My family jokes that my Bar Mitzvah was the last party before COVID-19 closed down the world. The primary focus of a Bar Mitzvah is the Torah reading and the sermon that accompanies it. The portion that fell on that Shabbat came from the Book of Exodus. All young Jews knew the script from the Passover seder: the ritual retelling of the story that Jewish families do every year. The Israelites lived and prospered freely in the land of Egypt until a Pharaoh who did not know them rose to power and enslaved them. Moses and his brother Aaron delivered God’s message, “let my people go” (Exodus 5:1), and after a series of plagues and miracles, the Jewish people crossed the parted Red Sea into the promised land. As a child, I learned this as a story of fighting for freedom, suffering for liberation and the battle for justice. As I stood on the bima delivering my sermon, I referred to the plagues as brutal and violent, calling them the “wrong way to go” because they created struggles and death for innocent Egyptians.
This year, Passover comes amidst the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and the Israeli-American attacks on Iranian civilians. This seder was a devastating reminder of the brutal destruction we are bearing witness to. As I sat at the seder, I felt conflicted, for it is impossible to weep solely for the suffering of our forebearers, when so many suffer today—suffer in our name. The seder commands Jews to remember past generations who fought for freedom, but we must also fight for the freedom of others today. As the Book of Isaiah tells us, “Learn to do good. Devote yourself to justice; Aid the wronged” (Isaiah 1:17). We are commanded to dedicate ourselves to the struggle for freedom, and to fight those who oppose it—and we must recognize the Passover commandments and fight for liberation for all people.
Early in the seder, the youngest at the table recites the four questions. As the youngest of three, I have long had these memorized. The third of these questions asks simply, “On all other nights we eat all types of vegetables, why on this night do we only eat maror (bitter herbs)?” Just as with the matzah, the saltwater-dipped parsley, and all else in the seder, we eat the maror to memorialize and remember our people’s struggle for freedom.
The Talmud tells us in Pesachim, “The bitter herb is [eaten] because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our fathers” (Pesachim 116b); critically, it further posits “in every generation a man is bound to regard himself as though he personally had gone forth from Egypt” (Pesachim 116b). This bitter herb is meant to help us internalize the struggles of past generations, to place ourselves in their shoes. However, mere remembrance in and of itself is not enough. We must let this memory compel us to struggle for the liberation of all those who live under tyranny.
Passover, as I learned it, is the story of our people’s freedom; it is the story of suffering and of struggle, of liberation and of love. Yet, more than a story, it is a lesson on justice. Exodus 21:9 commands, “You shall not oppress a stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” We are directed to refuse the draw to oppress our fellow man, for we too once lived under oppression. The Talmud tells us in Sanhedrin 32b of the value held in Deuteronomy of “Justice, justice shall you follow” (Deuteronomy 16:20). The rituals command the pursuit of justice, not just for individuals, but for all. Even children’s versions of the ritual explain that as we dip parsley in salt water during the seder, we do so to remember the tears of those who suffer. Even in celebration, we cannot forget the killings and destruction abroad. When we read out the names of the plagues, we dip our finger into the wine and drop the wine on a plate—onto our plate, one drop for each plague. One drop for each act of brutality committed upon the Egyptians, for—just as God commanded the angels cease their celebrations of Egyptian death (Megillah 10b:26)—we cannot celebrate while death reigns, double so when the death is done in our name. The Passover seder places children at the center of the ritual; it asks what kind of world we build for them and how we choose to build it. In the 2018 BBC documentary “Gaza Dreams,” an interviewer asks a Palestinian girl what her biggest dream in life is. The girl, no older than 15 years old, responds, “I don’t want my children to be as scared as I am today.” In a 2021 documentary in which interviewers asked children what their dreams were, a teenager responded saying she dreamt of being an engineer so she could repair the houses destroyed by the occupation. The children in Gaza do not dream of idealistic luxury. They dream of normal lives, of having homes, of simply being allowed to grow up. If we cannot hear the voices of these children amidst our own rituals of memory and liberation, then we have rendered those rituals empty and meaningless. To refuse to keep confronting these children is in fact a betrayal of the past. This year, as we return to eating leavened bread, we must continue this debate. We must continue the discourse of freedom, and we must never stop fighting.