[When telling the story of the Exodus] begin with shame and end with praise. (Mishna Pesachim 10:4)
If you want to understand a people, listen to the way it tells its stories. In the literature of humanity there are many kinds of stories. Some – we know them from childhood – end with the words, “And they all lived happily ever after.” We call them fairy tales, fantasies, myths. In the artificial reality they conjure up, the evil dragon is slain, the wicked witch defeated, the curse lifted, the conflict resolved. Judaism has no such stories because it does not believe in myth. In the Jewish narrative, the battle against evil is never complete. The messianic age has not yet come. Until then we live in a universe in which, though there is liberation from Egypt, after Pharaoh comes Amalek, and after Amalek, other tyrants. Injustice must be fought in every generation. The legacy of the Exodus is not a world in which “they all lived happily ever after.” There is no closure, no “sense of an ending.” Instead there is something more real and at the same time more radical: Shabbos – a world of rest that is temporary but no less utopian, where one day in seven we experience pure, unmediated freedom and gain the strength to continue the journey, to take up the struggle.
Beyond myth, there is a second great literary genre that we owe to the Greeks, namely tragedy. Tragedy tells the story of human beings, with their aspirations and ambitions, in a world governed by impersonal forces. To be human is to wish, to plan, to dream. But our dreams are destined to crash against the rocks of a reality fundamentally indifferent to our existence. They are hubris, and are always punished by nemesis. Oedipus and the other great figures of Greek drama fail to defeat the forces of fate, as they were bound to do. Tragedy is the consequence of a vision of the sheer abyss between humanity and the gods. Zeus, like other ancient deities, had no special affection for human beings. They disturbed his peace. They threatened to steal his secret knowledge. The gods of polytheistic cultures tended to be at best mildly irritated by, at worst actively hostile to human beings. A tragic universe is a place where bad things happen for no particular reason; where there is no ultimate justice and no expectation of it; where we learn to accept, with Stoic courage, the random cruelties of circumstance. As Aristotle put it, a tragic hero is one whose fortunes change “from happiness to misery; and the cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error on his part” (Poetics). Or as Jean Anouilh wrote:
In tragedy nothing is in doubt and everyone’s destiny is known. That makes for tranquility. There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it’s all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it. (Antigone)
There is – there can be – no tragedy in Judaism. That is not because there are no disasters, crises, catastrophes. Manifestly there are. Jewish history, as often as not, has been written in tears. Nor is it because in a Jewish story there is always a happy ending. That, to repeat, is the structure of myth, not Judaism. But there is always hope, grounded hope, justified not by optimism, innocence, or a “Whiggish theory” that sees history as constant progress, but by the terms of the covenant between heaven and earth. Judaism is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope.
In the lexicon of civilization, there are deep commonalities but no less profound differences. Every culture makes music but only some produce symphonies. Every people tells stories but not all create novels, let alone those of Dickens or Tolstoy. Each individual has memories but only in certain ages and societies do they write autobiographies. Every map of the human condition must find a place for emotion, but not every culture generates, or even finds meaningful, the emotion called hope. In the West, we tend to take it for granted as if it were a universal phenomenon. It is not. It has deep conceptual preconditions that are, if anything, exceptional rather than normal. What must we believe if we are to hope?
Hope is born when people first come to believe the following: that there is an author of the universe; that He is not merely the first cause, prime mover, initiator of the big bang, but that He is actively involved in history; that He is personal, meaning one who understands us; that He brought the world into existence not out of mere curiosity or for some reason unfathomable to us, but out of love, as a parent gives birth to a child; that, despite the chasm between God and us, the infinite and the miniscule, the eternal and the fleeting, there is communication, God speaks; that God binds Himself to the same rules of ethics He gives to us; and that therefore, having given His word, He will not fail to honor it. These are massive beliefs. They constitute the metaphysics of Judaism and have left their trace on its daughter monotheisms, Christianity and Islam. But without them, there is no hope, and with them, though there may be misery, injustice, and pain, there is no tragedy in the Greek sense, for tragedy means the absence of hope.
“Begin with shame and end with praise” – in this quintessentially anti-tragic formula the rabbis specified how the Pesacḥ story should be told. They disagreed on details. According to some, the narration should be along the lines of the reply to the wise son in the Book of Dvarim (6:21), “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord our God brought us out.” According to others it should echo Joshua’s final address to the Israelites, “Long ago your ancestors – Terach, the father of Abraham and Nachor – lived on the other side of the Euphrates and worshipped other gods” (Josh. 24:2). In fact, we do both. However, all agree that in telling the story we must start with the bad news (slavery, idolatry) and end with the good (liberation, revelation). In this simple rule, the rabbis were doing more than outlining the form of the Haggada narrative. They were summarizing the structure of the Jewish imagination. A nation’s emotional tonality is expressed in how it tells its story.
The Book of Genesis, for example, is dominated by sibling rivalry, but it ends on a note of reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers (“You intended evil against me, but God turned it into good” [Gen. 50:20]). The land promised to the patriarchs is still not theirs. Genesis comes to a close with their descendants in Egypt. But again there is a chord of expectation. Joseph says, “I am about to die, but God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Gen. 50:24). The Mosaic books close with Moses forbidden to enter the land to which he had led his people for forty years, but God leads him up the mountain so he can see it from afar. The Hebrew Bible as a whole ends (II Chr. 36) with Cyrus, king of Persia, giving permission to the Jews to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple. There is no closure to these endings, no guarantee of what will happen next. But there is a confidence, born of covenant, whose name is hope. There will be difficulties ahead, but they will not be insurmountable. There will be grief, but it will not be paralyzing or final. Terrible suffering may lie in wait around the corner, but something and someone will survive. There may be exile but eventually there will be homecoming, return. Defeat is never ultimate, nor do we face the uncertain future alone. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me” (Ps. 23:4). Wherever we are, there is a way back to the Promised Land, the good society, the destination that lies beyond our field of vision but that we know is there.
There is nothing in the empirical character of the events themselves that dictates this way, rather than that, of telling the story. History does not give rise to hope; hope gives rise to history. As the philosopher-critic Ernst Cassirer put it, the “meaning of historical time is built not solely from recollection of the past, but no less from anticipation of the future. It depends as much on the striving as on the act, as much on the tendency toward the future as on the contemplation and actualization of the past” (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms). The Hebrew Bible narrates history the way it does because it sees the relationship between God and man the way it does. We can see this by a simple thought experiment.
Imagine the Hebrew Bible rewritten as Greek tragedy. The same events might be recounted, but the division of books would be different. The Book of Genesis would run on into the first chapters of Exodus, with the hopes of Abraham and his children dashed in the face of slavery. The Mosaic books would come to an end not with Deuteronomy but with Joshua and Judges and its closing verse, heavy with disillusionment and the sense of chaos: “In those days there was no king in Israel; each person did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). The Bible as a whole might have ended with the Babylonian exile and the Book of Lamentations. The difference between hope and tragedy lies not in what happens but in how we interpret and respond to it. The moral imagination is shaped not only by events but also, and even primarily, by how we recount them; where we begin and end; how we frame our telling, structuring the narrative.
The Pesaḥ story – “Begin with shame and end with praise” – is the archetype of the Jewish reading of history, its insistence on rescuing a thread of meaning from catastrophe, its refusal, at times heroic, to be demoralized by defeat, to give in to the siren call of despair. It is the rejection of myth and tragedy, optimism and pessimism alike. The Jewish narrative does not ask us to believe in a world in which there are simple happy endings. Nor does it allow us to take refuge in the cynical belief that every aspiration ends in failure (it is worth remembering that the first “cynics,” from whom we get the word, were Greek philosophers). Anouilh was right: tragedy is restful; Judaism is restless. There is nothing peaceful about hope. Far simpler to believe nothing, expect nothing, reconcile oneself to the meaninglessness of a universe endlessly revolving in silence around a void, and therefore accept the inevitability of fate. Far harder to strive for justice against oppression, freedom against tyranny, knowing that even victory is never final before the end of days and that until then we must fight the battle in every generation, just as the story of the Exodus must be told every year. Yet to be a Jew is to choose what Levinas calls “difficult liberty” over easy necessity. Israel, says the Torah, is the people whose name means “one who struggles with God and with man and who prevails” (Gen. 32:28). Far from being simple or naive, hope demands, creates, and expresses indomitable moral courage.
Viktor Frankl was a Jew who survived Auschwitz and, on the basis of his experiences, founded a school of psychiatry he called logotherapy. Survival, he argued, whether in the concentration camps or through trauma, grief, depression, and loss, is a matter of “man’s search for meaning.” If we can find meaning in our suffering, we can emerge, if not physically, then at least psychologically, intact. There was, he discovered, one freedom left in Auschwitz, when every other vestige of liberty and humanity had been destroyed:
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (Man’s Search for Meaning)
I am awestruck at the courage of successive generations of Jews, survivors of the Crusades, blood libels, inquisitions, expulsions, ghettos, and pogroms, who wrestled with God in prayer and lamentation, who did not accept their fate passively or silently, giving way either to blind submission (“such is the will of God”) or to a bleak, Greek view of fate, but who continued – in the fine phrase of Nadezhda Mandelstam – to “hope against hope.” Jews are not blind to the existence of evil. We feel it, taste it, each year afresh, in the bread of oppression and the bitter herbs of slavery. But we refuse with every fiber of our being to be resigned to it. To understand the Jewish people, one must listen to the way it tells its story. A people whose narrative “begins with shame and ends with praise” is one that, knowing in its bones the reality of evil, did not cease wrestling with the angel of death until it discovered the path from suffering to hope.
