On Passover and our fading democracy

Our republican democracy — “the Great Experiment,” as the French political thinker Count Alexis de Tocqueville dubbed it — may soon be “the Great Experiment That Failed” because the foundational document that set this “experiment” in motion — the Constitution of the United States — is being sabotaged from within.

Passover is approaching, and it brings with it a challenge: What are we going to do about it?

And I do mean we. America is not a Christian country built on Christian values, despite far right claims to the contrary.

Several notable Christian scholars are the first to admit this. America, they say, was built on the values taken from our Torah and the rest of the Tanach, our Bible. It “was nothing short of the underlying fabric upon which American society was founded,” in the words of the Mormon legal scholar Dr. John Woodland Welch.

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According to the Jesuit-educated scholar and philosopher Thomas Cahill, it was our Bible that introduced the world to “a new conception of men and women as individuals with unique destinies — a conception that would inform the Declaration of Independence.”

It was “the Jews,” he added, who found “a new way of understanding and feeling the world, so much so that it may be said with some justice that theirs is the only new idea that human beings have ever had…. The Jews started it all — and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick.”

Referring to America’s Founding Fathers, the Methodist-raised philosopher and historian Hartley Burr Alexander noted in a 1919 lecture that our Bible “formed their minds and dominated their characters; its conceptions were their conceptions.”

The Tanach’s “conceptions” — its mitzvot, its commandments, that these eminent Christian scholars say gave birth to the Founders’ vision of America — were based entirely on the singular event we commemorate on Passover and vicariously relive during the seder. The Torah emphasizes this multiple times, which is why Passover holds such significance in relation to recent events, as will be discussed below.

That our republican democracy is under serious threat is beyond challenge because one branch of our constitutionally created government (the executive) seeks to neuter its constitutionally co-equal partners (the judiciary and the Congress). If it succeeds, the results will be catastrophic.

Consider what this administration has set in motion in just its first 74 days:

• On Tuesday, the Trump administration put our health at risk when it fired staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. It is part of the administration’s plan to cut 10,000 jobs from the entire Department of Health and Human Services. Trump and Elon Musk are ripping apart — for the most part, illegally and unconstitutionally — the imperfect but nevertheless vital social safety net millions of Americans, children and the elderly especially, depend on. Their actions to date are already threatening the very existence of the Social Security Administration. Just as tax season got underway, 6,700 Internal Revenue Service employees — the great majority of whom taxpayers depend on for information and advice — were fired.

• The CDC itself is to be cut by at least 2,400 jobs in departments that focus on global health and domestic disease prevention. The CDC has also been ordered to end monitoring and releasing its annual reports on gun violence in America — reports that are essential to formulating efforts aimed at combatting that violence. Last July, for example, the CDC reported that 46,728 people in the United States died by gun in 2023, among the highest annual totals on record. Among the dead in 2023 were 2,581 children aged 18 and under. The CDC’s reporting has long been a target of the National Rifle Association and the lesser-known Gun Owners of America, both of which spend millions each election cycle supporting mainly Republican candidates.

• A nation built by the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution in Europe is now seeking to shut its doors to new waves of immigrants fleeing persecution in their native lands.

• Constitutionally guaranteed free speech is being trampled on (that battling antisemitism is being used as the excuse will come back to haunt us).

• Our education system is being dismantled because only what this administration considers acceptable may be taught. In that vein, too, government agencies and departments are being forced to ignore history and social progress. The Pentagon, for example, has removed virtually every mention of the Holocaust and erased valuable documents related to the Shoah from its website. Trump’s attempt to rewrite history, as seen in his executive order threatening the Smithsonian, is a white supremacist’s dream come true.

These items represent just the tip of a nightmarish iceberg. Passover demands that we — and to repeat, I do mean “we” — take the lead in righting these wrongs.

Consider why the Israelites became Egypt’s slaves. When God created humankind, God assumed that people would figure out for themselves how to behave. They did not, and sending the Great Flood did nothing to change that. Ten generations after the Flood, therefore, God chose another approach. God called our Father Abraham to found a family that would grow into a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, built on the principles of tzedakah u’mishpat, righteousness and justice, and tasked with teaching those principles to the world.

The bad behavior of Abraham’s great-grandsons, our Father Jacob’s 12 sons, however, was so extreme that God felt that they needed to experience cruelty and injustice firsthand, they needed to learn what God expected them — us — to do about it, and they needed to have those lessons burned into their very souls.

That is why Israel became Egypt’s slaves and why God eventually took them out of Egypt, brought them to Sinai, and turned them — us — into a walking, talking moral and ethical instruction book for humankind.

In every generation, we are obligated to see ourselves as the ones who experienced the degradations of slavery and the ones to whom God gave those laws and that mission.

Throughout the Torah, many commandments, many mitzvot, that make up the code of morality and ethics we are to teach the world — by example — specifically include these words. We have to perform them because “I, the Lord, am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

That applies, as well, to all the Torah’s mitzvot, even those that do not carry that tagline. As God is quoted as saying in Leviticus 19:36-37: “I, the Lord, am your God who freed you from the land of Egypt. You shall faithfully observe all My laws and all My rules.”

For that reason, we may not defraud anyone, steal from anyone, lie about anyone, deal basely with anyone, or mislead anyone. We must treat everyone as our equals and respect and protect them, their possessions, and their privacy.

We must be proactive in seeing to it that the poor, the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, and the marginalized have whatever basic needs they lack — including food, shelter, clothing, and even medical care.

We must protect workers’ rights, including their right to receive equal pay for equal work, and to be paid in a timely fashion. Last Thursday, Trump issued an executive order limiting the right of many government employees to unionize. That order also ended the government’s participation in collective bargaining. The order violates the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which Trump’s order says “enables hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management.”

Because we must not “stand idly by the blood of [our] fellow,” we must be proactive in helping to correct the wrongs we see in society. This includes creating courts of justice that are truly just, fair, and equitable.

We must protect the stranger, especially anyone fleeing from oppression and persecution, because the Torah requires us to give refuge to a runaway slave and to see to his or her welfare. Someone fleeing from oppression and persecution is a slave in every sense.

We must honor and respect our parents and all the elderly. We cannot simply ignore their needs or let the government ignore them.

We must also protect all the Earth’s plant life and all its animal life.

And we must do all these things in a way that encourages the rest of the world to do them, too, because “I, the Lord, am your God who freed you from the land of Egypt. You shall faithfully observe all My laws and all My rules.”

That is what Passover — the Festival of Freedom, the z’man cheiruteinu — is about, and what the seder and its strange rituals are about. The seder’s 15 steps are meant to remind us of who we are, why we are, and what we are supposed to do because of who and why we are.

We may not sit idly by. We need to actively oppose this administration’s assaults on our republican democracy and even lead that opposition.

A new pharaoh has arisen. Passover demands that we stand up to him. It is our job. It is why God brought us out of the land of Egypt.

Shammai Engelmayer is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.