and who want the story to have universal appeal so they can say to their Gentile friends and the wider Gentile world, “see, we all in this together, this desire for freedom”. It sure sounds nice.

Sorry, but it’s not really true. 2)

While the story is about freedom, and while mankind has always sought freedom from oppression, and from the control of others, the story of Pesach is not primarily a story about freedom with any universal application. 3)

It is a story about one people, one ethnic culture, demanding (and through struggle and sacrifice and great risk and faith) getting its freedom, not to act without responsibility or consequences, but to be a nation, to establish its own identity as separate from the world, 4)

to see its purpose and identity in its own unique manner, to establish laws and customs of its own that express its own values.

That is not universalist. It is particularistic. 5)

The Hebrew Nation was brought out of Egypt with a “strong hand and an outstretched arm”, not the British or the French or the Germans or the Russians, or the Chinese. 6)

The Hebrew Nation was given the Law at Sinai and the Ten Statements (Ten Commandments) exemplified by the statement that this was for the people who were taken out of Egypt, to Freedom to be what they are supposed to be, a Holy Nation and a light to the other nations. 7)

Can't be more particularist and non-universalist than that, can you?

So, sure, I have nothing against seeing universal values in the Seder, in Pesach. After all, freedom, personal liberty, the right to one’s own ethnic identity, are universal.
8)

And that is OK to understand how the values and principles of the holiday could apply to all humanity.

As long as we remember this Passover, is about more than those universalist values. 9)

It is something about Jews and for Jews uniquely, something that makes Am Yisrael unique and separate, and not something that makes everyone the same." 10)