David McCullough, in “American History and America’s Future,” on his concern about a younger generation of historically illiterate Americans:
[W]e have to know who we were if we’re to know who we are and where we’re headed. This is essential. We have to value what our forebears — and not just in the 18th century, but our own parents and grandparents — did for us, or we’re not going to take it very seriously, and it can slip away.
If you don’t care about it — if you’ve inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and you’re not interested in it — you’re going to lose it. . .
And there’s no secret to teaching history or to making history interesting. Barbara Tuchman said it in two words, “Tell stories.” That’s what history is: a story.
Passover is a story — our story — of a people assisted by God, who revolted against impossible odds, spent decades in a wilderness, built a country, survived the destruction of sacred buildings and an entire society, lost their land, lived in exile, preserved a Book, never gave up, never gave in, recovered from centuries of pogroms and ultimately a Holocaust, never forgot (lest their right hand wither), and now celebrate a holiday thousands of years old in unparalleled freedom and comfort in America, in existential danger in a reborn state of Israel, under senseless attack in countries throughout the world, and ultimately — if you scroll through it all — a mystery and a miracle.
Leon Wieseltier has called the current generation of Jews the “spoiled brats of Jewish history.” We have been given an unparalleled history and live in unparalleled times with unparalleled opportunities. It is an inheritance. The seder is a moment for us to appreciate it, to learn and re-learn from it, and to pass it on.
More Passover readings here and here (and definitely here — read it all the way through, to its remarkable conclusion), and in the Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah. And we should not forget those still captive.