What have you been doing to fill the hours these past few weeks? Watching the news? Looking for answers? Checking your temperature, or wearing a mask? Bickering with cooped-up kids, family, or friends? Working from home—or worrying how you’ll pay the rent? Praying the worst does not befall your loved ones? All of the above?

In my case, I have been working on this Haggadah. It is an exercise that feels especially fraught with meaning this year. In many ways, Passover is a fitting holiday for a time like right now. The seder is a ritual for finding hope amid darkness. It tells a timeless, limitless story about personal and collective liberation.

And yet there is no lack of irony in trying to hold a seder this year. A pandemic has struck the planet. The world is under quarantine. We are unable fulfill the fundamental practice of Passover: to gather together around a table, to share the same meal, to ponder the same deep questions, to be in community with one another. This is no small loss. At a moment in our lives when we need physical community the most, we are also obligated not to seek it out. That hurts.

But just because we cannot hold a seder in exactly the same traditional way as we have always done does not mean that Passover is beyond our reach. Every year, we undertake this ritual whose structure holds whatever we choose to put into it. This year, tonight truly is a night different from all other nights—and that means our “social distance” seder is full of potential to hold new, fresh, important meaning.

Often, Passover can feel overstuffed with references and metaphors, symbols and allusions. This year, the story feels strikingly literal. It is easier than ever to find ourselves within the story of the Exodus, to say and mean, “In every generation, each of us must act as if we had personally gone out of Egypt.” This year, we too find ourselves confronting hardship and despair, death and disease, fear and injustice. This year, our world is turned upside-down just like it was for Moses and the ancient Israelites.

So just like them, we have to ask ourselves: What next? What does it look like, for us to put the world to rights? What can we learn from these trials and tribulations? How can we embrace the paradox of our lives right now—and stay strong in solidarity, working towards collective liberation like our ancestors did, even as we stay apart?


haggadah Section: Introduction