Generation by generation, each person must see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt, as it is said: “This is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.” (Mishnah Pesachim 10:5)
Once, at a dinner, I found myself sitting next to a famous opera singer. “What I envy you for [he meant Jews],” he said, “is your gift of history. I know nothing about my great-grandparents, but you have a history that goes all the way back.”
So strong is this sense that Benjamin Disraeli (born a Jew, but baptized by his father as a child) referred to it in one of his most famous replies in Parliament. In 1835, the Irish Catholic politician Daniel O’Connell made a slighting reference to Disraeli’s Jewish ancestry. Disraeli replied, “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
Where does it come from, this Jewish consciousness of the past? The prophets of Israel were the first people to see God in history. The ancient world – the world of myth – saw the presence of the gods in nature, in the unchanging rhythm of the seasons and the fearful dislocations of flood, famine, and storm. The revolution of ancient Israel was to see God not in nature but above it, utterly transcendent, yet revealing Himself to mankind in the form of a call to build a different kind of society than any that had existed hitherto.
Monotheism was not the only great Israelite discovery. More significant still was the realization that God is not only the Creator but also the Redeemer. As Judah Halevi pointed out in the Kuzari, the Ten Commandments begin not with the words “I am the Lord your God who created heaven and earth,” but with “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 20:2). He is to be found not only in what Wordsworth described as that “sense sublime” of “something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air,” but in the great events of history, above all the liberation of a small slave people from the grip of the greatest empire of the ancient world, the Egypt of the pharaohs.
From earliest times, Israel knew that something unprecedented had happened whose significance would reverberate far beyond its own time. Speaking to the generation that would soon cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land, Moses reminded them of the unique experience they had undergone:
Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created man on earth; ask from one end of the heavens to the other. Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of ?… Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by miraculous signs and wonders and wars, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? [Deut. 4: 32,34]
Israel knew God not by contemplating the sun and the stars but directly through its own past. Where other faiths, ancient and modern, saw religion as the flight from history into a world without time, Judaism saw time itself as the arena where God and mankind met. Three-quarters of the Hebrew Bible is made up of historical narratives. Jews were the first to make the momentous claim that history has meaning. It is not merely a sequence of disconnected events, but the long story of humanity’s response to, or rebellion against, the voice of God as it echoes in the conscience of mankind.
