Liberal Jews wouldn't have it any other way.
"We don't have a corner on the struggle for freedom," said Steve Einstein, a lay leader of the Sebastopol Jewish community. "We just have a holiday for it."
To Einstein, who led a Seder on Thursday night at the Sebastopol Area Senior Center, Passover is such a universal celebration that "the Jewish thing is the tip of the iceberg."
Ironically, the Haggadah — the text followed at Seders, telling the Exodus story — never mentions Moses by name. The reason, Einstein said, is "to keep our eyes on God as a mover and a liberator, and our own need for redemption."
But Moses, religious leader, lawgiver and prophet, is the story's main character. Placed by his mother in a basket in the river Nile and raised in the Egyptian pharaoh's household, Moses returns — on God's commandment — to make the famous plea, "Let my people go," to an unfeeling pharaoh.
Pharaoh relents after God wreaks 10 plagues upon the Egyptians, culminating with the death of all first-born male children, in which the Israelites — marking their homes with lamb's blood — enable the angel of death to pass over their portals.
But the duplicitous pharaoh, after setting the Israelites free, then sends his army after them. In the Torah and the Quran, Moses parts the Red Sea, enabling his people to escape, then closes it and drowns the pharaoh's soldiers.
Jews regard Moses as "the greatest prophet ever," portrayed in the Torah as "the only one who saw God face to face," Keller said.
In the Quran, the central religious text of Islam, the Israelites' Exodus is a dominant story.
"O children of Israel! Remember those blessings of Mine with which I graced you, and how I favored you above all other people," God says in the Quran.
Moses is mentioned more often in the Quran than Muhammad, the founder of Islam, said Ibrahim Ibrahim, a member of the Islamic Society of Santa Rosa.
Moses is one of the six major prophets — including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad — named in the Quran. "We consider them Muslims," Ibrahim said.
In the Quran, Muhammad ascends to heaven and meets Moses, who counsels Muhammad in his negotiations with God over the number of mandatory prayers for his people.
In his own time, Moses saved the Israelites from persecution and massacre by the pharaoh, Ibrahim said. "It's a very powerful story; it's about freedom," he said.
Muslims see a connection between Exodus and their own Hijra, a lifesaving migration by Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622A.D.
A thousand years later, the Pilgrims set sail aboard the Mayflower in 1620, seeking religious freedom in America and carrying Bibles emblazoned with Moses leading his people to a new land, according to author Bruce Feiler.
References to the Exodus rebound through the nation's history.
Patriot Thomas Paine, in his tract "Common Sense," described King George as the "hardened, sullen tempered pharaoh."
In 1776, Benjamin Franklin proposed an image of Moses leading the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt and closing the sea over pharaoh's army for the Great Seal of the emergent United States.
His proposed motto: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
Neither idea made it onto the seal, but the House chamber in the U.S. Capitol features marble relief portraits of 23 famous lawgivers: 11facing left and 11 facing right, all of them looking toward a bearded Moses, the only one whose full face is depicted.
The African-American spiritual, "Go Down Moses," was called the national anthem of slaves in the mid-1800s, and Harriet Tubman, an abolitionist who worked on the Underground Railroad, was called "the Moses of her people."
French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi modeled the Statue of Liberty after a Roman goddess, adding two elements — the rays of sun around her head and the tablet in her arms — from the image of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments.
It's perhaps more trivial, but Superman, the comic book character created by two Cleveland Jews in the 1930s, was originally named Kal-El, the Hebrew word for "friend of God" or "voice of God."
More than any other figure in the ancient world, Moses "embodies the American story," Feiler wrote in the Washington Post in 2009. "He is the champion of oppressed people."
Modern Jews apply the Passover story to all forms of enslavement and "the possibility of liberation," Keller said.
"We don't always notice everything that oppresses us," he said. "Sometimes we are oppressed in ways that are very comfortable."
Women, for example, may feel enslaved "by a system that constantly judges you by how you look," Keller said.
Einstein, a hospice nurse, said the quest for freedom could now apply, for some, to the fight for universal health care.
Neither one is concerned by the proposition that there is no archaeological evidence of Moses and the Israelites wandering in the Sinai desert for 40years.
Exodus is likely a myth, Keller said.
"What's important is this is our story. We see it as our origin; we repeat it every year."
Jewish families who do not celebrate the birth of Jesus gather instead for Passover, Einstein said.
"This really is our Christmas," he said.
You can reach Staff Writer GuyKovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.
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