Passover Wisdom for a Nation Losing Its Memory

America is suffering from a cultural Alzheimer’s. An ancient Jewish ritual—the Passover seder—may hold the cure. 

Last year, more than 7 in 10 Americans failed the basic civic literacy quiz administered annually by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. Even among college students, knowledge of basic facts about American history and civics is shockingly low. The results of a recent survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni were so distressingly poor that they titled their corresponding report: “Losing America’s Memory.” 

This goes beyond knowledge of mere trivia. What’s at stake is our very identity and purpose as Americans. In his classic work “After Virtue,” Alasdair MacIntyre wrote: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I do to?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”  

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The stories we tell shape who we are. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, put it: “Identity, which is always particular, is based on story, the narrative that links me to the past, guides me in the present, and places on me responsibility for the future.” 

The Biblical Roots of the American Story 

Our forefathers understood this truth. Our long-standing national commitment to religious liberty, for example, stems not merely from the rational acceptance of some abstract ideal, but rather from our national story, which defines who we are and what we stand for.  

Our national forefathers, the Puritans, suffered persecution for their beliefs and so they crossed an ocean seeking a home in the New World where they would have the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. The Puritans, in turn, drew deeply from the wellsprings of the Bible—seeing themselves as the Israelites, the king of England as the pharaoh, the Atlantic Ocean as the Red Sea, and America as the new Promised Land.  

Generations later, understanding the power linking the American story to the biblical story of the Exodus, Ben Franklin proposed that our national seal be an image of “Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand.” (Unsurprisingly, this pharaoh looked quite a bit more like King George III than Ramses II.) Underneath the image, Franklin proposed, would appear the following motto: “Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.”  

Cultural Alzheimer’s Is a Choice 

Perhaps worst of all is that our cultural Alzheimer’s is a choice. “The trouble with humanity,” Richard Weaver wryly observed, “is that it forgets to read the minutes of the last meeting.” We, collectively, are failing to pass on the story of who we are to the next generation.  

Radicals have convinced too many Americans that we lack a story worth telling. The supposedly “real” American story, they say, is rooted in our “original sin” of slavery, a product of our inherent and institutional racism—as if what is exceptional about America is slavery itself, and not that we fought a war to eradicate it. 

The radicals want us to stop telling our story because they know it forms the basis of Americans’ commitment to our constitutional order—liberty, justice, the rule of law, limited government, natural rights, and the equal dignity of all human beings. The critical theorists know that the first step to undermining and replacing our constitutional order is persuading us that the American founding was in 1619 not 1776. 

The Mandate of Moses to Remember  

It is Moses who taught us that having a future depends on remembering our past.  

On the eve of the Exodus, Moses commanded the Israelites to educate their children about their story, how God freed them from the house of bondage with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. As it says, “And you shall tell your son in that day, saying, ‘This is done because of what the LORD did for me when I came up from Egypt.’”   

As Rabbi Sacks explained: “It is as if Moses were saying: ‘Forget where you came from and why, and you will eventually lose your identity, your continuity, and raison d’etre. … Forget the story of freedom and you will eventually lose freedom itself.” 

This story would define who the Israelites were and what they stood for, including how they treated others. “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the soul of a stranger, since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  

Moses knew that to survive as a people, the Israelites would have to be intentional about transmitting their story to succeeding generations—for it was the story that defined who they were and what they stood for. Forgetting the story would be an act of national suicide. 

This is why Jews gather around the dinner table every year during Passover to retell the story of freedom. More than a just a meal, the Passover seder is designed to transmit Jewish values and identity to the children present through a combination of storytelling, songs, symbolic foods, rituals, and creative biblical exegesis. For more than 3,000 years, including nearly two millennia in exile, the Passover rituals have kept Jewish memory alive, and that has kept the Jewish people alive. 

Passover’s Lesson for America 

For America to survive, we must keep the American story alive. As President Ronald Reagan warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” 

In his commentary on the Passover Haggadah, Rabbi Sacks connects the Passover rituals to American civic rituals, such as presidential inaugural addresses, that give shape to America’s civil religion:  

In a strange way civil religion has the same relationship to the United States as [Passover] does to the Jewish people. It is, first and foremost, not a philosophy but a story. It tells of how a persecuted group escaped from the Old World and made a hazardous journey to an unknown land, there to construct a new society, in Abraham Lincoln’s famous words, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Like the [Passover] story, it must be told repeatedly, as it is in every inaugural address. It defines the nation, not merely in terms of its past but also as a moral-spiritual commitment to the future.  

It is no accident that the founders of America turned to the Hebrew Bible, or that successive presidents have done likewise, because there is no other text in Western literature that draws these themes—history, providence, covenant, responsibility, “the exile and the stranger,” the need to fight for freedom in every generation—together in a vision that is at once political and spiritual. Israel, ancient and modern, and the United States are the two supreme examples of societies constructed in conscious pursuit of an idea. 

Americans today need to be intentional about transmitting the American story and American values to the next generation. That could mean new rituals, such as the Fourth of July seder proposed by Dennis Prager.  

But most of all, America needs schools that are dedicated to cultural transmission. As the Phoenix Declaration observes, a “civilization survives only if it intentionally transmits its history, traditions, and values. American students must learn “the whole truth about America—its merits and failings—without obscuring that America is a great source of good in the world and that we have a tradition that is worth passing on.”