The Chief Rabbi’s Pesach Message 5771

The Chief Rabbi Sacks’ Pesach message, written in 2011 as an introduction to the United Synagogue‘s Guide to Pesach and shared with communities across the Commonwealth.

‘Even if we are all wise, all understanding, all people of experience, all learned in Torah, still we are under an obligation to speak about the Exodus from Egypt, and the more we do so, the more we are worthy of praise.’

So says the Haggadah, and to an extraordinary degree it remains so. Still we tell the story, even though Jews have done so for thirty-three centuries, making the Seder service almost certainly the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. And still it fascinates, intrigues and engages us, because its themes are fundamental and constitute a challenge in every age, including ours.

It speaks about oppression, about an unfree society where the strong enslave the weak, and that has not ceased in parts of the world today where, for example, child labour is still common, or women deprived of rights. It speaks about the bread of affliction, and that too still exists in a world where a billion people live in abject poverty. It speaks about the long walk to freedom, and there are all too many places where the journey is still incomplete.

The themes of the Exodus and of Pesach are universal and never exhausted. But they are also particular. They tell us what it is to be a Jew, not just a member of humanity in general. The Seder service is the way we hand our story on to the next generation, connecting it with the distant past (“This is the bread of affliction our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt”) and a hoped-for future, when Elijah will come and tell us that the Messiah is on his way.

There never was a more beautiful way of giving our children their entry into identity than by insisting that the entire ritual be set in motion by the questions asked by a child. Nor is there a more powerful one than by re-enacting the formative events of our people, tasting the tastes, recalling the miracles, turning history into memory, as if we were there, caught as our ancestors were between fear and hope, and taking the risk of setting out on the journey of faith.

Somehow this most ancient story never ceases to be new. For this is the never-ending story of the never-ending people made great by their never-ending faith.