The Power of Passover During a Plague

This year, Passover seems to be near the end of a dark period in all of our lives, emerging from the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in America and looking towards a return to a semblance of normality. A redemption you might say. It’s not just the timing of the holiday — built around a retelling of the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt — that feels off. It’s that every aspect of its story and rituals now seems almost cruelly ironic.
 

And yet through it all, Passover happened again last year and will happen again tonight. Indeed, Passover and the telling of the story of the Exodus has happend every year in Jewish homes for centuries -- millenia, really. 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.


Perhaps you’re disappointed because you can’t celebrate the way we’re used to. But do you also remember matzo, the unleavened cracker we eat because Jews rushed out of their homes before their bread could rise? The entire holiday is rooted in glorifying a moment when life unfolded in very unexpected ways — and human beings found meaning, even liberation, in it.


Jews observed Passover throughout dire circumstances in history. During the Holocaust, they observed in ghettos, concentration camps and forests. Passover must have been celebrated during the bubonic plagues of the 14th through 17th centuries while there were Jews living in Europe. So in a sense, our predicament is nothing new.


haggadah Section: Introduction