Sermon: The Exodus as fiction – Pesach

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 13 April 2025

Nearly 80 years ago, a remarkable document appeared in a prominent Yiddish newspaper in Buenos Aires. Dated Warsaw, April 26 1943, it was entitled “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God.” It appeared to be a letter to God from Yossel Rakover, a Chassid, written at the height of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which he sealed in a bottle for a future generation to discover. In it, he challenges God for what is happening, while at the same time affirming his continued belief in God.

Translated into many languages, you can find it in Shoah anthologies and in some modern Yom Kippur liturgies. It had an enormous impact in Germany and the author, Thomas Mann, hailed it as a “gripping human and religious document” and offered to help promote it to German readers. [Alvin Rosenfeld, ‘Holocaust Fictions and the Transformation of Historical Memory’ in Remembering for the Future (Papers presented to the Holocaust Conference, Oxford 1988, Vol 2, p1529)]

For some time, it was believed to be a genuine document out of the Shoah. Even though it became clear, by the end of the 1950s, that it was not authentic, serious writers continued to write about it as if it were, even into the late 1980s (eg Dan Cohn-Sherbok, ‘Life After Death’ in Jewish Chronicle, 22 December 1989, p24.)

It was actually written by Zvi Kolitz, and when he submitted the story in 1946 he had clearly subtitled it ‘a story.’ He was born in Lithuania, but spent the war in the USA, fought in the War of Independence in 1948 and was a writer and film producer in Israel. When the truth emerged about the origin of the story, he was accused of plagiarism. The problem arose because, when the Hebrew version appeared in the 1950s, it accidentally omitted his name and the subtitle – and so it was assumed to be a genuine document by a martyr who died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and that Kolitz was claiming it to be his.

He wrote it in response to the question: “How might a Chassidic family like the Rakovers, imbued with deep religious faith, have spoken to God at such a time?” Kolitz never tried to pretend it was anything but a work of fiction. But fiction or not, it is still very powerful, and well-worth reading.

Last night we sat around our Seder tables reading another work of fiction – ‘fiction’ in the sense that virtually the only record we have of the Exodus is the one we read about in the Torah.

When a historian wants to establish the authenticity or otherwise of a document, they look for some external evidence to corroborate or disprove what the text says. In the case of the Exodus, it might, for example, be some reference in Egyptian records to the Hebrew slavery in Egypt, the circumstances by which those slaves left Egypt or what happened to the Egyptian army.

When I was rabbi in Paris, my colleague jokingly asked me once: “why did you English name so many famous places after defeats?” I looked puzzled. He went on to say, “Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Station.” More seriously, no nation is going to proclaim its defeats from the rooftops. But we might have expected something in Egyptian records trying to present what happened in as positive a light as possible; akin, for example, to the way Churchill presented Dunkirk as something less than the catastrophe it was. As far as the Exodus is concerned, however, the historian would have to say, “we simply do not know if it actually happened.”

Yet last night, millions of Jews around the world sat at their Seder tables and said “we” – not ‘they’ – “we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” At the Seder we were at, there were some non-Jews, for whom it was their first Seder. I wondered what they made of these people who had certainly never been slaves, nor, possibly, ever been to Egypt, nevertheless proclaiming that they had been. ‘History’ and ‘memory.’ History is what happened to ‘them’; memory is what happened to us, to you and me: “we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.”

So we don’t know if there ever was an Exodus. What we do know is that something happened, something so momentous that it burned itself into Jewish consciousness and psyche, so that, some 3½-4000 years after it might have happened, we don’t just tell that story but we re-enact it, in a very elaborate way. And in so doing, we make it ours.

It remains a bench-mark, a reference point against which we can set our present situation. It’s one of the reasons we have Shabbat; we are required to mention the Exodus in every act of prayer and so on. It gives us a moral compass for how we should treat others: “do not oppress the other, for you know the heart of the slave.” At the Seder we look at slavery and freedom then and see how we measure against it now.

Questions of historical truth are important for historians; but at the Seder table, we are more interested in truth of a different order, an existential truth maybe, something which speaks to the human situation, informs it and tells us what is meant to be. The philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas responded to the authenticity of Yossel Rackover by declaring that it is “genuine as only a story can be.” Maybe we can appropriate Levinas’ words: “the Exodus is genuine as only a story can be.”

But there is a more serious problem with the Exodus than the historical one and that brings us back to Yossel Rakover. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising began on Seder night 1943. The Jews knew there would be no miraculous Exodus; they knew the outcome even before they fired the first shot. Does not the Shoah, then, make a mockery of all that we celebrate at the Seder? Is this not a greater challenge to the truth of the Exodus than any lack of supporting historical evidence?

There is a tension, then, between theology and observed reality and there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground. Either the theology is correct or the evidence of our eyes is. Perhaps the theology has got it wrong. The mantra here goes something like this: “God is not loving and caring; just as the Exodus is a myth, so too is human freedom. And the sooner we understand and accept that human existence has little meaning and purpose the better. We may not be happy with that but at least we will stop living in some sort of foolish expectation that life can be different.”

Or should we somehow ignore observable reality and just concentrate on the theology? The mantra here is: “Yes, there is suffering, but it is God’s will. Don’t question. Just accept.” We recoil against that approach because it seems to be an acquiescent acceptance of what happens, with its concomitant lack of incentive to struggle against it. But the first path – to ignore the theology – is surely equally deficient. Where else can it lead but to despair and emptiness? “There is no meaning to life – just live for yourself, live for the Now because there is nothing else.”

I have no doubt that those people in the Warsaw were infinitely more aware of that tension than we are. How did they manage to sit around even their rudimentary Seder tables – as we know they did – in the full knowledge of what lay ahead for them?

Throughout the ages we have struggled to find some harmonious resolution of that tension and – in the interest of full disclosure – I’m not going to resolve it this morning. What we do know is that despair and denial are not the Jewish way. At the beginning of the Ghetto Uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, one of the leaders of the revolt is reputed to have proclaimed, “Today we establish the State of Israel.”

Last night, we broke one of the three matzot and put one half aside, to be used later as the Afikomen. We held up the other half and said ha lachma anya, “this is the bread of poverty, of affliction.” It is the matzah of future redemption, but it remains broken – we live in a broken, unredeemed world, where the darkness of slavery, oppression and injustice endure. And what is the last thing that we eat at the Seder? Halachically, it’s the Afikomen. It’s meant to be a reminder of the world as it could be – the bit that makes ha lachma whole – as it could be, but it isn’t yet.

For what has happened to that ‘bread of affliction’? There is no transubstantiation in Jewish life. Yet, by the time we actually take that first bite of matzah, it has become something else, the bread of freedom. Nothing has happened to it – but something has happened to us. Between breaking it and taking that first bite, we have been on a journey, told a story, relived a story, our story, and whether it actually happened or not is irrelevant. Our hope is still unbroken. The Exodus reminds us to hold on to that hope with all our strength, so that the darkness that so threatens our world at the moment may never snuff out the flame of freedom.