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The Passover Story is a drama in three acts.
in Egypt.
Act I takes place
The harrator begins: "Now there max arose a new king over
Egypt, who did not know Josgéh."
And then the tragedy unfolds.
Step
by step, the Israelites are feduced to an army of slave labourers,
helpléSS before the mercilessfiess of their taskmasters.
More and more
die from exhaustion, and their childfen are slain at birth.
Moses, makes a defiant gesture of resistance, bazto no avail.
ére paralysed with fear and despair.
One mén;
The people
They can only cry out in anguish to
the God of their forefathers, whom they vaguely remember.
Act II takes plade in the wilderness.
The God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob has seen the affliction of Hfis people; and Hé has heard their cry.
Through Moses and Aafon He has accomplished the impossiblew
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a nation for Himself out of tpe midst offnotherflgjcigy,
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Hé has taken
.«nwrr'u~-»,__,...H. .m...»‘, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.
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The survivérs have escaped: 600,000 of them. They are befiildered. They
can scarcely believe what has happened. On the one hand they rejoice that
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they are alive and free; that Eharaoh's boast, "Israel is not; his seed
mafis to more," proved premature; Ehas7éée—uPinarjirhflfixg$Lya§_§§§n:;pE§e§
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They burst into song} "i will sifig to the Lord, for ée
has triumfihéd gloriously; the horse and its rider He has thrown into the
sea!" On the other hand their 9gw—found-freedom frightens them. They
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do not know how to fag? the uncertéin future. They rebel against their
leader. They Quarrel among themsélves. They even long to return to the
flesh pots of Egypt. Physically they are redeemed; spiritually they are
still in bondage.
Act III takes place at Mount Sinai.
composure and their self-d1501p11ne,
The people have regained their
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Moses returns from
thfi summit, where he has been communicating with the God
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And in His name he now addresses the people: "You have seen what I did
tq};3:~h<_e Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you
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Now therefore, if you will obq
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voice and keep My oowenant,
yw; shall be My own possession amohg all peoples, even though éll'fhe
earth is Mine, and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a hoiy
nation."
And the peoplegall—EODTQGG—ef—eb-em, respond with one accio‘rd:
"All that the Lord has spoken we will do." If they keep [this promige,
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a glorious future lies ahead, for them and for mailéindd
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The Passover Story is, moreover,
pfototype of a
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pat‘ta‘n of
events which has repeated itself in our history again and again.
600
years after the Exdadus froin Egypt, the Israeliteslfieggconquered by 07
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Baby]:on; their Temple/wager burnt slew}, their V?
arm‘ies decimated and their p6pu1ation, from king Zedekiakfifiownwards,
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all except the poorest stratum, carried away into captivify.’
Once
again there/wag despair.
Israelites
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is lost"
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By the waters of Babylon the exiled
"Our bones are dried up," they
But within 50 years deliverance came: thg‘ough
Cyrus, king of Persia, God's anointed.
return
to
their homeland.
say, "and our hépe
The exiles
w; allowedhto
But tfiey returned- so demoralised thatlfiepi'
W‘Ode-eeéas they looked- only for material secpfityl, not for spiritual renewal
‘9 They engaged in bitter feuds with one another, and
even the rebuilding of
‘7 the Temple, authorised
by Cyrus, mg: delayed for a Whole generation. And
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even then
three more generations before the high hopes of the
Prophets begin: to be fulfilled. That:
when the Israelites, assembled
g; Ezra and Nehemiah at the water gate, solemnly reaffirmfl their ancient
Covenant with God and pledged themselves to live by the Torah.
itzge-Lel;
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new, u; native phabe
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Bondage, delifierence, regeneration.
three-act drama wgé enacted once more.
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600 years later the same
This time Home is the task-
master.
Oppressed, humiliated, impoverished ané reduced to starvation,
the Judeans resort to rebellion. But it 15 a hopeless war. Jerusalem
i; besieged, the Temple set aflame; the fortéress of Massada holds out
for three moré years, then its defenders too are slaughtered or commit
sfiicide. Yetflthere are survivors, and the survivors are in theiégggL
What is there fbr them to do but to mourn their dead and
to lament fiKKXXKKKKKKKXflKXXKKXKHX their losses? "Woe unto us," they
sail, "that the Temple has been destroyed, the place whéié Israel's
ofi despair.
sins were afiohed." éfiwfiTfiTT-AJ
But there is one man among them who
pan see beyond tfie gloom to the opportunities which lie ahead. His
name is Yochanan ben Zakkai. He it is who escapes from besieged
Jérusalem, goes to the Roman Commander and says: "Give me Yavneh".
At Yavneh he builds a college, and there the surviving scholars
gather
to lay the founQations of a new epoch in Israel's spiritual
history,
LN) an epoch which produces the Mishhah and the Talmud and the Midrash
and igg;g;;é Jewish life for centuries to come.
All this would be merely of historical interest if it were not
for the fact that the same drama haséfiigé§233 yet again in our
lifetime.
It began in Germany in the 1950's, when there arose a
new Pharaoh who
knew not Joseph, who, like his predecessors, determined
upon the Final
Solution but pursued HXXH it with unprecedented
ferocity. Again there
were gestures of defiance. The Jews of the
Warsaw Ghetto acted as Moses
did when he slew the Egyp§$§n taskmaster. But to no avail.
Six million
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Jewsidied in circumstances of unspeakable degradation and agony.
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with them perished countless institutions of Jewish life and learning,
among them XXX great Rabbinic Seminaries, Liberal and Orthodox, in
.Berlin and Breslau, in Slobodka and Mir.l
Destruction on sud: a vast
Irgéale, human and cultural, had never occurred before.
It was a
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tragedy
of such magnitude that even today, twenty-five years later, we hafé”not
yet assimilated 1%.
We sééreely dare to remember it, for the me$oiy
is too painful as well as mingled with feelings of guilt, for pefhaps,
we cofild have done more than we did to prevent it or to reazue the
victims
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And if we do not recall sufficiently the tragedy, still less do
wé keéfi before our consciousness the fact, for it is a fact, that it
‘was followed by a deliVerance.
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have our
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CyrusegxHie—aeme—wee—Qwaght—E&eeahe%er.
save the six million.
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True, the deliverance came too late to
Act I was followed by Act II.
But it did come. Hitler was defeated. We did
Wifik‘fll‘h-
Dm‘qk} [3"n
(kufd—m'lt
And thanks to the
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afSovid' [iv-(fin 5
Vlctory of the-inshty armies unfiei—bés—eeaaand, and the—a&&&efi—e§m&es;
there did survive, even in Central and Western Europe, about a million
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JeWS, and another 10 or 12 million in lands which Hitler was mercifuilj
prevented from conquering.
survivors of the Holocaust.
Today we are all, directly or indirectly,
It was, admittedly; too great tn calamity
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uto permlt us to re301ce w1th any sort of wheée—heaiéeéness.
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We are not
ihclined to sing fl songfof triumph. We are more inclined to echo the
pathos of Jeremiah, PA voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter
Weeping, Rachel weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted
‘for her children, bécause
they are not" G§;4449. And yet, for all our
sorrow; we eight to give thanks that the Final Solution was once
again
frustrated, and that we are min ha-Q'letah, of the surviving
remn
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We ought: to give thanks for our good fortune, and we ought to
consider the obligations which it imposes on us.
five years in which to do so.
We have had twenty—
But what have we done?
We have been
concerned almost exclusively with our material welfare and our political
security.
resettled the refugees.» We have cream} the State of
Isi‘a’el and defended 117:5 We have rebuilt
our representative organisations
@fiave
and our welfare services.
We have feathered our private economic nests.
And we have quarrekled with one another. But we have done retirvi fiJga
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life“~ We are still in the wilderness.
spiritually we are still in bondage.
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to rebuild
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Physically we are redeemed-iii;
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Act III has not 'yetfbegun.
Or hardly.
There have of course been individuals among us who,
“alike Moses at Mount Sinai, like the Second Isaiéh in Babylonia, and
like Yochanan ben Zakkai dklfavneh, have looked Beyond the cqnfusion of
snithe present to the challenge and the promise which lie
One such
man, perhaps the greatest, was Leo Baéck. As leader 09 German Jewry,
he understood and experienced uniquely the
of the Holocaust.
let when he came to this countryuhaving survived the onncentration
camps by a miracle as yet unexplained, he did not: abandon himself to
imagfiandespair. On the contrary, this septuagenarian rabbi, a man.
and acquainted with grief, devoted himself with fiery passion
Wrrows
to the reconstruction of
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the religious life of his people.
Among
other things, he pleaded insistently flab the establishment of a Jewish
theological college here in England, to replace in some small
measure
the great centres of 'Jewish learning which the Nazis had
destroyed. He
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lived just long Enough to see that dream fulfilled, and when he died
the
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.Coi’lége was. named after him.
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If Leo Baeck was our Yochanan ben Zakkai; then Leo Baeck College
our answer to the Nazis, as Yavneh was our answer
is our Yavneh.
It is
to the Romané.
And yet
thirteen years this Gollege, which shc'nuld
Be the pride of post-Holocaust Britlieh and European Jewry, has had to
strt‘nggle along like some Cinderella.
There are young men willing to
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devote their lives to the rebuilding of Jewish life as rabbis sadPO-l—ig-ieur-i-Oeéers, but we cannot aféerd-‘b-o give
hamers-imam,
There are Jewish scholars ready to teach, but we
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can 0 image
.
There are Jewish books aygilable
in abundance, but we haven't got the money to buy them for the College
out
mink
Library. There is» researcto be undertaken, publicatlons to be isms-ed,
but these things do hot even come within our purview because ‘they aré
"not financially
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them decent bursaries.
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feasible.
We
do—not—mn
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have abuildingLfit
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to house a nursery school, and the administration of the College would
be éonsidered ludicrous for the smallest department of a cmmercial
enterprise,
The College exists, and
in Spite of all its handicaps it has trained and will train
rabbis and
teachers. But compared with
the vision which inspiyed it, and
the challenge which it has to meet, and the potential which
it could
23n
fulfil, it is a disgrace.
For on
a
Leo Baeck College depends the
whole future of Progressive Judaism, andftherefore to a large
extent of
Judaism generally; in Great Britain, and in Europe, an in more
distant
lands.
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The other day I had the privilege ofilistening to one
of the
otitstanding Jewish theologians of our timé, Pi‘ofessor
Ehnil Fackenheim,
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Ee was on a} visit from Toronto‘afié—W
BC—eck'fivi-JL-ege.
He‘
spoke about the Holocaust and he said something like
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‘Thé tragedy which we experienced was so immense that we cannot“
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‘Easp ifié full significance, and we should not pretend that we cgfi ~~
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l‘Bfit éertain things are; nevertheless, clear.
And one of them is thig,_
that we who have survived are under a solemn obligation,_an—eb&igfijion
to ensxre the
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Jewish future and so to see to.it that Eitler aaé'nts-heiéee—ere not
accbrded any postdhumous victories.
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To ensure the Jewish future is not a matfier only of saving
Jew}sh_i
:Tiifies in the Physical sense. It is not sufficient, therefore,
to gi?a ,'
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money to the J.P.A. and the Jewish Welfare Board. fihe Jewish peplé iswh
a people which lives by its faith. Without that faith it is
doomed, “:~~
as surely in the State of Israel as in the Diaspora. All of
cu} piston}?
bears witness to that fact. And that faith; in its turn, can gurvive
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onEX on a basis of sound learning. Without well trained rabbi; andwaifii“
Jewishly educated laity; there is no future for the House of Israel.
If among our children and chi1dren's children there
are no chachagim, 3;
no wise sons, but gnly children unable to ask questions
and paraité
unable to answer them; then the Final Solution will
bécgme final; Eharaoh
and Nebuchadne27ar and Titus and Hitler will laugh
in their graves; four
thousand years of faith and vision; of dedicated labour
and heroic
struggle, will he consigned to fihe mfisefims of
histony;,afid humanity'Qill
aim) a} win/{Jbe impoverished, perhaps to the 2§§é£I—¢hat the
forces of enlightenment
Meow-L '0.
w¥331be~€fl$bgethen~1aaquisbed-kg the forces of darkness.
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Such is our responsibflity. It can be stated in
general tergs and
remain so much empty rhetoric. Or it can be
staked in specific terms,‘
And the specific task which we are called upon to
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perform at this time'
is to mate of 329 Leo Baeck
College a true Yavneh; ensuring the
sfiiritfial
future
Jewry
for
generations
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to come.
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Now is the time tofigfiild.
of redemption.
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We have su§§eied and we have suz¥éved.
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Now is the time to complete the process
Let Act III commence!
Let it be said generations
hence, and let it be said partly at least thanks to us, 3g Zisrael
chai 3g b'li dai, "The people of Israel are alive, beyond all doubt."
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