(One night that would come to be the night of the Passover seder…)

Abram, I have good news and bad news.  Which do you want first?

Um, let me have the bad news.

The child that you don’t even have yet, his grandchildren and then the whole nation that descends from them will all be enslaved and oppressed in a foreign land for four centuries.

Yikes.  What’s the good news?

Once I free them, they will all be rich! (Genesis 15:13-14, more or less.)

We have a tradition that we are rewarded for righteousness and held to account for wrongdoing.  Yet long before “we” even existed, before the first Jewish child was born, our fortune was immutably cast by God to be misfortune.  Abram and Sarai, bereft of hope for children, are simultaneously buoyed by God’s promise of fertility and burdened by the certainty of slavery.

This is the foretelling of our bondage, a spring coiling tighter over time, trapping us in an inescapable spiral of Egyptian xenophobia, oppression, infanticide, slavery and wholesale death.  This is all Divinely divined and no measure of mitzvot will save us.

Our seder prompts us to ask questions.  I have one. What did we do to deserve a pre-natal destiny of slavery and near extinction?

Our teachers have puzzled over this for centuries.  The........

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