Last night, in a prerecorded message, Benjamin Netanyahu compared the war against Iran, Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis to the ten plagues visited against Egypt in the Bible. In this analogy, Netanyahu compares Israel’s enemies to Egypt and himself to God.

Netanyahu’s speeches often seek to evoke the Dionysian intoxication that eviscerates distinctions and to place his premiership within a grand, world-historical, and civilizational context. Building off the recent deaths of four soldiers, Netanyahu’s war time bravado and repeated claim that Israel has become a super-power apparently yearned for the poetic register of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

Yet, Netanyahu is not God, Egypt is currently our ally, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis attack us daily, and to many Israelis, Netanyahu’s speech conjures up not Die Walküre, but Elmer Fudd jamming his spear into holes in the ground singing “Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!” After all, Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that the corruption trial against him concerns “Bugs Bunny,” has given wartime addresses with a Bugs Bunny doll positioned behind him, and has not refrained from repeated mentions of his plea for pardon while enemy missiles rain down upon Israel.

Yet, despite our current militaristic turn, the Passover holiday is not a celebration of the ten plagues, but of freedom. The plagues are not a cause for rejoicing, and the Rabbis mandate that we pour out some wine during the Passover Seder in a small expression of sympathy even for the suffering of Israel’s greatest enemies. Rather the rejoicing is in celebration of freedom. The Passover Seder, Judaism’s best-known exultation of freedom, is, perhaps ironically, also its most highly religiously regulated event. The Rabbis mandated a twelve-step event, with numerous fixed rituals, symbols arranged according to law on a Seder plate, and a ritualized retelling of the Passover story with a fixed text that usually takes hours to read. The Seder ends with the declaration, or perhaps prayer, that it has been completed “according to its halakha, according to every law and ordinance,” emphasizing how little of this celebration of freedom we are free to alter.

The freedom celebrated on Passover is not a freedom from law, but a freedom under law. This is emphasized by the transformation that occurs in the Haggadah itself, where Seder participants begin by recounting how the Israelites were slaves (‘abadim) to Pharoah in Egypt, and ends with the declaration that the Israelites are worshippers of God, ‘abde Hashem, where the Hebrew for slaves and worshippers is the exact same word.

The difference between slavery to human beings and freedom under God, then, would appear to lie in the advent of the Law, whose detailed form is evident throughout all aspects of the Seder. That is, according to the Passover Haggadah, the rule of law is what makes Israel free. It is that rule of law that does not differentiate between classes or groups, but mandates the same Seder for all. Even kings and priests must follow all the details of the Passover rituals. No human being is above the law, just as no human being is above God.

In valuing the rule of law, the Jewish tradition and the liberal tradition coincide. Both agree that law cannot be different for human rulers and the ruled, nor can it differ among factions within a state. There cannot be a law against violence that makes exception when the perpetrators are West Bank settlers. Nor can the law protect Haredi protests against the draft when Haredi parties are in government, while criminalizing protest against the war. What would be even worse would be forming different legal systems, e.g. for Haredim, for Arabs, for Jews, for Muslims etc.

Rather, the principle of rule of law is at the heart of the Jewish tradition, celebrated in the Passover holiday. To make law subject to the arbitrary determination of those in power is not democratic, not in keeping with the spirit of the Jewish tradition, and a kind of slavery whose removal is a true cause for celebration.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)