One of my first childhood memories is my pre-kindergarten “Pilgrim’s Landing” reenactment. Half the class dressed as Pilgrims, and sat in canoes. The other half was dressed as Native Americans, and we shared a mock Thanksgiving feast.

Why did we do this? After all, we learn the facts in school — so why the pageantry, why the acting?

Such questions were asked by the rabbis about the Passover seder, where Jews reenact the Exodus. The Haggadah itself commands the seder participant to behave “as if he himself had left from Egypt,” not just to pay homage to the historical past or even to be inspired. Instead, the goal is to live it, to be transported back in time.

Without time machines, how is this to be achieved? The rabbis’ emphasis was on the children, whose imagination is most dynamic. Children recite “MaNishtana,” where they acknowledge this is not a normal night. Anything is possible. On all other nights, you are an eight-year old boy from Westchester, but tonight, you can become a traverser of Mediterranean deserts, a crosser of seas. The Exodus can be lived again.

In fact, eminent rabbis were known to eschew adult conversation at the seder, in favor of focusing all the attention on engaging the kids, sometimes using childish antics considered foreign to typically austere men.

The operative principle is that there are certain moments in history that are so unparalleled and anomalous, that mere memorials cannot capture their ethos. You must pretend you were a slave in Egypt.

When Napoleon Bonaparte encountered Jews on Tisha B’av wailing about their Temple, the emperor asked when it had been lost. When told the Temple’s destruction was 2,000 years ago in a distant land, he was stunned. The Jews were acting as if no time had passed, like they had actually been there. Indeed, the Jewish sense of memory is unbelievable.

Why do educators fret the death of the last generation of Holocaust survivors? Don’t we still have the books, museums, and stories? With Soviet archives being released, we might be able to know even more about the Holocaust in 50 years than we do now. However, it is rightfully understood that nothing relates the greatest evil in human history like seeing survivors that experienced it. No documentary can capture the feeling one gets by seeing the numbers tattooed on an arm. The link to living history is immeasurable.

Reenactments are also common features of American culture. December alone includes recreations of the Boston Tea Party, Valley Forge, and Delaware River Crossing. Animating this habit is the reverence Americans have for our exceptional history. As early as 1802, Vermonters were reenacting the 1777 Battle of Bennington, with veterans on-hand being celebrated as living connections to the conflict.

It’s hard to maintain a bond with the past against the tide of time. In his 1838 Lyceum Address, Abraham Lincoln noted this problem as America’s founding generation was dying out.  Today, a more pernicious threat stands poised to thrust the coup de grace into our decaying historical conscience. These ideologues toppling statues and maligning the past — without recognizing any nuance, or separating those who don’t deserve to be celebrated from those who do — seek to sever our connection with it. Since the French Revolution, these cultural crusaders want to begin at Year Zero. We who look to the past with glowing eyes must rebuff them and prevail. That is our peculiar heritage as Jews and as Americans.

Joshua Blustein is a University of Chicago Law School student and a Krauthammer Fellow at the Tikvah Fund 

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