We Never Stopped Telling Our Story

When my youngest daughter was 5, she didn’t want to go to kindergarten. A friend recommended a book called The Invisible String. It tells the story of two children who can’t fall asleep. Their mother gently explains that an invisible string exists between them and everyone they love. 

You mean to say there’s a string connecting us to Daddy at the office right now?

Yes. 

And Aunt Sarah in Australia? 

Yes. 

And even Grandad in heaven? 

Yes — there are millions of invisible strings connecting us to the people we love, and when we pull on them, they feel the tug and pull back. 

That day, for the first time in months, my daughter went happily to kindergarten. When I picked her up, she looked at me and said, “Did you feel me pulling?”

That invisible string is exactly what we pull when we sit around the seder table and tell the story of our ancestors in Egypt. It is what countless Jews who had drifted from their Jewish identity felt amid the slaughter on October 7. It is what many young Israelis adrift in Thailand felt when they returned to their war-torn land to fight. And it is the string Moses reminds the people of as they leave Egypt for the land of Israel. 

Thinkers have given this string different names. Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik called it the covenant of fate, a bond forged in shared pain. Ahad Ha’am called it ru’ach ha’umah, the spirit of the nation. Natan Sharansky felt it in a Soviet gulag. Israeli hostages felt it in the tunnels of Gaza. The string holds taut against every cultural force that has tried to cut it.

But not everyone is pulling. Postmodernism deconstructed grand narratives. Individuals drift as free-floating atoms, inhabiting only the present, without belonging, without rooted identity. Responsibility has been hollowed into performance: not what I owe, but what, in this moment, makes me feel righteous. Freedom, in this vision, means only freedom from: from constraint, from the demands of the other, from the weight of history. The self and its desires become the highest court of appeal.

The Haggadah is a defiant protest against this vision. Once a year, we sit around the seder table and read the telling — weaving layer upon layer into an intergenerational conversation that stretches across time and space. It is a story of a particular kind of freedom: not the freedom that breaks us loose from constraint, but the freedom that binds us to something larger than ourselves. At its heart lies the Maggid, the narrative core of the evening. But rather than retelling the Exodus directly, the rabbis frame the narrative around a farmer bringing his first fruits — his bikkurim — to the Temple in Jerusalem, centuries after the Exodus, and reciting the narrative arc of his people: Arami oved avi — my forefather was a wandering Aramean (Deuteronomy 26:5).

They could have chosen the splitting of the sea, the song of triumph at the shore, the women who defied tyranny to save Moses. Why tell the story through a farmer, centuries after the Exodus, bringing his first fruits to the Temple?

The answer, I believe, goes to the heart of why we are still here.

When Jews throughout the centuries gather at the seder table, we gather in the midst of our own unfinished stories. We do not know how the chapter we are living through will end. The rabbis understood this. And so they gave us not a narrator who is still inside the rupture, but one who has lived to see its resolution. The farmer in Parshat Ki Tavo carries the gift of hindsight and the privilege of perspective. He can look back across slavery, exodus, wandering and arrival, and see God’s footprints moving through it all. And when we hear the story told through his mouth — “my forefather was a wandering Aramean, and he went down to Egypt … and they afflicted us … and the Lord brought us out” (Deuteronomy 26:5–8) — something shifts. We are no longer merely recounting the past. We are being invited to see our own present moment from the other side of its redemption.

And it is precisely that perspective that transforms the farmer’s simple act into the secret of Jewish survival. He could take the fruits he had so tenderly nurtured and enjoy them in the comfort of his own home. Instead, he carries them to the Temple, recounts the triumphs and tragedies of his people, and proclaims: You, a single anonymous farmer, are part of an incandescent, unbroken journey. You are bound by that invisible string — horizontally to your people’s story, vertically to God and His covenant.

The Torah then commands the Jewish farmer to share his fruits with the Levite, the stranger, the orphan and the widow. Because real freedom is not the satisfaction of private desire but responsibility to those beyond ourselves. Freedom is not a given. It is an apprenticeship, tended patiently, like those first fruits, until we are ready to offer ourselves to something larger than ourselves.

Like the people of Israel who celebrated the very first Passover still in Egypt — still behind closed doors, still waiting as the plague moved through the darkness outside (Exodus 12:22–23) — we, too, sit at our seder tables in the midst of uncertainty. We are in a moment of war and rising antisemitism, and we don’t know how this chapter ends. Moses commanded the people: Tell this story to your children (Exodus 13:8). Not later, when it is safe. Not when the outcome is clear. Now. Even now. Especially now.

So we, too, must find a way to weave this present moment into the long and tumultuous tapestry of our people’s memory. That is the calling of this hour. And we take comfort knowing that the story we tell will one day be recounted by our own farmer: a descendant who has seen how this chapter ends, who will carry this moment to their own altar with gratitude and with joy. But that day will come only if we pull on the string with enough intention and love that centuries on, our descendants will still feel the tug pulling back.