Passover’s Impact on the American Story

Most Americans don’t realize how the Passover Haggadah’s retelling of the Exodus from Egypt has profoundly impacted the United States.

After the Boston Tea party, future president John Adams mused that the stirrings of rebellion were a worthy cause - as Moses’s fight against Pharaoh had been. On December 16, 1773, when the American colonists, disguised as Mohawk Indians, threw hundreds of chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxation, it was the opening salvo in the process of liberation that consciously drew from the story of biblical Israel.

Had the colonists continued to allow themselves to be beholden to oppressive British policies, they would, Adams wrote in his diary, be “subjecting ourselves and our Posterity forever to Egyptian Taskmasters — to Burthens, Indignities, to Ignominy, Reproach and Contempt, to Desolation and Oppression to Poverty and Servitude.”

After the British victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill, Adams’s beloved wife Abigail wrote to him in a June 18th, 1775, letter reassuring him that the God of the Jewish people was on the Revolutionaries’ side despite the setback. “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong [Ecclesiastes 9:11], but the God of Israel is he that giveth strength and power unto his people [Ps. 68:35]. Trust in him at all times, ye people pour out your hearts before him. God is a refuge for us [Ps. 62:8],” she urged.

Thomas Paine and the Ten Plagues

Thomas Paine, the English-born political philosopher and eventual American Founding Father whose influential pamphlet “Common Sense” would inspire the Revolutionary cause, evoked the last of the Ten Plagues when recounting his earlier experience in a French prison during that country’s own revolution. Paine had been arrested and scheduled for execution in Paris. A guard had put a chalk mark on the doors of the prisoners due to be guillotined. But the door was closed the night before his scheduled execution, hiding the mark inside the cell.

"The Angel of Death," he wrote in wonder, had passed over Paine, as it had done over the houses of the Israelites who had smeared the doorposts with the blood of the Paschal sacrifice. Later, in “Common Sense,” Paine anonymously expressed his feelings towards the British monarch George III by stating “I rejected the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England for ever.”

Moses and Washington

Later, as the newly formed United States established itself, the Exodus story was ever-present. President Washington was often compared to Moses. Upon the first president’s passing, the pastor Eli Forbes even referred to Moses as having been “the Washington of Israel” in a eulogy.

Washington himself cited the biblical story of liberation in articulating his vision for the country and in expressing gratitude for the contributions of Jews to society. In a letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Savannah, Georgia, he wrote “May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land — whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation — still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven.”

Divine Protection

In his second inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that his administration would be blessed by the same divine protection that guided the Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, stating: “I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”

“It has often been remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel than any other nation upon the globe.”

No wonder that the prominent clergyman Abiel Abbot remarked in a 1799 Thanksgiving Sermon that “It has often been remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel than any other nation upon the globe.”

Cry Freedom

Years later, amidst the Civil War, the Passover story powered the cause of freedom. Lincoln, America’s Great Liberator, was commonly compared to Moses, as Washington had been earlier. The freed slave Sojourner Truth spoke to the renowned abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe in the Atlantic Monthly about how in gaining her freedom “I left the house of bondage, I left everything behind. I wa’n’t goin’ to keep nothin’ of Egypt on me.”

And Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher, cited God’s instructions to Moses when his flock stood stuck between the Egyptian forces and the sea, how at this crucial moment for America “right before us lies the Red Sea of war. It is red indeed. There is blood in it. We have come to the very edge of it and the word of God to us to-day is ‘Speak unto this people that they go forward.’” This citation of Exodus 14:15, the moment right before Moses miraculously splits the waters and then drowns the Egyptians, was meant to evoke a similar sense of God’s intervention on behalf of those who sought to rid the United States of the scourge of slavery.

Decades later, amidst the fight for civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr., on the evening before his assassination, described how if someone had asked him “‘Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?’ I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt.” He saw the march towards equality for all Americans as echoing the exodus from Pharaonic enslavement.

Republicans and Democrats

Modern US presidents have maintained the American affinity for the Exodus, across both sides of the aisle. George W. Bush, a Republican, remarked in 2005, “That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai …”, the ultimate destination of the people who had been freed from Pharaoh.

Barack Obama, a Democrat, hosted a Seder in the White House, and reflected at length on the holiday’s impact on world history. In a 2016 statement, he wrote:

“One of Passover’s most powerful rituals is its tradition of storytelling – millions of Jewish families, friends, and even strangers sitting together and sharing the inspirational tale of the Exodus. Led by a prophet and chased by an army, sustained by a faith in God and rewarded with deliverance, the Israelites’ journey from bondage to the Promised Land remains one of history’s greatest examples of emancipation. This story of redemption and hope, told and retold over thousands of years, has comforted countless Jewish families during times of oppression, echoing in rallying cries for civil rights around the world.”

This Passover, as Jewish families around the Seder table recount the ancient biblical tale of the liberation of the Jewish People, all Americans have a reason to celebrate.