How is This Passover Different from All Other Passovers?

Some Ideas for This Year’s Passover Seder

Dear Friends,

The inexhaustible genius of the Passover seder is the requirement that we see ourselves as part of the story. In the traditional Haggadah text, we begin the telling of our ancient tale with the reminder that “the more one expands upon the story of the Exodus, the more praiseworthy it is.” And as we conclude the telling we are reminded that “in every generation, every person must view themselves as personally having gone forth from bondage to liberation.”

Every year – for so many centuries – the Passover seder is the same: the same order, the same text, the same symbolic foods. But because we are instructed to make the story our own, every year the seder is also different, because we are different, and our circumstances have changed.

This year Passover arrives after six months of brutal war in Israel and Gaza, with no end in sight. Thousands of dead. Gaza demolished. Israeli hostages, their status unknown, still incarcerated by Hamas. Malnourished Gazans struggling to survive. Deadly missiles raining down on Israel from Iran and from Lebanon.

Would-be Pharaohs with hardened hearts sit in seats of power, determined to dehumanize their enemies in the name of so-called victory. The Hamas leadership, like Pharaoh in our tale, is even willing to sacrifice their own people rather than let the hostages go. The ayatollahs of Iran try to maintain their totalitarian grip on power and to deflect the wrath of millions of resentful Iranians by demonizing, attacking, and scapegoating the Jewish state. Nor is Israel in any way immune from the corrupting influence of power, their leader apparently willing to sacrifice his society rather than give up his rule. Israel too must be held to account for its ongoing oppression and suppression of the Palestinians under its control.

This Passover we face a world that has fiercely, relentlessly taken up sides on this conflict. Global antisemitism has exploded. Anger and anguish dominate. Communities and families have been riven, forced into opposing camps. Thoughtful debate and discussion have often become untenable.

As I contemplate the seder I will lead this coming Monday evening, I am dizzied by this year’s grim and terrifying landscape. When we recite, “Let my people go!” I will speak of the Israeli hostages suffering and maybe dead in the Hamas tunnels and will redouble my advocacy for their release. When we hold up the matzah and say, “Let all who are hungry, come and eat!” I will speak of the atrocity of Gazan children starving and will donate more funds to organizations that are attempting to feed them. Judaism is fundamentally a critique on the innate human tendency to accumulate and abuse power over others. The Passover story illustrates this essential moral principle and insists that we contemplate our world through this lens.

But with tensions and fear running so distressingly high right now, how do we gather in love and fellowship around the seder table? So much of life these days feels like an ongoing shouting match, and I don’t want to bring that energy to our holiday celebration. This is where the power of ritual can assist us. I have been thinking hard about how to integrate our pained hearts and passionate opinions into our seders this year. I offer below two suggestions, one for our hearts, and one for our minds, and if they speak to you, please feel free to adopt and adapt them. I also encourage you to explore the plethora of creative and thoughtful seder ideas available online.

Yachatz: Breaking the Middle Matzah, Acknowledging Our Broken Hearts

Rabbi Yael Levy has created a beautiful resource, “A Pesach Guide to Honor and Heal Our Broken Hearts.” I have adapted this ritual from her guide, and encourage you to look at all the resources on her website.

Early in the seder (“seder” means “order”) before we enter the section called Magid, the telling of the story, we take a matzah and break it in two. This is called Yachatz. We take half of this matzah and wrap it up, as it becomes the Afikomen with which we will conclude our meal.

Typically, the leader breaks a single matzah on behalf of everyone assembled. Tonight, however, every participant takes up a sheet of matzah. Together we recite:

We each come to the seder with tender hearts. Each of us carrying our own blend of sadness, pain, anger, confusion, despair.

Let us acknowledge that each of our hearts might be aching for different reasons and the grief and sorrows we are experiencing might be rising from different wells.

Let us find kinship and connection by listening to each other’s pain and responding to each other’s hurts with compassion.

Let us not follow the harsh judgments and critiques that arise in the mind and cause us to harden our hearts and turn away. When we notice judgments arising, let us instead pause, and breathe, and behold the caring and vulnerable human being before us.

Each person in turn will then have the opportunity, if they wish, to share their sorrow. Holding their matzah up, they will break it in two and say, “My heart aches for...” or “I feel such pain and grief about...” and then speak briefly from their heart. When they are done, they will say “Dibarti – I have spoken,” and everyone will respond “Shamati- I have heard.”

Of course, anyone who wishes to pass and not speak may do so.

When everyone has had the opportunity to share, Rabbi Levy suggests we read this profound passage by Etty Hillesum, A Dutch Jew who was murdered in Auschwitz but whose remarkable diaries survived:

And you must be able to bear your sorrow; even if it seems to crush you, you will be able to stand up again, for human beings are so strong, and your sorrow must become an integral part of yourself; you mustn’t run away from it.

Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate. But if you do instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge— from which new sorrows will be born for others—then sorrow will never cease in this world.

And if you have given sorrow the space it demands, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich. So beautiful and so rich that it makes you want to believe in God.

More Than Four Questions

In the Talmudic tractate Pesachim we learn that the Four Questions were originally intended not as a set formula, but as examples of the kinds of questions that the seder was meant to elicit. But there are so many important questions to be asked and debated, as our Feast of Freedom collides with the multiple crises that we and our world are facing. We will not have enough time to debate in great depth this evening, but we can put all our questions on the table. We ask these questions from our deep caring, curiosity, and concern.

Everyone will find an index card and a pen by their place setting. Before we chant the traditional Four Questions, there will be time to write down questions each person feels we should be addressing this Passover. A designated reader will read the collected questions without attribution. The task while listening to the questions will be to notice our reactions, but not respond. Rather, the challenge will be to give silent thanks for our freedoms, for we are indeed blessed with freedoms: the freedom to speak, the freedom to ask challenging questions, the freedom to disagree. 

For this is what the Haggadah teaches immediately after the four questions are asked:

Avadim hayinu - We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,
and Life Unfolding our God brought us out of there
with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.
And if the Holy One had not brought our ancestors out of Egypt
then we, and our children, and the children of our children,
would still be enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt.
Therefore, even were we all wise, all intelligent,
all sages, and all versed in the Torah,
it is still incumbent upon us
to tell this tale of liberation;
and the more one expands upon the story of the Exodus, the more praiseworthy it is.

Wishing you a meaningful and uplifting Passover,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler