Adina Roth – Director of Jewish Life

I have taken the liberty of writing a slightly longer piece in anticipation of the upcoming Pesach festival. Please read it in your time as it has some ideas to consider for the Pesach seder.

Pesach this year, our festival of Freedom no doubt contains a multitude of feelings. It has been seven long months since our last major holiday, Sukkot which marked a very different and painful time for Jews around the world and especially in Israel.

How do we tell the story of our passage from slavery to freedom when many are not free? How do we find joy when there is so much suffering and anguish around us?

This year, we will be reading the following poem at our Pesach seder which I wrote for our High School students.

After we read about the four children, we will consider a fifth child, the one who is not even present at the Seder table. This is her poem:

The Fifth Child

Tonight is Pesach night And some Jews are not free
As we wash our hands, will they have water to wash theirs?
When the ‘master of the house’ breaks the middle matzah – Will they invite in their captor to split the bread of affliction? Their charoset – the tunnels
The marror – their bitter tears
There will be no meal, no Afikoman
Though we seek them constantly, they are hidden

But when it comes to the telling – I hope they tell.
Like Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Elazar Ben Azarayah
Let them tell the story all night long
And be disturbed by a student in the morning saying
‘It is time for the Shema-come, with us’
Except for them there will be no night
And there will be no day
And there is not yet a student coming with the Shema
But still, how I hope they tell the story

Although the Pesach Seder involves so much – from special wine glasses, a seder plate and a matzah cover (with three sections inside), not to mention an elaborate menu – at its essence, Pesach is about storytelling. And storytelling is the one thing that even a Hamas captor cannot steal from our souls or the souls of the hostages. When I write that I hope the hostages tell the story of freedom, it is really a way of saying I pray that after seven long and agonising months, their spirits have not been squashed. Let our story give them strength!

As a Jewish people, we have celebrated Pesach in many different time periods and been asked to find hope and joy in the most dismal of places. Just before Pesach 1939, on the eve of World War 2, the Hasidic Rebbe Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (writer of the Esh Kodesh), wrote a letter to his community. Seeing Hitler on the horizon, he had exhorted his people to leave Poland but as the year rolled on, it became almost impossible for many to leave. In this letter, knowing that the reality ahead was grim, he instructed his followers to be joyous on Pesach. He wrote: ‘Your joy should be so exalted that you feel that you can barely hold yourself back from breaking into an ecstatic dance; leaping from the earth to the heavens….’ I wonder about Shapira’s audaciousness – encouraging his community to find joy amidst fear and uncertainty. It is not my intention to compare the events of our time in a simplistic way to the Holocaust. But I am struck by the Rebbe’s radical resistance to despair. He knew what his people faced. And yet he exhorted them to joy on Pesach night. It is deeply moving!

This year, let us not give in to despair. We have a story to tell. It is an important story and a powerful story. It is a story of ultimately finding freedom and not just Jewish freedom. The Pesach story speaks universally to the spark within each human that yearns for true liberty.  

During Pesach we do not recite the full Hallel, (songs of praise) which is recited on the other holidays. The reason we only recite half is given in a Midrash in Yalkut Shimoni which cites Proverbs, ‘Do not rejoice in the downfall of your enemies.’ Even as we finally escaped the Egyptians and they fell into the sea while chasing us, we are reminded to temper our rejoicing because other human beings suffered. A modern Rabbi, Rabbi Dr Eduard Baneth cites this Midrash and says this is ALSO the reason why we spill ten drops of wine from our overflowing glasses at the Seder – because we have in mind not just our own story but the stories of others around us, even our enemies. This year, we cannot spill this wine without also considering not only our own story but the story and the suffering of others. At our seder, when we spill the wine from our cup and remember the downfall of the Egyptians, we will mention the painful suffering that has befallen not only us this war, but also innocent Palestinians. And we will pray for a better time, when we can all imagine a shared future.

Pesach this year is overlayed with so many feelings and meanings. It feels like a lot to hold: We will need to create a chair for the hostages and remember their absence. We will have a painful reckoning with the vastness of suffering this war has caused. We will know inside ourselves that ugly anti-semitism has re-emerged. At the same time, as Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira boldly asserted, Jewish people have seen tough times before. We need to challenge ourselves to find the joy – in our sweet children singing the songs of Pesach, in the familiar tastes of kneidels and chicken soup (vegetable broth for the vegetarians), in the familiar tunes and the opportunity for family and friends to be together. Our very creating of our Seders this year is testament to the audacity of Jewish hope. I hope you find meaning and comfort in the telling of our ancient story. I pray our hostages might too.

Chag Kasher Ve’Sameach