Passover: Freedom from Pride

Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Montreal. He is the author, most recently, of Israel in Palestine and Zionism Decoded in 101 Quotes.

Purim and Passover are celebrated one month apart during the full moon. Both mark redemption, deliverance, and liberation. Both occurred outside the Holy Land, Purim in Persia, and Exodus that Passover celebrates, in Egypt. Both happened when hope was all but lost. In the story of Purim, a royal decree was issued “to destroy, massacre, and exterminate all the Jews, young and old, children and women, on a single day…”. In Egypt, perhaps, the most desperate moment in the Israelites’ tribulations, ensued when, fleeing the Pharaoh’s army, they found themselves squeezed between the sea and the desert as they heard the pharaonic chariots approach.

The ways the two redemptions are commemorated are vastly different. Purim is celebrated for one day, while Passover lasts seven or eight days. Hallel, psalms of gratitude, is recited on Passover but not on Purim. Purim comes and goes, but the Exodus from Egypt is recalled in the context of 54 commandments, such as the kiddush (blessing over wine) which ushers in  the Sabbath every Friday night.

This reflects different paths of redemption. On Purim, we witness a court intrigue with Esther, an intrepid woman at the centre of the action. The book of Esther, which relates the story of the holiday, does not mention God’s name even once. Conversely, on Passover, the main actor is not human; the splitting of the sea that enabled liberation is presented as divine intervention.  This stands in stark contrast to the frequent references to Moses in the account of the Exodus in the Pentateuch. And the Haggadah, the text read at the Passover seder, emphasizes that this divine intervention was unmediated, direct: “Not through an angel, not through a seraph, not through any emissary”. This emphasis has been explained by the need to inculcate the idea of a direct divine intervention to the children, who are the principal target of the entire ceremony. Had they heard the name of Moses reiterated as frequently as it is in the book of Exodus, they might have ascribed the miraculous liberation to a human. More generally, care must be taken, particularly with children, not to create a cult of personality around great leaders that might, in innocent minds, overshadow God himself.

This recognition of an immaterial deity is not easy. Suffice it to recall the biblical episode of the Golden Calf, when the Israelites came to worship a newly cast idol, proclaiming “This, Israel, is your god, who brought you up out of Egypt.” It is not unusual for people to cling to objects, endowing them with holiness. This is why God commended Moses for breaking the Tablets of the Law — unquestionably “holy” because fashioned by God himself — in reaction to this act of idolatry.

Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks once remarked: “Holiness is not a property of objects. It is a property of human acts and intentions.” Similarly, Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz affirmed that “The idea of holiness as an immanent property of things—persons, locations, institutions, objects, or events—is a magical-mystical concept that smacks of idolatry.” This should be an important lesson for those who celebrate Passover: it is not a history of Jews liberating themselves from slavery to settle on “their” land, not a celebration of a people or their prowess.

In the story of Purim, the main causes of the royal decree threatening imminent destruction were wounded pride and greed. Haman, the powerful vizier, was offended by Mordechai the Jew, who refused to bow down to him. Haman also promised to pour the wealth of the victims of the planned mass murder into the royal coffers.

The cause of the Egyptian slavery was xenophobia. The Pharaoh feared the Other: “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase ….” This led to enslavement, increased oppression and, when this did not assuage the Pharaoh’s fear, infanticide: he ordered the midwives: “When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birthstool: if it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.”

Revenge is natural. This is why the Torah not only forbids it but instructs the Jews to be mindful of the impression they make even upon those who have persecuted Jews in the past. Moses, in an argument with God, invokes about Egyptian public opinion, even though the Egyptians exploited his people during more than two centuries of slavery.

The Torah, speaking of Egypt, stresses the reasons for gratitude towards the Egyptians, and not revenge. Indeed, it was to Egypt that the Israelites fled from famine in the Land of Canaan and were warmly received there. The Torah is well aware that gratitude, rather than rancour and revenge, is what makes us human.

Past suffering can be transformed into a potential for hatred and violence. This transformation can be enhanced by deliberate educational policies shaping a particular kind of collective interpretation of the tragedy. This is how the mainstream Israeli society weaponizes the memory of the Nazi genocide to justify dispossessions, deportations, and even genocide of Palestinians. This brutality is claimed to be required to establish and maintain a state reserved for one ethnic group in a land that has long been home to a diverse population.

No wonder that many Israelis, just like the Pharaoh of yore, see Palestinians as the “demographic bomb”. They are imprisoned in the fear of sharing the land, a prospect perceived as an existential threat. Rank-and-file Israelis, as well as their leaders, routinely refer to Palestinian resistance as Nazis.

This vengeful brutality is all the more immoral because Israelis, rather than directing it at the Germans and other Europeans, many of whom were perpetrating the genocide, direct their ire at the Palestinians, who played no role in the tragedy of European Jews. Most of Israel’s wars have been fought to perpetuate the Zionist nature of the state—that is, to resist the idea of living in equality with the Palestinians. In other words, the main cause of violence in the region is the perpetuation of the Zionist apartheid, grounded in the belief that antisemitism is eternal and universal and that only “the Jewish state” can protect the Jews.

The current military assault on Iran, unleashed in February 2026, is also rooted in the question of Palestine. Israel seeks to eliminate the last major state committed to Palestinian rights by rendering Iran dysfunctional through subversion, decapitation, destruction, or fragmentation.

One of the moral teachings of Passover is consideration towards the Other, towards someone who is different. The Torah links the prohibition of xenophobia, of oppressing people who are different, directly to the Israelites’ past suffering: “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.“

This prohibition is not easy to follow; this is why the Torah repeats it dozens of times, more than any other commandment. But some reject this idea in principle. Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky, the founder of a stream of Zionism and precursor of Likud that nowadays rules Israel, expressed a political philosophy that one can recognize in Israel’s behaviour, including its genocide in Gaza. In an essay characteristically titled  “Homo homini lupus” (Man is Wolf to Man), he wrote in Russian in 1910:

“Sometimes we base too many rosy hopes on the fallacy that a certain people has itself suffered and will therefore feel the agony of another people and understand it and its conscience will not allow it to inflict on the weaker people what had been earlier inflicted on it. But in reality it appears that these are mere pretty phrases … Only the New Testament (sic) says ‘you shall not oppress a stranger; for you know the heart of the stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt’. Contemporary morality has no place for such childish humanism. … A nation’s substance, the alpha and omega of the uniqueness of its character – this is embodied in the specific physical quality, in the component of its racial composition.”

In 1948, Albert Einstein condemned Jabotinsky’s right-wing Zionism as fascist. The evolution of Israeli society has since shown that all political Zionism, not only this variety, contains seeds of fascism, which may take time to sprout. Nowadays, in the wake of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli bombing of Iran, more and more people, hitherto sympathetic to Israel, are concluding that the Zionist state, in its structural xenophobia, resembles Hitlerite Germany. Thus, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman recently remarked that the Israeli cabinet includes “people who make Nazis look humane”.

In celebrating Passover, it is important not to transform the festival of freedom into a celebration of pride, supremacy, and impunity.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)