By the time you will be reading this, the seder night will be behind you.
But as I write in Jerusalem with the sunset of seder night drawing near, all I can think and write about is seder night.
This is a difficult and sobering one for the Jewish people.
Pesach was not cancelled. The seder was not cancelled.
A night on which we speak of miracles and freedom, as not far from here my fellow Jews experience the diametric opposite, sequestered in the bowels of hell, of captivity, with prayers dedicated to the release of these hostages by the chief rabbi of Israel circulate that we can insert into the Haggadah just before the recitation of “Vehi She’amdah, And He stood by our fathers and by us . . . ”
I think of my great-grandmother who celebrated Pesach in the ghetto, before she perished there.
I think of her daughter, my Bubbie, who escaped just before the war, and everyone she loved and left behind was murdered — and who never cancelled Pesach.
Not only did she celebrate it, she guarded it.
I think of the famous Survivors’ Haggadah written by Yosef Sheinson for the US Army of Occupation of Bavaria, and of Rabbi Klausner’s preamble in which he linked the suffering of the Jews under Pharaoh and their immediate suffering under the Nazis.
In that spirit . . . “bechol dor v’dor, in every generation one must see oneself personally as though having gone forth from Egypt.” Right now, in our time, it feels like we are living those words, just that now “in every generation” has us living as through Southern Israel, part of Nir Oz, part of Kibbutz Be’eri and Ofakim and Shlomit and Sderot. Just as we somehow recovered from Egypt and from the Nazis, we will recover and rebuild these towns and kibbutzim and areas, too. Bechol dor v’dor.
I recall that somewhere in that Haggadah was a version of Dayenu that captured the depths of the survivors’ tragedy, patterning the famous poem after their own heartaches and near destruction they endured and witnessed.
The seder is very potent in its traversal of the vast spectrum of human emotions.
The maror, the brutal bitter pain, it’s there.
The maror, the bitterness about the hostages. The bitterness about the fallen soldiers. The bitterness about the wounded soldiers. The bitterness of the families.
Before we bind the maror with a touch of charoset, of a smidge of sweetness, to offset the bitterness, we are motionless with the marror, unvarnished, unsugarcoated. Pain.
There’s the saltwater for the tears. The tears that have drenched us all since Oct. 7.
Yet that is not where the Haggadah ends. It is not the terminus.
The Haggadah also encompasses the Exodus. The outstretched hand. And there is Hallel, the praises. The promises kept.
A door opened wide: This year I can only envision and hope it will be a door that will have the hostages streaming through, returning to their loved ones, to their homes.
So much this year will be left unuttered, yet we are also left undeterred.
No matter how stymied we might feel at every turn, no matter the marror feels magnified, no matter the abandonment that might seem pervasive, we always manage to end the seder on a hopeful note.
We conclude with hope.
As did our ancestors.
As did many of our own grandparents.
As we will tonight.
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