Dear Friends,
There is a moment at every Passover Seder when you can feel it tick over into a story of redemption, not oppression. When the detailed accountings of the suffering of our people give way to the exuberant declarations of miracle after miracle, culminating in our escape from slavery. After all the cleaning and cooking, the matzah and maror, the several glasses of wine, the shift feels appropriately earned.
But I have been wondering lately about the people sitting at that table who cannot quite feel it. The people whose personal oppressions are too heavy or intense to let them tap into their sense of redemption. Someone’s marriage is quietly unraveling. Someone got a phone call from the doctor last week that sucked the color out of their world. Someone is still nursing a deep wound from years ago that never fully healed. They are saying the same words, eating the same matzah, but the joy feels like it belongs to a different table entirely.
The people who walked out of Egypt 3,300 years ago were in that same condition. The Exodus was the most dramatic national moment in our history: the sea splitting, the slavery ending, the impossible becoming real. And they were exhausted. Someone’s back hurt from decades of physical labor. Someone had just buried a parent in a land they were leaving forever. Someone was terrified rather than relieved, because freedom is frightening when you have never known it. The miracle was real — and the exhaustion was equally real. Both of those things were true at the same time, in the same body, on the same afternoon.
The Haggadah tells us that in every generation we are obligated to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. For most of my life I understood that as an instruction about gratitude only. I understand it a bit deeper now. It is asking us to locate ourselves inside a story that is still unfolding, to feel its weight and its momentum, even when we are tired, even when we are grieving, even when the personal circumstances of our lives make celebration feel like a performance we have not rehearsed.
We need to hold the bigger picture of the incredible things happening around us even while honoring our struggles and pain.
We are living through an extraordinary moment in Jewish history. Since October 7th, 2023, we have watched our people attacked with a savagery that reached back across centuries. And then we watched something that few predicted: Israel dismantling Hezbollah’s command, decimating Hamas, striking inside Iran itself. A tiny country, surrounded, grieving, and somehow still standing with a strength that has left the world struggling to explain it. Israel is teaching the world what it means to live and fight with conviction.
We have also watched Jews who had set their identity down somewhere along the way pick it back up with both hands. Pull up a chair at the Seder table for the first time in years. The bigger story is very much alive, tumbling forward with a force that is bringing us closer to our better selves.
And so we sit at the Seder. We say the ancient words. We hold the matzah, which is simultaneously the bread of affliction and the bread of freedom. It is the food we were forced to eat as slaves and it is the food we hastily packed up and brought with us on our miraculous journey of liberation. The same object carrying both meanings at once. Maybe that is the point. We can feel the pain in our lives and still celebrate the great moments we are living through.
We bring whatever we are carrying this year and we say: We are still here. After everything. Still here.
And next year will be even better: Because next year in Jerusalem.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Pesach Sameach to you and everyone you love.
Rabbi Fishel and Ettie Zaklos