Pesach 5772

The following is excerpted from articles by Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

The Pesach (Passover) seder puts the education of our children at its heart. The narrative of the Haggadah is constructed in response to a child’s questions: first the famous four questions, and soon after, the passages describing the four sons’ differing approaches to the seder.

In Torah, (Shemot/Exodus 12:26, 13:8, 13:14), when Moshe (Moses) addresses the people as they are about to go free, his theme is children, education and the distant future. “And when your children ask you, what does this ceremony mean to you?...On that day, tell your son, I do this because of what the L-rd did for me when I came out of Egypt…In days to come, when your son asks you, what does this mean?” Moshe recognizes that it is education that helps build and sustain a free society.

Throughout history, Jews have been scattered amongst the nations of the world. Faced with persecution, assimilation and numerous life-threatening challenges, Jews have proven to be a stubborn people -- a people that not only overcame these obstacles, but thrived. How has this happened? It is because Jews have known that to defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilization, you need education. You need to teach children why freedom matters and how it was achieved.

Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression. True freedom requires the rule of law and justice and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others.

Freedom begins with what we teach our children. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on Pesach, when the entire ritual of handing on our story to the next generation is set in motion by the questions asked by a child.  Pesach’s central lesson is quite simple: encourage your children to ask questions and teach them the history of freedom if you never want them to lose it.