This week begins with very provocative words: “If you listen.” In that phrase alone, you find a secret of the remarkable survival of the Jewish people.
What is it we listen to? From the time we are children, we love to listen to stories. Not only does the Torah tell the story of the Jewish people, but we ourselves tell it over and over again. The story of Passover – recounted in the Haggadah, the “telling” – is a story we never tire of repeating and learning. Several years ago, I was in Dharmsala and gave a lecture to Tibetan monks who asked me to speak on how the Jews survived in exile. I told them first they must love their story. It can be painful, it can have elements of tragedy as well as deliverance, but if you keep telling it, in each generation, you will endure.
The second secret is that our story is a universal one. Adam and Eve, who start everything, are not Jewish. Pharaoh’s daughter, who saves Moses, is not Jewish. When you ask a traditional Jew how they are doing, they say “Baruch Hashem” – blessed be God. Three times in the Torah “Baruch Hashem” is said – and each time it is by a non-Jew: by Noah in Genesis 9:26; by Abraham’s servant Eliezer in Gen. 24:27; and by Moses’ father-in-law Jethro in Exodus 18:10.
In many traditions, the New Year begins with the founding of that religion. But in Judaism the start of the year is the creation of the world. To love Judaism is to love God’s world.
The reverse of this is true as well. Those who hate Jews, in the end, will hate the world. It was true of Soviet communism, of Nazism, and today it is true of the enemies of the Jewish people who wish to destroy not only Israel, but the idea of freedom that we cherish. Our story is sacred, and it affirms values sorely needed by a benighted world.
The third element in Jewish survival is that we never made the mistake of believing that the story was over. We end the Passover Seder with “next year.” When a prayer was created after the founding of Israel, it hoped for “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.” We are a people convinced that the Messiah has not arrived and the story is not over.
The Jewish people, despite the adversity we have faced, decided long ago that we would not disappear until we knew the end of the story. We are the Scheherazade of the nations, living each night by recounting more about where we have been, what we have seen and how we have hoped. The writer Philip Pullman said: “Thou shalt not might’ reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.”
Once upon a time, there was a little people who had no chance of surviving. But they believed and they persisted and to this very day, thousands of years later, they refuse to stop telling their story.
