In fact, she comes every year; the haggadah we use includes her famous sonnet, “The New Colossus.” I’ll read aloud the words she lent the Statue of Liberty—“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—and we’ll all feel good. We’ll feel good dissing the “brazen giant of Greek fame,” a stand-in for Pharoahs everywhere. We’ll be glad to bring the Exodus story home to our own “sea-washed, sunset gates.” And we’ll congratulate ourselves for universalizing the meaning of the Exodus, giving a “world-wide welcome” to exiles from everywhere.

A Night of Questions, the Reconstructionist haggadah that features readings from Lazarus alongside others from Abraham Lincoln and the political theorist Michael Walzer, reminds us that “Whoever expands upon the story of the Exodus is worthy of praise,” as the haggadah says. Emma Lazarus’s famous poem does just that, reviving the famous Passover exhortation “Let all who are hungry come and eat” and turning it into a tenet of American life.

When Lazarus—a wealthy New Yorker of Sephardic heritage—wrote those words in 1883, she had no idea that they would someday speak not only for the Statue, but also for the country. The statue lay in pieces in a warehouse in Paris; it would be three more years before it was transported to and assembled in New York. And America itself was under construction. Nativism was a more likely path than inclusiveness. It was only in 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’s death, that her friend Georgina Schuyler undertook to have her poem emblazoned on a bronze plaque to be affixed to the base of the Statue of Liberty. Liberty’s torch was the pillar of fire that led the Israelites by night to America, a Promised Land.

Of course by 1924, the “Golden Door” had closed. The seas no longer parted for immigrants—including millions who might have eluded Hitler—and America had turned back on its own promise. But readers of the haggadah know that freedom is something to be renewed in every generation, not something given once for good.

Emma Lazarus knew what it means to live a double life, as American and as Jew. We are in exile and we are at home. We are slaves and we are free. We are bearers of a universal fire and guardians of our own particularity.

I feel the contradictions keenly at the pair of seders I attend. At the seder I lead—a gathering of friends who love Jews more than Judaism—I play the role of the wise child. My job is to ask the right questions that will help them to find as much meaning as matzo in a ritual that is largely alien to them. A week before the seder, I email each person a question that expands the seder outward to touch on human rights, sweatshop labor, the trafficking of women, and holes in the ozone layer. To some (the three therapists among us), I send questions that narrow the seder to the dimensions of the psyche: What is your personal Egypt, your narrow place?

At the other seder I attend, that of my learned brothers and sisters-in-law, I play the role of the child who barely knows how (or what) to ask. My siblings recount their most recent shiur, my Schechter-educated nieces take turns speedreading in Hebrew, and no one needs questions about climate change to tell them that why all this matters and just how deeply.

Or how widely. That the Exodus story has legs is not news. It’s been a quarter-century since Michael Walzer laid at the feet of the Exodus two distinct traditions of revolutionary politics (and yes, velvele, there are traditions of revolution). In one—for Walzer, the wrong one—we are ever waiting for the messiah. This type of revolution is other-worldly in that it entails a hope for change that exists in the imagination, in which there is perfect righteousness and justice. By contrast, the other tradition, the one Walzer prefers, teaches instead the necessity of taking action in the here and now of history, not dreaming about revolution, but marching toward righteousness and justice—proximal righteousness; rough justice. As he wrote in his 1985 book Exodus and Revolution:

So pharaonic oppression, deliverance, Sinai, and Canaan are still with us, powerful memories shaping our perceptions of the political world. The “door of hope” is still open; things are not what they might be—even when what they might be isn’t totally different from what they are. We still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics and about its proper form:

—first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;

—second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;

—and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.” There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.

Walzer’s challenge to use the Exodus as a moral imperative is clearly a challenge to universalize it. But do we, in universalizing Exodus, and by extension the Passover story, lose it as a Jewish story?

In a 2001 talk called “Universalism and Jewish Values,” Walzer observed what Emma Lazarus already knew: Not all universalisms are the same. The universalism Walzer claims for Judaism, which he derives from both Biblical and Talmudic sources, is what he calls a “universalism of the weak.” For him, it is a “low-flying universalism,” the voice of the dispossessed. Of necessity, Walzer observes, Jews have always had to grant other nations their sovereignty and other peoples (within limits) their moral agency. Walzer makes us look back to Lazarus and ask, how Jewish is her universalism? Is it, too, a universalism of the weak? In other words, is Lazarus’s “golden door” also Hosea’s “door of hope”?

Yes and no. Lazarus’s sonnet, like her commitment to assist the Russian refugees, is indeed a Jewish vision; it came from a sense of herself, a fourth-generation American, as another in a long line of Jewish exiles. But her Jewish universalism, while it takes the part of the poor and wretched, is hardly “low-flying.” On the contrary, hers is a universalism from above, in which affluent, modern Jews welcome exiles not to a wilderness, but to developed, hospitable cities. And there are other differences. First, whereas the sources, according to Walzer, are preoccupied with the agency of “other nations,” Lazarus regards poor refugees as a nationless mass whose agency itself has been suppressed; presumably, it is only now to be realized. Second, her Exodus is presided over not by Moses but by “a mighty woman,” a “mother of exiles” who guides not with pillars of cloud and fire, but by the “imprisoned lightning” —electricity? technology?—of her raised torch.

Iniviting Emma Lazarus to our seder reminds us that we are Jews of latter days. Our immigrants don’t hanker after Egypt; they call their family on cellphones. In lieu of the revolutionary purges of the Levites, we have benevolent societies and welfare agencies. When we expand our seder to include “The New Colossus” we modernize and universalize, but as we do, weigh all that has changed for us as ethical Jews, alongside all that has not.

Esther Schor is a professor of English at Princeton University and a contributing editor at Tablet Magazine. She is the author of the Nextbook Press biography Emma Lazarus.

Attached were a few short letters. I read them once or twice and felt a warm rush of empathy towards their author. I could tell he was young, as he possessed that special sort of certainty that is only ours to keep until we become settled, mature, and reasonable adults.

He needed every bit of the brashness of youth to pull off his central argument: poverty, wrote the juvenile correspondent, was the one true path, the best way of life, a state of glistening bliss to which we must all aspire. If powers corrupts, he thundered, the lack of it must redeem.

It would be unkind to quote the eager young man’s work verbatim, but there he was, in letter after letter, arguing passionately that if one is to remain morally upright and politically just, one had to commit to a life of obstinate abjection. His greatest aspiration, the writer added, was to amble through life a cheerful pauper, sustained by bread and flowers and the occasional poem.

The letters filled my heart with hope. An itinerant college professor, I’ve spent much time in the company of young men and women on the cusp of adulthood, and was too often dismayed to learn that their ambitions had more to do with IPOs than poetry. This kid, whoever he was, may have been naïve, but he at least seemed to have soul to spare. I liked him.

As I put down the letters, however, a question crept into my mind—why was my friend sending me the epistles of some random dude? I was perplexed. I leaned back in my comfortable chair, sipped on the espresso I had made in my fine Italian machine from fresh-roasted beans I had imported from Costa Rica, launched a new window on my silvery new MacBook Pro, and intended to get to the bottom of the mystery.

A second later, a bolt struck hard. I knew who had written these letters. It was me.

It was 10 years ago. I had just graduated college and arrived in New York on a one-way ticket and with just enough cash to buy a few cups of coffee and the occasional hot dog. I was writing to my friend from the main hall of the public library on 42nd Street. And my enthusiasm was genuine: despite being impoverished, I felt freer than I had ever been, a man without duty living a life of no consequence. I sneered at the drones I saw passing me on their way from Grand Central Terminal to midtown Manhattan’s corporate castles. All they’ll ever have is money, I told myself then, whereas me, I’d always have the spirit.

I’ve since abandoned the follies of my youth, as you surely realize, and while I am still faithful to many of the same core ideals, I’ve rid myself of the foolish notion that poverty is in some way poetic, romantic or righteous in its own right. I still prefer the riches of Wordsworth to those of Wall Street, but if I can discuss the The Prelude while sipping on a lovely 2005 St. Emilion and sitting on a comfortable leather sofa, hallelujah. Wealth and poverty in of themselves don’t define us in any way; the values we assign to them do.

Just ask Hosea. The prophet, delivering this week’s haftorah, knew all there is to know about keepin’ it real. On God’s command, he married a harlot and named his daughter Unloved and his son Not Mine. He preached during tempestuous times in Jewish history, with the Northern Kingdom of Israel spinning downward toward ruin. And he realized that the problem was not so much having or not having earthly possessions but the way these possessions, or the lack thereof, make us see the world.

As Exhibit A he offered Ephraim, another name for the northern kingdom founded by the sinful king Jeroboam after the virtuous Solomon’s death. “And Ephraim said: Surely I have become rich; I have found power for myself,” Hosea booms, adding, “all my toils shall not suffice for my iniquity which is sin.”

Prosperous at the time of Hosea’s prophesying, the folks at the northern kingdom must have looked upon the ranting madman and his oddly named offspring as a collection of kooky outcasts. After all, isn’t material wealth proof of divine love? Wouldn’t God bless with riches only those of his creations he saw as deserving and just?

Unlike Calvinism, Judaism, quite radically, contends that the answer is no. Trying to assign spiritual values to material circumstances requires, by necessity, a belief that Man could somehow divine the mindset of God. Instead, our theology offers us a more complicated, and, ultimately, far more liberating assertion. Since we cannot ever know the Lord’s will, it tells us, all we have to go by is the laws he had given us. And these laws, being laws, are subject to endless debate, discussion, argument without end. We are therefore advised to seek the answers not in signs from above but in ourselves. We are urged, to paraphrase a seasonal favorite, to be good for goodness’s sake. We are meant to do the right thing without any expectation of compensation.

But this isn’t some altruistic fantasy. With righteous behavior come rewards, not heavenly prizes but earthly ones—if we obey those laws, prophet after prophet tells us, what we’ll get is a society that’s just and progressive and allows each man, rich or poor, to live with dignity and grace.

The captains of the northern kingdom saw things differently. For them, just like for my youthful self, there was merit in might and purity in power. They found proof of God’s love in every shekel and every sword, and they were so busy with inventory that they didn’t see the catastrophe coming right at them. We all know how their journey ended. May it not be that way for us.