In the spirit of Pesach — a night shaped by the number four: four questions, four children, four cups — this piece offers one question and four possible answers.

Tonight is the night of questions. We don’t merely permit them; we sanctify them. The Seder might be the single greatest educational experience of the Jewish year – at least until the second cup of wine, when the room grows warmer, the pace slows, and some of us become just comfortable enough to confuse freedom with sleep.

But before we get there, I want to place one question squarely on the table — not as an abstract thought, but as a Seder‑question: something to argue about, return to, wrestle with, and carry out of the night, maybe during the meal.

It was asked more than a century ago by one of the most famous writers in the world. What makes it so arresting is not merely that he asked it, but where he asked it: at the very end of an essay, after pages of observation and analysis, he closes not with an answer but with a challenge.

Here is the passage, in full, at the conclusion of his essay Concerning the Jews:

“To conclude: If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream‑stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, survived them all and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” — Mark Twain, Harper’s Magazine, September 1899

“To conclude: If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream‑stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, survived them all and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” — Mark Twain, Harper’s Magazine, September 1899

That is the question: What is the secret of his immortality?

Who Was Mark Twain — and Why Was He Asking This?

To appreciate the weight of that question, it helps to remember who was asking it  -and why his voice carried so far.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was not only a literary giant; he was a public figure on a scale that is hard to recreate in today’s fractured media world. By the end of the nineteenth century, he was among the most famous writers alive: a bestselling author, a sought‑after lecturer who filled halls on both sides of the Atlantic, a man whose opinions travelled quickly and landed forcefully. When Mark Twain asked a question, people paid attention.

It is quoted by many that he once said he had been raised with the casual prejudices common to his Christian environment – and that while such thoughts may have passed through his mind, they never truly took root in his heart. Whether or not the phrasing is exact, the spirit of that admission is unmistakable in the essay itself. Twain is not writing from a position of complacent admiration, but from a place of visible self‑interrogation: a man examining inherited assumptions in public and refusing to let them go unchallenged.

This particular essay did not emerge in a vacuum. Twain had been writing about Europe, and about Vienna in particular, and in response received letters from Jews in America asking him to make sense of the hatred that seemed to follow them everywhere. One letter, from a Jewish lawyer, finally gave him the specific questions he needed: Why the Jews? Will it ever end? What has become of the Golden Rule?

He was not without contradiction. He repeated a common claim of his era — that Jews were disinclined to serve as soldiers — and then, when corrected by War Department figures showing the opposite to be true, he retracted and apologized publicly in a postscript. This matters. It tells us something essential about the man: he was willing to revise his views when confronted with evidence. He was not performing virtue; he was pursuing truth.

He died in 1910. The question he left behind has never gone away.

In 1934, Harper & Brothers republished the essay with a Publishers’ Note that reads like a chill running down the spine. On rereading Twain, they wrote, they were struck by its “extraordinary application to present‑day events.” Except for statistics, it “might have been written in 1934 rather than in 1898.”

They felt it must be reprinted because the problem discussed had become “of such grave significance to Jews and non‑Jews alike throughout the world.”

The year is 1934. Hitler has just become Führer. What the publishers feared was already beginning.

And here we are, at a Seder in Israel in 2026, with the same essay on the table. If an editor were publishing it tonight, they might reach for exactly the same words: extraordinary application to present‑day events.

Three layers of time. One unanswered question.

I propose Four Possible Answers

Twain leaves the question open. I don’t think any single answer is enough — and in the best tradition of the Seder, I am not aiming for unanimity. I’m aiming for a good argument that makes the room come alive.

So, in the spirit of this night of four, here are four answers. They are not mutually exclusive.

The first and most fundamental answer is G‑d and His covenant with us. We are not merely a nation in the political sense; we are a people bound by a promise that predates every empire Twain names — and outlasts them. Empires rise and fall; covenants are carried. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Persian — they are gone. We remain, because we were never merely a people, but a promise.

2. Memory and Education — Including the Seder Itself

The second answer is our insistence on remembering who we are. Against every odd, in every exile, in every generation that tried to make us forget, Jews gathered at tables like this one and told the story again.

This very Seder is part of the answer. It is an engine of continuity. Jewish survival was never powered by land alone or army alone. It was powered by transmission: parents to children, teachers to students, questions to answers to deeper questions. Education is not incidental to Jewish survival — it is the very mechanism of it. Tonight may be the greatest classroom in the world.

3. The Cruel Irony of Opposition

The third answer is painful, but historically undeniable: our enemies, who have never let us forget that we are Jews. October 7 is the most recent and devastating reminder of this ancient pattern – that those who seek to destroy us ultimately fail, but in the attempt they force us to remember who we are.

Persecution, with terrible irony, has sometimes acted as a barrier against disappearance. When the surrounding culture beckoned and assimilation felt easy, hatred returned and reminded us: you are not one of us. That is not a virtue; it is a tragedy. But it is part of the historical mechanism Twain was circling — and that we are still living through.

4. Hope — Not Optimism

The fourth answer belongs to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, whose voice so many of us still hear at moments like these. He drew a distinction that cuts to the heart of Jewish existence.

Optimism, he taught, is the belief that things will get better on their own – a passive virtue requiring no courage. Hope is something harder: the belief that if we take responsibility, together, we can make things better. Hope is active. Hope is demanding. Hope takes courage.

“The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope.”

No Jew who knows our history can be an optimist. But no true Jew has ever surrendered hope. Not by accident did the Jewish people name the anthem of their renewed sovereignty Hatikvah — The Hope. That single word is a theology: we do not deny pain; we refuse despair.

These four answers are not in competition. They work together.

G‑d holds the covenant. We hold the memory. Our enemies hold up the mirror. And hope holds us together.

Perhaps the Seder is the most Jewish way to respond to Twain’s question — not with a slogan, but with a practice; not with certainty, but with responsibility. As Rabbi Sacks wrote: “Pesach kept hope alive. Hope kept the Jewish people alive.”

We are not optimists. We are something harder, and deeper, and more demanding.

We are people of hope.

Tonight, once again, we tell the story.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)