AUGUST 31 • 2023 | 63

numerous. But the Egyptians ill-treated 
us and made us suffer, subjecting us to 
harsh labor. Then we cried out to the 
Lord, the God of our ancestors, and the 
Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, 
toil and oppression. So the Lord brought 
us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and 
an outstretched arm, with great terror and 
with signs and wonders.” Deut. 26:5-8
Here for the first time, the retelling of 
the nation’s history becomes an obligation 
for every citizen of the nation. In this act, 
known as vidui bikkurim, “the confession 
made over first-fruits,” Jews were com-
manded, as it were, to become a nation of 
storytellers.
This is a remarkable development. 
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi tells us that 
“only in Israel and nowhere else is 
the injunction to remember felt as 
a religious imperative to an entire 
people.” Time and again through-
out Devarim comes the command to 
remember: “Remember that you were a 
slave in Egypt.” (Deut. 5:15; 15:15; 16:12; 
24:18; 24:22); “Remember what Amalek 
did to you.” (Deut. 25:17) “Remember 
what God did to Miriam.” (Deut. 24:9) 
“Remember the days of old; consider the 
generations long past. Ask your father 
and he will tell you, your elders, and 
they will explain to you.” (Deut. 32:7)
The vidui bikkurim, though, is more 
than this. It is, compressed into the 
shortest possible space, the entire his-
tory of the nation in summary form. In 
a few short sentences we have here “the 
patriarchal origins in Mesopotamia, the 
emergence of the Hebrew nation in the 
midst of history rather than in mythic 
prehistory, slavery in Egypt and libera-
tion therefrom, the climactic acquisition 
of the land of Israel, and throughout — 
the acknowledgement of God as lord of 
history.”
We should note here an important 
nuance. Jews were the first people to find 
God in history. They were the first to 
think in historical terms — of time as an 
arena of change as opposed to cyclical 
time in which the seasons rotate, peo-
ple are born and die, but nothing really 
changes. Jews were the first people to 
write history — many centuries before 
Herodotus and Thucydides, often wrong-
ly described as the first historians. Yet 
biblical Hebrew has no word that means 
“history” (the closest equivalent is divrei 

hayamim, “chronicles”). Instead, it uses 
the root zachor, meaning “memory.”

HISTORY AND MEMORY
There is a fundamental difference 
between history and memory. History 
is “his story,” an account of events that 
happened sometime else to someone else. 
Memory is “my story.” It is the past inter-
nalized and made part of my identity. 
That is what the Mishnah in Pesachim 
means when it says, “Each person must 
see themselves as if they (personally) 
escaped Egypt.” (Mishnah Pesachim 10:5)
Throughout the book of Devarim, 
Moses warns the people — no less than 
14 times — not to forget. If they forget 
the past, they will lose their identity and 
sense of direction and disaster will fol-
low. Moreover, not only are the people 
commanded to remember, they are also 
commanded to hand that memory on to 
their children.
This entire phenomenon represents a 
remarkable cluster of ideas: about identity 
as a matter of collective memory; about 
the ritual retelling of the nation’s story; 
above all about the fact that every one of 
us is a guardian of that story and mem-
ory. It is not the leader alone, or some 
elite, who are trained to recall the past, 
but every one of us. This, too, is an aspect 
of the devolution and democratization 
of leadership that we find throughout 
Judaism as a way of life. The great leaders 
tell the story of the group, but the greatest 
of leaders, Moses, taught the group to 
become a nation of storytellers.
You can still see the power of this idea 
today. As I once wrote, if you visit the 
presidential memorials in Washington, 
you will see that each carries an inscrip-
tion taken from their words: Jefferson’s 
“We hold these truths to be self-evident 
. . .,” Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have 
to fear, is fear itself,” Lincoln’s Gettysburg 
Address and his second Inaugural, “With 
malice toward none; with charity for all.” 
Each memorial tells a story.
London has no such equivalent. It 
contains many memorials and statues 
of historical leaders, each with a brief 
inscription stating who it represents, 
but there are no speeches or quotations. 
There is no story. Even the memorial 
to Winston Churchill, whose speeches 
rivalled Lincoln’s in power, bears only one 
word: Churchill.

A NATIONAL STORY
America has a national story because it is 
a society based on the idea of covenant. 
Narrative is at the heart of covenantal 
politics because it locates national identity 
in a set of historic events. The memory of 
those events evokes the values for which 
those who came before us fought and of 
which we are the guardians.
A covenantal narrative is always 
inclusive, the property of all its citizens, 
newcomers as well as the native-born. 
It says to everyone, regardless of class 
or creed: this is who we are. It creates 
a sense of common identity that tran-
scends other identities. That is why, for 
example, Martin Luther King Jr. was able 
to use it to such effect in some of his 
greatest speeches. He was telling his fel-
low African Americans to see themselves 
as an equal part of the nation. At the 
same time, he was telling white-Amer-
icans to honor their commitment to 
the Declaration of Independence and 
its statement that “all men are created 
equal.”
England does not have the same kind 
of national narrative because it is based 
not on covenant but on hierarchy and 
tradition. England, writes Roger Scruton, 
“was not a nation or a creed or a language 
or a state but a home. Things at home 
don’t need an explanation. They are there 
because they are there.”
England, historically, was a class-based 
society in which there were ruling elites 
who governed on behalf of the nation as 
a whole. America, founded by Puritans 
who saw themselves as a new Israel 
bound by covenant, was not a society of 
rulers and ruled, but rather one of collec-
tive responsibility. Hence the phrase, cen-
tral to American politics but never used 
in English politics: “We, the people.”
By making the Israelites a nation of sto-
rytellers, Moses helped turn them into a 
people bound by collective responsibility 
— to one another, to the past and future, 
and to God. By framing a narrative that 
successive generations would make their 
own and teach to their children, Moses 
turned Jews into a nation of leaders. 

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) was a 

global religious leader, philosopher, the author of 

more than 25 books and moral voice for our time. His 

series of essays on the weekly Torah portion, entitled 

“Covenant & Conversation” will continue to be shared 

and distributed around the world. 

