Jewish families across the world are currently anticipating the holiday of Passover. As in any year, cleaning and shopping absorb our lives in preparation for the festival, but this does not feel like any other year. We will come together at the Seder and praise our liberation as our Israel Defense Forces currently purge terror and looming threats from our midst. We will tell the story of our freedom as more than 130 Jewish lives are presently captive in Gaza. Our Seders will feel different due to the Hamas massacre of October 7, the ongoing war, and the issue of the hostages that continues to consume so many of our lives.
The Haggadah, the script of the Seder, is not a story of our freedom from Egypt in the past. It is the blueprint for our continual struggle for a greater sense of freedom from harm, intimidation, and constriction. It is also the blueprint for us to understand the tactics of our enemies. The Haggadah claims that new enemies arise against the Jewish people in every generation, but their strategies feel familiar. Even in the most extremely horrifying example of October 7, our enemies continue to perpetrate infanticide against the Jewish people.
Perhaps the most significant message of the Seder this year is that the Haggadah teaches that an overwhelming punishing response is the only appropriate action against such villains.
As I study the Haggadah in preparation for Passover, I find myself pausing at the section in which we spill wine as we recite the 10 plagues that God inflicts on the Egyptians. Increasingly severe, each plague brings with it a greater sense of suffering for Egypt until the shackles of our slavery are finally broken.
We spill out wine as we recite, “Blood, frogs, lice, wild animals...” We take the progression of the plagues for granted. There is a false ease in which we effortlessly move through the plagues without honoring their message.
Imagine calls for a ceasefire between each plague
Due to the recent turn in America toward a state of absolute moral confusion, I now imagine calls for a ceasefire between each plague. Worst of all, I imagine Jewish leaders in Egypt lobbying for God to stop the plagues. “Blood – humanitarian aid, frogs – ceasefire...” Could you imagine the different narrative had Egypt survived the first three plagues, won public support for a ceasefire, and then been emboldened to increase Jewish suffering? As absurd as that story sounds, it is exactly our current trajectory today.
Israel must rid Gaza of Hamas.
Israel needs an unambiguous victory, not only for its own sake, but for the sake of the world at large. Every success in on the part of terror breeds greater support for terror. Take New York City as an example. New York has become a hub for pro-Hamas demonstrations. Less than 25 years after September 11, after two failed war efforts, New Yorkers no longer have any trepidation advocating for terrorism.
How can New Yorkers allow pro-Hamas demonstrations to fill their streets? How can New Yorkers have forgotten so quickly the savage results of unchecked terror networks? It’s simple. New Yorkers lack a September 11 Seder to remind them each year of the event and the gruesome consequences of evil.
There have always been people who hate the values of America and Israel: liberalism, democracy, education, minority rights, freedom of the press, etc. There can be no negotiation to convince them of the merit of our way of life. They simply wish us dead. This intense conflict between civilizations dates back to ancient Egypt.
Sometimes, the only way for our values to triumph is through force. If we don’t succeed, our children’s future hangs in jeopardy. This is one of the lessons of the Seder; one of the lessons of history that we too easily forget.
The new wrinkle in today’s conflict is how many American leaders – even American Jewish leaders – have been subsumed by absurdist calls for an absolute ceasefire, without any consideration for the return of the hostages or Israel’s future. These are calls to, essentially, hand a victory to Hamas.
This year, preparing for the recitation of the plagues at the Seder, I don’t just hear the Egyptians and Pharaoh calling for the plagues to stop. I hear Jewish leaders harshly criticizing God and Moses. Would God and Moses have stopped punishing the Egyptians, there would be no Seder because the Egyptians would have succeeded in crushing us.
The calls to end the Gaza blockade, to cut off the war efforts before the IDF entered Gaza; the false accusations surrounding the Shifa hospital; the pressure to declare an immediate ceasefire rather than enter Rafah – these calls would render absolutely futile the efforts of so many to liberate the world from the terror of Hamas.
According to parts of the Jewish tradition, only 20% of Jews walked out of Egypt into the vast expansive unknown of the wilderness. It is scary to move against the grain with clarity. Moral judgment often stands at odds with compassion. The path of moral clarity does not necessarily lead directly to reward. We know that from the biblical narrative, and we know it from modern historical justice movements. Nonetheless, compassion for others must not overwhelm our moral clarity. That is one of the overarching messages of the Seder that I will highlight this year.
We spill the wine as we recite the plagues as an expression of empathy, as an acknowledgment of the toll the plagues took on the Egyptians. We never gloss over the suffering of others. Yet, the Seder calls us to honor the process of the plagues as the path to achieving our freedom from harm, as a process by which Jews could begin to venture out into the expanse of possibility, and the only way to help bring the world a set of law that would serve as a crucial building block for Western civilization.
This year, it is not enough to recite the plagues of the past and understand their integral role in the story of our liberation. We must honor the plagues and comprehend that Rafah is but the next important step in our efforts toward liberation today.
The writer serves as the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, CA, and sits on the executive board of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition.