Have a Terrible Passover!

Friday April 11, 2025/13 Nisan 5785/Pesach

Hevre/Friends,

With Pesach just days away, I struggled this week when, at the end of meetings and phone calls, I would normally say "Chag Sameach!”. The instinct to wish people a joyous holiday would get stymied by the reality that this is hardly a joyous time - not in the USA, not in Canada, and certainly not in Israel. The words would get stuck in my throat as I searched for the most appropriate salutation -- until I heard it on a recent Call Me Back podcast on which host Dan Senor interviews Rachel Goldberg. 

In her clear, steady and striking voice of moral and spiritual clarity, a voice we’ve come to know and cherish over the last 18 months, Rachel declares that the most important mitzvah to fulfill this Pesach is to have the most awful, painful, difficult Seders we can possibly have. For only by struggling as deeply as we can will we find a path to take us through and beyond this terrible time by bringing all the hostages home and ending the war.

On our Seder plates, she urges, should be items that disturb and upset us: a roll of masking tape with the number of days since October 7, 2023 (Saturday will mark 554 days; Sunday 555); a sour, bitter lemon; a limp and dying yellow flower. Any item that will prompt us to ask the single most urgent question this night of telling the story of Jewish liberation demands us to ask: WHY ARE THERE STILL 59 HOSTAGES IN GAZA, 24 OF WHOM ARE STILL ALIVE??

What’s different from last year’s Seders, Rachel reminds listeners, is that while there are still captives, now we know what they are being forced to endure. Now we have testimonies from returned hostages about the physical torture, sexual violence, extreme starvation and psychological abuse they were subjected to and others still have to suffer. We should all be drinking the salt water on our tables this year, Rachel advises, so we can literally taste the revulsion of the hostages at having to drink what we now know are tiny amounts of foul, dirty, polluted water given to them. Our Seders should have us crying, gagging, begging for freedom.

Hopefully, our Seders will help clarify for us why our story of oppression and liberation continues to feature so prominently in our Jewish consciousness and practice, which will then help clarify for us how to actualize its message to fight for our own safety and freedom and to fulfill the Torah’s command to use our own experience of suffering to alleviate that of others.

The one ray of light Rachel speaks of for this year’s Seders is having been enlightened recently by other hostages’ stories about how Hersh, z"l, tried to comfort them in their unfathomable pain before he was brutally murdered by his captors. She’s been told that in the dark, dank dungeons of Gaza, Hersh would share with others the line he found most inspiring, most hopeful, in the writings of Shoah survivor and psychologist, philosopher and neurologist, Victor Frankl: One who has a “why” will find their “how”.

We, too, as a people, as communities, as families, friends, and neighbours, need to articulate and recommit to our “why” so that we can finally implement a “how” that will lead to the return of our hostages and a lasting peace in Israel and throughout the world; to an era of shared values and vision wherein all can live in safety, with dignity and purpose.

And so, please accept my deepest blessings for a terrible, and a terribly meaningful and motivating Pesach.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

Photo Courtesy of Ronen Avisror