Five of the greatest sages in Jewish history — Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Akiva, and Rabbi Tarfon — once gathered together in Bnei Brak for the Passover Seder. They spent the entire night retelling the story of the Exodus from Egypt, until their students came to them at dawn and said: “Our teachers, the time for the morning Shema has arrived.”
Jews read this passage every year at the Passover Seder. Most treat it as a charming story about great scholars so absorbed in learning that they forgot to pray. But our familiarity with the story too often blinds us to how strange it actually is. The students were not at the table with their teachers. They were outside, in the street, while the greatest rabbis of the generation sat together behind closed doors. Why were the students standing outside rather than sitting at the Seder with their teachers? And why didn’t the sages themselves notice that dawn had arrived?
To understand what is really happening in this story, we need the historical context. By the second century of the Common Era, the Land of Israel had been under Roman occupation for generations. The Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70CE, killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, and reduced the Jewish people to a subject population in their own homeland. The question of how to respond divided the Jewish world.
Rabbi Akiva, the towering sage of his generation, threw his full support behind Bar Kokhba, the military leader who launched a massive armed revolt against Rome in 132 CE and whom Rabbi Akiva believed was the long-awaited redeemer of Israel. Others in that same room were far more cautious. These men did not regularly share a dinner table.
So what were all five of them doing together, in one house, in the middle of the night, while students stood guard outside?
Rabbi Yehuda Leon Ashkenazi explains that Bnei Brak was the headquarters of the Jewish underground, and this gathering was illegal. The students outside were sentries scanning for Roman patrols. What the rabbis were doing inside was not a study session — it was a war council, a meeting to plan the liberation of their people from Roman domination. Which means their all-night discussion of the Exodus was not a retelling of something God once did in the distant past. It was a strategy session for something God was still doing, in their own generation. The Exodus never truly ended. It simply continued on to a new chapter. They were not commemorating a completed redemption. They were living one.
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The Bible demands that the Exodus remain, always, at the center of our consciousness: “So that you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt all the days of your life” (Deuteronomy 16:3). To remember the Exodus is to carry it forward as a present reality, to understand that the God who redeemed Israel from Egypt remains in the business of redemption, and that every generation of Israel that finds itself under threat is living inside the same story that began in Egypt. The Haggadah says it directly: “In every generation, each person is obligated to see himself as if he personally left Egypt.” The rabbis in Bnei Brak were living out this command.
Every month, we pray: “May He who performed miracles for our forefathers and redeemed them from bondage to freedom, redeem us soon and gather in our dispersed from the four corners of the earth, uniting all of Israel together.” The original redemption and the final one appear in the same breath. They are not two separate stories. They are one story, and the chapters are still being written.
Which brings us to this year.
Passover is days away. Across Israel, families are preparing their Seder tables as missiles rain down from the sky. Israeli and American soldiers are fighting Iran — a regime that seeks the annihilation of the Jewish people with the same murderous clarity as Pharaoh, as Haman, as Hitler. The men and women sitting down to those Seder tables this year are not commemorating the Exodus. They are living it.
The rabbis of Bnei Brak had their Seder added to the Haggadah. Today, we read about their night of hidden resistance and recognize it as every bit as much a part of the Passover story as the Exodus itself — which is exactly why it is in the Haggadah.
Our Seder this year, conducted under fire, in the land of Israel, in the very land those sages fought for, will one day be remembered the same way.
We are not reading about the Exodus. We are living it.
