The Book of Exodus is a book of staggering importance to Western civilization. That’s because the Passover story culminates with the Jews leaving Egypt and heading into the wilderness, where they receive the Ten Commandments, which are the moral cornerstone of Western culture. This holiday is as important in 2025 as it was 3,400 years ago and has been every year since.

Jews have been commemorating Passover for roughly 3,400 years. They’ve celebrated it through purges, pogroms, wars, and the Holocaust, and through it all, they’ve stayed true to their identity and the Torah’s lessons. (The Torah is the first five books of the Old Testament.)

The pressures of the outside world have only bound them more tightly to the Torah’s protections and morals. Agam Berger, who was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, and only returned to Israel on January 30, 2024, recounted how, even in Gaza, she and another Israeli prisoner observed Passover, as well as keeping the other Jewish holidays:

When Hamas overran the Nahal Oz base on Oct. 7, 2023, many of my friends were murdered. In those harrowing moments, as I was being kidnapped, I had the freedom to choose what to say. I recited, continuously, the same verse that Jews on the threshold of death have said for millennia: Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

[snip]

I learned, as my forebears did, that imprisonment can’t overwhelm the inner spiritual life. Our faith and covenant with God, the story we remember on Passover, is more powerful than any cruel captor. Even as Hamas tried to coerce me into converting to Islam—at times, forcing a hijab on my head—they couldn’t take away my soul.

[snip]

My fellow scout Liri Albag and I marked Passover together last year. Held in a small room with no natural light, we did what we could to set the holiday mood. We cleaned our room and adorned the table with napkins and other small “decorations” made from scraps of paper. As a surprise, Liri wrote me a makeshift Passover Haggadah, the text that recounts our ancestors’ journey out of slavery.

The same essay, which is (sadly) behind a paywall at the Wall Street Journal, recounts what every Jew knows: The Haggadah tells each Jew not just to read the story of Exodus as history but to relive it personally. That’s why the Haggadah tells us that we say to our children that we engage in the Passover rituals, “God acted for me when I came out of Egypt.” In the Jews’ darkest times, they feel the immediacy of God.

But what happens when there are no darkest times? What happens in the West when Jews have lived without that external pressure for seventy years? And what happens when the government becomes the Jews’ God?

That’s when the lessons from the Exodus narrative are lost and the Commandments abandoned—and things go downhill fast, whether because, as the faithful would say, when we abandon God, he teaches us a painful lesson or because, as people who value faith without believing might say, Exodus is the apex of human wisdom about tyranny, freedom, and morality. Either way...

So, what are those lessons?

The Passover lesson is, most obviously, about faith in God. But it’s also a reminder that tyrants are not only cruel to those they deem their enemies (e.g., the Jews) but also do not care about their own people, provided that the tyrants are themselves protected from the damage they inflict. Thus, Pharaoh didn’t care that his people groaned under the first nine plagues. He yielded only when the tenth—the death of the firstborn—struck within his own palace.

The world today has many such Pharaohs, whether in China, Gaza and the West Bank, Iran, North Korea, or any other benighted place. We don’t do the people in those nations a favor by keeping their Pharaohs in power.

This is not to say that we Americans are obligated to wage war against every tyrant. It is to say, though, that we must recognize evil when we see it—and too many Western leftists, including Jews, look at the tyrants in Gaza, the West Bank, China, and Iran, and see only “victims” of America. When they do that, simply by providing moral support to these evil people, these leftists are as cruel to the suffering people in those countries as the tyrants themselves are.

As for the lessons of the Ten Commandments (and, of course, the Noahide laws), they are the root of a civilized society: Do not elevate government or petty idols above a moral God, do not commit murder, do not engage in sexual immorality, do not steal (which includes stealing a man’s liberty through slavery), do not torture animals, have just courts, honor your parents, do not lie about or otherwise defame people, and do not mire yourself in jealously. You don’t have to be religious to recognize that, as Dennis Prager has often said, a society built around these Biblical commandments will be a safe, happy, and prosperous one.

This Passover, whether you’re Jewish or not, and even whether you’re religious or not, remember the Passover lessons. By doing so, you will find yourself on the side of moral decency, individual liberty, and an ordered, prosperous society.

Image by Grok AI.