Dvar Torah - Passover 2024

How Different Is This Year from All Other Years

Rabbi Rachel Zerin

Like many of you, I find myself immersed these days in the physical preparations for Passover. But I also find myself thinking almost constantly about how to prepare myself personally: spiritually, intellectually, psychologically. I find myself asking, not mah nishtanah halailah hazeh, but rather,

Mah nishtanah hashanah hazot?
How different is this year from all other years?

How can we celebrate redemption when over 130 of our people are still being held hostage?

How can we declare "all who are hungry, come and eat" when so many innocents are starving in Gaza, and even relief workers are not safe?

How can we sing "Avadim Hayinu" at our seder tables: "we were once slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt; but now we are free people" when we know not all of our people are free?

 
How can we sing "Dayeinu," "it would have been enough for us simply to have been brought to the land of Israel," when we know that the reality for our friends and family in Israel is neither acceptable nor sustainable; living in Israel is such a blessing, but living in Isarel with Hamas as a neighbor is not enough. I cannot say "Dayeinu" to that.

How different is this year from all other years.

At first, these questions feel overwhelming. It almost seems wrong to celebrate the Festival of Freedom this year. But then I remember that this is not the first time our people have prepared to celebrate the redemption of our ancestors while our own redemption seems questionable at best. It was just four years ago that I asked similar questions, wondering how we could utter some of these very same lines while living in isolation during a pandemic, food hard to find, no sense of what the future held. Mere decades before that, Jews across Europe celebrated this "Festival of Freedom" in ghettos and concentration camps. For centuries before that, Passover was a time of particular danger for Jewish communities facing blood libels. And I could go on and on.

In fact, the very first Passover itself was celebrated at a moment when our redemption from slavery hung in the balance.

 
I always find it powerful that the first Passover was celebrated not when our ancestors were freed, but while they were still enslaved. After nine plagues, Pharaoh still refuses to let the people go. What’s more, he has now told Moses he is forbidden to return upon penalty of death. The people have been told to prepare a meal, get inside, be ready to leave but shelter in place lest the Destroyer fail to differentiate between Israelite and Egyptian. It was in that way that the first Passover meal was eaten - enslaved, despite nine plagues befalling the Egyptians; hiding in their homes from the Angel of Death; probably wondering if freedom would ever come. Only after that meal, in the middle of the night, did our ancestors leave Egypt. And it would not be for another 8 days that the people would be truly free after finally crossing the Sea of Reeds.

Now I know, that first seder was not the same as our seders. Families at that first Passover Seder in Egypt did not use the Maxwell House Haggadah. Forget coffee, they did not have any kind of haggadah. But the rituals they performed that night in Egypt form the foundation for the rituals we perform today; the essence of what they celebrated on the brink of freedom is the same as the essence of what we, too, celebrate.

And so, perhaps, the fact that the first Passover was celebrated while still enslaved is meant to teach us that we do not celebrate redemption because we are free, but rather because freedom is possible. 

Paradoxically, perhaps the reality of celebrating a Festival of Freedom at so many times throughout history when we were not free teaches us one of the essential messages of this holiday. Because, while our history of exile, oppression, blood libels, inquisitions, and massacres is sobering to say the least, the fact that we are here to remember those moments and to continue celebrating means that redemption is always possible. 

It also means, as Rabbi Yitz Greenberg wrote, that the Exodus is not a singular event, but rather, "an open-ended journey to liberation." A journey that perhaps does not always take the most direct route, sometimes even moving in the wrong direction. There are moments in time when we feel redemption in our very being, and there are moments when we yearn to taste it, like one who wanders, parched, in the desert.

And so, while redemption is about possibility, Dr. Erica Brown reminds us that it is also about waiting and hoping. About finding the balance between patience and acting to bring redemption to this world. She writes that redemption "demands the capacity to tolerate delay, to accept trouble, and often suffering," while also ceaselessly working towards creating a world that is redeemed.

This may be a year when we thirst for redemption more than we taste it. When we have more questions than answers at the seder table. When we have to exercise more patience than we ever wanted, while also advocating in ways we never thought we would. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot fully embrace Passover, with all its emphasis on freedom from slavery, on divine salvation, on gratitude and sharing that gratitude with others. With all its emphasis on the eternal possibility of redemption and the ongoing, open-ended journey toward liberation.

As Dr. Erica Brown writes, the story of Passover "tells us that we cannot stop hoping for an improved world and acting to bring about change. It reminds us that redemption is about waiting patiently and then moving quickly when the moment arrives. Possibility exists."

As we prepare our homes for Passover, may we also prepare our hearts for a Festival of Freedom in a world where not all are free; and may we fully embrace Passover not as a celebration of redemption that already exists, but as another step in the open-ended journey towards redemption’s possibility.