But it is ever so much more than that. It is the night when parents give their children the gift of identity. Via this rite of passage, parent transmits to child a core certainty about his or her place in the world. The child learns that he is infinitely valuable and dignified; he understands intuitively that his existence in the world as a Jew has meaning and purpose.

How does such powerful “certainty of being” emerge from a festive meal celebrating an ancient historical event? In the monotony of daily living, certainty of being seems perpetually elusive. Part of the problem lies in how we experience time. We often live by the words of a medieval adage, “The past is no more, the future not yet, and the present is as the blink of an eye.” In this conception, we have no anchor in the torrential stream of time. Swept away are all vestiges of a rooted identity. The fleeting present is divorced from past and future.

when a Jew wakes up in the morning, he must remember the world as it could be — as it will one day be

Memory is the essence of hope: this is the deep meaning of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav's teaching that when a Jew wakes up in the morning, he must remember the world as it could be — as it will one day be. One can say that Hope is a memory of the future. In response to the question of “Who am I,” the human being answers, “I am my memory and my dreams; I am my history and my hope. Both past and future live in the present and inform my core identity. I am the sum total of my memories of past and future. They give my life its unique cast, character and form.”

In the Jewish weltanunschanuung (world view), individual memory does not stand alone. It is merged with the memory of the people, as the collective and the personal join together. A Jew's identity is formed by the symbiosis of the story of his person and the story of his people.

It is for this reason that Amalek is the biblical symbol of evil. For the Greek, evil comes from a lack of knowledge. Plato wrote that virtue is knowledge and ignorance is the source of evil. For the Hebrew, however, the primary source of evil is loss of memory, not lack of knowledge. Appropriately, Amalek — the symbol of evil in Jewish sources — is the person or the people without a memory.

Next Year in Jerusalem. Not only Jerusalem, the physical city, but Jerusalem, the symbol of a better tomorrow

It comes as little surprise that the major intellectual activity of contemporary Nazi sympathizers is historical revisionism, or Holocaust denial. To revise history is to destroy memory, which is to murder once again. Redemption in the biblical model depends on the eradication of Amalek. Redemption is the recovery of memory. Thus it is appropriate that the Jewish response to Amalek is: “Remember what Amalek did to you when you left Egypt."

The Passover Seder is a meal of memory. We remember and identify with the certainty that Israel felt in the infancy of its nationhood. The 40 years in the desert are Israel's “early childhood.” G-d acts in the role of the loving, supportive parent, providing the children of Israel with food (manna) and protection from the elements. We remember G-d's unconditional love for us. Throughout the radical uncertainty of all the subsequent years, it is the power of this unconditional love which sustains us.

We end the Seder with a dream for the future. Next Year in Jerusalem. Not only Jerusalem, the physical city, but Jerusalem, the symbol of a better tomorrow. In the Passover Seder, we give our children the promise of a dream and the sweetest gift of all: the gift of memory.