Hebrew scholar and Jewish academic Irene Lancaster reflects on Exodus and its connection to slavery and liberation. 

The festival of Purim has come and gone and in the four weeks now leading up to Pesach we are in a frenzy of preparedness. Houses are turned upside down as we get rid of any trace of leaven. Winter turns into spring and the Book of Exodus leads into Leviticus.

The last chapters of Exodus (35-40) read at the end of March describe the intricacies of constructing the Mishkan, the construction housing the Shekinah, the Presence of G-D. 

Leviticus starts with the phrase ‘And G-D called…’ G-D called to Moses to tell him the magnificent construction built by people in His honour had actually been built for the benefit of Moses and his people, and not in order to exclude them. 

This 1st chapter is read at the beginning of April, in the lead-up to Pesach. 

The Spanish biblical commentator Ramban (1194-1270), who finished his commentary in Acco, Israel, having himself been forced to flee Spain, states the following in the Book of Exodus:

‘This Book is the story of the first divinely-ordained national exile and the redemption from it … The exile was not completed until the day they returned to their place and came back  to the level of their forefathers. When they left Egypt, even though they had departed from the house of slavery, they were still considered to be exiles, for they were in a foreign land, wandering in the Wilderness. When they arrived at Mount Sinai and built the Mishkan and G-D returned and rested His Presence among them, then they had returned to the level of their forefathers.’

For us it is still important what it means to be a slave and consider how difficult it is to unshackle ourselves from the state of servitude. Although there are still places in the world where physical slavery continues to operate, we now tend to regard slavery as an addiction to the latest fad. This could be social media, public opinion, pressure groups and our own anxieties and neuroses - all those entities which hamper us from ‘breaking free’. Slavery of the addictive kind is easy to embrace and the desire to ‘be free’ is harder to fulfill than we think.

In March we have also been watching as the House of Lords Committee debates the Holocaust Memorial Bill. If this Bill is passed, Britain’s own glorious achievement in having brought about the abolition of slavery will be forgotten forever.

In 1833 Thomas Fowell Buxton enabled the eventual passing of the Slavery Abolition Act, first approved by George III. The Act gave freedom to millions of people around the world and is justifiably commemorated by the modest Buxton Memorial situated in Victoria Tower Gardens, near Westminster. 

By contrast, this Buxton monument to life and liberty, first expressed in the Book of Exodus, will be shamefully overshadowed by a hideous gigantic construction to dead Jews if the current Holocaust Memorial Bill goes ahead. 

What message will this ‘tourist attraction’ give the world? That Jews who were the first to fight against slavery and actively marched with Martin Luther King and other civil rights people, including great rabbis at their head, are in 2025 only prepared to give lip service to this country’s tremendous leap forward in following the most sublime tenets of our Bible, the Exodus story and all it entails? 

This story is the story of the journey of slavery to freedom. It still enthralls so many peoples all over the world, not least in the continent of Africa. In my own work I’ve encountered many victims of slavery, civil war, rape and mutilation, who’ve told me that the Jewish story of the Exodus is what has kept them going through all their travails, because, just as to every Jewish man, woman and child at Pesach, the Exodus story is fully alive for them too, and they have lived it.

The world should rejoice with us that Judaism is a religion of hope and of choosing life. They should rejoice that, in heeding the words of the Exodus story retold by Jews all over the world in less than four weeks, a British monarch, George III, enabled the process which eventually led, in 1833, (ie before the reign of Queen Victoria), to the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act.

At that time the British parliament was acting in the spirit of the Book of Exodus. By contrast, the Shoah was enabled and perpetrated by Europeans caught up in the slavery of addiction: addiction to their own negativity, hate, self-loathing and jealousy. 

This Shoah-enabling spirit should be fought wherever encountered and eradicated at source. Because commemorating negativity only enhances it. Just ask yourself, is antisemitism actually on the wane in the countries boasting 300 Holocaust monuments, museums and memorials, do you think? Are Jews currently safe to walk the streets in those countries?

That is the lesson we take in these few weeks leading from Purim to Pesach. After the Purim celebration of victory over our enemies everywhere who ‘in every generation rise up to destroy us’, we finish the Book of Exodus and, as Pesach approaches, we start the Book of G-D’s calling, known in Latin as ‘Leviticus’, which is all about service. From slavery to service (the same Hebrew root) we will have travelled miles, as did the Buxtons and the Wilberforces on their long road to the implementation of timeless Old Testament values.