More important than God taking the Jews out of Egypt is why. And that the next generation know this. If they will not be taught, then they will make up reasons that have nothing to do with the story.
A central moment of Yetziat Mitzrayim—leaving Egypt—comes with a commandment:
You must tell your children.
You must teach them what happened, why we left Egypt, and what it means.
And this may be the most important part of the entire story.
Because if you don’t tell your children why you do something—why it mattered to you, why it shaped your life—you create a vacuum. And nature abhors a vacuum. If we don’t give them the story, they will invent one.
We see this again and again. People end up “making up” what Judaism is because no one ever taught them what it actually means: why we keep mitzvot, why we pray daily, why we keep kosher. Lacking knowledge, they fill in the gaps with ideas that make sense to them—even when those ideas make no sense within Judaism itself.
I recently spoke to a well-meaning non-Jew who asked, “Aren’t the kosher laws really just about health?”
I explained: 3,500 years ago, Jews didn’t know germ theory. Kashrut wasn’t about bacteria. We keep kosher because we were commanded—to remind ourselves that God took us out of Egypt for a purpose. Once you forget the purpose, everything else unravels.
There’s a famous line attributed to the early secular Jewish movements: they hoped to raise a generation of heretics. Instead, they produced a generation of ignoramuses—am ha’aretz. Because without education, people don’t even know what they’re rejecting.
And that matters.
A heretic knows what he’s rejecting. Someone who never learned isn’t a heretic at all—he’s simply a child who was never taught.
There’s a telling contrast here. One revolutionary knew nothing about Judaism; another grew up in yeshiva and knew exactly what he was turning away from. When asked why, he cited the story of Rabbi Meir learning Torah from Acher—on Shabbat—while Acher rides a horse. They reach the boundary where Rabbi Meir must stop, and Acher says, “You can’t go further. I will.” And the man said, I continued.
That’s rejection with knowledge. That’s a conscious choice.
Our problem today is different. We’re surrounded by people who promote grand moral ideas—often under the banner of “social justice”—without realizing that many of those ideas are fundamentally alien to Judaism. Not because they’re evil, but because no one ever taught them what Judaism actually stands for.
And that brings us back to the mitzvah of telling the story.
Our job is not just to remember leaving Egypt—but to teach it, clearly and honestly, to the next generation. So they’ll know who they are, what they stand on, and—if they ever choose otherwise—what it is they’re choosing to leave.
Something to think about.
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