Storytelling as Freedom

Passover as a Conversation Feast

What stories did our ancestors tell one another when they were slaves in Egypt? What stories did they tell themselves as they were leaving? The Torah itself tells us little of the slaves’ narrative life. We know that they groaned and moaned and wept. But perhaps they were too in the mortar to have time and energy for reflection. We know that when they left they sang and danced. But they were probably focused on fleeing the Egyptians and didn’t have much bandwidth for narration. Primal emotions tend to come first. Stories tend to come second.

The Jewish People are a people of the Book, but it’s not clear that we always were so studious, so literate, so wordy. Maybe our verbosity opens like a gush from a trauma in which all our focus was on brick-laying. Perhaps our intellectualism is our way of expressing our joy and relief in no longer having to do hard labor day in and day out. Or perhaps it’s an over-compensation for our fear of having been stripped of a voice and treated like animals. The seder night is a night of feasting, but fundamentally it’s a ritual whose sacrament is the word. Instead of offering up a lamb, we offer a shank-bone and a story. We offer up our words.

It’s powerful to remember that in the ancient world, leisure was not for everyone. And that leisure entailed storytelling and reflection. Nobody remembers what Alcibiades ate at Socrates’s Symposium, but they do remember his speech. For the free, the feast serves the discourse, not the other way around. This is a mark of freedom: to transcend the need to eat and see a meal as a pretext for talking. The opportunity cost of talking is eating and vice versa (we can’t talk and chew at the same time). Maggid (the story of the past) leads up to the feast while Nirtzah (the story of the future) concludes it.

Today, as freedom of speech has again become a hot-button issue in the culture wars, let’s take a step back and consider that the ancients saw speech as a form of freedom. The ability to speak thoughtfully reflected the distinction between slave and free. We should not take good conversation for granted. And we should appreciate both how Graeco-Roman and how Jewish it is to see good conversation as the apex of liberation. What is God doing in heaven? Why, having a great debate with the angels over a tractate of Gemara, of course. No doubt, on Passover, the heavenly beings also tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

Jewish tradition teaches that the remedy is made before the disease. In the case of Passover, the story is made before the trauma. Reflection is given to humanity as a pre-condition for suffering. The ability to tell our story, to change our story, to interpret our story, and to live into a new future—these are part of our divine endowment.

Even those who are by themselves for Seder are required to tell the story: to themselves. There is freedom in telling and hearing your story. There is liberation in knowing that you have a story. You’ve made it to the point where you can be self-reflective. “We were slaves in Egypt and now we are free.”

Chag Sameach,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh