Dear Friends,

I want to wish you a very happy and healthy Passover season. It's good to see each one of you here worshiping in this beautiful chapel on this first day of our great Festival of Freedom. We look forward to the Seder together which will commence in a few minutes.

But first, I want to ask you this question since this is, after all, a night for asking questions. Can you think of any other people in all of history which has insisted on making so much of their former history as slaves? We Jews have made a religious duty out of remembering that we were once slaves, and I believe that that is unique.

One thinks of the story of the Jewish father and his son who, one September morning, stood in Grand Central station as the son awaited the train which was to take him away to college. Just for a moment the father stood there, wanting to say so many things but saying only one: "Son, never forget who you are."  Well, worth more than a score of lectures on behavior was that one challenge to something deep within the boy's remembrance.

The modern philosopher Martin Buber once said, "We Jews are a community based on memory." Well, never in the course of the year is that memory more acute than with the arrival of the Passover season. For over and over again, we are reminded throughout the Haggadah how they set over us taskmasters to afflict us with burdens. And how we built for Pharaoh the store city. . . and the Egyptians dealt ill with us and afflicted us, and laid upon us cruel bondage.

Like that boy at the train station, we Jews never allow ourselves to forget who we are. And yet, one would think dear friends, that former slaves would want to forget. It seems reasonable to me that those who were enslaved would want to deny, to repress their painful memories of their degraded past. Historically, if anything former slaves have made harsher rulers, sterner judges, and more arrogant victors.

Yes, it is a peculiar pride which causes us to remember our heritage as slaves. So tonight it is important that we ask ourselves: "What does all this have to say to us?" If Passover is supposed to be a moment when ritual and real life fuse so that a moment of experiencing liberation-then what should all of that experience mean for us today? Well, surely the Seder this year is all the more poignant, isn't it? For there are many hundreds of empty places at Seder tables this year.

In the wake of September 11^th (and have no doubt but that all things are changed and influenced by that watershed date in the minds of civilized men and women), Passover's clarion call to our human responsibility is all the more urgent and insistent.

We realize so keenly that at the heart of Pesach is triumph over evil-liberation from despots of hate and from Pharaohs who are quick to enslave whomever they brand as "the stranger" or the "infidel."

The wanton disregard for innocent life, and the arrogant, calculated and pre-mediated -- and surely sadistic-- attack upon the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and those on that jet which crashed in western Pennsylvania represent an unleashed evil and level of malevolence, every bit as vicious as the cruelest of Pharaohs of history.

The plagues of hate, of terrorism, of violence and death which attack our way of life, our faith, our pluralism, our enlightenment must be stubbornly cast off.  Let our righteous zeal be focused instead upon defeating and humbling haters and the perpetrators of violent atrocities.

And thus the civilized world, led by the United States, must continue to stand tall against Pharaoh. This year Moses' cloak is fashioned in red, white, and blue!

These are among the lessons which our long and often difficult trek through history has taught us as Jews. Freedom never comes as a lightly or easily-given treat. Every generation is called to bestir itself in the defense of liberty-to struggle, and even to bleed, that righteousness never submit to tyranny.

Are we not a remarkable people, we Jews?  We are the people described by the ancient sage Sforim, "as the people that walk around with. . . . thousands] of years of history on its back." Yes, we are a people with a peculiar pride -- we remember that we were once bondsmen to Pharaoh of Egypt. And may God so nerve our hearts and minds that we never forget our responsibilities, both as Jews and as Americans. Filled with such courage, Lincoln's vision will be all the more splendidly fulfilled, and "government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from the earth."