We Are Not There Yet

But We Can Get There with Faith and Humility

As we sit down to our seders in a few hours, it is worth reminding ourselves that there are more questions than answers in the Hagadah, the ancient script which is more of an argument about than a formula for our national liberation.

Like all good arguments, we begin our meal with a question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

And while we end our seder meals with triumphant song and celebration, and the last words of the night “Next Year in Jerusalem!” we might understand that embedded in its confident declaration is an implied, even provocative follow-up question, “What do you mean next year? Why not now?”

Why not now? Because we are not there yet. “In every generation it is one’s duty to regard themselves as though they have personally gone out of Egypt.” In other words, we are not yet free.

Do any of us have the answer to why we are not there yet?

The Wise Child. The Wicked Child. The Simple Child. The One Who Does Not Know To Ask. Each serves up their questions to the room and if we are patient and humble enough, we can listen to and consider the place from which each of us approaches this sacred festival of freedom. We make a mistake tonight if our seders become free-for-alls with more answers and certainties rather than a meal among family and friends to cherish the blessing of being together and finding our way to “next year” yet again.

The death and destruction and captivity of Jewish souls by Hamas has been an unimaginable tear in the fabric of the Jewish people since October 7. The death and destruction and captivity of Palestinian souls has been an unimaginable tear in the fabric of the Palestinian people since Israel began its war on Hamas in Gaza soon after.

Writing from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, the Piacezner Rebbe, Kalonymos Kalman Shapira taught his students, “Not only at a time when things are going well for us shall we go in God’s ways, higher and higher. Even in distress and darkness, heaven forfend, we shall do so. When all is going well for a person, it is easier to serve God with joy, love and fervor. When, however, he is, God forbid, in trouble, he must make use of his situation, serving God with a broken heart and an outpouring of soul.” It is precisely from a place of brokenness, Rabbi Shapira said, that we are most attuned to the Divine Voice.

There are too many Wise Children on every side of the table in this terrible and dark Israel-Hamas War. Give me the humble experts queries; the chutzpah of the wicked child’s obnoxious questions; let the simple child ask “why is this happening again?” And with love and a warm embrace of family and friendship, coax questions from those who don’t even know where to begin. We must hear it all. We have so much still to learn from each other.

Maddening death tolls and incomprehensible numbers of traumatized war victims continue to rise while triumphalist, totalist certainties drag us further into the miasma of a debilitating and cancerous hatred. We are all better than this.

Let our Matzah, our Bread of Affliction, remind us over and over and over again that all who are hungry to breathe, to eat, to live — let them come and join our sacred meal. As the Hagadah teaches when we raise that first piece of matzah, “Now we are all slaves, next year let us be free.”

I’ll leave you with a few choice words from our tradition that can be guardrails for your Seder meals in these fraught times.

Love thy neighbor as thyself. (Leviticus 19:18)

Be kind to the stranger because you were strangers in a strange land. (Leviticus 19:34)

What is hateful to you don’t do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary; go forth and learn. (Hillel, Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a)

Happy Passover. Next Year in Jerusalem.