Making Pesach Personal How the Seder Makes Passover OUR story

Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff - Summary of Rav Shimon Schwab

One of the most intriguing answers in how we are expected to see ourselves as though we left Egypt comes from Rav Shimon Schwab in his book Maayan Beit Hashoeiva, Exodus 13:8.

His mind-bending interpretation is that you were there, you just don’t remember being there. When the Torah says “What Hashem did for me” that is a literal verse -- it is not speaking in metaphorical or theoretical language; the Torah says it because the Torah means it. You were in Egypt, and you were taken out.

He explains this phenomenon in the following way: Your body is made up of many parts. It is a known fact that the body you have now is not the same body you had as a baby or even as a child. Over your many years living on earth your body has changed. You not only have grown, but billions of your cells have died out and new ones have appeared. If you were to look at a picture of yourself as a newborn, you most likely wouldn’t have realized it was you without your mother telling you that you are the cute baby in the photo. That baby doesn’t look like you, sound like you, smell like you or feel like you, but it is still you. You don’t even remember being a newborn! But that was you whether you remember it or not.

The Jewish people are very much the same. Our ancestors are not different people who we descend from, they are us, just an earlier version of us, just like that baby was us all those years ago. The fact that those Jews in Egypt sounded, looked and acted differently is irrelevant. You are looking at the Jewish people the wrong way, says Rabbi Schwab — we are one large organic being that spans thousands of years of Jewish history. We were “born” as a people in Egypt over 3,000 years ago and have slowly been growing as a people ever since then.

Ritual, Myth, and Eternal Return: Mircea Eliade

Escaping the 'Terror of History'

In our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history—from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning; if they are only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the 'liberties' that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history?

We know how, in the past, humanity has been able to endure the sufferings we have enumerated: they were regarded as a punishment inflicted by God, the syndrome of the decline of the 'age,' and so on. And it was possible to accept them precisely because they had a metahistorical meaning [...] Every war rehearsed the struggle between good and evil, every fresh social injustice was identified with the sufferings of the Saviour (or, for example, in the pre-Christian world, with the passion of a divine messenger or vegetation god), each new massacre repeated the glorious end of the martyrs. [...] By virtue of this view, tens of millions of men were able, for century after century, to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without committing suicide or falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history.

The Terror of the 'Eternal Return'

In certain highly evolved societies, the intellectual élites progressively detach themselves from the patterns of traditional religion. The periodical resanctification of cosmic time then proves useless and without meaning. [...] But repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence. When it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation [...] that is, when it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity.