles. The language of Exodus is repurposed to describe conflicts that bear little resemblance to the original story, often in ways that flatten or invert the Jewish experience itself.

We are told this is an expansion of the tradition. It is not. It is the quiet replacement of a particular story with a generic one.

The values behind this are not the problem. Caring about hunger, oppression, or climate change reflects a moral seriousness that is deeply aligned with Jewish tradition. The impulse to repair the world, to relieve suffering, and to act with justice is real and important. But not every value belongs in every ritual.

The Haggadah itself already tells us how to hold this story. Dayenu (“it would have been enough”) slows the narrative down, step by step, insisting that each specific act mattered. The message is not that the story can mean anything, but that what actually happened is sufficient and worthy of preservation in its own right.

And then we say, בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים (“in every generation a person must see himself as if he personally came out of Egypt”). This is not an exercise in general empathy or a prompt to insert ourselves into someone else’s struggle. It is an act of identification with a specific history and a specific trajectory, from Egypt to Israel.

When we try to fit every modern concern into the structure of the Seder, we are not expanding its meaning. We are forcing a square peg into a round hole, and in the process, we risk losing the shape of the story itself. Because Passover is not a general-purpose platform for all moral causes. It is a specific story about a specific people who experienced a specific form of oppression and were brought out of it and directed toward a specific land.

When everything becomes Exodus, nothing is.

There is a time and a place for everything. There are countless arenas where global suffering should be confronted and addressed. But the Seder is something else. It is an act of memory, identity, and transmission, and it carries within it the earliest articulation of Jewish self-determination as a people in their own land. That is not incidental. It is the point.

And that matters even more now, because the Jewish story is no longer simply misunderstood. It is being actively reframed, softened, redirected, and at times inverted, often by voices that present themselves as allies.

With friends like these, distortion does not need enemies.

But Passover resists that pressure. It insists that this story belongs to the Jewish people. It insists that their experience is not a metaphor to be borrowed, but a reality to be remembered. It insists that freedom is not an abstract condition, but something tied to identity, continuity, and land.

And the Seder is where that insistence lives.

Not diluted, not repurposed, and not rewritten, but told as it is, with clarity and with boundaries.

Because if we cannot tell our own story faithfully at our own table, we should not be surprised when others tell it for us and get it wrong.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)