By Sam Ben-Meir in New York City
Passover is often described as a story of liberation. A people enslaved in Egypt are delivered from bondage and led toward freedom. It is retold each year at the Seder table, through ritual, food, and narrative. But if we take Passover seriously—not just as tradition, but as philosophy—it begins to look less like a celebration of freedom achieved and more like a disturbing reminder that freedom is never secure.
At its core, Passover is not about what happened once. It is about what must be recognized again and again. The command at the heart of the holiday is not simply to remember, but to remember as if you yourself had been enslaved. This is not historical education. It is a transformation of perspective. It refuses the distance that allows us to say: that was then; this is now. Instead, it insists: the structure of that experience still concerns you.
This is where Passover becomes radical. Most societies prefer to treat injustice as something safely confined to the past. Slavery, oppression, domination—these are things we condemn retrospectively, as a way of reassuring ourselves that we have moved beyond them. Passover refuses that comfort. It collapses past into present, forcing the recognition that what we call “freedom” is never final, never guaranteed, and never evenly distributed.
To understand this more deeply, it helps to turn to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, who offers a powerful way of thinking about moments of rupture. Badiou calls such moments Events—breaks in the normal order of things that reveal that what seemed necessary was, in fact, contingent. An Event is not just something that happens. It is something that changes what can be thought and what can be done.
The Exodus can be read in precisely this way. Egypt represents more than a historical empire. It represents a world in which inequality and domination have become normalized—where the structure of power appears fixed, inevitable, even natural. The radical claim of the Exodus is not simply that the Israelites were freed, but that such a system could be broken at all. What seemed permanent was revealed to be fragile. What seemed necessary was shown to be contingent.
That is what makes it an Event. But for Badiou, an Event is not enough. It must be followed by what he calls fidelity—a sustained commitment to the truth that the Event reveals. Without fidelity, the Event fades. It becomes just another story, absorbed into the existing order.
This is where the rituals of Passover take on new meaning. The Seder is not simply a reenactment. It is an attempt to maintain fidelity to the Event of liberation. It insists that the truth revealed by the Exodus—that oppression is not inevitable, that the world can be otherwise—must be kept alive. And it does so in a strikingly unconventional way.
The Seder is not a smooth narrative. It is fragmented, dialogical, often disorienting. There are questions without immediate answers, symbols that require interpretation, and rituals that interrupt the flow of the meal. Children are encouraged to ask questions; the structure resists closure. This is not accidental.
It reflects a deeper philosophical insight: Liberation cannot be transmitted as a finished doctrine. It must be enacted as an ongoing disruption. The Seder does not tell you what freedom is. It unsettles your sense of what is given. It trains you to recognize that the world you inhabit—no matter how stable it appears—could be otherwise.
This is also why Passover refuses to end with arrival. The story does not conclude with the Israelites entering a stable, just society. Instead, it leads into the wilderness—a space of uncertainty, vulnerability, and disorientation. This is not a narrative flaw. It is a philosophical statement.
Freedom is not the establishment of a final order. It is the opening of a space in which the future is no longer determined by the past. And that space is unstable. From this perspective, one of the most important elements of Passover is not the liberation itself, but the command that follows it: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
This is where Passover moves from memory to ethics. The experience of oppression is not meant to justify identity or entitlement. It is meant to generate a universal obligation. Having suffered injustice does not make one exceptional; it makes one responsible.
Here again, Badiou’s philosophy helps clarify what is at stake. For Badiou, an Event generates a universal truth—one that is not confined to a particular group or identity. The truth of the Exodus, in this sense, is not “our liberation,” but the principle that no one should be subject to such domination.
This is a demanding idea. It challenges the tendency to turn historical suffering into a source of moral privilege. Passover resists that move. It insists that the memory of oppression must be translated into solidarity, not exclusion. The stranger—precisely the one who does not belong—is the test of whether the truth of liberation has been maintained. The most uncomfortable possibility Passover raises is not that oppression continues—but that those who remember it may come to reproduce it.
And yet, this universalism is fragile. Memory does not simply fade—it is neutralized, transformed into ritual that asks nothing of us. What was once a living confrontation with injustice can harden into tradition, identity, or even justification for new forms of exclusion. The danger is always that the Event will be domesticated—converted into tradition precisely so that it no longer interrupts anything.
This is why Passover must be repeated. Not because we forget the story, but because we forget its implications. We forget that the structures we condemn in the past persist precisely because we have learned to live comfortably within their revised forms in the present. We forget that the line between oppressor and oppressed is not fixed but shifting. And we forget, perhaps most uncomfortably, that we are implicated in the very systems we prefer to believe we merely observe. In this sense, Passover is not a celebration in the usual sense. It is not about affirming what has been achieved. It is about refusing to accept the present as sufficient.
It asks a question that remains as urgent now as it was in the ancient world: Where, today, does the structure of Egypt persist? The answer is not obvious, and it is not singular. It may appear in economic inequality, in systems of labor exploitation, in the treatment of migrants and refugees, in racial injustice, or in more subtle forms of domination that shape how we live and think. The point is not to identify a single modern “Egypt,” but to recognize that the conditions of unfreedom are never entirely absent.
Passover does not provide a program for political action. It does something more fundamental. It cultivates a disposition—a way of seeing and responding to the world. It demands vigilance. It insists that freedom is not something we possess, but something we must continually enact and defend. It reminds us that the stability of our institutions should never be mistaken for justice, and that the absence of visible chains does not guarantee the presence of genuine freedom.
To read Passover through a radical philosophy of emancipation, then, is to see it not as a closed story, but as an open demand. It calls on us to remain faithful to the possibility that the world can be otherwise, even when it appears fixed. It asks us to recognize the persistence of domination, even when it is normalized or hidden. And it challenges us to extend the memory of liberation beyond ourselves—to those who remain vulnerable, excluded, or unseen.
Long after the story of Exodus was first told, the question remains: are we living in freedom—or have we learned to mistake new forms of constraint for freedom itself? Passover does not answer it. It returns the question to us—and offers no reassurance that we would recognize the answer or want to.
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Sam Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology.