This year, Passover falls smack in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic in America. It's not just the timing of the holiday that feels off. It's that every aspect of its story and rituals now seems almost cruelly ironic. And yet, there will still be Passover. Passover is the stem cell of the Jewish people, a reserve of core source material with the proven ability to generate new meaning and solace in circumstances even more extreme than what we are living through now. 

We're disappointed because we can't celebrate the way we're used to. But we eat matzah because we rushed out of our homes before bread could rise. Passover glorifies a moment when life unfolded in very unexpected ways. 

Most Jews throughout history have not been free, whether from murderous regimes or famines or pandemics. What we have been is devoted to the idea that we deserve to be. "The Haggadah's purpose is not, in fact, to present a narrative," Rabbi Mendel Herson explained, "It's a how-to guide to finding our own personal liberation."

The text of the Haggadah is not a retelling of the liberation story itself but a record of agreements and disagreements among its interpreters, because it is not the God-driven part of the story that we should be focused on, but the human-driven one. God will come to help when God comes to help; the question is what we do between now and then.

This is why Jews observed Passover in the basement "cantinas" of righteous friends during the Inquisition; they kept it during the Crusades, and they kept it throughout the Holocaust—in ghettos and concentration camps and forests. This year, we will do what millions of Jews have done before us: manifest our hope for liberation. That is our obligation, and our privilege. All the more so in moments when the taste of freedom—from oppression, from want, from disease—is not yet ours. 


haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story