As well as asking, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”, perhaps this year we should also be asking, “Why is this year different from all other years?”
When Pesach begins on Wednesday evening, it will carry particular poignancy against the backdrop of the conflict with Iran, and will resonate deeply for Americans marking the 250th anniversary of their nation’s founding. For it is no exaggeration to say that the core narrative of the festival, the journey of the Israelites from slavery to freedom, helped inspire the US Revolution in the 18th century.
The Exodus story served as a major template through which many colonists understood and justified their rebellion, casting Britain as Pharaoh, the colonies as Israel, and liberty as a kind of national exodus.
When the Founding Fathers gathered in 1776 to design a seal for the new nation, Benjamin Franklin proposed an image of Moses dividing the Red Sea. His sketch depicted Pharaoh in an open chariot being overwhelmed by the returning waters as Moses, illuminated by a pillar of fire, raised his staff. Franklin suggested accompanying this with the motto: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” Ultimately, Congress adopted the eagle-and-shield design we know today.
Franklin was not alone in drawing on the Exodus. John Adams, having heard a sermon in 1776, wrote to his wife how the preacher compared “the case of Israel and that of America, and the conduct of Pharaoh and that of George”. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense and later writings, attacked monarchy and British rule in explicitly biblical terms, calling King George III the “hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England” and likening colonial resistance to Israel’s liberation from Egypt.
In the sermons and popular rhetoric of the era, George Washington was frequently compared to Moses, a leader guiding his people to freedom, while King George III was cast as a Pharaoh defying God’s will. Phrases drawn from Passover themes, “Let my people go,” liberation from bondage, God siding with the oppressed, became woven into the political vocabulary linking religious imagination to the call for independence.
Over time, this Exodus narrative extended far beyond the revolution. It shaped how later generations understood America’s ongoing struggles for freedom, inspiring abolitionists and, much later, the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently invoked the story, casting African Americans as the Israelites and racial segregation as “Egypt.” In his final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered in 1968, he drew directly on the imagery of Pharaoh and bondage, warning that those who wished to prolong oppression would seek to divide the enslaved among themselves. The reach of the Exodus has never been confined just to America. As the 19th-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine observed: “Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.”
As nations sought independence from the British Empire throughout the 20th century, the story served as an explicit template for imagining liberation from colonial rule. Post-war Latin American liberation theologians read the Exodus as a paradigmatic account of God’s solidarity with the oppressed.
The influential American academic Michael Walze, wrote Exodus and Revolution in which he summarised the exodus as a political model: “First, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt; second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive – a promised land; and third, that ‘the way to the land is through the wilderness.’ There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.”
As we gather around the Seder table, with Israel engaged in what feels like an existential struggle against Iran, the message of hope at the heart of the Exodus story feels more urgent than ever. The journey from slavery to freedom has never been linear, and the struggle continues across every generation.
Zaki Cooper is the co-founder of Integra and a Vice-President of the Council of Christians and Jews
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