Wrestling With Passover

How should American Jews who have no intention of making their own exodus understand this beloved but somewhat problematic story?

Passover at the White House, 2010. And yes, they’re using the Maxwell House Haggadah. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

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Since Passover begins this weekend, I offer this conversation I had with my good friend Rabbi Yael Ridberg about the meaning of the holiday, the problematic parts of the Passover story, how to think about living in the diaspora when you have no intention of making your own exodus, and the purpose of looking for hope in the darkness.

You can listen to the audio here, or on your favorite podcast app. I’ve also included a transcript below.

Paul Waldman: In my family, as in many secular Jewish families, Passover was the most important Jewish holiday, really the only one we celebrated with any vigor. But the events of the last year and a half have led many people to re-examine their own practices and ideas. And since Passover begins this weekend, I thought it was a good opportunity to ask some probing questions about what this holiday means, particularly in the world today and in our own lives.

I hope this discussion will be of interest not just to Jews, but to anyone who's curious about the relationship of tradition to politics and contemporary life. So when I had the idea of doing this episode, I knew who I wanted to help guide me through my own questions and my own uncertainty. Yael Ridberg is Rabbi of Congregation Dor Hadash in La Jolla, California. She is the past president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. She writes and speaks frequently about all kinds of issues. And she is a very good friend of mine.

So I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of questions about the American Jewish experience, the meaning of the diaspora and how it relates to Passover. What's the deal with God? That guy. But why don't we start, Yael, with you telling people what the story of Passover is and what the holiday is about and what Jews do and what it's supposed to mean.

Yael Ridberg: Sure. So on one foot, as we like to say, Passover is the origin story of the Jewish people. So if Genesis I in the Bible is the story of all humanity and the mythic creation of the world, the Passover story is what's animated and kind of sustained Jewish peoplehood for thousands of years. It's a remembrance in the book of Exodus of the time when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt for some 400 years under a tyrannical ruler who violently suppressed the Israelite minority living under his rule and who feared one day they might rise up against him. And so there were taskmasters to carry out his plan and the Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites and forced them to endure slavery and oppression.

And so the story of Passover comes to teach that a person named Moses was appointed by God to be sort of the proxy for God, to be able to go in and to redeem the Israelites from Egypt. And he did so according to the text with a lot of help and some signs and portents from God, the 10 plagues that afflicted the Egyptians until such time as Pharaoh would say, okay, enough already, you can go.

The whole story is made really clear in Cecil B. DeMille's iconic 10 Commandments, but really the story is about the exodus from Egypt and our foundational story as a Jewish people, as a story of remembrance of the past, what grounds us in the present and always helps us to think about who we are as a people going forward. It's the single most – you're not alone Paul, it's the single most celebrated Jewish holiday, regardless of background, regardless of observance, religiosity, anything. It's the single most celebrated holiday because it's a home-based holiday with a festive meal and special symbols and singing and matzah, the dreaded cardboard, no yeast in the dough. Maybe we'll talk about why that is, but that's the short version. Did I catch everything you possibly wanted in that? Okay.

Paul Waldman: So do you think it's because it's, as you said, a home-based holiday that that's why it's the one that even Jews who don't go to synagogue on the high holidays and things like that, that they still do? Is that the reason or is there something more fundamental there that makes it the one that even people who are not observant in almost any other way will still do Passover?

Yael Ridberg: Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of it. I think it's always helpful if you don't have to leave home to make such a big effort. Although Passover is the most effort-driven holiday with preparing, if you're in a home that won't eat any products that are rising, right? We don't have any kind of yeast in the dough, it's all without that kind of puffiness of the bread because we didn't have time for the dough to rise before leaving Egypt. But it's really about, I think, the archetypal redemption story. That's really at the core. That it's a reminder that as much as I think the world has changed in obvious ways since ancient times, but there's no change in what oppression and degradation and exploitation are all about and they're part of the human condition now as they were thousands of years ago.

So it's a holiday that allows for both a grounding in the past story, but also the ability to look at it with the hope that drives it. Because that's also at its core is that it's really a hopeful story. The idea that there can be dignity from degradation. There can be a rising out of oppression and slavery.

Paul Waldman: It has a happy ending.

Yael Ridberg: Yes, in so far as Jews are ever really happy, yes, it has a happy ending. It is of the stories of the holidays where, you know, as the adage goes, they tried to kill us, we won, let's eat. As opposed to, they tried to kill us and we lost. So if those are the animating ideas, you know, in a humorous way behind holidays, then this is, yes, a joyful and a very hope-filled holiday.

Paul Waldman: This is from my perspective as, as I said, a secular Jew who grew up not really going to synagogue, but for whom Jewishness was still very important in our family. I think that there's a couple of things that strike me about it as I try to think about it more. The first is that it expresses certain liberal ideas that can be divorced from God. So even if you strip away everything about the story that has to do with anything divine, it can still just be a story of liberation. We were slaves and that sucked and we escaped and now we're free. And this reminds us that slavery is bad and liberation is good. Even if the God stuff doesn't do anything for you, you can still appreciate the story as sort of expressing that basic value.

And then there's the, it's sort of a stand-in for the entirety of Jewish history, I think. That as Jews, our history is one of oppression and displacement. And this tells that first iteration of that story. And it also makes it kind of an explanation for American Jewish liberalism. Let me tell you the story that I have repeated to my kids many times at Passover Seders. One of the things I say to them is that Passover is an immigration story and that's your history too. You live in America because, it’s my grandparents and their parents who came, so it's my kids’ great-grandparents, who fled the Czar and the Cossacks who were killing them and raping them. And they undertook this arduous, dangerous, uncertain journey across land and sea to go to a place where they didn't know what their life was going to be like, they didn't speak the language. It was this extraordinarily difficult thing. They didn't have anything. They knew they were going to have to work terribly hard.

And why did they do this thing? What I say to my kids is, they did it for you. So that you can live the life that you do in this country with so much opportunities, you can do almost anything, and you have this life of relative ease and comfort. And you may never in your life have to do something as difficult as what your great-grandparents did.

So Passover helps us remember that your privileges and opportunities were built on the suffering and the courage of those people who came before you. And I have to say, in terms of it being kind of a liberal story, I don't know if conservatives would disagree with this, but the understanding of Judaism that I was raised in was, everybody jokes about how like Jewish parents are always like, look at that person who's Jewish, you know, like that Nobel Prize winner, his name is Bernstein. That's that was certainly a part of how I was raised, and I think every Jew I know was raised. But there was also something where, at least in my house, my parents were always pointing to people who were on the forefront of social justice efforts.

One of the stories that that that my mother in particular always pointed to was the story of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, the three civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi. James Chaney was black, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were Jewish. And the lesson of that was that this is what Jews do, that they are taking action to create justice in the world, even at risk to themselves. And this is something to be deeply proud of.

That's the way that I would like the Passover story to be told as this thing that says, yes, we have experienced oppression and displacement, and that's why we have to be sympathetic to those who experience oppression and displacement, and we have to understand what it means in the world.

Yael Ridberg: So far, so good. I'm with you.

Paul Waldman: Okay, well here's a question then. In that story, there's no God. Is that a problem? The story that I tell about what Passover means, it doesn't have anything to do with religion. It doesn't have to do with the parting of the Red Sea. So is there something that's problematic about the fact that the divine element is stripped away?

Yael Ridberg: So, okay, we could spend a lot of time just talking about theology. But what I want to say is this, there's the way that I think Judaism, the way I approach Judaism, as a religious leader, as a person of faith, as a rabbi for 30 years, whatever, all these things, and as a Reconstructionist Jew, which is a liberal denomination that seeks to understand the intersection between modernity and the past and to understand how Jews are an evolving religious civilization, that we have evolved and changed throughout our history. There's a way to look at the traditional biblical story that is, canonic in its way, we're not changing that story. And there's a way to see it as sacred mythology. I don't mean this in a cute way, like, “Oh, it's a fairy tale.” I think sacred mythology is actually quite profound, because it teaches us all kinds of way literature is profound. It doesn't have to be 100% true in the way that it's told to find meaning in it, whether you're talking about God, as an actual force or power that makes for liberation in the world, or whether you're just talking about a really good story.

Because you can ask not just about God, but in general, is this story of the liberation of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage true? I mean, not just God, but there's a parting of the Red Sea and there's these 10 plagues that are kind of fantastic and how do they even, are they true? If by “true” you want to know is God literally true and is this an accurate accounting of events that happened more or less the way they are told and therefore if you don't tell them that way, you're sort of, as you say, right, missing a major piece of it. I would say that our ancestors who wrote down the Bible, and I believe that human beings wrote these divinely inspired stories, they wrote them down. And those who wrote the Haggadah, which is the text that we use at the Passover Seder, which means the telling of the story, they didn't write history.

They wrote of their experience of this power that made for redemption or stood against oppression and in favor of freedom. And if God is a power, a force in the world that makes for these things, you can tell the story by saying, in the Bible, the Bible imagines, or the Torah as we call it, the Bible imagines that God reached in or through Moses' agency and pulled the people out of the land. And you don't ever have to ask the question, do we really believe that God did that? Because you're talking about a sacred text that says something that we may or may not know if it actually happened exactly the same way, but we can give credence to it by saying that the text imagines that? That gives us liberty both to subscribe to the traditional texts, but also to say, we may or may not believe in its literal nature.

It's a question of your sense of your relationship to Judaism to exclude theology from the history of the Jewish people or not. You don't have to subscribe theologically, but to ignore that at one time, this story resonated primarily because of a supernatural God and the whole idea that God knows us, because that's the whole evolution of Jewish life, religious thinking and religious thought. It's part of the DNA, if you will, of the Jewish people. It doesn't mean that you, Paul Waldman in 2025, still subscribe to the exact same thinking that our ancestors did about the story and about the accuracy or the reality of God's power.

Paul Waldman: Well, that brings up a question that I have about the 10 plagues. Believe in God or not, he's not a very nice guy.

Yael Ridberg: Not in this story, no.

Paul Waldman: The God of the Old Testament is capricious and cruel. In this in this story, it's Pharaoh's decision not to let the Jews go, that brings about the plagues. But Pharaoh, he's sitting safe in his castle with his attendants while the common heartland working class Egyptians are the ones who have to deal with the locusts and the frogs and the murder of the firstborn and they're being punished. I was looking at this humanist Haggadah that talks about having mourning and sympathy for the suffering of the Egyptian people in this part of the story. But it's the God of the Jews that's doing it to them!

Yael Ridberg: So first of all, tyrants don't care, not only do they not care about the others that they're oppressing, they don't care about their own people who are caught up in the mix of that same suffering. Okay, so we can agree that Pharaoh as depicted in the Exodus story – and certainly by Yul Brenner – really does not care about the suffering of his own people. And that goes for how they are imagined to be the task masters, and they're the ones inflicting pain, right? And we could look at any period of history with genocidal tendencies, whether you're talking about the Holocaust, you're talking about Rwanda, whether you're talking about any other time where those locals, those working class or those folks on the ground, they're not faring too well either. So that's one thing.

The rabbis of the Third to the Fifth century of the common era, who after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 of the common era, just a little Jewish history here, sought to figure out a way to reconnect to God, reconnect to their practices, reconnect to the stories of their people. And, they looked at the Bible story and they also were sort of like, hmm, what, God is sort of capricious and like, why is God hardening God's heart, for example? That's in the text too, not just that Pharoah hardened his own heart, but that God hardened Pharoah’s heart to keep him from letting the people go.

Paul Waldman: That never made any sense to me at all.

Yael Ridberg: That still doesn't make sense. It still doesn't make sense. The challenge of the text is to ask what is that about, right? And is there something to be said for what we keep ourselves from doing in the world when we block our own capacity for forward movement? But that's another sermon.

There's a midrash, there's a rabbinic interpretation about the moment when the water closes over the Egyptians after the Israelites are imagined to have made it safely to the other side. And the midrash says – midrash is a word that means interpretation or like a sense that it's not literally, it's the rabbi's sort of their own fantasy of what's really going on between the lines of the text – and so there's this story that apparently the archangels, the ministering angels up in the heavenly world start rejoicing over the demise of the Egyptians. And the text imagines there that God chastises them and says, how can you rejoice when my creatures are drowning?

So is it consistent? Absolutely not. But that would be asking far too much, right, of religious text and tradition that if you want it to be consistent all the time, you will be absolutely sorely disappointed. Because it's complicated. Because life is not always so simple either. And certainly politics is not so simple, right? It's not always that the good guy wins and the bad guys are punished, right? Sometimes good people suffer and sometimes bad guys go without punishment.

It's no different in the text. Yes, Pharaoh is inflicting oppression. And what is the way to the tyrant and to stop his tyranny? Well, at least in that story, God says, I'm more powerful than you, Pharaoh. And I want my supremacy as the God of this story to be clear. And so, the first few plagues that God brings or is imagined to bring, you might remember if you've read this text at all in this way, Pharaoh calls his magicians and says, hey, hey, like, counter this. So the first three or four plagues, blood and frogs and lice, these things, his courtiers and his magicians, they can stop it. And then comes a time where they're actually no longer as powerful as God has imagined to be. And so the plagues get more intense until the very end, of course, where it's so personal that Pharaoh has to say, okay, okay, go.

Paul Waldman: This is why the plagues have always reminded me of economic sanctions. We want to punish Iran, say, for something, so we impose a bunch of economic sanctions. And the whole idea is not that the Ayatollah is going to suffer, but that things will get so bad for the people of Iran with whom we have no argument that then he will decide eventually to change whatever policy we want him to change. I also like how a midrash is kind of like retconning, you know what that term is? It's retroactive continuity. It's when like, a later Star Wars thing, they insert some little explanation, like, here's why this makes sense with the other things now that we've changed how we understand it.

Yael Ridberg: 100% yes. That's exactly what they do. And it's fantasy because there's no evidence. What they're trying to do, and this is why I think that Judaism really does as an evolving religious civilization teach us how to contend with the ancient story and the modern world, because that's what they were trying to do back then too. They were like, wait, really? Like that's what happened? I don't really think that that's the case. What does that mean for us? And so they developed all kinds of ways of thinking about that to try to address their own questions, their own quote modern questions. They were modern at one time; they're not modern for us now. But I would say that Jews today, observant Jews, whatever the level of observance, we are not biblical Jews. We are rabbinic Jews. We are Jews that have inherited the, the tradition of taking the past and making it relevant in any era. And we assume to a lesser or greater extent the authority to make those decisions based on our reality.

And Passover is a perfect story and a perfect holiday to do that because there's still lots of things that very, very uber-traditional Jews do in terms of their preparation and what they don't eat and all of the things. And yet they will have modern adaptations to the Seder to remind us, which it's supposed to be really for the benefit of teaching the next generation, teaching children. That's what the Seder is. It's meant to be an opportunity for learning and asking questions. Ah, see this thing that happened way back when and this thing that's happening now, we are not the first to suffer. We are not the first to experience this and we are not the first to ask, how do we find hope at a time of darkness?

Paul Waldman: I want to talk about what this says about the diaspora. Because one of the things that you say at Passover is “Next year in Jerusalem,” which means we're here now wherever we are, but we are going, like the Jews who went out of Egypt, we are going to make it to the land of Israel. And kind of inherent in that is the idea that life in the diaspora is necessarily lesser in some way than once you make your return to Israel. Now, it was one thing to say that when Israel was sort of hypothetical and an imagined place, even if it was an actual geographic place, it was still an imaginary place in some way. But now Israel is a modern state with a particular government and particular policies, including ones you may abhor. And so can you say “Next year in Jerusalem” when maybe you and like many people, for instance, living here in America, are actually pretty happy in the diaspora and could go to Israel if they want to, but they don't want to.

Yael Ridberg: This presumes or your perspective presumes a literal understanding of the words. Okay, so that's the first thing, which is to say, twice during the year does this phrase get repeated, “Next year in Jerusalem.” The first is at the end of Yom Kippur, which is the most solemn day on a Jewish calendar, the holy day of atonement. And the concluding service contains this phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem.” And so it does also at the Seder, the moment of the liberation, the story where we talk about the liberation of our people. So yes, I am sure at times historically over the course of our history when we were oppressed in all kinds of different scenarios, the idea of next year in Jerusalem was both literal and aspirational.

The word Jerusalem, the name Jerusalem in Hebrew is, has ir shalem, a whole city. Shalom, the word for peace, actually the derivative is the word for wholeness. So if at any time in our history when we did not feel whole, complete as a people, either because we were oppressed or because we were suffering or even because we were aspirationally hoping for something more than what we have right now, which of course is the essence of prayer, right? Let there be something better than there is right at this moment when we're talking about hardship. That doesn't have to be a dig, right, or a diss on where you live. It is about, what is that idea of aspirational wholeness? What is that idea of what has driven our people historically throughout our history? When we think about the root of the connection to this land of Zion, that's a biblical relationship. That goes to the Psalmist who said after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and wrote a poem, it said, by the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. That place, that homeland, that, deep connection is a remembrance of home. Home in the way that – where was your mom from? Where's your family from? Like what part of Eastern Europe?

Paul Waldman: There in what is today Ukraine, but at the time was Russia.

Yael Ridberg: Okay. So me too. So we're never going to say, “Next year in Ukraine.” Certainly not now, but I mean, it's never been that we ever said the literal place of my grandparents, my great grandparents, which in my case, my great-grandmother's shtetl was wiped out in the Holocaust. But we can't go back there, but we have even further in our story an idea of home. An idea of self-determined geography. And so even if it isn't literal, and we say it at our Seder, I'm not moving to Israel next year. There was a time when I thought about moving to Israel, but I never connected it in a literal way to this sentence because I live a flourishing Jewish life in a diaspora. And so I always am in the mindset of asking, what is Yerushalayim? Is there an idea of Jerusalem like the rabbis taught of Yerushalayim shel mala, a Jerusalem in sort of like the heavenly cosmic idea of Jerusalem, and Yerushalayim shel mata, the sort of the grounded understanding or the literal nature of Jerusalem. You can't make someone feel aspirational. Like that's a kind of a thing that sort of either it's a meaningful idea or it isn't, but that's how I see that line. And I don't think of it as a diss.

Paul Waldman: Because once it is a real place, then it becomes very difficult to divide those two as this sort of spiritual place where you will live the fullest Jewish life.

Yael Ridberg: But I don't, yeah, I guess I don't see it as that by saying next year in Jerusalem that that's an expression of the fullness of my Jewish life. And if you take anything literally, Paul, you'll never move the needle. If God is either like present or not, well, okay, I guess there's nothing in between. So I choose to see the gray and I choose to not live in the extremes of yes or no, or proof or not because I value the way in which the tradition has sought through times of trouble like this one too, to bring us some sense of hope or transformation or, and even the idea of a moral imperative. To build a world that is shalem. Not just a literal Jerusalem, but to build a world that is more whole, that is a kind of a counter testimony to the world as it is.

I like that reminder. I want that reminder. Regardless of what the politics are, I need that reminder because that helps me understand my vocation, my sacred vocation in the world. What's my job? To try to make this world just a little bit better than it was when I entered it, knowing that I'm not going to make it perfect and I'm not going to finish the job.

Paul Waldman: I guess I just struggle with being able intellectually, emotionally to separate it from the actual place and everything that comes with it. Especially in the last year and a half, people have been thinking a lot about antisemitism and safety. I wrote this piece a while back talking about how Joe Biden used to always come out and say that if it were not for Israel, no Jew in the world would be safe. And I question that. But one of the things I did when I was writing that, I went back and I looked at some of the writings from Theodor Herzl, who is sort of the founder of modern Zionism. And he was arguing – this is at the turn of the 20th century – for the creation of a Jewish state, at one point he says, I'm quoting here, once there is a Jewish state “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil and die peacefully in our own homes.” And it was this vision of both that this is our, what will sort of be the, I guess, the fulfillment of everything that we've been waiting for, but also will give us real, tangible safety. And that certainly hasn't happened. I think I am safer as a Jew in America than I would be if I was living in Israel.

Yael Ridberg: But are you safer as a Jew? I've heard this before: I'm safer as a Jew in America than I am in Israel. Most of the time in Israel, most of the time, pre-October 7th, let's just think about that for a second. This is an amazing country that has been born and has achieved all kinds of contributions to the world in technology and in science, so yes, I get it, terrorism, okay. And at the same time, I say to not feel like the world understands your Judaism, meaning in the diaspora or specifically in America. The smallest version of which just happened recently where an interfaith group calls me up and says, hey, can you come give a little like a two to three minute thing on whatever it is and do it on whatever the date is on Saturday, the 12th of April, this Saturday? And these are clergy. They are not thinking that, it's the Sabbath. Maybe it's a Jewish thing that I wouldn't do. Or B, it's the evening of the Seder and it's the evening of Passover and you've decided that that doesn't register either? And now that's not anti-Semitism. That's just ignorance, but it's also a sense of like, it doesn't matter. And that doesn't happen in Israel as an example, because the calendar is the Jewish calendar. No one's ever going ask a rabbi to speak on the Sabbath unless it's in a synagogue. No one's ever going to say like, what are you doing on Passover, and can you come do this thing if you're a religious person.

Paul Waldman: That raises something interesting too, which is, part of the diaspora experience is being a little bit of an outsider. And I would say that that's not always bad. I feel that that has always given me more of a perspective on the place that I live.

Yael Ridberg: Yes, except not every time you stand up as an outsider, are you rewarded. Not every time you stand up to defend yourself, your principles, are you rewarded. And in a climate that, it's certainly right now, in a climate where to stand up and be Jewish is equated with a particular viewpoint about the world and about Israel and about what that means about you. Well, that's a different set of risks. A rabbi I know in Philadelphia was going to participate, this is just literally a month ago, was going to participate in a pro-choice, reproductive freedom kind of action with a bunch of clergy. And she got an email from the organizer saying, so sorry, Rabbi, we can't actually continue this conversation with you because there are members of the team who are not willing to be with a Zionist on this effort of reproductive freedom. Canceling her complete participation. She's the rabbi. She's the Jewish representative amongst the clergy, but no. She's standing up for reproductive freedom. Isn't that enough? Isn't that the risk taking of I'm standing here with you and I'm the other quote unquote and yet no. Can't do it. That's of this time.

Paul Waldman: Even now with our current, you know, dissent into authoritarianism. I think I have more faith in the version of liberal democracy in America to embody my values, my liberal values, even my Jewish values than I have faith in the future of the Israeli state to embody my values. But that's a whole other question.

Yael Ridberg: I hear you, I hear you, and I see you.

Paul Waldman: Okay, well is there anything else you think that we haven't covered about Passover that people need to know?

Yael Ridberg: Here's what I want to say to go back for a second to the idea, the question about God, because I think it's worth defending the idea of God for just a second and this power that makes for salvation or redemption or whatever the word is, because I think it's the story itself and God's character in the story that is meant to teach humankind about a response to injustice. And that courage and hope and determination and all of the things that are supposed to run counter to the most difficult experiences both of the exodus and of us can be called godly. That's a small G. It's not supernatural, but it is about, just when we think that the darkness is going to eclipse everything, just when we think there's no hope, holidays like Passover are meant to remind us that in the words of Michael Walzer, wherever you live, it's probably Egypt. This is in his book, Exodus and Revolution. Wherever you live, it's probably Egypt and there's probably some promised land that you want to get to, whatever it is. But the only way, he says, to get to that promised land is that you link arms with each other and march through it, march through the wilderness. There's a wilderness in every generation. And if this moment represents a wilderness in America and in Israel, and we have a holiday like Passover or these kinds of rituals to help us remind ourselves that there is light after darkness, not always, and we don't know how long the darkness will hold, well, then I think it's incumbent upon us to find ways to find meaning in this holiday in particular for Jews, because it's too easy to say, oh well, it's dark. I'm not even going look for the light.

Paul Waldman: Well, that is a great place to end. You have made me feel better, which is your job as a rabbi.

Yael Ridberg: I wish you a meaningful Passover, however you celebrate and however you tell the story to you and everyone who's listening as well.