Writing Our Own History
Of the eighty or so haggadot that I own, one of my favourites is The Dry Bones Passover Haggadah. As you’d expect, alongside the traditional text, it features a healthy dose of Jewish humour:
“No bread?! We’ve been slaves in Egypt for 400 years”
“And we leave in such a hurry that…”
“… there’s no time to pack sandwiches?”
“I tell you, people will be talking about this for years!”
Or this one:
“To win our freedom from Egypt...”
“Ten terrible plagues were brought upon the Egyptians.”
“Could you imagine the flack we’d get from the media if that happened today?”
“Uh… this is supposed to make us feel better?”
They’re funnier after four cups of wine.
But there’s one cartoon that cuts deeper. Early in the Maggid section:
“It says that ‘in every generation they rise up to destroy us’”
“But now, with people living longer…”
“It works out to two in every generation.”
That cartoon accompanies a text we all know well:
וְהִיא שֶׁעָמְדָה לַאֲבוֹתֵינוּ וְלָנוּ.
And this [promise] is what has stood by our ancestors and us
שֶׁלֹּא אֶחָד בִּלְבַד עָמַד עָלֵינוּ לְכַלּוֹתֵנוּ, אֶלָּא שֶׁבְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר עוֹמְדִים עָלֵינוּ לְכַלוֹתֵנוּ,
for it was not only one man who rose up to destroy us: in every single generation people rise up to destroy us
וְהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מַצִּילֵנוּ מִיָּדָם.
But the Holy One, Blessed Be He, saves us from their hands.
In my family, we sing this to a melody that sounds like it belongs in Les Misérables—the opening number, where prisoners toil in chains.
The Cutlers and the Powerses argue about the exact tune (of course we do), but either way, it’s not a song of liberation. Despite its hopeful ending, this is a dirge. It’s a reminder of persecution, of threat, of endurance in the face of annihilation.
I wanted to see how the commentators have dealt with this phrase—this notion that “in every generation they rise to destroy us.” I combed through my haggadot. Dozens. And what did I find? Almost nothing. Because it’s so accepted. So internalized. So ingrained. We say it, we sing it, we move on. As if that’s simply what it means to be Jewish: we suffer, and we survive.
Yes, history has been filled with those who tried לְכַלוֹתֵנוּ—to destroy us. But must that become the organizing principle of our Jewish identity?
The most interesting “commentary” I found is in the excellent Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel which includes portraits of six enemies, who appear to be Egyptian, Roman, Crusader, Nazi, Soviet, and a contemporary terrorist. Is it really in opposition to those people that we want to define our identity?
Let me say this as clearly as I can: Jewish identity cannot live in the shadow of its enemies.
Memory is the Jewish superpower. But we live in a world of history. A world where we can see our story not only as a chain of traumas, but as a tapestry of achievement, insight, resilience, joy.
Salo Wittmayer Baron—the first professor of Jewish history at a Western university—called out this obsession with Jewish suffering. He scorned what he called “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” He didn’t deny the violence. He didn’t erase the pogroms. But he saw something else: a people living between the horrors. Writing, creating, learning, dreaming.
His predecessor, Heinrich Graetz, imagined Jewish history as a chain of pain and piety—a Leidens-und-gelehrtengeschichte, “a history of suffering and scholarship.” Baron said: enough. We are not only the people who endured; we are the people who built.
And yet, today, I see so many still defining their Jewishness not through Torah or Shabbat or community—but through fighting antisemitism. I’m invited to conference after conference, summit after summit, all in the name of fighting antisemitism. I go to some. I skip others. Because I’m tired. Not of standing up for Jews—but of that – and defending Israel – being the only thing we seem to stand for.
I believe that this obsession with antisemitism is an outgrowth of the centrality of remembering the Holocaust in Jewish thought.
Remembering the Holocaust ranks first in the United States and second in Canada as a measure of Jewish identity. Certainly not kashrut or Shabbat or Torah study. Not “working for justice/equality in society” or “continuing family traditions/celebrating Jewish holidays with family” or even “being a part of a Jewish community”. Rather, it is Remembering the Holocaust – an event that reinforces the Jewish memory of persecution, combining it with the history of a catalogued and curated Jewish genocide.
And if Remembering the Holocaust is going to top our list of what it means to be Jewish, then fighting antisemitism as a primary mode of Jewish expression is going to be a natural outgrowth.
The problem is there is no mitzvah to fight antisemitism. I’ve checked all 613.
Fighting antisemitism is necessary. But it is not sufficient. It is not a vision. It is not an identity. It cannot nourish the soul or pass to the next generation.
When we define our Jewish lives by who hates us, we surrender the pen to our enemies. We let them write our story. We let their violence, their bigotry, their obsession with us become the shape of our selfhood.
And if one day—please God—antisemitism disappears from the earth, what will we have left? If we have built our identity solely around opposition, we will be left with a hollow shell.
David Hartman once asked: should our defining lens be Auschwitz or Sinai? Will we be a people shaped by trauma or by covenant?
Auschwitz is memory. Sinai is mission. Auschwitz is what was done to us. Sinai is what we chose. Sinai is what we choose still.
“In every generation they tried to destroy us” is not a strategy for survival. It’s a warning. It’s not a philosophy. It’s a footnote to the story that we ourselves must write.
There is so much more to being Jewish than not being killed. So much more than remembering who tried to kill us. Jewish identity must be richer than resistance, deeper than trauma, fuller than fear.
What would it look like to build a Jewish identity rooted in covenant, not catastrophe? In love of Torah, not loathing of antisemites? In our values, our culture, our dreams—not just in our scars?
Let’s answer that question. Not with cartoons or dirges—but with lives of meaning. With joy. With depth. With God.
Let “in every generation they tried to destroy us” remind us of what we’ve survived. But let Sinai remind us of why we’re still here.
