About the Author

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg served for 30 years as a university president. He is now president emeritus and university professor at the George Washington University, where he teaches courses on the university presidency in America. He is also an adviser to Korn/Ferry International, where he is helping to find the next generation of university leadership. In June 2008 Simon and Schuster will release his new book Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out On Higher Education. B.A. Columbia, M.P.A. Harvard, J.D. Yale. Fifteen honorary degrees. A swell guy. But not much of a dancer.

He will blog about issues torn from the headlines dealing with higher education. Contemporary topics of pressing, current concern. And some serious matters too.

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Why Is This Holiday Different From All Other Holidays?

Each year at the Passover Seder I take our family through a service that recalls the story of Exodus. And as many of you will recall, Moses led his people out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, through the desert and to the edge of Canaan. Because of misdeeds committed along the way, Moses is denied access to his people’s future homeland. Its story has been told religiously for millennia, and cinematically for over half a century. This year, the modern Moses died; Charlton Heston has finally entered the Promised Land.

Biblical epics orchestrated by Hollywood are indelibly etched into the psyches of movie-goers. Pyramids and Tutankhamen’s tomb aside, it remains difficult to visualize a Pharaoh who doesn’t resemble Yul Brenner or a Moses other than Heston, as portrayed in the 1956 film, The Ten Commandments. The story continues with Steven Spielberg’s 1981 story of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the search by the Nazis for the ark and tabernacle built by Moses. In 2005, a French-Israeli cinematic team produced, Go, Live, and Become, the tale of a young boy, Shlomo, who was part of the Israeli “Operation Moses” that rescued and air-lifted thousands of Ethiopian Jews who fled the their home country, were stranded in the Sudan, and were brought to Israel. The story’s non-Jewish child was “placed” by his mother into the hands of a Jewish woman whose own child had died, and this adopted pair travel together in the modern exodus. As the child boards the Israeli plane, his birth mother says, “Go, live, and become.” What Moses was denied, Sholmo was permitted.

Cinema aside, Passover is one of my favorite Jewish holidays, in part because of the gathering of family around a table for ritual, special symbolic foods such as matzah (unleavened bread), and a focused conversation about the meaning of the holiday evoked by the components of the meal. We celebrate the message that links, from generation to generation, all people in search of liberty. Each year we recall those around the world struggling to be free. Each year we retell the story with some innovative message so that it does not become stale, so we never forget the trials of bondage and the blessing of freedom, so that we ourselves feel as if we were personally part of the exodus.

This year, I experienced a Rashomon moment on the Friday afternoon preceding the first Seder. Invited to a luncheon sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, I went to break bread with Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Arab Republic of Egypt’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. I sat with a law-school classmate, also Jewish, and we marveled at history that stretched over 5,000 years, tracing our heritage from Egypt to Washington, D.C.; from slavery to freedom; to my mother’s immigration to Israel in 1918 from Odessa; to his marriage over 40 years ago to an Israeli woman from Haifa; to the dozens of trips we have both made to Jewish communities around the world; to a signed peace accord between Israel and Egypt; to a visit I made to Cairo in 2001; to an uneasy border with the Palestinians living in Gaza; to the rise of fundamentalism within Egypt’s border; to the diplomatic hope of détente (Shalom still seems far off).

Within the liturgy of the Passover Haggadah is the practice of asking and answering four questions, beginning with “why is this night different from all other nights?” — and responding in a manner appropriate for four hypothetical children: wise, simple, wicked, and too young to know how to ask.

For someone who has spent most of his professional life in the academy, I have always relished the challenge of answering a question so that anyone — everyone — can understand its answer, or its message. It is the ultimate teaching moment, the professor’s “test,” so to speak: to be clear but not simplistic, to be thorough but not pedantic, to expound but not dictate, to broaden but not overstate; and mostly, to enrich the dialogue. The beauty of Passover is that all participants are engaged, all questions deserving of response, and all interpretations worthy of consideration. It elevates the ceremony into a seminar. Diaynu.

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