Rabbi 360

As we move into Passover this coming week, our attention will naturally turn to the events in Israel and Gaza. Indeed, this has been our reality as we have moved into any Jewish celebration or space over these past six months—each holiday, each gathering feels overshadowed by the horrible events happening thousands of miles away.

This has been the case because while the events are physically happening far away, spiritually and emotionally they are happening close by. As Jews, we are concerned with what happens to the Jewish people regardless of where they are in the world. No matter one’s opinions, Israel is a part of our shared history and collective identity and what happens there impacts us here.

Since October 7^th and beyond, we are all carrying around our own fears and hopes and concerns for what has happened and continues to happen. And while traditionally we ask four questions at the Seder which prompts the telling of the story, this year we may be entering into Passover with four questions of our own:

How do we celebrate a holiday when so many are suffering?

How do we celebrate redemption and liberation and freedom when so many are still in captivity?

How do we invite “all who are hungry come and eat” when a humanitarian crisis and famine is afflicted by one nation upon another?

How do we recline and drink wine when safety is threatened, hatred runs rampant, governments promote terror, and people are being dehumanized?

We celebrate because we must. Our holidays come regardless of what is going on in our lives, and we must remember that Jewish continuity, Jewish survival, Jewish life is predicated on our observance of these sacred days. It is our traditions and texts that have sustained us for generations and will sustain us for generations to come. Observing Passover is an obligation for ourselves, for our ancestors, and for our descendants. Judaism is larger than any one thing.

And yet, admittingly, this year may feel particularly challenging. How do we observe when our people are engaged in war? (We have experienced conflict in the Mideast before, but this feels somewhat harsher and worse.) It is a fair question, and the answer is that, yes, this Passover will be very different. And, this Passover will be very much the same.

It is different because of the circumstances of course, and we must pay heed. When we sit around the Seder table this coming Monday night, we must acknowledge the events in Israel and Gaza. To not do so would be disingenuous and not realistic.

And yet it is the same because Passover is always meant to be responsive to what is happening in our lives in the moment. When celebrated correctly, Passover is not just about a biblical story and the freeing of ancient Israelites. It is not only about an ancient past or historical origin. Indeed, it is not only about us. The story we tell at Passover is both a particular story and a universal story that provides the paradigm of liberation upon which we place our own concerns and struggles. The specific story is there to convey timeless values.

When we read in the Haggadah, “in every generation one must see oneself as having personally been redeemed from Egypt,” the point is not to imagine ourselves following Moses crossing the Red Sea, slogging through mud with a sack of unleavened dough on our backs. The point is to see our lives and our troubles in that framework of oppression and liberation. We define the oppression, and we chart the course towards liberation. The key is to lean into the challenge of the holiday, and to allow it to provide the framework for engaging with what is on our hearts and minds.

For me, in anticipating celebrating Passover this year, two parts of the Seder stand out, and I offer them to you for reflection.

First: while the Seder is a retelling of this story of freedom through the tasting and eating of symbolic foods, not all the foods are sweet and pleasant. Some of the symbolic foods are there to remind us of harshness and pain. Indeed, throughout the Seder we often mix these symbolic foods to remind us that joy and sorrow are not experienced in isolation, but that we often hold them both at the same time.

One instance specifically I am thinking of: we dip the karpas (green vegetable), a symbol of new growth and hope, in salt water, a symbol of tears and sadness. I invite us to pay close attention to this part, and to even give voice perhaps to where we see sadness and where we see hope. Speak them aloud at the Seder. It is important to acknowledge both and hold on to both, to acknowledge our pain and seek comfort, and to find a way forward and seek help. [Thanks to my colleague Rabbi Toba Spitzer for this practice.]

A second part of the Seder that feels particularly relevant is the parable of the four children. Within the Haggadah, a midrash (commentary) speaks of four different children with four different personalities, each of whom asks a different question about the Seder. These four different questions each prompts a different answer and a different way to tell the story (The midrash is based on the fact that the Torah commands us four different times, each in a slightly different way, that we are to tell our children about the Exodus). It is a recognition of the fact that there exist different learning styles that we must account for when sharing or teaching. It is also a recognition that we have multiple aspects to our own identities which can be emphasized at different times.

But this year, I am thinking of the four children as representing the multiplicity of opinions and voices in our communities, and the need to find a way to continue to find common ground.

Throughout these past several months not only have I been personally pained by the horrible news from Israel and Gaza, but I have been personally pained by the fissures I have seen within Jewish communities and between Jewish communities and historic friends and allies. Again, we have experienced this before, but something about this feels harsher. We have sewn distrust, turned against each other in anger, made assumptions, created factions and labels, treated each other as “other.”

To me it seems that a lot of the friction is superficial, and that many of us want the same things, but we fight over emphasis, position, or even specific words. We are making the mistake of essentializing based on difference. We would do well, rather, to hold up the story of the four children, each of whom is different, yet each sitting around the same table sharing the same food and telling the same story.

These are, again, for me, two of the aspects of the Seder that I have been thinking about in light of these times. Other aspects of the Seder or Passover might be speaking to you in the moment. And this is what the Seder is all about: finding structure in a traditional practice to engage with the story, our concerns, and each other.

We should also remember that because of this the Seder is not one thing. It can hold multiple concerns and interpretations at once. It is an expansive, ever-evolving story and we do a disservice to limit it to only one thing. Any attempt to limit its scope, or provide firm answers rather than open questions, to invite certainty rather than curiosity is, in my view, not in keeping with the spirit of the Seder.

Passover has been celebrated in the past and will continue to be celebrated in the future. I would offer that Passover has probably been celebrated in circumstances more difficult than the ones we face this year. So yes, Passover this year will feel different. And it will feel the same. And that is what Passover is.

Wishing you a meaningful, hopeful, peaceful, healing, questioning, and expansive Passover.