What Passover Is Really About

For one thing, the Passover celebration is the first annual holiday to commemorate a human social achievement rather than a natural occurrence.

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This is a guest essay written by Sam Hilt and adapted from a chapter in his newly published book, “Paradigm Wars: A Brief History of Consciousness from the Insects to the Antisemites” — available on Amazon and Kindle.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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The holiday of Passover, celebrated annually by Jews around the world, dates back to the 1st millennium BC and is based on the events recounted in Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew Bible.

The tale of the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt may fairly be described the central dramatic episode in Bible, and it is clearly the prerequisite for all that follows.

In more ways than we can count, this narrative is the foundational event of a new paradigm of human freedom and dignity that continues to define the contours of the world in which we all live. It underpins our contemporary value systems to such an extent that even those who dream of slaves and harems feel constrained to pose in public forums as liberators and anti-colonialists. 

Scholars have long debated whether the Biblical account of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt was merely a fictional invention, or whether its actuality was definitive, probable, or possible.

The distinguished historian, Paul Johnson, treated it unequivocally as having a historical basis, and he includes it in his inventory of Jewish “firsts” as the only recorded story from antiquity of the successful revolt and escape of an enslaved people.¹

Be that as it may, the Exodus from Egypt can also be understood on multiple levels as a metaphor, and I would suggest that this may be its most important and enduring aspect.

God’s command to reorder the months (i.e. to reset the clock) suggests the inauguration of a new era. The Exodus marks the bold beginning of a new relationship with both the spiritual world and the physical world, and a new adventure in the realms of consciousness.

In addition to celebrating deliverance from oppression under Pharaoh, the Exodus also celebrates liberation from bondage to the natural order. It is a Declaration of Independence which prefigures and informs all such later declarations. 

Pagan festivals typically celebrated recurring events based on the natural cycle: the first fruits, the harvest, the solstice. While their pagan neighbors would be celebrating the renewal of the land every spring with feasting, dancing and romancing, the Jews instituted an annual springtime ritual in which they would sit around, eat dry matzoh and bitter herbs, and read a long story to remember the sufferings and enslavement of their ancestors, and their eventual liberation.

The Jewish holiday of Passover, which celebrates the Exodus from Egypt, is the first holiday invented by mankind which is based upon a historical event. In other words, the Passover celebration is the first annual holiday to commemorate a human social achievement rather than a natural occurrence.

The Exodus from Egypt, and its annual commemoration, inaugurated a radically new relationship with time. In contrast to the world of synchronic cultures, where time was experienced as endlessly recurring cycles, the Jews posited a beginning and end to time, and a meaningful structure to the events that lie in between.

This new conception of time is clearly reflected in the Jews’ profound interest in the history of the world and their own place within its unfolding story. Paul Johnson wrote: 

“The Jews were above all historians, and the Bible was essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatical historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks, and because they constantly added to their historical records, they developed a deep sense of historical perspective which the Greeks never attained.”

Whereas archaic societies typically lived within the timeless parameters of their rituals and taboos without the slightest thought of ever questioning or changing them, the Jews, in sharpest contrast, became active participants in the project of creating their culture and their future.

The celebration of Passover, as an annual ritual to commemorate their enslavement as well as their liberation, served the Hebrews as a cornerstone in building their sense of history as a playing field upon which humans were free to create their own worlds.

Over the centuries of their tenure in the Promised Land the Jews experiment with various forms of social organization including governance in a variety of admixtures by priests, by prophets, by kings, and by scholars.

And throughout their long subsequent history of dispossessions and migrations, they demonstrate a continuing capacity to reinvent themselves through two millennia under the widest range of diverse conditions as they journey from Babylonia to Spain to Russia and, finally, back to their own land.

These transformations and metamorphoses, both during Biblical times as well as during the post-exilic millennia, are remarkable and baffling as Jewish continuity is somehow maintained while countries, cultures and circumstances keep shifting.²

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After their Exodus from Egypt, the Jews receive various commandments to guide them on their way during their peregrinations in the desert. The common denominator of these new behavioral rules, strange as many of them may appear to us today, was to support the Exodus psychologically and behaviorally.

Just as God takes his people out of the Land of Egypt, the laws given in the desert serve to remove humanity from its prior subservience to natural religion. The Hebrews attempt to execute a complete about-face as they turn away from the gods who had guided humanity’s evolution all through past ages.

And various aspects of Hebrew beliefs and ritual behavior reveal an ongoing effort to create an absolute religious antithesis to the worship of the natural world and its gods. 

So, what was it about natural religion that was so distressing as to make the Jews want to wipe the slate clean and start over? The long answer is what I tried to provide in a convincing way in “Paradigm Wars” over the course of about 300 pages. The following short answer, which may not convince you at all, is the best I can do in a brief essay.

There were two universal practices which were abolished by the Hebrews to facilitate the Exodus, namely idolatry and human sacrifice. The Hebrews were commanded to cut them off at the roots as the prerequisite for a new relationship with Divinity. It took them a while, and the effort proceeded in fits and starts.

But, given that after thousands of years of doing so, we now no longer worship idols or sacrifice infants on flaming altars, we can hardly deny the ultimate success of the reforms which the Hebrews set in motion and Christianity carried forward.

Most people today do not really know much about either of these practices, yet both idolatry and sacrifice were as common as rain and sun in the ancient world. For long millennia, the gods stood at the peak of the pyramidal social structure. Through their statues, the gods commanded and their mortal subjects obeyed.

When the Hebrews fiercely prohibited the making of images, they short-circuited the worship of the gods through their statues and silenced their voices. While the human world was freed to flourish, the ancient gods were deprived of their sacrifices and tribute. Their energetic resources were much diminished, and they have never forgiven those who overthrew their dominion. This is the root source of antisemitism.

As the Haggadah, the Passover prayer book, explains, “In every generation they rise up against us.” Pharoah’s army keeps seeking a rematch. And every time they lose a round, they point to their dead and denounce the wickedness of the evil Jews. “All we were trying to do was to restore our honor and dominion by exterminating all of you. And now look at what you’ve done! We will never forgive you!”

The Jews, meanwhile, have been ready to make peace and move on, and they have been ready for centuries, for millennia. They point to all the blessings that have come to humanity after turning away from the ancient gods with their rage and hatred, their lust for power and their thirst for blood.

But to no avail.

The Jews live their lives quietly and productively, they carefully avoid provoking their neighbors and make peaceful gestures. But the ancient hatred waits and stalks, moves from soul to soul, and dreams of revenge. From time to time, when vigilance is slack, opportunities for vengeance present themselves.

And then, the massacre of the innocents is re-enacted as the mob offers sacrificial victims to its god and the air is filled with joyous shouts of “God is Great!”

We Jews keep trying to make sense of why we are hated and tormented when we did not do anything to deserve it. No, it is not because of anything we did. Not recently, anyway. And the hatred is not likely to go away anytime soon.

So, this Passover, in addition to patting ourselves on the back for making the world a better place, we might want to discuss the nature of our adversaries and what survival on the earth plane will require of us.

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1. Johnson, Paul. “A History of the Jews.” New York: Harper Perennial, 1988.

2. Rivkin, Ellis. “The Unity Principle: The Shaping of Jewish History.” Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 2003.