My Bible

CHAIR: In this session, Jonathan Sacks, explores the story of the Exodus from Egypt. This session also marks the launch of his new Haggadah, aptly named The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah, which Book Week is delighted to be hosting. There are many Haggadot available, but this new one is very special and will enhance anyone’s enjoyment of the Seder service. The commentary and essays that he has written to accompany the text are, as one has come to expect, full of wonderful insights and bring original and fascinating contemporary perspectives to the familiar themes of Pesach. To give you an indication, the titles of the essays include: A Tale of Two Civilisations; Pesach, Freud and Jewish Identity; History and Memory; Women and the Exodus; and The Art of asking Many Questions. And so, unashamedly plagiarising the title of his first chapter, I am now going to ask him to tell us about this ‘Story of Stories’.

 

JONATHAN SACKS: Friends, I’ve been asked to talk this evening about the story of the Exodus, about the Haggadah, the Pesach narrative. I must say that, for the first time I can remember, I am actually reluctant to talk about one of my books. I normally love talking about them! But I had so much fun writing it that I don’t want to spoil your fun reading it by telling you ‘who dunnit’ or what-have-you! All I can say is that I’d rather you read it. As you probably know, it’s not one book but two, one of which is a new commentary to the Haggadah, and the other half of the book is a book in its own right on some of the big themes of Pesach, some of them in the form of classic shiurim, others where I’ve tried to bring together some of the different disciplines, philosophy, history of ideas, sociology, politics, and through them let the story of the Exodus speak to us again as something new.

 

I wanted to see whether, indeed, it did have something new to say and I think it does. What I’m really trying to do in this work is to listen to the Bible and to let it speak to us, bringing to bear on that listening the very best of what we know about the world as a whole and what we have learned in 3,300 years. What I have asked really, the tacit question I ask throughout this Haggadah is: Can we recover that wonderful broad sweep of Jewish scholarship which we saw last in the great classic Golden Age of Sephardi Jewry that began really with Saadia Gaon and culminated in Yosef Albo and included the really great figures Yehuda Halevy, Nahmanides, Maimonides? Can we recover something of that expansive way of studying our texts, and do so with full confidence in facing the universe of knowledge, and feel again the passion and the intellectual excitement which always should accompany our study of Torah? Does Judaism have something to say to the world? Does the world have something to say to us?

 

In particular what I felt, reading commentary after commentary after commentary on the Haggadah, is: Where are the commentaries that deal with the big themes? Those themes that really define the biblical story: Jewish identity, Jewish history, Jewish memory, the history of the West as a whole. How did the Haggadah affect the early Zionists? Did it cause, did it have a part to play, in the shivat zionim, the return to Zion? And, above all, the concept which gives Pesach its name and the Bible its meaning, zman heruteinu, the season of our freedom?

 

What does freedom mean in Judaism and what does that have to do with the modern world? Therefore, let me just share with you over the next few minutes one tiny fragment. It is less than one chapter of the book but I found it very, very interesting. Here it is. How has this story, the story of stories really, the great meta-narrative of western civilization, the story of the Exodus, how has that affected the world as a whole, not just us?

 

One thing is very striking and that is that there have been four revolutions that shaped the modern world. What were they? Yes, English, American, French, Russian. I am going to be extremely tendentious tonight (but then, that’s my prerogative!) and I’m going to say the following: that I think it is fair to say that the English and American Revolutions actually, despite their upheaval (I mean they both led civil wars), did create a successful transition to democracy, freedom of worship, freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and human rights. Whereas the French and Russian Revolutions remain far more ambiguous achievements in history. They were accompanied at various stages by significant suppression of human rights. The French and Russian Revolutions began in a dream of Utopia, and ended in the nightmare of hell.

 

The question is: What was the difference? How do we explain the difference between the English and American experience, and the French and Russian experience?

 

Let me postulate one significant fact. I don’t say that this is the whole explanation but surely it is part of it. The English and American Revolutions were based on the Hebrew Bible. The French and Russian Revolutions were significantly not. They were based on philosophical theories, the French one on, I suppose more than most, on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx. So we have a very interesting contrast between two routes to freedom: a biblical route and a philosophical route. And I just want to trace how the English and American Revolutions actually happened in very, very broad brushstrokes, and what did they have to do with the story of the book of Exodus and the book of Deuteronomy.

 

It seems to me that what is really significant is that freedom in the modern world reaches its point in the 17^th century through two extremely important events in the history of the West. The first, that day in 1517 when Martin Luther nails the 95 theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg; and the second, that moment in 1450 when Gutenberg invents printing. What did these two events do? How are they related?

 

Obviously, one of the features of the Reformation, whether we look at Luther or, even more significantly, Calvin, one of the things that happens is the Reformation attempts to move the authority of religious life from the Church to the Bible: sola scripture, go back to the Bible and read that because that is the ultimate authority. Of course, John Wycliffe had already said this in the 14^th century, but he didn’t make a great impact, it was not a best-seller. What happened between John Wycliffe in the 14^th century and Martin Luther in the 15^th century? [Answer from audience] Exactly. Excellent!

 

You see, when you say to people: ‘Go and read the Bible’, it doesn’t help very much if (a) you don’t have a Bible and (b) you can’t read. And, of course, in the days before printing, books were very expensive, in very short supply and, of course, where was the Bible? In the church. And who were the people who could read? They were the priests. You know the fascinating English word ‘clerical’, which means what? On the one hand it means a member of the clergy, and on the other it’s the person in the office who does the reading and writing. Now why do those two words come together in one? The answer is because, of course, in the Middle Ages it was the clergy who were literate. They were the ones who could read and write. And, therefore, you could not get to the Bible except through the Church and through the priest who told you what he wanted to tell you and didn’t tell you the rest.

 

The real significant development is in the 15^th century when suddenly printing makes this incredibly dramatic appearance and, for the first time, books are available on a large scale at an affordable price. And which were the first books produced in mass quantities? The Bibles. And, of course, this was the first time that the Bible was available in vernacular translation. All of a sudden, you know, you want to make the Bible accessible. You translate it into the local language. So, at that time you see the Coverdale, the Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, culminating in the King James’ Bible of 1611. And the incredible thing is that these things are produced in their hundreds of thousands.

 

I didn’t have time to read the papers this morning: was the late Christopher Hill a Russian spy or wasn’t he a Russian spy? But Christopher Hill points out in one of his works the sheer scale of this, that by 1640 there were a million Bibles in circulation in England alone. Does anyone know the population of England in 1640? Well I don’t. I mean I’m actually asking! Somewhere between five and seven million. So this sudden appearance of a million Bibles is evidence of all sorts of stuff: (1) the inexpensive nature of it; (2) the sudden mass of literacy; and (3) what comes out of all of this is democratisation of access to knowledge.

 

For the first time people are able to read the Bible in their own homes and discuss it amongst themselves. They do not have to go to an established authority to hear the Bible as expounded by the local priest. And this has a colossal effect on European culture. And of course what they found once they opened the Bible is something completely different from what the Church had been teaching them - for instance, ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’, you know, ‘leave politics to the politicians’ or ‘the divine right of kings’ or what the New Testament calls ‘the powers that be’. All of a sudden they read the Hebrew Bible. You know, they call the 21^st century ‘the age of the death of deference’. I don’t know if Judaism ever had a ‘birth of deference’! You open the pages of a Tanach and there you have prophets criticising kings. Nobody has got any derech eretz for anyone else! All of a sudden, you suddenly realise that in biblical politics you have got this framing event of the covenant at Sinai, Ten Commandments, the whole Torah, and all of a sudden, for the first time, people grasp the idea that there is a moral limit to the use of power. The kings, if they command you to do immoral things, should not be obeyed. And all of a sudden the entire inherently revolutionary potential of the Hebrew Bible gets unleashed.

 

So we find that, for instance, Cromwell, in his speeches to parliament, is constantly referring to Tanach, quoting it all the time. Of course he turns out to be Moshe Rabbeinu, but then he would get all the best parts, wouldn’t he! But there it is. Cromwell’s speeches are saturated with biblical references. And there, of course, on the way to America, the Pilgrim Fathers John Winthrop, who bought the Arabella in 1630, is giving the founders of America the sermons. He’s reading the Bible to them. He reads it as they do, in Hebrew. And what is he reading to them? The covenant that Moses makes on the banks of the Jordan at the end of the book of Devarim. These people are saturated in the biblical text.

 

And I have to say that, amongst the political theorists of modernity, that is the key text they engage in. Hobbes, in The Leviathan, Locke in his A Letter Concerning Toleration, even Spinoza, is engaged in a dialogue with the Bible. When Hobbes is doing the first political document of modern times, The Leviathan, he is not having a dialogue with Plato’s Republic. He is not engaged in a study of Aristotle’s Politics. He is quoting the Bible, 657 biblical quotations in Hobbes’ The Leviathan alone.

 

You suddenly realise that the growth of freedom in the modern world, in America and in England, is a biblical freedom. What is absolutely fascinating,,and this was one of the biggest discoveries I made in the course of writing this book, is that there is then a huge difference between England and America. In the 17^th century they are using the biblical text, biblical ideas. But for England, that stops there. It doesn’t continue, whereas in America it continues all the way through to the present day.

 

I discovered one of the most extraordinary and unknown commentaries to the biblical story of the Exodus. It’s a wonderful commentary, you can get it on the internet. …What do you think is the longest-running commentary to the Pesach story? The answer is the assembled inaugural addresses of American presidents, from Washington’s first in 1789 to George W. Bush in 2001. My computer wasn’t working today, perhaps it also suffers from burnout on the community front, so I couldn’t actually dig them up. But here it is. From every single inaugural, from 1789 to 2001, with one sole exception Washington’s second inaugural which lasts for three minutes and consists of only about six sentences, every one of them other than that refers to God. Almost all of them refer to divine providence. Most of them, many of them, in some form or another, refer to the Exodus from Egypt or refer to covenant and are saturated in biblical language.

 

You know that when Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were sitting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, and they are preparing the American Declaration of Independence, they designed the Great Seal of America. Ben Franklin had Moshe Rabbeinu leading the Israelites through the Red Sea with the pursuing Egyptians being drowned. I think the interpretation does not need to be spelled out. The Egyptians are the Brits, the Red Sea is the Atlantic, etc. etc. The wicked Pharoah is George III, etc. That was Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson thought that was a tiniest bit undiplomatic, and so he designed a seal which just had the pillar of cloud leading the Israelites through the wilderness. But that’s what they were thinking.

 

I mean the classic example is Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural. But just listen, in more recent times, listen to this language. I mean, think what would happen if a British Prime Minister spoke this language. Right? Here’s JFK inaugural, 1961:

 

‘I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago. The world is very different now for man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe, the belief (listen to this) that the Rights of Man come not from the generosity of the State but from the hand of God. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on earth God’s work must be truly our own.’ JFK

 

Now listen to LBJ in 1965. Listen to this. I might use this for a drosha one Shabbos! Just remind yourself, Exodus, leading the Israelites through the wilderness. Listen to this:

 

‘They came here, the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened, to find a place where a man could be his own man, they made a covenant with this land conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union. It was one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind and it binds us still. If we keep its terms we shall flourish. Under this covenant of justice, liberty and union, we have become a nation and we have kept our freedom but we have no promise from God that our greatness will endure. We have been allowed by Him to see greatness with the sweat of our hands and the strength of our spirit.’

 

Beautiful language. Biblical language. Nothing else. Here’s George W. in 2001. ‘I know this is in our reach,’ he’s talking about, I don’t know what he’s talking about actually!

 

‘I know this is in our reach because we are guided by a power larger than ourselves who creates us equal in His image. Americans are generous and strong and decent, not because we believe in ourselves but because we hold beliefs beyond ourselves. We are not this nation’s story’s author, God is, who fills time and eternity with His purpose. Yet His purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another.’

 

And you will find this, I repeat, in virtually all presidential inaugurals over the space of more than two centuries. What we are hearing in those speeches is what, in 1975, the American sociologist Robert Bellah called ‘civil religion’, and what is interesting about the civil religion of America is that it isn’t Christianity. This is not the language of Christianity. This is the language of the book of Exodus and the book of Devarim. This is straightforward Tanach, biblical, covenantal theology, based on a journey through the wilderness to the promised land.

 

In other words, America really identified with the Exodus story and made it their own. And here it is, I think a classic expression, Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame, in 1849 writing in the novel of his called White Jacket. Listen to the language here:

 

‘We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our time. We bear the ark of the liberties of the world. God has predestined. Mankind expects great things from our race, and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are pioneers of the world, the advance guard sent on through the wilderness of untried things to break a new path in the new world that is ours.’

 

Astonishing language. And what we have here, incidentally, is a fascinating thought which I don’t know if anyone reflected on before. We have a combination of two mitzvos. Firstly, when do we tell the story? On Pesach. Sit down. Tell the story to future generations. Secondly, does anyone remember when in biblical law the king had to tell the story to the people? You know of this particular mitzvah? After Succoth, every seventh year, the 612^th command, ‘ Hakel, hakel et-ha’am ha’anashim vehanashim vehataf’, ‘ Assemble the people and tell them the story’ which, according to most Jewish authorities and non-Jewish scholars was the book of Devarim in which Moses goes over that history of the Exodus and the wanderings.

 

So we have a sudden discovery that American presidential inaugurals are somewhere halfway between the Seder night on Pesach and mitzvas hakel, only they do it every four years! Az beseder! But that is actually what is happening. And that is, I find, a just fascinating thing.

 

So here we are, in a little fragment of one of the chapters of the book, suddenly realising that Pesach is a prelude to a very particular kind of politics in the modern world, the politics that I have called in a couple of my books, The Dignity of Difference and The Politics of Hope, ‘covenantal politics’. And there are other very, very good writers, the late Daniel Elazar and, lehavdil bein chaim lechaim, Michael Waltzer of Princeton, who have written about Exodus politics. And what I want you to understand, therefore, is that the story of the Exodus, the story of the Seder night, decisively influenced the shape of freedom in the modern world.

 

Now, what then was the difference between this kind of politics and the kind of politics that lay behind the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution? I said that the difference is between the Bible and philosophy. And, again to be tendentious, I am going to say this: what is the problem that philosophy has with politics? Philosophy has never been able to grapple with the concept of time. You either have a kind of Platonic philosophy which is timeless, or you have a Hegelian Marxist dialectic which sees history as inevitability.

 

Now, actually political change takes time and only happens in and through time. What’s more, that time is not Hegelian or Marxist time, which is inevitable. There is nothing inevitable in history because history is made by our choices and our choices are free and therefore there is no historical inevitability.

 

What is unique to Judaism is a concept of time which sees time as a journey with a starting point and a destination. Or time as a story with a beginning and an end. A journey that is full of digressions, faults, turnings, backslidings, blind alleys, the 40 years in the wilderness, what Nelson Mandela calls ‘the long walk to freedom’. But, a journey in which we never lose sight of where we started from, our origins all those centuries back. And we never lose sight of our destination, the promised land, the Messianic age.

 

And I have to tell you that that story through which we hand on our memories and our hopes to our children, and re-live it through the matzah, the maror, the four cups of freedom, that is human politics. Politics that goes with the grain of humanity knowing that there is no way suddenly to change through revolution without doing violence to everything that is human in our situation.

 

And therefore philosophy yields truth that is timeless. The Hebrew Bible yields truth that is lived and enacted and embodied in time. The big difference, therefore, is that philosophy sees truth as system, but the Bible sees truth as story.

 

System lives in a kind of timeless realm. But story, any story, any narrative, is enacted through time, through chronological sequence. That is why the Seder night is the story of all stories, the story of the long journey to freedom. That is, therefore, my view as to why the Pesach story was so powerful and so influential.

 

The truth is that the journey to freedom, to human rights, to mutual respect, to a society of justice and human dignity, is a long journey. It doesn’t happen in a single generation. I mean, Pesach happened 3,300 years ago. When was slavery abolished? In Britain and in America, only in the 19^th century. And in some parts of the western world, not until the 20^th century. It is a long journey and, therefore, we will never get there unless (a) we tell the story; (b) we tell it to our children and they to theirs; and (c) we therefore make a covenant with ancestors who vested their hopes in us and with our children whom we empower to take the journey one stage further. And that is why Pesach politics is so much better and greater and realistic than philosophical politics. That is why the Pesach story is the great meta-narrative of western civilisation.

 

What do we see from this?

 

Firstly, that Pesach is an essentially inescapably political festival. It is not just about ‘how big is a kezais of matzah?’ and ‘how long do you have to eat it?’ It is also about the kind of world we try and create.

 

Secondly, that its themes remain intensely relevant today. It is an incredible thing but, when we talk about lechem oni, the bread of affliction, how can we not be moved by that in a world in which, even today, 30,000 children die every single day from preventable diseases? In which millions, hundreds of millions of children, are suffering from lack of adequate food, housing, access to medical treatment? Where, even in 2015, on present estimates, 88 million children in the world will not have any education of any form whatsoever? And when we talk about the ‘politics of freedom’, which is what the Exodus story is a prelude to, is that any less relevant today in an age of failed states, rogue states and tyrannical regimes? I have to say that the Pesach story is at least as relevant today as it was at any point in the past.

 

Thirdly, we can now understand, and I’m going to be tendentious but provocative here, at least one aspect of the reason why it is that in the contemporary world, as of this moment, the country far and away more than any other country in the world that identifies with the plight of Israel right now, is the United States. Why is that? Well, there may be many reasons, but one reason I have suggested, it may be only a tiny reason, but the social and, above all, political construction of America is saturated in ideas, metaphors, the language of Tanach. The United States is closer to a biblical political system than any other contemporary country, and indeed more than most countries that have ever been.

 

Fourthly, the Pesach story has at least some relevance to Israel itself. You know, the Jewish tradition suggests, especially the Pesach, that there might just be an alternative to the relationship of religion and the State which consists in religious parts and coalition negotiations and so on and so forth. I call that ‘the politics of religious interest’. But there is something else, which is the politics of religious principle. And that is much more interesting and I have not yet seen that fully developed. It is a remarkable thing that very few Israelis have ever really studied, with the exception of the late Daniel Elazar of Bar Ilan of blessed memory, have made a serious effort to think through: ‘What are the political implications of Judaism for the structure of Israel as a Judaic state?’

 

Well, there we are. I hope you’ll find the book interesting. I hope it will provoke you to ask some interesting questions about how Israel could be a different kind of place and about what Pesach does have to say to us. You know that there are more commentaries to the Haggadah than on any other book in the entire Jewish literature? So when you come to write the ten thousand and first commentary to the Haggadah, you are forced to ask, Ma nishtanah haHaggadah hazot micol haHaggadot? And I hope you will find it a little bit different because I have to try to bring out the big themes, to make the text live for our time, and to map it onto the landscape of Israel today and the contemporary western world.

 

I enjoyed writing it. I hope you will enjoy reading it. Thank you very much.