Jewish holidays often seem to arrive precisely when their messages resonate most.
This year, Purim – marking the defeat of an ancient Persian foe who sought to destroy the Jewish people – fell just days after Israel targeted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and key figures around him, a modern Persian adversary animated by a similar aim.
The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 – an assault that laid bare the fragility of life here – came on Simchat Torah, the day following Sukkot, a holiday whose central ritual, sitting in a rickety booth, is meant to impress upon us just how fragile life is.
And a few months before October 7, Tisha B’Av – the day commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples, attributed in Jewish tradition to baseless hatred – arrived as the country was at each other’s throats over proposed judicial reform.
And now comes Passover, the Festival of Freedom, as the war against Iran looms large and terrifyingly real.
As always, so many words from the Haggadah – compiled centuries ago – will resonate with our own lived experience. None more than this verse: “In every single generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed is He, saves us from their hands.”
That one is obvious – and, unfortunately, one that too often seems to fit the moment perfectly.
But another passage this year will also carry contemporary weight: the one about the wicked son, appearing in the section that describes how the Passover story must be told – to a wise son, a wicked son, a simple one, and one who does not know how to ask.
The wicked son is considered so because he excludes himself from the community. And what is the contemporary resonance? Those among our own people – and they are not few, including some prominent figures abroad – who, as Maimonides wrote in the Mishneh Torah, hold themselves aloof from their own people and “show themselves indifferent when they are in distress.”
These people, Maimonides wrote, will have “no share in the world to come.”
Judaism is a collective faith
Aryeh Frimer, in his commentary on the Haggadah, Departing Egypt, cites Rabbi Jonathan Sacks as saying that the failure of an individual to identify with the collective fate of the Jewish people “is a denial of one of the principles of Judaism, namely that ours is a collective faith.”
Those Jews working against Israel – the homeland of the Jewish people, where about half of the Jewish people are gathered – are denying that principle. What makes the wicked child wicked, Sacks wrote, “is not that he fails to believe but that he fails to identify with the people of whom he is a part.”
On Wednesday night, we will recite these passages while sitting around the Seder table, with the specter of ballistic missiles, safe rooms, and red-alert sirens still fresh in our minds. And we will talk about freedom.
The freedom that will be on many of our minds is a very particular kind: freedom from. Not – as the Haggadah tells – freedom from the shackles of Egypt, but freedom from something else: freedom from the fear of a nuclear Iran, freedom from interceptor fragments falling on our homes, freedom from the worry of another round of reserve duty for those we love.
There is a well-known line from a 1960s song that Janis Joplin sang: “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” There is a certain truth to that: If nothing binds you – if you have nothing to lose – nothing can threaten you, and you are free. But that is not the freedom the Haggadah speaks of. That is not Jewish freedom.
Sacks, in his writings, spoke of two types of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. Freedom from tyranny, from fear, from threat – that is essential. It is the necessary first step.
But that is only the first step. The greater challenge is how a society uses its freedom once it has secured it. Ideally, that is what we can focus on in better times.
But not this year.
This year, because of the war, we are preoccupied with the “freedom from” side of the equation: freedom from the sirens, shelters, and the daily and nightly disruptions to our lives. That is what is on our minds. It’s natural.
But as we read the Haggadah, we are reminded that this is only part of the picture, that the goal is greater. Moses asked Pharaoh to let his people go – not simply to be free, but to serve God. There was a purpose to that freedom, something beyond the mere absence of chains.
This year, it is harder to focus on. The urgency of the moment pulls in a different direction – toward the immediate, toward what must be defended against, toward the need to secure a basic sense of normalcy.
In that sense, the poignant last line of the Seder service, “Next year in Jerusalem!,” may carry a different meaning this year, especially for those of us sitting in Israel and in Jerusalem: not a hope for a different place, but for a different state of mind – one with the space to think about freedom not only in terms of what we must defend against, but what we want to build.