The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

No great achiever - even those who made it seem easy - ever succeeded without hard work.

Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.

Religiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it's more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race.

Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, "What happened?" but rather, "How then shall I live?" And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.

The build-up of personal and collective debt in America and Europe should have sent warning signals to anyone familiar with the biblical institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, created specifically because of the danger of people being trapped by debt.