Every year, Jewish families around the world gather round their tables, open their Haggadahs and retell the same story. The Passover Seder is among the oldest continuously performed narratives in human history — and yet, somehow, it never feels old.

Over the last few months, I have been privileged to conduct 100 interviews for Our Jewish Story. The pilot project, supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, recorded in-depth video interviews with Jewish men and women from across the world about their Jewish journey and identity. There were Jews from the former Soviet Union to Turkey, from Israel to North Africa, from Iran to Mexico, not to mention the suburbs of North America. In this small sample, every conceivable form of Jewish faith, practice and tradition was represented. The diversity was, frankly, breathtaking.

What intrigued me was that, notwithstanding that diversity, one story appears in the accounts of a majority of Jews — the one we tell at the Seder table. Some 70% of interviewees spontaneously talked about Passover during their interview, with 29% identifying it as their favorite holiday. Hanukkah came second at 21%, followed by Yom Kippur at 19%, Rosh Hashanah at 15% and Purim at 11%. Because Our Jewish Story is a storytelling platform, not a survey tool, we also learned why Passover resonates so deeply.

I can say with some authority that not one person cited craving matzah. We did, however, learn of five ways Jews do talk about Passover: as a family gathering, theatrical production, living document, Holocaust memory and — perhaps most significantly — vehicle of transmission. That last category was the most consistent finding across the entire dataset, cutting across Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and secular voices, across Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Iranian families, across every generation from centenarians to Gen Z.

“It’s how we learn about who we are,” said one interviewee, with the kind of simplicity that takes several thousand years to hone.

Passover is a remarkably elegant narrative: a clear beginning (we were slaves in Egypt), a compelling middle (Moses emerges as an unlikely, reluctant leader) and a dramatic end (the parting of the Red Sea, freedom on the other side). It is both past and present: the Haggadah does not say they went out of Egypt — it says we went out of Egypt.

That “we” carries enormous freight. Every generation doesn’t simply hear the Exodus story; they are part of it. The seder is not a history lesson but an act of radical inclusion. It is also relentlessly creative.

For many, Passover is an occasion for reinvention — Haggadahs rewritten, jokes planted before the plagues, current events woven into The Four Questions. Joshua Holo, former Dean of Hebrew Union College, described his family Haggadah as “total chaos… completely out of order,” with candles being lit midway through the seder. Sara Elias described the aliyah of Soviet Jewry to Israel as a modern day exodus for which she prayed every year until it happened. And Selma Holo recalled a conversation in which the Dalai Lama told her he thought that Passover was the greatest narrative ritual in the world that helped maintain Jewish identity in the Diaspora.

What I am discovering is that this consistent founding narrative we share allows for millions of individual journeys to mirror the past in the present, individual stories that reflect moments of redemption and freedom and self identification. 

Dov Forman, great-grandson of Holocaust survivors, described sitting at the seder with his great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, “hearing about her own story of exodus.” after surviving the camps. Ralph Berger, whose father co-founded the Bielski partisan brigade, named Passover as his favorite holiday “because it’s a holiday of freedom,” the same freedom his parents had fought for in the forest of Byelorussia. In families like these, the ancient story and the living one collapse into each other.

Jewish philanthropy has long understood that the most powerful gift a community can give its next generation is a sense of belonging — a reason to stay, to engage, to carry something forward. Telling our stories does that. Jewish philanthropic investment in memory and storytelling is not about archives or nostalgia, but the kind of story that connects Jews to where they come from and engenders belonging for future generations.

The Exodus story has endured, not because it is the story of a great leader, but because in the retelling men and women — young and old, over countless generations — sit around the same table, making their own journey, writing their own story.

Stephen D. Smith is co-founder of Our Jewish Story and executive director emeritus of the USC Shoah Foundation.