Dear Friends,
We just got finished celebrating beautiful, if painful, Passover Seders in our homes and in community.
I wanted to begin by sharing the words with which I opened our Seder here at Society Hill Synagogue, with over 150 people across the generations crammed warmly in our social hall:
The seder has always been my favorite Jewish ritual — the carefully ordered structure, the instructions you can precisely follow; while at the same the rich nature of all the passages, each phrase pregnant with different meanings, new interpretations in each passing year.
It’s a night of questions, open-ended discussion, bringing together all the best parts of being jewish: dialogue, debate, interpretation, values, singing, and of course, food. It is really a capsule of so many experiences that are central to what it means to be Jewish.
At the same time, its subject matter is not light: this is our central story. We are a people who experience literal peaks and valleys, descents and ascents, ebbs and flows. Our formative family heard a call from Adonai-the Source of Being, to go forth, lekh leklha, to a promised land—to a sense of promise and possibility; before internal and external forces—family dysfunction and heartache internally; famine and drought externally — led us to descend to mitzrayim, to a place of narrowness and constriction, in which we found only temporary nourishment, and our souls and bodies were ultimately subjugated and oppressed.
From there God heard our crying out, and issued another call to another ancestor, this time not just on behalf of one person or one family but on behalf of an entire people, to rise up, breaking free of our oppression, journeying through stormy seas, out into the wilderness, on our way back to the promised land from which we came.
Ever since, this story has served as the paradigm for our people, both as our foundational story —how we became who we are — and as the model to inspire us in each generation: many of our grandparents, for example, journeyed from a different place of oppression across a different sea, to land on new shores that promised freedom. Others made that reverse journey from Europe or from North Africa or the middle east, back, after centuries to what is now Israel.
Which brings us to this year. This is a different Seder than any I have experienced in my lifetime, cast as it is in the shadow of the events of October 7 and the subsequent war.
Perhaps the central passage of the haggadah is the verse which says, b’khol dor vador chayav et adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza mi’mitzraim. In every generation one is obligated to see oneself as one who personally went out from Egypt.
The seder is a ritual of sacred empathy. Through an act of imagination and immersion we ourselves go through the journey of constriction to expansion, slavery to freedom, oppression to promise. We start with the bread of affliction, saltwater tears and bitter herbs; we end with the sweet nostalgia of matzo ball soup; the promise of the spring, hallel; and the bread of redemption.
This journey reminds us that in every generation, no matter how narrow the straits that we are in feel—no matter how constricting our external conditions or our internal psyche feels, we have a track record of breaking free from these conditions, of making it through to the other side, of feeling an internal and external sense of release. In a year where hostages cannot be with their families, where antisemitism has reached a point we haven’t seen in decades, the ritual of experiencing this move from constriction to freedom reminds us of what our soul already knows. We have been through this before and we can make it through it again.
So, too, in continuing the theme of empathy, does the seder instill a subtle call in us to know and love the stranger for we were strangers in the land of Egypt. It’s not enough to have empathy for our own condition—though that is important; we are called upon to love our neighbors as we love ourselves: it does start with loving ourselves. We have to also turn that love towards others experiencing narrow straits as well. As Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman writes, “when we put down the haggadah, we are expected to have a heightened sense of Jewish identity and to be more attuned to our Jewish responsibilities. That is,” he writes, “if we leave the Seder and ignore the plight of the homeless or the hungry, as a start, we have missed the point.”
So we’re about to start our journey. A journey of possibility—we remind ourselves of the possibility we have within ourselves for more expanded experiences of freedom for ourselves and our fellow human beings. We invite ourselves into the ritual to explore and tap into that expanded possibility and promise, symbolized by those words with which we’ll close our seder—l’shana ha ba b’yerushalayim next year in Jerusalem, the place of shalem/shalom—peace and wholeness.
Mo’adim le’simchah—may you allow yourselves a holiday week in which you let some joy into your lives.
A few words on the anti-Israel protests taking place on college campuses in the United States:
Of course, we do celebrate this week of Pesach in the shadow of war and protest, and it’s the latter that I want to spend a few moments on. This is a heart-wrenching war, as all war is: innocents dead and suffering, hostages still held in unspeakable conditions. For Israel,the context for this war is the events of October 7, the deadliest attack on Israelis and Jews since the Holocaust, with the governing regime of a neighboring territory declaring its intent, through word and action, to carry out the destruction of the State of Israel and the Jews living there.
While one can certainly debate the execution of this war—the tactics, the balance struck between pursuing military objectives and caring for civilian life, the approach to humanitarian aid — as well as whether the war as a whole is a wise, just response to the events of October 7, at bottom, that is not what these campus protests are about, or at least, not what a central theme of these protests are about.
As some may be surprised to discover, a core thread motivating these protests is not anti-war. These protests are not analogous to the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, again, at least not by the words of many of the central organizers.
For many, these protests are as much about nationalism as any gathering centered around Zionism is—in some ways, that’s the irony of these protests: at first glance, you might think they come from a place of high minded ideals: “can’t we all get along, can’t we all coexist, how can we find a path forward for two peoples in peace?”
That is not the central thrust of these protests; the central thrust of these protests is pro-Palestinian nationalism, in many ways simply the cousin of Zionism, in the sense that each of the two movements seeks a homeland for a distressed people in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is ironic, because to these protests, “Zionist” is the ultimate slur, the embodiment of evil. And yet the cause for which they are advocating — Palestinian nationalism — is not about finding a platform of equality or liberal ideals or individual rights; it comes from a simple desire to turn the tactics that they decry in the hands of one party — Israel — back onto them.
“By any means necessary”—a refrain circulated in these protests means to unleash violence on Israel, echoing the assault of October 7, so that Palestinians have national sovereignty “from the river to the sea.” A central thrust of these protests sees the fundamental misdeed of Israel not as the war in Gaza post-October 7, or Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza begun in 1967. It sees the very founding of the State of Israel and 1948, and even pre-1948 immigration of Jewish refugees to what is presently Israel and what was then British Mandatory Palestine, as an encroachment on the just ideals of Palestinian nationalism and thus fatally flawed from its inception.
As one staff writer from The Atlantic, who reported on the protests described it:
Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state [i.e., Israel] must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”
All of this is to say that we’ve begun to see a shift in the protests from “ceasefire”—a call that, while I opposed it because I believe October 7 revealed new levels of capability and desire from Hamas in its efforts to destroy Israel, I understood, out of the humility we all should have that war is horrific, and that we should always approach it delicately and with a recognition that human life is so sacred that war should be undertaken only in the most dire of circumstances (which I believe October 7 and Hamas represent, but again, on which I believe reasonable minds can disagree).
These protests are not about ceasefire. They are about replacing one nation-state—Israel—with another nation-state—Palestine.
I continue to believe that the only reasonable pathway forward is pairing the move to defeat the eliminationist Hamas with a pathway forward for the Palestinian people that eventually involves its own sovereignty and statehood, alongside the one Jewish state in the entire world, Israel. These are two peoples who have experienced dispossession and hardship across different timelines. We live in an imperfect world where no one gets everything they want. Compromise is the only pathway forward.
I pray that ultimately we achieve a level of peace, recognition, and coexistence that many other parts of the world, even in disputed areas, have achieved. We’re not there yet, and I pray that these students, who see one people’s struggle for freedom and survival very clearly, can come to see another’s as well.
I’d like to close with some words I shared last Friday night, when our Kitot Hey and Vav students (5th and 6th grades) led parts of our service:
I confess, I’m not much of a poetry guy. My wife will tease me about the fact that I listen to songs over and over but still don’t know any of the lyrics. I’m someone whose job is to immerse myself in text—liturgy, prophecy, psalm—but I still struggle when the genre is poetry; when it’s not straightforward prose.
And yet, this week, I encountered a well-known Jewish poem, which I usually gloss over, but which I saw in a new light, thanks to an author’s commentary on it. It gave me a little inspiration relevant to life and death; to being a kid, and being a parent, so I thought I’d share it with you on this Shabbat, featuring our Kitah Hey and Vav students and their parents.
The poem is by a woman named Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky or simply, Zelda, as she was better known. She was born in Tzarist Russia—what is now Ukraine—in 1914 and immigrated with her family to Jerusalem when she was 12 years old, presumably in response to rising antisemitism. The poem is now used in Holocaust commemoration rituals all over the world, and is one of the few modern contributions that has become a widely accepted part of the Jewish canon, the ever-growing body of sacred Jewish texts.
This time, the poem caught my eye because of a particular comment Rabbi Sheldon Marder made about it in which writes:
From our parents’ arms to the end of life, each of us is shaped and reshaped by life experience and given identity (“a name”) continually… “The poem that I’m about to read ”he writes, “encourages exploration of the prism-like nature of identity and its origins. How did I become who I am? Where did I acquire this identity, my unique sense of self? What combination of accident and intention, of nature and nurture, made me the human being that I am? Who am I in relation to other people and in relation to God?”