I attended a pre-Passover seder hosted by Jews United for Justice at Baltimore’s Beth Am synagogue, and left with a clearer answer to a question I often ask, what does it mean to be an American Jew right now? If you want to see that answer lived rather than theorized, sit at JUJF’s Seder table next Pesach.

What struck me first was not only the energy in the room, but the layering of texts. On the table sat the Haggadah alongside something I had never seen placed there before, the United States Constitution. The juxtaposition was not decorative. It was interpretive. The story of the Exodus, of liberation from bondage triggered by a God who hears the cry of the oppressed, was being read alongside the American experiment in democracy. Not as a perfect fulfillment of that story, but as one of its remarkable chapters. For American Jews, this country has been, in many ways, a miraculous space of flourishing after two thousand years of vulnerability. And yet, the seder insisted, that miracle is not self-sustaining. It depends on what we do with it.

Throughout the evening, speakers rose to connect the ancient narrative to present struggles. Representatives from organizations like the ACLU and CASA spoke about concrete issues: resisting the cooperation of local and state agencies with ICE in ways that erode trust and safety in immigrant communities, a very important issue for most American Jews, confronting a criminal justice system that, in places like Maryland, still treats children as adults at alarming rates, advocating for economic justice in a world where freedom and opportunity are formally declared but unevenly allowed. These were not abstractions. They were framed as contemporary Pharaonic Egypts, structures that constrain, diminish, and dehumanize.

And that is where the Juxtaposed undercurrents of the evening became especially powerful. The Hebrew Bible tells us that human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. But the God of the Bible is not defined by static attributes. The divine name revealed to Moses in Exodus, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, is often translated “I will become what I choose to become.” God is not described so much as enacted. God becomes through action in history, liberating, responding, creating.

Exodus itself gives us concrete examples of what that looks like. At the burning bush, God tells Moses, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people… and I have come down to deliver them.” The emphasis is not on what God is, but on what God does—seeing, hearing, responding, liberating. And later, at the sea, when the Israelites are trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the water, the moment of salvation is not passive. The tradition lingers on the figure of Nachshon stepping into the sea before it parts. Redemption, in that telling, requires human movement toward risk, toward responsibility. Divine liberation and human courage meet in the same moment.

If that is what it means to speak of God, then being created in God’s image is not a statement about what we are, but about what we are called to do. We, too, become through our actions. We create the moral texture of the world we inhabit.

Which brings us back to freedom.

The Exodus is not simply a story about leaving slavery. It is a story about what comes after. The Israelites do not walk out of Egypt into a fully formed freedom. They enter a wilderness where freedom has to be learned, argued over, institutionalized, and, often, failed. Freedom, in this sense, is not just the absence of constraint. It is the presence of responsibility.

Genesis offers a different but related image. Adam and Eve are given a choice. They can remain within the given order, or they can eat from the tree and enter a world where knowledge, consequence, and creativity are intertwined. Their choice does not simply liberate them, it burdens them with the task of making a world. Freedom at its most fundamental is terrifying with its generative capacity to shape reality through decision and action.

The seder kept returning to this question: if we are free, if we, as American Jews, benefit from a society that has afforded us unprecedented security and opportunity, what do we owe to those who are not equally free? It is easy to say that all lives matter. It is harder to confront the reality that not all lives are treated as if they matter at all. Freedom, then, becomes a diagnostic as much as a condition. It asks us to notice where dignity is denied and to decide whether we will respond.

What I witnessed that night was an attempt to answer that question collectively. Jewish ritual was not being set aside in favor of political concern. It was the very medium through which those concerns were articulated. The Exodus story was not a distant memory but a living framework. And the Constitution was not treated as sacred scripture, but as a human document that, like all such documents, requires interpretation, defense, and, at times, correction.

To be an American Jew in that room was to inhabit both inheritances at once, the particular story of a people shaped by exile and liberation, and the broader project of a democracy that remains unfinished. It meant recognizing that the freedoms we enjoy are historically contingent and morally demanding.

I left feeling a complicated kind of pride. Not pride in arrival, as if the work were done, but pride in aspiration, in the attempt to take Jewish texts, Jewish memory, and Jewish ethics and bring them into conversation with the urgent questions of American life. To be an American Jew, in that sense, is not only to remember what was done to us, but to decide what we will do for others.

And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of the seder, liberation is not a possession. It is a practice.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)