There are two aspects of Pesaĥ that make it different from the other pilgrimage festivals, Shavuot and Sukkot. First, in the Torah, the word simĥa, “rejoicing,” does not appear at all in connection with it. In Leviticus the word appears specifically in connection with Sukkot. In Deuteronomy it figures twice in connection with Sukkot, once with Shavuot. But there is no explicit command to rejoice on Pesaĥ.

The second is that a Full Hallel is said only on the first day (outside Israel, the first two days). The Talmud (Arakhin 10a–b) gives a reason for this. The sacrifices offered in the Temple did not vary on the seven days of Pesaĥ, (Num. 28:24), whereas they did on Sukkot. This gives each day of Sukkot something of the status of a festival in its own right whereas on Pesaĥ, the subsequent days are a mere repetition of the first.

However, the answer of the Talmud is not sufficient to explain one phenomenon: the fact that we do not say a Full Hallel on the seventh day. According to tradition, the division of the Reed Sea took place on the seventh day. Moses had initially asked Pharaoh for permission to travel with the people three days into the wilderness to worship God. When it became clear that they were not about to return, Pharaoh was notified on the fourth day. He and his chariots traveled on days five and six. On the seventh the Israelites crossed the Sea and sang the Song (Rashi to Ex. 14:5). That is why the crossing of the Sea is the Torah Reading for the seventh day. The Talmud, in its discussion of the origin of ­Hallel (Pesaĥim 117a), lists a number of historic occasions on which it was sung. The first of these is at the Reed Sea! In other words, according to the ­Talmud, Hallel originated on the seventh day of Pesaĥ. Therefore, regardless of the sacrifices, it should at least be said on that day.

A midrash (Yalkut Shimoni, Emor 654) gives a similar answer to both questions. Rejoicing is not mentioned in connection with Pesaĥ because it was a period “during which the Egyptians died.” We do not say a Full Hallel other than on the first day because of the principle (Prov. 24:17), “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart be glad” – a prohibition against Schadenfreude. This recalls another passage in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 39b), which says that during the division of the Reed Sea, the angels above wanted to sing a song of triumph like the Israelites below. God silenced them with the words, “The works of My hands are drowning in the sea and you wish to sing a song?”

There is an obvious question: If God stopped the angels singing, why did He not stop the Israelites? The technical answer is that there is a halakhic difference between Hallel said at the time of the event and Hallel said subsequently on the anniversary of the event. The first is a direct expression of emotion; the second is an act of memory. The first does not require a blessing, the second does. That is why we do not make a blessing on the Hallel said at the Seder table whereas we do in the synagogue. At the Seder table there is a halakhic requirement that “each person must see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt” (Pesaĥim 10:5). Therefore Hallel for us is as it was for the Israelites at the time: an immediate personal experience. At the time of a miraculous escape we are overwhelmed with gratitude and a sense of relief and release. It is not a time for balanced emotion and detachment. However, for the angels (and for the Israelites themselves on subsequent years), Hallel was not the result of an immediate experience. Hence it was overridden by the prohibition against taking pleasure at seeing your enemy fall, and only an abridged version (“Half Hallel”) is said.

The same reasoning – “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls” – appears in the famous explanation offered by Abudraham (Abu Dirham, Seville, fourteenth century) as to why we spill drops of wine while reciting the Ten Plagues at the Seder table: to remind ourselves of the suffering of the Egyptians. The implication may be that we should feel sorry for the Egyptians who suffered for the recalcitrance of a single individual, Pharaoh (Moses once said to God, “Shall one man sin and will You be angry with the whole congregation?” [Num. 16:22]). Or perhaps the point is that even the execution of justice should occasion mixed feelings. The Talmud rules that the command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” applies even to a criminal who has committed a capital crime (Sanhedrin 52a). Death must be as painless as ­possible, because though a person has forfeited his life, he has not forfeited his status as a human.

Are these sentiments merely the products of post-biblical Judaism? Or do they have some basis in Tanakh itself?

There are two puzzling passages which may shed light on the question. The first is the strange insistence by God that, before they leave, the Israelites should ask their Egyptian neighbors for “articles of silver and gold” (Ex. 11:2). Did they need silver and gold for the journey? Besides which, as the sages pointed out, if they had not taken gold from Egypt they would not have been able to make a golden calf (Berakhot 32a). Yet there is nothing minor or accidental about this detail. God mentioned it to Moses before he had even started his mission (Ex. 3:22). Centuries earlier He alluded to it to Abraham: “Afterward they will come out with great possessions” (Gen. 15:14). Even before then it had been a feature of Abraham’s own exile to Egypt: “Abram had become very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold” (Gen. 13:2).

It cannot be that the years of exile and suffering were for the sake of wealth. Divine blessings are to be found in Israel, not exile. Nor is there anything to be said for taking money from the wicked. As Abraham said to the king of Sodom, “I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the strap of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, ‘I made Abram rich’” (Gen. 14:23).

Instead, the explanation is to be found in the later law of Deuteronomy about releasing a slave:

When you set him free from your service you must not send him away empty-handed. You must give generously to him of your flock, your granary and your wine vat with which the Lord your God has blessed you; so you shall give him. And you shall remember that you were once a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you; this is why, today, I command you thus. (Deut. 15:13–15)

There are two elements at stake here. The first is that when you release a slave you must give him initial support to start a new life in freedom. The other and more significant is emotional closure. Slavery is humiliating. The parting gift from the master does not compensate for the years of freedom lost, but it does mean that there is a final act of goodwill. It is there precisely to mitigate the resentment that otherwise exists between a former slave and his or her master. It is there to prevent some form of revenge (see Lev. 19:18).

The law in Deuteronomy refers to an Israelite releasing a slave. But there is no reason to doubt that the same logic applies to God’s insistence that the Israelites receive gifts from the Egyptians. The Torah is calibrated to human nature. It was, as the sages say, “not given to angels” (Berakhot 25b). Humiliation, resentment and the desire for revenge have destroyed civilizations in the past.¹ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). They are no basis for a nation about to create a free society under the sovereignty of God. The Israelites were to leave Egypt without a legacy of hate.

footnotes: ¹ See Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred

The same logic applies to the arresting statement of Moses: “You shall not despise an Egyptian, for you were strangers in his land” (Deut. 23:8). This is one of the great apparent non-sequiturs in the Torah. The Egyptians enslaved our ancestors. They tried to carry out a program of genocide. It is not as if Moses wanted the people to forget their suffering in Egypt. To the contrary, God had commanded the Israelites never to forget it, never to cease reenacting it once a year.

Rather, the explanation is this: If the Israelites continued to resent the Egyptians for the way they had been treated, then Moses would have taken the Israelites out of Egypt, but would not have taken Egypt out of the Israelites. In a psychological sense they would still be slaves to the past. They would see themselves as victims, and victimhood is incompatible with freedom. Victimhood defines you as an object, not a subject, as someone others act upon, not someone who takes destiny into his own hands. Victims destroy; they do not build. Victims look back, not forward. To be free, you have to let go of hate. That is the burden of Moses’ command.

Egypt never became, in the Jewish imagination, a symbol of evil. That was reserved for the Amalekites. The humanizing of the Egyptians led Isaiah to one of the most remarkable prophecies in all religious ­literature. The day will come, he says, when the Egyptians will themselves suffer from a tyrannical leader. On that day they will cry out to God, who will respond by performing the same kind of miracle for them as once before He had performed for the Israelites:

When they cry out to the Lord because of their oppressors, He will send them a savior and defender, and He will rescue them. So the Lord will make Himself known to the Egyptians, and on that day they will acknowledge the Lord. (Is. 19:20–21)

There will come a day when God Himself will bless the Egyptians, saying, “Blessed be Egypt, My people” (ibid. 25).

This same biblical concern that one should not dehumanize one’s enemies is a key theme of the book of Jonah. It is the lesson God seeks to teach the prophet by sending him a leafy plant to give him shade during the day. When the plant dies, Jonah curses his fate. God then says:

“You cared about that plant, which you did not toil for and did not grow, which appeared overnight and was lost overnight. And am I not to care for the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people in it – who do not know their right hands from their left – and many animals?” (Jonah 4:10–11)

The fact that the Assyrians were Israel’s once and future enemies does not justify depriving them of the chance to repent and be forgiven.

This entire cluster of attitudes is extraordinary, yet it is central to our understanding of the Exodus. The sin of the Egyptians was that they dehumanized the Israelites. Therefore if Israel is to be the antitype, the opposite, of Egypt, it must not dehumanize the Egyptians. We must not hate them. We must not say a Full Hallel on the day they drowned in the Sea. Because Egyptians died, our entire “joy” on the festival is muted, not even mentioned in the Torah at all.

Retribution is not revenge. Punishment is not hate. Justice is not vindictiveness. The moral system of the Torah depends on making a fundamental distinction between interpersonal emotion and impersonal law. Revenge, hate and vindictiveness are all I-Thou ­relationships. Justice is the opposite: the principled refusal to let I-Thou relationships determine the fate of individuals within society. Justice means that all must submit to the impartial process of law. Retribution is an act of restoring moral order to society. It has nothing to do with revenge which is, strictly speaking, lawless. When law and justice prevail, there can be punishment without animosity. The law-based society envisaged by the Torah is one where people hate not the sinner but the sin.

One of the recurring dangers of religion, indeed of civilizations generally, is that they divide humanity into the saved and the damned, the redeemed and the accursed, the believer and the infidel, the ­civilized and the barbarian, the children of light and the children of darkness. There is no limit to the evils that can be visited on those not of our faith, since one is doing so in the name of God, truth and right, and since one’s victims are less than fully human. That is an abomination, an offense against God and His image – humankind.

Spilling wine during the recitation of the plagues, refraining from Full Hallel on the seventh day, not hating an Egyptian: all these and more are fundamental to the Torah’s insistence that our humanity precedes our religious identity. Man was made in God’s image long before the covenant with Abraham or the Israelites. To be a Jew is the Jewish way of being human. It is not a justification for seeing others as less than human.

If Rabbi Yaakov Emden is right, then there is a statement to this effect at the very beginning of the Seder. The first words we say at the opening of Maggid are: “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.” The difference between the first invocation and the second, says Rabbi Emden, is that the first, “Let all who are hungry come in and eat,” is addressed to non-Jews, on the basis of the principle that “We must support non-Jews as well as Jews because of the ways of peace” (Gittin 61a).².

footnotes: ² Rabbi Yaakov Emden, Siddur Amudei VeSha’arei Shamayim

This is no small principle. We are commanded not to forget the victims of our victories, not to lose empathy with our enemies, nor to dehumanize the human other. That does not mean abandoning the search for justice – quite the reverse. But law is one thing, interpersonal emotion another. There is a haunting line in the account of the plagues, when Pharaoh’s own advisers tell him: “Let the people go…. Do you not yet realize that Egypt is ruined?” (Ex. 10:7). Hate destroys the hater, not just the hated.

To be free, you have to let go of hate.