As we noted above, the Exodus happened five times before it happened. First Abraham and Sarah went into exile in Egypt, then Abraham foresaw the fate of his descendants in a night vision, then he and Sarah were forced into exile to Gerar, then Isaac and Rebecca suffered the same fate, then Jacob went into exile to Laban: four journeys and a prophecy, each prefiguring what the Israelites would have to endure, but each also a kind of assurance that they would survive and return.

So it came about that the Exodus also happened after it happened. In one of his most remarkable flights of prophecy, Moses warned the people even before they had entered the land that one day they would dishonor the covenant and be forced into exile again. There, far from home, they would reflect on their fate and come to the conclusion that defeat and disaster were not the mere happenstance of history but the result of their faithlessness to God. If they would return to God then God would return to them and bring them back to their land:

Then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where He scattered you. Even if you are scattered to the furthermost lands under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and take you back. (Deut. 30:3–4)

It was an astonishing vision but, as it happened, a necessary one. Israel’s existence as a nation in its land could never be taken for granted. It was a small country, surrounded not only by other small nations but by large and hungry empires. It was also fractious. The tribal confederation that lasted throughout the period of the judges gave way to a monarchy, but the nation was imperfectly united and after a mere three generations of kings it split into Israel and Judah, north and south. Most of the literary prophets either anticipated defeat and exile, or experienced it. Yet they had hope.

Theirs was not mere hope, optimism, wishful thinking. It was grounded in historical experience and theological principle. God had redeemed the people in the past. He would do so again in the future. Partly because the people, sobered by suffering, would repent. Partly because God had given His word and would not break it. Partly because the bond between God and the people was unbreakable, like that between a father and a son, or as the prophets preferred to see it, like that between a husband and a faithless wife he cannot bring himself to divorce because he still loves her. But fundamentally, because the Exodus is the shape of Jewish time. Sin brings exile. Repentance brings return. So it was; so it will be.

The prophets foresaw a second exodus. Hosea did, long in advance:

“They shall come trembling like a bird from Egypt, like a dove from the land of Assyria. And I will let them dwell in their houses,” says the Lord. (Hos. 11:11)

Likewise Amos:

I will bring back the captives of My people Israel; they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink wine from them; they shall also make gardens and eat fruit from them. I will plant them in their land…. (Amos 9:14–15)

Amos and Hosea both prophesied in the eighth century BCE and both directed their words to the northern kingdom, which did indeed fall to the Assyrians as they had foreseen. A century and a half later the southern kingdom of Judea also fell, this time to the Babylonians. There in exile it was Ezekiel who gave the people hope, though his was a dark hope.

In one of the most haunting of all prophetic visions – we read it on Shabbat Ĥol HaMo’ed – Ezekiel sees his people as a landscape of corpses, a valley of dry bones. They are devastated. They say avda ­tikvateinu, “our hope is gone.” God then asks him: “Son of man, can these bones be revived?” The prophet does not know what to say. Then he sees the bones slowly come together and grow flesh and skin and come to life again. Then he hears God say:

Son of man, these bones are all the house of Israel: behold, they say, “Our bones have dried, our hope is lost, our decree has been sealed.” Therefore, prophesy, saying to them, “Thus spoke the Lord God: ‘Behold, I shall open your graves and lift you out of your graves, My people; I shall bring you to the land of Israel. And you will know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and lift you out of your graves, My people.’” (Ezek. 37:11–13)

Isaiah, the poet laureate of hope, had a more positive vision – we read it as the Haftara for the eighth day. The prophet foresaw a day in which “the Lord will reach out His hand a second time to reclaim the surviving remnant that is left of His people from Assyria, from Lower Egypt, Pathros, Cush, from Elam, Shinar, Hamath and the islands of the sea.” Once again He would prevail over the waters, drying up “the gulf of the Egyptian sea” and the Euphrates river, so that the Israelites will once again walk through waters that have become dry land, and “there will be a highway for the remnant of His people that is left from Assyria, as there was for Israel when they came up from Egypt” (Is. 11:11–16).

Isaiah’s younger contemporary Micah put it most simply: “As in the days of your exodus from Egypt, so I will show you wonders” (Mic. 7:15). And so it happened. Barely half a century after conquering Judea and destroying the Temple, Babylon fell to the Persians. First Cyrus, then Darius, gave the Jews permission to return, rebuild the Temple and reestablish their national life. It may have been less miraculous than the prophets hoped: not all the people returned, nor was there true ­political independence. But it was a second exodus.

Then came Greece, the empire of Alexander the Great, and then Rome. There were times when these Hellenistic powers allowed Jews a measure of autonomy and religious freedom, but others when that freedom was denied. Three times Jews rose in revolt, once successfully against Antiochus IV, twice unsuccessfully against Rome, the Great Revolt of 66–73 and the Bar Kokhba rebellion of 132–135. These were two of the greatest disasters of Jewish history. In the first, the Temple was destroyed again. In the second, the whole of Judea was devastated (see “Surviving Grief,” below).

Jews went into exile again, some to Babylon, others to Egypt, yet others to Rome and other parts of the Mediterranean and beyond. A rabbinic midrash,¹ 29. commenting on Jacob’s dream of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending, interprets it as a reference to the empires that would conquer Jacob’s children. He saw the angels of Babylon, the Medes and Persians, and Greece rise and then come down, but the angel of Rome kept rising, showing no sign of decline, and Jacob was afraid. This was an exile seemingly without end.

footnotes: ¹ Leviticus Raba, Emor

For the first time we hear a note of absolute despair. In the wake of the Hadrianic persecutions that followed the defeat of Bar Kokhba, we find the following statement in the Talmud: “By rights we should issue a decree that no Jew should marry and have children, so that the seed of Abraham might come to an end of its own accord” (Bava Batra 60b). Rarely before and rarely since have such words been said, let alone recorded in one of Judaism’s canonical texts.

Yet despair did not prevail. From Babylon in talmudic or early post-talmudic times, we begin to hear of a new custom, of saying at the beginning of the Seder service in Aramaic: “This is the bread of oppression our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come in and eat; let all who are in need come and join us for the Pesaĥ. Now we are here; next year in the land of Israel. Now – slaves; next year we shall be free.” As if to say: Yes, we are in exile again. But we have been here before, and we have returned before. Next year.

The centuries passed. Then came the 1860s and the childhood of a young member of a highly assimilated family in Austro-Hungary, Theodor Herzl. Previously, in the atmosphere of European nationalism and the unification of Italy, rabbis like Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Yehuda Alkalai had begun to advocate a return to Zion. Moses Hess, a secular Jew and one-time companion of Karl Marx, had found himself drawn back to the fate of his people by the Damascus blood libel of 1841, and he too had become a Zionist. Herzl knew none of this at the time, but in later life, he recalled the following childhood dream:

One night, as I was going to sleep, I suddenly remembered the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The story of the historical exodus and the legend of the future redemption, which will be brought about by King Messiah, became confused in my mind…. One night I had a wonderful dream: King Messiah came…. On one of the clouds we met the figure of Moses…and the Messiah…turned to me: “Go and announce to the Jews that I will soon come and perform great miracles for my people and for the whole world.”² (Borgo Press, 2008), intro. Alex Bein, 17.

footnotes: ² Quoted in T. Herzl, The Jewish State

Herzl’s parents had given him little Jewish instruction and he grew up to be somewhat dismissive of religion. But this he knew: that once there was an exodus and there would be again.

At the end of the Second World War, as in Moses’ day, the Jewish people had barely survived attempted genocide. As the scale of the Final Solution became clear, the Jewish people were closer to Ezekiel’s vision than ever before. A third of them had become a valley of dry bones. Now in a last-ditch effort to restore to the Jewish people its ancient, ancestral home, David Ben-Gurion stood to address the United Nations Commission charged with deciding the fate of the land to which Moses had led his people those many centuries before. If it voted for partition, then in effect the United Nations would be deciding to bring into being the modern State of Israel, restoring sovereignty to the people that had lost it two thousand years earlier. Ben-Gurion must have known that it was the most important speech of his life and that the fate of the Jewish people rested on its outcome. In the course of his remarks he said this:

Three hundred years ago a ship called the Mayflower set sail to the New World. This was a great event in the history of England. Yet I wonder if there is one Englishman who knows at what time the ship set sail? Do the English know how many people embarked on this voyage? What quality of bread did they eat? Yet more than 3,300 years ago…the Jews left Egypt. Every Jew in the world, even in America or Soviet Russia, knows on exactly what day they left – the fifteenth of the month of Nisan – and everyone knows what kind of bread the Jews ate.³ (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005), 114–15.

footnotes: ³ Quoted in Lawrence Hoffman, Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide

The United Nations voted, with the requisite majority, for ­partition. Seven months later the State of Israel was reborn. The third exodus had taken place.

The narrative arch is vast, from the banks of the Jordan to Babylon to Austro-Hungary to the United Nations in New York, spanning more than half the history of civilization. Yet the Pesaĥ story lived on, time and again rescuing a people from despair.

There is no proof of hope, no scientific theory on which it can be grounded, no compelling, unequivocal historical evidence that the human story is destined to end well. The optimistic reading, which used to be called the Whig theory of history, was dealt a catastrophic blow in the twentieth century: two world wars, a hundred million deaths, and two evil empires, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, as bestial as any the world has ever known. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall led to vicious ethnic conflict in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya and elsewhere. The “Arab Spring” of 2011 has not, as I write, yet led to the spread of freedom, civil rights and the rule of law in the Middle East. There is no straight inference from the past to optimism about the human future. But there are grounds for hope: the story of Israel, its exiles, its exoduses, its survival against the odds, its refusal to despair.

Israel’s existence has never been easy: not in biblical times and not today. It has always been a small country surrounded by large empires, without the natural resources, the wealth, the landmass or the demographic strength ever to become, in worldly terms, a superpower. All it had, then and now, was the individual strength and resourcefulness of its people – that and its faith and way of life. The relationship between God and the Jewish people has been fraught. There were times when the people turned away from God. There were times when God “hid His face” from the people. But the name “Israel” itself, according to the Torah (Gen. 32:28), means one who wrestles with God and with man and prevails. We never stop wrestling with God, nor He with us.

Reading the story of the Exodus against the history of the Jewish people through the ages, one thing shines with greater intensity than all others: the way that monotheism confers dignity and responsibility on the individual, every individual equally. There is no hierarchy in heaven; therefore there is, ideally, no hierarchy on earth. We are each called on to be holy, to be knowledgeable like priests, visionary like prophets, ­willing to fight battles like kings.

The ideal society is one formed by covenant, in which we each accept responsibility for the fate of the nation. That is not democracy in the Greek sense, which is about government and power. It is about society as a moral enterprise. It is about freedom-as-responsibility, not freedom-as-autonomy. It is, as John Locke put it, about liberty, not license. It is about freedom as the collective achievement of a people who know what it tastes like to eat the bread of affliction and know also that a society of everyone-for-himself is less like the route to the ­Promised Land than like the way back to Egypt. It is a difficult freedom, but it is one worth having.

Societies where everyone is valued, where everyone has dignity, where there may be economic differences but no class distinctions, where no one is so poor as to be deprived of the essentials of existence, where responsibility is not delegated up or down but distributed throughout the population, where children are precious, the elderly respected, where education is the highest priority, and where no one stands aside from his duties to the nation as a whole – such societies are morally strong even if they are small and outnumbered. That is the Jewish faith. That is what Israel, the people, the land and their story mean.

There is one passage missing from the Haggada that, perhaps, deserves to be reinstated. It occurs at the point where Rabbi Elazar ben Azaria has compared himself to a seventy-year-old man (the burdens of leadership made his hair turn gray overnight [Berakhot 28a]) but he never understood until now why we must mention the Exodus from Egypt at night until Ben Zoma explained it to him. Ben Zoma inferred it from the phrase, “so that you may remember the day of your Exodus out of Egypt all the days of your life.” The word “all,” says Ben Zoma, comes to include nights. Not so, said the sages. It comes to include the Messianic Age.

There the text breaks off. It is, in fact, an extract from the Mishna. However, the Talmud (Berakhot 12b) tells us how the conversation continued. Ben Zoma said to the sages:

Will we remember the going out of Egypt in the Messianic Age? Did not the prophet Jeremiah say otherwise? For he said, “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when people will no longer say, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,’ but they will say, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the descendants of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where He had banished them.’ Then they will live in their own land” (Jer. 23:7–8).

The sages concurred, adding simply that when that time comes we will still remember the Exodus from Egypt, even though we will have another and larger exodus for which to thank God.

So it has come to pass, and it is wondrous in our eyes. There are stories that change the world, none more remarkable than that of Pesaĥ, the master-narrative of hope.