The 3,000-Year-Old Lesson Jews Still Haven’t Mastered

Every morning and every evening, millions of Jews around the world recite words that seem almost redundant: they remember the Exodus from Egypt. Not once a year during Passover, not occasionally when the mood strikes, but twice daily, without fail. This practice stems from an explicit biblical commandment that appears to border on obsessive. The Bible doesn’t simply tell us to remember our liberation from Egyptian bondage; it commands us to “remember the day when you went out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life” (Deuteronomy 16:3). The Sages, parsing this phrase with surgical precision, found that the word “all” seems superfluous. From this seemingly unnecessary word, they derived that we must remember the Exodus both day and night, every single day of our existence.

But here’s what should puzzle anyone reading this commandment: Why does God demand such relentless remembrance? If the Exodus succeeded—if the Israelites did indeed escape Egypt and receive the Torah at Sinai—why this daily obsession with an ancient event?

Rabbi Yehuda Leon Ashkenazi observes that we don’t constantly rehearse events that have truly succeeded, that have become integrated into our collective soul. Abraham’s departure from Ur of the Chaldeans, for instance, merits only a brief mention in the Passover Haggadah precisely because that departure was complete and irreversible. No one today worships the gods of ancient Mesopotamia; that victory is final, and so there is no need to dwell on it.

The Exodus from Egypt, however, remains unfinished business. The Sages themselves acknowledged this reality, teaching that in the messianic era, we will focus primarily on the final redemption and mention the Egyptian Exodus only secondarily. The very fact that we still need daily reminders means the Exodus hasn’t fully accomplished its purpose.

What exactly was that purpose? The Bible provides the answer:

The operative phrase here is “take one nation,” which literally translates as “take for himself a nation.” God didn’t simply rescue individual slaves; He created a nation. He separated millions of Israelites from their Egyptian neighbors and forged them into a distinct people with their own identity, destiny, and ultimate homeland. This wasn’t a spiritual awakening or a religious conversion; it was the birth of a nation.

Here lies the lesson we still haven’t absorbed, the reason we must remember the Exodus morning and night: the people of Israel are not merely a religious community but a nation that must ultimately separate from all the “Egypts” of the world to fulfill their divine mission.

Though the lesson of the Exodus should have been clear, many Jews have refused to learn it. The greatest heresy embraced by the Jewish Reform movement, founded by Abraham Geiger in 19th-century Germany, was its systematic elimination of Jewish national consciousness. Geiger didn’t merely reform Jewish practice, he attempted to transform Jews from a nation into what he called “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” At the core of Geiger’s plan to “reform” Judaism was, as Leora Batnitzky writes, “his attempt to rid the Judaism of his day of any concept of Jewish collective politics or messianic hope.”

The results speak for themselves. By rejecting Jewish nationhood, the Reform movement created the perfect conditions for assimilation and demographic collapse. With intermarriage rates now exceeding 70% among American Reform Jews, the movement has engineered its own disappearance. More tragically, it failed to prepare Jews for the reality that would soon confront them across Europe.

The emergence of modern antisemitism in the late 1800s (the very term suggests that Jews constitute a separate ethnic group) proved that no amount of assimilation could transform Jews into generic Europeans. Despite centuries of Jewish presence in European societies, despite remarkable achievements in science, arts, and commerce, antisemites continued to view Jews as foreigners, as “Semites” who didn’t genuinely belong.

The antisemites were wrong to persecute Jews, but they were right about one crucial point: Jews are not simply “Europeans of the Mosaic faith.” They are a distinct nation, exactly as the Exodus proclaimed. Every attempt to obscure this reality has ended in tragedy.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook explains why God insisted on creating a nation rather than merely establishing a religion. A holy nation demonstrates that divine ideals can penetrate every level of society—not just exceptional individuals living in monasteries, but entire populations, including “the wise and foolish, rich and poor.” Religion can sanctify individual lives, but only a nation can transform society itself, bringing holiness into politics, economics, agriculture, and every aspect of collective life.

This is why God didn’t establish Judaism as a universal religion practiced by individuals scattered across the globe. He created a nation destined for its own land, where it could demonstrate how divine principles operate not just in synagogues but in parliaments, not just in private homes but in public squares.

The Land of Israel isn’t an afterthought or a romantic attachment. It’s the essential laboratory where Jewish national identity achieves its complete expression. Without the land, Jewish nationhood remains theoretical; without nationhood, Judaism itself becomes merely another denomination competing in the marketplace of personal spirituality.

We remember the Exodus every day and every night because God’s plan remains unfulfilled. Too many Jews still prefer the fleshpots of Egypt—the comfort of assimilation, the security of other nations, the illusion that they are “Jewish Americans” as opposed to Jews who are living in America. And too many Gentiles still deny the Jewish people their right to national existence in their ancestral homeland.

The daily remembrance of the Exodus carries both promise and warning. God’s plan will ultimately succeed. But until it does, the Jewish people remain vulnerable to every form of persecution and assimilation. Only when the final redemption arrives, when Jewish national identity is fully restored and recognized, will we finally be able to speak of the Exodus in the past tense.

Until then, we remember. Every morning and every night. Because the Exodus isn’t history, it’s prophecy still waiting to be fulfilled.