From Freedom to Responsibility

Rabbi Sacks: Kvod HaRav, Mara D’atra, Rabbi Mirvis. Kvod HaDayan, Dayan Binstock, beloved friends. First of all, may I express my thanks to KLC and for this wonderful programme, for the privilege of being able to launch the Machzor here and share some words with you.

May I also and especially say, what a privilege… [oh, sorry. What's this? How come? Oh, look, no hands. Just don't try driving like this - microphone change]

Yeah, friends, may I say, what a privilege and a true delight it is for Elaine and myself to know that Anglo-Jewry will be in the wonderful, caring, and outstanding hands of you, Rabbi Mirvis and Rebbetzin Valerie. I think you know that this is a great community and they are so privileged to look forward to the prospect of you leading it, which I know you will do with immense distinction and with great blessing for all of us. So may Hashem bless you. And I congratulate you. 

By one of the deftest pieces of Divine Providence I've ever come across, Elaine and I happened to be in Buenos Aires the day they elected the Pope. And therefore I need publicly to deny the rumour that I went there because I heard there was going to be a vacancy. But it was good to see three wonderful successions, but yours, Rabbi Mirvis, is the very best. 

Secondly, may I give my thanks to Matthew Miller, publisher extraordinary, who is really doing the most remarkable things. I don't know if you've seen what's been happening with Koren and Magid these last few years. It really is transforming the entire library of Jewish thought and Jewish writings, modern texts, and classical ones. 

And Matthew, you and your remarkable team - and a special thanks to typesetter and typographer, extraordinary Raphael Friedman - who has had to put up with all sorts of stuff from us with his unflappable good humour.

Please thank the whole team. Every one of them has been extraordinary. And we thank you for the beautiful job you've done on the Machzor.

And the lovely transformation you've done for the Haggadah, which really is now panim chadashot, completely new. And we thank you so much and please convey my thanks to the team. 

There is a little beautiful story here because… that you will see in the Machzor. The Machzor contains an absolutely glorious new translation of Shir HaShirim done by my niece, Jessica. Shir HaShirim is the greatest love poem in literature. And somehow I hope it was a little bit of zechut in the merit of bringing out the power and the passion of that poetry. That Jessica, subsequent to doing that, got engaged… first thing tomorrow morning and going flying out to Yerushalayim to officiate the wedding. So may all our efforts be rewarded so beautifully. 

A huge debt of thanks, not only on my behalf, but on Anglo-Jewry's to Dayan Ivan Binstock who has laboured tirelessly on Minhag Anglia, which it needs a sort of kind of jeweller's precision to get things right in very, very, in very complex territory because we haven't had a homemade Machzor now for what, over 100 years, I think.

And the way the Dayan has done it has been not only a triumph of scholarship but of wisdom and great judgement. And I want to associate in those thanks Dr. Lionel Kopelowitz who has been an unfailing source of information about how things are done in England. And thank you so much, both of you. It's been a privilege to work with you. 

For Elaine and myself, though, the really emotional significance of this Machzor is as a memorial to somebody who was so beloved to us, to the late Marilyn Rosenfelder, of blessed memory. And Anthony, we so thank you for doing this in her memory.

Friends, I don't know if you know this, but when I first met Elaine, first year she was in Cambridge, she shared a room with Marilyn. And so we got to know, I got to know Marilyn and Elaine at the same time. In fact, I invited them both to dinner.

This is the only time in my entire life in which I have cooked a chicken. After that, I decided to save humanity and never do it again. There's an old Yiddish saying from the Shtetl, ‘If a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is ill.’ In this case, I think both of them were, but with great strength and character, they kept smiling. 

And I just knew I couldn't marry both, so, but they were just wonderful people. Marilyn, who came from Cardiff, had a lovely Cardiff lilt, was just a person full of fun and a sparkle in her eyes and a wonderful sense of humour.

But she was a deep, deep person as well, incredibly committed to Judaism, a person of immense moral - and in her last years, of physical strength and courage. She was a wonderful wife to Anthony and she was just an amazing mother to her three quite wonderful girls, to Joanne and Harriet and Hannah. She loved you so much as she did to your husbands, to Joel and Robert and Jonathan and your children.

She was a very special person and we know that she would want a positive way of her memory living on and I think this is such a beautiful way of doing it. And thank you for the privilege of being able to do it in her memory. And as Rabbi Mirvis says, quite rightly - he was much too diplomatic to say it -, reminding us that sapar means a haircut. The instruction, obviously, to the barber as to the speaker is cut it short. 

And of course, I always get this in America. We've just come back from North and South America and in America, they use words that sound like English but it's utterly different.

And my favourite is momentarily, because in English English momentarily means briefly but in American English, it means soon. 

And so everyone gets up and says, ‘The Chief Rabbi will speak momentarily.’ And I have to tell them that ‘Friends, Chief Rabbis never speak momentarily.’

But this evening, I'll give it a go. Okay, so here we go. If you've got the mekorot, I want us to take you through a little overview on what exactly the story of Sefer Shemot, of the Exodus actually is. I want to suggest to you something radical which we're only going to see in one book but I will argue that it's true of other books in the Bible as well. That the Torah is the subtlest book I know, because even at the most basic level, when we read the Torah as children or when we read it even with the lessons in mind that we heard as children, we read it one way. There is a surface narrative.

But if we read the clues, and there are clues always, those clues will take us one level deeper, to the sub-narrative, or what I call the counter-narrative. And read at the second level, the Torah gives us a quite different message, altogether more profound, altogether appealing to a more mature sense of mind. And that is what I'm going to show with the book of Exodus, the story of the going out of Egypt itself.

There's a surface narrative and there's a depth narrative and we're going to look at them both. So let me begin by looking at the end of the book. We've just completed it over the last few weeks - Teruma, Tetzaveh, Ki Tisa, Vayakhel and Pekudei.

And right at the end, in the end of Shemot, Shemot ends with the completion of the building of the Mishkan. And it was the late Nechama Leibowitz who pointed out that there are literary parallels between the Israelites' creation of the Mishkan and God's Creation of the universe. There are key words that resonate in both passages.

So if you have a look in the English, can you see there? “And God made the sky,” “They shall make me a sanctuary.” Asei, the verb la'asot. “And God saw that all he had made,” “Moses saw all this good work,” well, they had done it, and again, “asher asa,” “asher asu.”

The heaven and the earth, “Vayechulu haShamayim v’Ha’aretz v'chol tzeva'am,” “Vayichal melacha,” and so on and so forth. The verb vayichal, or vayechulu, and then vayichal, “And God completed all the work that he had made. There in the Creation narrative at the beginning of Bereishit, at the end of Shemot, and Moses completed the work.

At the end of Creation, and God blessed, at the end of the Mishkan, and Moses blessed. Sanctified it, sanctified the seventh day, you shall sanctify it, the Mishkan. In other words, the key words asa, melacha, vayar, vayechulu, vayichal, vayevarech, vayekadesh, all those keywords appear in only two places in the Torah - the God creating the universe at the beginning of Bereishit, the Israelites creating the Mishkan at the end of Exodus.

There are also hidden clues as well. Very interesting one is numerical. What is the key number of creation? Seven, because seven days.

But it goes a little bit deeper than this, and I don't know if you ever noticed this. The first verse of Bereishit, “Bereishit bara Elokim et haShamayim v’et haAretz” contains how many words? Seven. Second verse, 14.

The last day, Shabbat, “Vayechulu haShamayim veHaAretz,” 35. The word tov appears seven times. The word vayar - and God saw - appears seven times.

The word eretz or aretz appears 21 times. The word Elokim appears 35 times. If you count the words in the Creation narrative, they come to 67 times 7. Everything is a multiple of seven. So it operates as a fractal in the big picture, and if you put the microscope there, everything is a multiple of seven as well. 

If you look at the creation of the Mishkan, you will see there too, everything is a multiple of seven.

So for instance, in Teruma, when God commands the building of the Tabernacle, the word lev - “kol nediv libo,” “kol chacham lev,” “kol ish asher nesa’o libo,” “vayaviu kol nediv lev.” The word lev, heart, appears seven times. If you look at Pekudei, when they actually do it, again, the word seven, again, the word lev appears seven times.

What does it say about Betzalel? “Lehorot natan beLibo,” “milayotam chochmat lev,” “kol ish chacham lev,” etc, etc. Again, the word lev seven times. At the beginning and the end of the Mishkan, the word heart appears seven times, which is the human equivalent of God's good.

If our heart is, you know, God creates physical things that are good, we endow them with goodness when we do so with a wise and willing heart. So that appears in multiples of seven. The last two chapters of Shemot contain, each one of them, when the Israelites make the Bigdei Kehuna, the clothes of the Kohanim, and when Moshe Rabbeinu sets up the Mishkan, which takes seven days, you will see that seven times in the account of the making of the garments of the Kohanim, the phrase “Ka’asher et tziva Hashem et Moshe” appears seven times. In the next chapter, the last chapter of Shemot, it says “Ka’asher et tziva Hashem et Moshe” seven times. 

So these multiples of seven set up in our minds resonances as well as all those verbs that I mentioned. So there are verbal and there are numerical links between this.

In other words, Bereshit and Shemot are framed at the beginning by God's Creation, at the end by our creation. And that is how it works. So why? Because clearly the Torah is trying to hint at us, hint to us, that principle which the Rabbis put in that very powerful phrase, “Naseh shutaf leHaKadosh Baruch Hu beMa’aseh Bereishit.” When we do things for Hashem, we become God's partners in the work of Creation. That is not a mere phrase of the Rabbis, that is a close reading, a close literary reading of the text. Because, actually, the building of the Mishkan, this microcosm which is supposed to be a mini cosmos, that is our way of becoming God's partner in the work of Creation.

God creates with words. We create with obedience and with a willing heart. So that is the principle. However, now I want to show you something very remarkable, which goes like this.

Did you ever notice that throughout Shemot, there are a series of doublings? An event happens twice instead of once. So for instance, Parashat Beshalach. How does Beshalach begin and end? In the middle, the sea divides. But just before the sea divides, and just after the sea divides, the same event happens only with different people. What is that? A war, right? 

[Quotes Shemot 13:17] … “birotam milchama.” And at the end, Amalek - “VaYomer ki yad al keis Yah milchama laHashem b’Amalek.” The word milchama appears in the opening sentence and the closing sentence. So you have two wars. One just before the division of the Red Sea, one just after the Red Sea. 

What other twos do we have in Shemot? 

What happens when you ask a Chief Rabbi to do the washing up? Something gets broken. Something gets broken in Shemot.

What is that? Exactly. Give the luchot to a rabbi, you should have known this in the first place. Two sets of tablets that Moses receives. 

What else happens twice? Pardon? He went twice up to God, yes.

What else happens twice? The Anan Hashem, the Cloud of God, covers two things in Shemot. What's the first thing it covers? Mount Sinai. What's the second thing it covers? The Mishkan, the Ohel Moed. 

How many times did the Israelites hear the Ten Commandments? In Exodus, I don't mean in Devarim.

Twice, once from God and once then Moses then read it to them from a book. 

How many times do we read about the building of the Mishkan? Twice, once in Shemot, Teruma and Tetzaveh, once in Vayakhel and Pekudei. The whole thing, there's a set of repetitions and dualisms here that is too powerful, not to notice, we have to notice.

However, you will see there's a difference in each case. 

What is the difference between the war against Pharaoh and his charioteers before the division of the Red Sea and the war against the Amalekites after the Red Sea? Who fought them? Who fought the war against the Egyptians? Have a look, have you got it there? It's that box there, right? The one that says Shemot, Perek Yud Dalet yes? “Vayomer Moshe…” Moses said to the people, “Al tiru,” don't be afraid, “Hityatsevu ure’u et yeshuat Hashem,” stand still and see the salvation of the Lord. Go down one line and it says, “Hashem yilachem lachem, v’atem tacharishun.” God will fight for you and you just be silent. [Shemot 14: 14] Do stand there and do nothing, God will fight the battle for you. 

What's it say about the war against the Amalekites? Opposite box, can you see? Shemot, Perek Yud Zayin. 

“Vayavo Amalek veYilachem im Yisrael beRefidim.” The Amalekites came, they warred against Israel in Refidim. “Vayomer Moshe liYehoshua, bechar lanu anashim, v'tzei leHilachem im Amalek.” God, Moses says to Yehoshua, gather men and you go and fight against the Amalekites. [Shemot 17:8-9] 

And you know what happened. As long as Moses lifted his hands, they won. If he dropped his hands, they began losing. Aaron and Hur supported his hands and they defeated the Amalekites. 

Now, can you see the difference? The first one, God does. The second one, the Israelites do. 

Let's have a look at the two tablets.

First of all, in the next box down, can you see Shemot, Perek, Lamed Bet? It says [Exodus 32:16] “The tablets were the work of God and the writing was the work of God.”

What about the second tablets? Moshe Rabbeinu - look at the opposite box. Shemot, Perek Lamed Dalet [Shemot 34:1] Hew, hew the tablets, and I'll write on them. 

Have a look at the next box down, Shemot, Perek Kaf Dalet, [Shemot 24:12] Moses goes up the mountain and the mountain and the cloud covers the mountain. Right? God comes down on the mountain, the Mount Sinai becomes holy, the Israelites don't have to do anything except keep their distance from it for three days and purify themselves. That's it.

They didn't do anything to deserve that appearance of God. 

But have a look opposite, where it says Shemot, Perek Mem. [Shemot 40:34] God's Cloud comes down and fills the Mishkan, the Tent of Meeting, exactly as it had covered the mountain, but the difference was the Israelites didn't have to do anything for God's presence to cover the mountain. In order for God's presence to cover the Mishkan, they had to make the Mishkan. 

So there's a difference between a natural thing that God covers and a man-made thing or a woman-made thing that God covers.

Okay. What about the actual hearing of the Ten Commandments? Have a look. Shemot, Perek Kaf, [Shemot 20:14-15] The first time they heard it from God and the mountain trembled and the people trembled and they stood afar off and they said, whatever God does, we will do. Whatever God says now, He said, na’aseh, we will do. But what about the second time? Have a look just opposite that.

[Shemot 24:7] When it comes to the second time, when Moses reads it to them, then they don't just say, all that God says, we will do. They say, “na'aseh v'nishma.” They say, not only we will do it, but we will strive to understand it and listen to it and internalise it. 

So Moses, in a certain sense, Moses' reading has a greater impact on the Israelites than God's first announcement where the people are scared and tremble and stand far off. 

And then, as you will see, Shemot 25, [1-2] The whole of Teruma and Tetzaveh is God telling Moses to construct the Mishkan, but Vayakhel and Pekudei, just in the opposite box [Shemot 35:1]. 

Moses, afterwards, what happens between Teruma and Tetzaveh and Vayakhel and Pekudei? What happens between these two things? What? What? No, no, between Teruma and Tetzaveh and Vayakhel and Pekudei comes? Ki Tisa, the Golden Calf, right? So, you know, God's instructions don't prevent the Golden Calf, but after the Golden Calf, Moses assembles the people and he instructs them. The precise chronological sequence there is a matter of great dispute among the mefarshim…

Can you now see that as a pattern is emerging? It applies to every one of these doublings. In each case of a double, the first is done wholly by Divine initiative. And in each case, the second one, there is a human contribution.

Moses carves the tablets, the Israelites fight their own battle, etc. etc. In each case, there's a human addition and human participation. Now, let us look at the effect of the two.

What happens with the battle against the Egyptians? Just before God saves the day, they complain. They want to go back. What are we doing here? Didn't you have enough graves, you took us out here to die? 

What complaints are there when the Amalekites come and attack them? None. None, none at all, okay? 

So, when God does things, they're in a very bolshy state, but when Moses says to them, guys, you're gonna have to fight this battle, there are no complaints.

What happens when, what's the difference, in the case of Moses, between the first and second tablets? What's the difference? Something happened to Moses after the second set of tablets. His face shone. Yeah, he had horns, according to Michelangelo.

He, “Moshe lo yada ki karan or panav,” that mistranslation. Moses' face shone after the second tablets. Why didn't they shine after the first tablets? Answer, because he hadn't done anything for the first tablets. All he did was receive them. But for the second, he participated, so his face shone. And you see the big difference.

The first tablets, the holiest objects we've ever had, were broken. But the second ones were not broken. And you can sort of see that the Israelites, facing that first set of 10 commandments from God Himself, you know, they're terrified.

The Rabbis said it was like God suspended the mountains over their head. They were just overwhelmed. But when Moses repeats them, they say, oh, that's na’aseh v'nishma. Not only will we keep them, but we will strive to understand why we're keeping them. And so on and so forth. 

As long as God appeared on Mount Sinai, then they knew that they were going to have to say goodbye to that mountain at some stage. That, not just the disappearance of Moses, terrified them. 

But the second they built the Mishkan and the Cloud covered the mountain, they knew that wherever they travelled, because the Mishkan was portable, God's Presence would go with them. And therefore, there was so much more power in that second experience of God's Cloud in the Mishkan than there was in God's Cloud on Mount Sinai.

And so on. And so on. 

In other words, we see that Shemot is telling us a story that various things happen twice. Once, entirely the act of God. But the second time, a key role is played by human beings. 

Now, if this is the case, we can make a formidable statement about the book of Shemot as a whole.

There is a way we read the book of Shemot as children. And it is the way we will tell the story of Shemot at the Seder table, where we're speaking to children. And that is a story in which the actor is God.

He redeemed us. We didn't need to do anything. “Ani velo malach, ani velo saraf, ani velo shaliach, ani hu velo acher.”

There's no reference to Moses in the Haggadah, once en passant. All of this is Divine. And therefore, when we read Sefer Shemot when we're young, we see Sefer Shemot as the book with more miracles than the whole of the rest of Tanach combined.

Miracle after miracle - 10 plagues, division of the Red Sea, water from a rock, manna from heaven, revelation of Mount Sinai. More miracles than all the books of Tanach put together. Whatever happens in the world, God does it.

But once we have begun to fathom this doubling, in which the first of a pair is done entirely by God, but the second is done by a combination of God and human beings, we see that it's the second one in each case - the second set of tablets, the second reading of the Ten Commandments, the Mishkan as opposed to Mount Sinai, and so on and so forth. It's the second one that lasts, that makes an impact on the people involved, makes the Israelites able to fight a battle without complaining, makes Moses' face shine, makes the Israelites know that they have built this Mishkan which becomes a home for the Divine Presence on earth and which is with them wherever they travel. It's the second of these that has a kiyum, that actually lasts and endures, and it is the second of these that changes the Israelites and changes Moses.

In which case Sefer Shemot, beneath the surface, is telling us something different entirely. It's saying God doesn't want us to leave it all to Him. He wants us to be His partners.

He wants us to do the work. 

Great though… the things that God does for us are great, it is the things we do for God that actually change us. 

It is the fact that Moshe Rabbeinu had to carve those second tablets that made his face glow with the charisma of creative endeavour.

It is the fact that the Israelites built the Mishkan, that they felt that God was in their midst, not just for a moment as He was on Mount Sinai, but at all times and in all places. 

If that is the case, if the real meaning of Sefer Shemot is God is calling on us to be His partners in the work of Creation, then the surface reading of Shemot, leave it all to God, is not the real meaning of Shemot, which is God's call to responsibility. 

Responsibility from the word response. God calls, we respond, something new and miraculous is made. 

And that is a second reading of the book of Shemot which is quite different from the first reading, and which you have to be grown-up to understand, because when you're a child, you know that your parents control the world and you are merely dependent. But when you grow up, you realise that your parents have prepared you to accept responsibility.

And when you accept that responsibility and do things in their spirit, that is when they get real nachat from you. Not when they are continually dependent on you to fight their battles for them, to divide the sea for them, to provide them with water from a rock and manna from heaven. 

In which case, the real story of Shemot is subtly different from the surface one and much, much more challenging.

If that is the case, then I suggest that we can read the whole of Bereishit and Shemot - which for various reasons were divided into two books - they actually constitute a single literary unit. And I've often pointed out and I wish there were a better word in English than chiasmus which isn't even English. But at least it might help you solve the Times word puzzle one day. 

Chiasmus, C-H-I-A-S-M-U-S, is the Latin for a literary form which is the basic literary structure in Torah and it is of the form A-B-C-C-B-A. 

So, you know, the classic example, “Shofech dam haAdam baAdam damo yishafech.”

Thank goodness it's only six words or I would have fallen off the stage. Are you with me? So A-B-C-C-B-A, “Shofech dam haAdam baAdam damo yishafech.” And you can always see it because the beginning and the end are the same. Are you with me? 

Now, I began by showing you that the beginning of Bereishit and the end of Shemot are the same. They are two works of Creation with this one difference. The only two works of Creation in the Five Books of Moses. With this one difference. That the first is done by God alone and the second is done by human beings doing it for God, instructed by God, “Ka’asher Hashem tziva et Moshe,” as God commanded Moses.

In which case we can see the whole of Bereishit and Shemot is one giant chiasmus and I've done it there for you. Can you see on the bottom the bit in English? A, it begins with Creation of the universe. First three chapters. Then, humanity and its failings. Then, the punishment for that which is the Flood. Then, there is hubris. People think too much of themselves. They see themselves as gods and they build a tower to reach heaven, the Tower of Babel. And then, the next long thing is all about Abraham to Joseph and his brothers, the family of the covenant. So, you've got the five stages, A, B, C, D, E. And that is the whole of Bereishit - A, B, C, D, E. 

And you will see the whole of Shemot is E, D, C, B, A. It's an exact mirror inversion, can you see? So, instead of family of the covenant, Shemot begins with the people of the covenant. Then, it moves on to hubris, a human being thinking he's like God. And that is not the builders of Babel, but Pharaoh. And then, there's punishment. What is the equivalent of the Flood in the book of Exodus? The 10 plagues. “Haterem teida, ki avda Mitzrayim,” ‘You see, the land is destroyed,’ say Pharaoh's counsellors to Pharaoh. And then, instead of the narrative of humanity and its failings, we get this long story of it, the Israelites and their failings. And then, it ends up with the work of Creation.

Are you with me? 

So, the whole of Bereishit and Shemot is a precisely structured, single literary unit in which the ending mirrors the beginning, but in a new key. It's no longer God alone, it's human beings responding to God. And that is how Shemot ends the way Bereishit begins.

Have a look there at the way Bereishit begins. Can you see? [Bereishit 1:31] “God saw all He had made, and behold, it was very good, and it was evening, it was morning on the sixth day.” [2:3] And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it He rested from His work, which God created to do.” 

That picture of serenity at the end of Creation, and that is mirrored right at the end of Shemot, by, [39:43] “And Moses saw all the work, and behold, they had made it as God commanded, so they did it, and Moses blessed them.” [40:34-35] “And the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the Mishkan,” as the glory of the Lord had filled the universe at the end of Bereishit.

So with that serene beginning and that serene ending, there is precise narrative closure. This is an extremely tightly constructed book. And what it is telling us is very simply this.

In the beginning, God creates the natural universe, and God creates order. It's perfect order. For three days, He creates domains, light and dark, upper and lower waters, sea and dry land. Then for the next three days, He peoples those domains with the appropriate objects - sun, moon, and stars, upper and lower waters, the birds and the fish, and then sea and dry land, the dry land, the animals and man. It's an exactly precise piece of structuring. God creates order.

The only trouble is He creates humanity. And you remember the story of that Jewish mother who said, ‘Now I've become a mother, I can relate to God so much better, because now I understand what it is to create something you can't control.’ So God creates order, and we create chaos.

Adam and Eve begin with a little bit of chaos, then Cain begins with a bad bit of chaos, murders his brother, and by the time we get to the Flood, “Vatimaleh ha’aretz chamas,” the whole structure of the universe is full of violence. Violence is disorder. 

And therefore, the whole problem of the Torah - and I'm not sure if Isaiah Berlin really fully understood this actually - is how do you combine freedom and order? 

Are you with me? That is the central problem of the Torah. It's the central problem of humanity. 

And I don't know any book that studies this in more depth than the Torah. How do you combine freedom and order? 

Bereishit begins - Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the people of the Flood, the builders of Babel, they create, they abuse their freedom, so you have freedom but not order. 

Shemot begins with Egypt, to the pharaohs, where you have order but not freedom. 

And the question is, how do you get both order and freedom? And the answer is, when we see the order God has created in the natural world and we voluntarily create that order in our world.

God creates the universe through scientific law and that is how He creates order. But we as free human beings are not particles and material objects that can be reducible to scientific laws, because we are free. And therefore, instead of scientific laws, we have the Torah’s laws, the laws that we keep freely because we understand them.

So it turns out that the whole story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, that long journey that begins on Pesach and ends on Shavuot and we count the days between, is from simple freedom, which means getting rid of, taking people out of the country or changing the form of government, to the really difficult form of freedom, law-governed liberty, where we obey the law because we understand the law and because we are responsible citizens responding to God's call. 

If that is the case, then the story of Shemot is a challenge to our responsibility. And the story we tell on Seder night is only the beginning of the story.

On Seder night, all our focus and all our thanks are to God. But once we have had the first Seder night, the second we begin Sefirat HaOmer and the long journey to accepting the law on Mount Sinai, then we realise that we have to become God's partners. We can't leave it all to God.

God is calling on us to be responsible human beings, restraining our liberty for the sake of other people's liberty, giving a little of what we have to others who have less, building a just, compassionate social order that honours human dignity and the sanctity of human life, and so on. 

And that only comes with the kind of society that the Torah envisages, where all of us accept responsibility as if we stood at Mount Sinai and we accept the “Kol Yisrael areivin zeh beZeh,” we are all responsible for one another. 

That incidentally, having just come from America, is one difference between American politics and British politics.

I missed Barack Obama's second inaugural. Did you hear it? I won't go into this. Long story, but American society, it had a leitmotif. He didn't say, “I have a dream.” (I wish I, every time I stand at the Lincoln Memorial, I'm sorely tempted.) But he used a phrase again and again and again.

You know the phrase? And you only hear it in American politics. You never hear it in British politics: “We, the people.”

That was the key phrase. “We, the people.” Now, has any British Prime Minister ever got up and used that phrase, “We, the people?” The answer's of course not. We're not even… The answer's no. Why? Because British society is built on monarchy, history, hierarchy, tradition, whereas American politics - as I say in the Haggadah and repeatedly - is built on covenant, of which the first classic example was accepting the Torah at Har Sinai, where all the Jewish people together accept responsibility. We, the people. “Kol Yisrael areivin zeh beZeh.” We are all responsible for creating a free society.

It isn't just the guy at the top. It's us. 

And that is why all the expectations of the Arab Spring and everything else were completely nonsense from the beginning, because you do not get a free society by removing a dictator, by removing a tyrant, by voting in a new government.

You get a free society when each one of us says, ‘It's up to us. We have to do this, and only we can do it together.’ That is the responsible society that God asked us to make.

That's why He led us through Egypt and all its suffering, so that we should long for freedom, but understand that this is a responsible freedom, a freedom we have to make together. 

And that is what makes the world's strongest free societies, and that is the eternal message of Pesach. 

Friends, I think it's an important message.

You know, I love dearly, the fastest-growing element in the Jewish world, which is the world of the yeshivot and the Chasidim and the Charedim, and it's beautiful and it's holy and it's lovely. And it's growing apace, and meanwhile, we are losing out. The centre is getting less and less in every Jewish society in the world.

Having just come from South America, I see it hardly exists. North America, it is diminishing, and the sign of it is Pesach. You know, sales of matzah are down in Israel. Why? Because on the one hand, more people are not keeping Pesach, and on the other hand, more people are only eating shmura matzah. So, the sales of matzah in the middle, there you are, you got your nice United Synagogue matzah there, and nobody's buying it. 

So, it seems to me that - I don't wish to criticise anyone here, and I absolutely don't, because I admire that holiness - but the truth is that somebody has got to stand up and say clearly and without hesitation that God does not expect us to live as if we're in the wilderness, leaving it all to Him.

All we need to do is learn and daven, and the universe will be fine. That's 40 years in the wilderness. That's not what living in the Land of Israel is about, and it's not what living in Chutz LaAretz is about.

God is calling on us to exercise responsibility by creating free societies, by righting wrongs, healing disease, righting injustices, fighting against poverty and ignorance and all the other bad things that happen. God wants us to be His partners in the work of Creation, and this is the kind of Judaism that we're fighting for, and this is the kind of challenge God is setting us from the very dawn of our history. 

So yes, we celebrate Pesach, and we thank God for the miracles of Jewish history from that day to this, because we have lived through the third great exodus of Jewish history - first from Egypt, second from Babylon, third from all the lands of our dispersion.

In some ways, the exodus we have lived through is the greatest of them all. But now comes the challenge. Can we respond to God's call to create freedom, not wait for Him to do it for us, to hew the tablets on which He will write His words, to build the Mishkan so that His Presence can fill our lives? Friends, that is the challenge of Pesach. That is the challenge of Jewish life today.

Thank you for being part of that challenge, for being a great and wonderful community, and may Hashem bless all of you, and may you all have a Chag Kasher veSameach. Amen.