48 | APRIL 6 • 2023 

P

esach is a night of 
questions, but there 
is one we do not ask, 
and it is significant. Why 
was there a Pesach in the 
first place? Why the years of 
suffering and slavery? Israel 
was redeemed. 
It regained its 
freedom. It 
returned to the 
land its ances-
tors had been 
promised cen-
turies before. 
But why the 
necessity of exile? Why did 
God not arrange for Abraham 
or Isaac or Jacob simply to 
inherit the land of Canaan? 
If the Israelites had not gone 
down to Egypt in the days 
of Joseph, there would have 
been no suffering and no 
need for redemption. Why 
Pesach?
The question is unavoid-
able, given the terms of the 
biblical narrative. The Torah 
indicates that there was 
nothing accidental about the 
events leading up to Pesach. 
Centuries before, Abraham 
had been told by God in 
the “covenant between the 
pieces,” “Know for certain 
that your descendants will 
be strangers in a country not 
their own, and they will be 
enslaved and ill-treated for 
four hundred years” (Genesis 
15:13). 
We make repeated ref-
erence in the course of the 
Haggadah to the fact that the 
whole sequence of events was 
part of a pre-ordained plan. 
God “had already calculated 
the end” of suffering. When 
Jacob went down to Egypt 
he was, we say, anus al pi 
ha-dibbur, “forced by Divine 
decree.” 
God Himself told Jacob, 
“Do not be afraid to go down 
to Egypt, for I will make you 
into a great nation there” 

(Genesis 46:3) without giv-
ing him an intimation of the 
sufferings his children would 
endure. The Sages say that at 
the end of his life, when Jacob 
wanted to tell his children 
what would happen to them 
“at the end of days,” the gift 
of prophecy was taken from 
him. Without knowing it, the 
Israelites were part of a nar-
rative that had been scripted 
long before.
A Midrash — one of the 
few places in which the Sages 
expressed their disquiet about 
this strange stratagem of 
providence — expresses the 
problem very acutely:
The Holy One blessed be 
He sought to bring about the 
decree He had spoken of to 
Abraham, that “your descen-
dants will be strangers in a 
country not their own.” So He 
arranged that Jacob should 
love Joseph more than his 
other sons, that the brothers 
would be jealous and hate 
Joseph, that they would sell 
him to the Ishmaelites who 
would bring him down to 
Egypt, and that Jacob would 
hear that Joseph was still alive 
and living there. The result 
was that Jacob and the tribes 
went to Egypt and became 
enslaved. 

WHY SLAVERY?
Rabbi Tanhuma said: To 
what can this be compared? 
To a herdsman who wishes 
to place the yoke on a cow, 
but the cow refuses to have 
it placed on her. What does 
the herdsman do? He takes a 
calf from the cow and leads 
it to the field where plough-
ing is to take place. The calf 
begins to cry for its mother. 
The cow, hearing the calf cry, 
rushes to the field, and there, 
while its attention is distract-
ed and it is thinking only of 
its child, the yoke is placed 
upon it. (Tanhuma, Vayeshev, 
4)
The script God writes for 
His people is sometimes cir-
cuitous and terrifying. The 
Sages applied to it the point-
ed phrase: “How awesome 
is God in His dealings with 
humankind” (Psalm 66:5). 
Why did He want His people 
to experience slavery? Why 
was exile in Egypt the nec-
essary prelude to their life 
as a sovereign nation in the 
Promised Land?
The Book of Jonah tells 
a strange story. Jonah has 
been asked by God to con-
vey a warning to the people 
of Nineveh. Their ways are 

corrupt; the city will be 
destroyed unless they repent. 
Jonah flees from his mis-
sion, and in the course of the 
book we learn why. He knew, 
he says, that the people of 
Nineveh, hearing the words 
of the prophet, would repent 
and be forgiven. For Jonah, 
this was unjust. When people 
do wrong, they should suf-
fer the consequences and be 
punished. 
This was particularly so in 
the case of Nineveh, a city of 
the Assyrians who were to be 
the cause of so much suffer-
ing to Israel. God’s forgive-
ness conflicted with Jonah’s 
sense of retributive justice. 
God decides to teach Jonah a 
moral lesson. He sends him 
a gourd to give him shade 
from the burning sun. The 
next day He sends a worm 
that makes the gourd wither 
and die. Jonah is plunged into 
suicidal depression. 
God then says to him: “You 
have been concerned about 
this gourd, though you did 
not tend it or make it grow. 
It sprang up overnight and 
died overnight. But Nineveh 
has more than 120,000 people 
who cannot tell their right 
hand from their left, and 
many cattle as well. Should I 

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

The Unasked Question 

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

