Honourable senators, next week, Jews around the world will sit at the dinner table to celebrate Passover and to read from a book called the Haggadah. The Haggadah tells the story of the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. But it does more than just tell the story. It is a script for how the Passover meal — the Seder — is to be organized and how it is to unfold. It is a ritualistic piece of interactive theatre in which the participants are slowly transported back in time to experience what it was like to be delivered from slavery.

For example, why does the Haggadah instruct us to eat only unleavened bread, and for eight long days? It is so that we experience the haste with which we had to flee Egypt, leaving no time for our bread to rise. Why does it instruct us to eat bitter herbs? It is to evoke the harshness of our experience as slaves. And why does it instruct us to drink four full glasses of wine in the course of the Seder? And Jews are not necessarily known for being big drinkers. It is so that we may lose our sense of time and place, and experience the story as if it happened to us personally in real time. As the Haggadah tells us, “in every generation we are obligated to view ourselves as if we were the ones who went out of Egypt.”

So why do we do this each and every year, religious and non-religious Jews alike? We do it because the Passover story is our origin story as a people. We tell it to bind ourselves to our shared memory and shared destiny as a people. But we also do it because the story of Passover is at the heart of one of the central ethical teachings of the Jewish tradition: that the world is broken and that each of us is obligated to do our part to repair it.

Passover forces us and reminds us to confront the bitter fact that we live in a world where millions of people remain enslaved and unfree — people enslaved by tyrants abroad, or in the hands of human traffickers in Canada; people unfree to practise their faith, or express their political views, or pursue their personal goals, because of state or family coercion and control; people who are prisoners of such poverty that they are denied the fruits of the freedom they might formally enjoy.

We tell the story of Passover because it reminds us that none of us are truly free while others remain unfree. We tell the story because it instructs us to seek their liberation with the same passion, dedication and pride that we celebrate our own delivery from slavery in Egypt.

This is what my parents taught me, what my wife Nancy and I passed on to our children, and what they, in turn, are passing on to their children.

If I may end by invoking the title of a well-known comedy album of my youth — and I date myself — you don’t have to be Jewish to learn the lesson of Passover and to pass it on to others.

Thank you for your kind attention, and happy Passover.