Question of the Week: What does "Haggadah" mean?

When
We Were
Sla, es
In Egypt

Our unique experience
before the Exodus.

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
Apple Tree Editor

esach is so full of imagery and sym-
bols that it is easy to focus on one
aspect of the holiday while missing
the full, underlying meaning of what
we are commemorating.
This often happens with the issue of slavery. For
some Jews, Pesach is the celebration of liberation
from slavery and not much else. All the details of
the story of the Exodus
from the rescue of
Moshe to his appointment by God as the savior of
Israel to the Ten Plagues and the splitting of the
sea — revolve around the fact that the Jews were
slaves in need of liberation.
Although God does command Jews to observe
the day of their liberation (Exodus 12: 14-19), it
should be understood how the Jews' experience of
slavery differed from all others.
The traditional Jewish view is that the enslave-
ment and liberation of the Jews from Egypt
served the purpose first of fulfilling a promise
made by God, and second of establishing the
Jews as a nation.
Within the Torah section regarding the
"Covenant Between the Parts" (Genesis 15:13-14),
God tells Avram (who later became Avraham),
that his descendants would spend 400 years as
aliens in a strange land, that God would judge the
host society of that land, and that Avram's descen-
dants would leave that alien land as rich people. It
was only after this experience that the Jews would
be worthy of receiving the Land of Israel.
With this mystical episode and its curious mes-
sage, it is apparent how the Egyptian slavery expe-
rience is one element in an evolving relationship
with God that ultimately led to nationhood and
statehood: The Children of Israel had to go
through Egypt to emerge as the nation of Israel.
As the Torah puts it, the Exodus was a process of
taking "a nation from within a nation"
(Deuteronomy 4:34).
Unlike cases where persons become enslaved
when their countries are conquered by others more
powerful, or where the indebted sell themselves
into slavery, or where professional slave traders
abduct hapless victims, the ancient Jews were
turned into slaves by their neighbors.
From the rabbinical view, the liberation of the
Jews was not necessary only because of the indig-
nity or outrage of enslaving a fellow human, but to
rescue the Jews from the depths of depravity in

which their Egyptian masters dwelled. The rabbis
tell us that Egypt, while the most technologically
advanced society of its time, was, nonetheless, the
most morally corrupt. Indeed, archaeological evi-
dence points out that incestuous marriages were
common in ancient Egypt.
What is worse, the rabbis teach, is that the Jews,
by living in Egypt, had sunk to almost the lowest
level of Egyptian-type impurity, themselves.
God's desire was not that the Jews should be the
equal of the Egyptians in Egypt which, the rab-
bis point out, would be little different from slavery
— but to leave Egypt altogether, both physically
and spiritually.
Egypt was not evil because it enslaved others,
but because it, as personified by Pharaoh, had no
concept of God.
Thus it was God, and not the Jews themselves,
who engineered the liberation. The Ten Plagues
were God's method of teaching divine omnis-
cience. As stated in the Vayotzieynu section of the
Haggadah: "And God brought us out of Egypt —
not through an angel, not through a seraph, not
through a messenger, but the Holy One, blessed
be He, in His glory, Himself."
Moses' appeal to Pharaoh was not to let the peo-
ple go because slavery in and of itself was evil, but
because the Jews ought to serve God and not the
king of Egypt (Exodus 7:16, and several places
through chapters 8, 9 and 10).
Although Egyptian society as a whole was accus-
tomed to the use of slaves (Jews were not the only
foreigners the Egyptians enslaved), the Torah
implies that the Jews were, for the most part, state
slaves. Whereas in other societies slaves were used
to save their masters from bothersome labor or to
support a national economy, most of the Jewish
slaves of Egypt worked for the glory of Pharaoh
himself. They were forced to build Pithom and
Raamses, "storage cities for Pharaoh" (Exodus
1:11). It is not surprising that God's focus of atten-
tion in getting the Jews out of Egypt is Pharaoh.
While in other societies, foreign people were
brought in specifically to serve as slaves, (either
as war prisoners or as captives sold in slave mar-
kets), the Jews settled in Egypt at the behest of
the government (Genesis 45:17-20; 47:5-6, 27).
It was only decades later, under a new ruler, that
the Jews were viewed as a source of trouble and
made slaves.
In many places, such as the United States, slaves
were regarded as inferior beings, brutes incapable
of civilization fit only for physical labor and