A Law For All Time

Great Stories Outlast Their Use

“You shall observe this as a law for all time, for you and for your descendants.”

Exodus 12:24

The Torah commands us to keep this as a law for all time, but what is the referent? In a narrow sense, it is the smearing of lamb’s blood over the door posts, which we no longer do. In the less narrow sense, it is the observance of the pascal sacrifice, which we also no longer do. A law for all time that we don’t observe? The words are now read to mean not a paschal lamb offering, but a mere shank-bone on the seder plate, a finger pointing at a pointer pointing at the thing itself. More broadly than this, even, the law for all time is the telling of the story, the act of remembrance.

This is the strange meaning of a law for all time. The specifics do inevitably change, and yet somehow the essence—an injunction to remember—remains perennial. Bruno Latour captures the sentiment when he writes, “We have never been modern,” but the opposite is also true: our ancient ancestors were always already modern, remote from their origin. This is the law for all time, that the ancient is as if contemporary and the contemporary nonetheless archaic.

Was the lamb’s blood more original than the derivative representation? Was the Exodus event more original than the seder event in which we recount it? In some sense, yes, they are hinge moments in history. On the other hand, if we look to them as singularities having little to do with us, then they are no longer a law for all time. Passover can be a law for all time only if we experience our own moment as hinge moment.

This is what the sages of B’nai Brak knew when they stayed up late until morning recounting the Exodus. Of course, on a plain, political level, they were mistaken; their revolt against the Romans failed. Their ritual did not translate into the miraculous salvation that we read about each year in the Torah. Yet on a metaphysical level, they must have done something right to be included in the seder, their model affirmed even as their revolt failed. This is worth considering, for it changes the meaning of seder from a story of obvious, material success into one that involves endurance, even when success seems impossible, far off, or intangible.

Perhaps there is no greater claim than that we have an obligation to remember our leaving Egypt even in the world to come. For in such a world, a redeemed one, the imperative to remember—the law for all time—proves to have a non-instrumental value. No longer is the Exodus about winning, or about world-betterment. It is simply a truth that requires retelling as an end in itself, the ultimate freedom, the ultimate meditation. There is no greater joy than recounting the journey from enslavement to liberation. The story is not only, then, for those who need hope, but even for those who do not. It is a kind of mystical epiphany, a law not just for all times in the chronological sense, but for all seasons in the emotional sense.

A great story is one that can outlast its use.

I don’t know what the world will bring next year, or in the next 100 years or the next 1,000 years. Will AI take over the world? Will the nation-state exist? Will there be life on Mars? Will the world be more totalitarian or more decentralized? More abundant? More impoverished? More democratic? Will there be more social inequality? Will a giant flood or another pandemic or nuclear disaster or some other unforeseen catastrophe set us back to pre-industrial times? I have no idea. I do know that there will be seder. I do know that there will be song and dance, Maggid, movement from degradation to praise, and doors, real, digital, and other, opening for Elijah to join us.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,

Zohar

P.S.— I am thrilled to share the good news that I am the 2022 recipient of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, awarded to an “emerging leader in the humanities whose vision promises to change the way we see our world.” Also, since I forgot to link to my conversation with John Tomasi last time, here it is.

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