Pesach hopes

This will be an unusual Pesach, coming as it does during an unusual year.

And yes, by unusual I mean chaotic, upsetting, deeply unsettling, and against all the rules as we’ve thought we’ve known them.

Last Pesach, coming about six months after October 7, was somber. Everything still was raw. Gravestones for massacre victims would not have been unveiled yet. Women who’d become pregnant right around then would be just entering their third trimester, well aware of the joy to come but still trying to figure out how to balance it. Some of the hostages had been released but some still were captive in Gaza. Although none of us knew what would happen, most of us wouldn’t have dreamed — and I’m realizing that along with the verb to dream, there should be its opposite, to nightmare — that some still would be held in a tunnel.

Those of us living here wouldn’t have nightmared that one of those hostage prisoners would be a young man from Tenafly, but Edan Alexander still is in a tunnel somewhere.

We had haggadot with new additions to help us deal with the situation, just as we did during covid.

But now we’re living in a world where the insanity has spiraled way past where it was last year. Antisemitism has blossomed, a kind of garish fungus that we can’t seem to uproot. (Do mushrooms have roots? I might be getting carried away here. But it’s no joke.)

And now the world economy has cratered. Even for those of us not fluent in graph, the ones showing the stock market over the last week are shocking. The lines plummet down as if a weight were tied to them.

Pesach is about liberation. It’s about the journey from oppression and slavery to freedom. It’s about escaping Egypt, Mitzrayim, the narrow place. There can be no more narrow a place than a tunnel in Gaza, patrolled by Hamas. We pray for the liberation of the hostages from that terrible place.

And we hope for our liberation from the chaos that is shattering our world; we hope for clarity and decency and hope and joy and love.

We hope for the redemption of our world, and we wish everyone a sweet and freedom-filled Pesach.

—JP