The Haggadah recounts how Pharaoh enslaved our ancestors in Egypt, but God rescued them and us from an existence of perpetual servitude to Egypt:
עֲבָדִים הָיִינוּ לְפַרְעֹה בְּמִצְרָיִם, וַיּוֹצִיאֵנוּ ה’ אֱלֹקינוּ מִשָּׁם בְּיָד חֲזָקָה וּבִזְרֹעַ נְטוּיָה. וְאִלּוּ לֹא הוֹצִיא הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אֶת אֲבוֹתֵינוּ מִמִּצְרָיִם, הֲרֵי אָנוּ וּבָנֵינוּ וּבְנֵי בָנֵינוּ מְשֻׁעְבָּדִים הָיִינוּ לְפַרְעֹה בְּמִצְרָיִם – We were slaves to Pharaoh in the land of Egypt, and the Lord, our God, took us out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched forearm. And if the Holy One, blessed be He, had not taken our ancestors from Egypt, we and our children and our children’s children would all be enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt.
The Haggadah states this in the affirmative; God promised to rescue the Jewish People, and God followed through. The Haggadah then states this in the negative; if God had not followed through, the Jewish People would not have been rescued.
But these statements are functionally equivalent and mean the same thing. What does the second one add that isn’t evident with the first?
The first statement highlights a superficial aspect of redemption; the Jewish People were undergoing immense difficulty, and God saved them. But perhaps the second statement adds another dimension; if God hadn’t saved them, they would have been fundamentally stuck – מְשֻׁעְבָּדִים.
Millions of African people were enslaved and brought to America in more recent history. While slavery has been outlawed for generations, a certain stuckness has persisted long after slavery has become history, at least partly as a result of disconnection from their heritage. People don’t know where they come from, inhibiting them from accessing the fullness of who they are.
With the Exodus, the Jewish People were permanently bestowed with the power of redemption, the ability to change and experience things dynamically, the ultimate cure to stuckness and stagnation. We weren’t stuck with Egypt, and we weren’t lost to Egypt; we have moved on from Egypt fully. Egypt is gone, and the cruel monster Pharaoh is a joke today, a weak pretender to greatness and strength.
People can get stuck, like quicksand. Egypt gradually worsened, starting relatively benign, descending slowly into full-blown enslavement and ethnic cleansing. The situation deteriorated even after Moshe appeared and entered the mix. The turning point in the story is when the people cry out, and God hears them after generations of trauma – וַנִּצְעַק אֶל־ה’ אֱלֹקי אֲבֹתֵינוּ, וַיִּשְׁמַע ה’ אֶת־קֹלֵנוּ, וַיַּרְא אֶת־עָנְיֵנוּ וְאֶת עֲמָלֵנוּ וְאֶת לַחֲצֵנוּ. Their cry wasn’t even a prayer – it was a sigh of utter despair from pain and anguish, not religious sentiment, although cries of pain are a form of prayer as well. The people had given up, never believing nor hoping that Moshe would or could save them; they were stuck.
The Shem miShmuel explains that the power of the Seder night is that its story of freedom on a national level offers us the opportunity to become free of the tendencies and troubles that hound us on a personal level. With the power to change, hard times no longer need to be so scary; they too, shall pass.
R’ Daniel Rowe suggests that the first step of breaking free is recognizing how damaging stuckness and stagnation are. The leafy vegetation that served as abundant comfort food in Egypt is bitter Maror; Egypt’s comforts are still bitter. The crutches that help you come to terms with and accept stuckness are not comforts at all; they are the deepest kind of bitter. God doesn’t just save people from suffering; God offers people the way out of stuckness.
If freedom means a life rooted in the future, with the ability to choose and become, then its pre-requisite is to taste the bitterness of what is missing in the present, that this moment isn’t good enough.