Passover this Year

21 Apr, 2025

Passover just wrapped up yesterday, and I'd been simmering on how to approach the story of Passover for the past 2 weeks as I lead up to the holiday and experienced it. This is a troubling time to be telling a story of Jewish liberation from the vantage point of our current historical moment including both the political reality of the US and on the ground in Israel and Palestine. This struck me as a particularly disturbing year to say the the line we say every year "next year in Jerusalem!" considering the way that Jewish entitlement to land is playing out in the ruthless murdering of Palestinians.

As I walked into my seder this year, I carried a bleak feeling that we are not going to have a linear transition out of the narrow place. That we wont get a Dan Savage "It Gets Better" experience of this historical moment. Were we the Egyptians this year? The Israelites? This weight that I was carrying didn't feel like "hopelessness" but it left me unsure how I was going to recline at the seder and act as if "I myself had come out of Egypt" the way we were commanded to.

There is an often-excluded detail in the Passover story that really struck me this year and helped me find resonance in connecting across time and space to the cold hard truths of bravery and liberation. When I was growing up, I was told that when the Israelites arrived at the sea, Moses tapped his staff, the sea parted, and they crossed. A closer read from the Rabbis reveals that when the Israelites arrived to the sea they were first terrified and stood at the water's edge unwilling to enter the water. God asked the people to "go forward" despite "forward" meaning the ocean. It wasn't Moses parting the sea that started the movement, it was a man who decided to leap into the ocean ¹. Upon seeing one doing it, the tribes followed suit, and leapt into the sea. It was then, as the Israelites risked literally sinking into Olam Haba (the world to come) that Moses was able to part the sea.

No one wants to jump into the sea alone and sometimes even the prophets don't know what to do. As Nachshon jumped into the water, Moses was still in a freeze state, praying and praying as the people started flocking as a group into the water. I don't read this as a story encouraging me to be the bravest lone wolf of the pack, I see this as a story about what happens when we've been practicing being brave as a group. Some of us will freeze, some will try to turn back, but some will know where forward is and move and as long as some know in that moment, we'll know how to follow. In this moment, behind the Israelites there was a deadly army and in front a leap of faith. Their descendants are here today because they jumped.

This is scary stuff and what happens next isn't great. For 40 years the people wander through the desert on the other side of the sea. Many of them regularly ask why they can't just go back to Egypt and have to be reminded of how bad it was there. An entire generation of them never even make it through the desert. But in that moment right after crossing the sea, Miriam and the women lead the people in a song. This song is a prayer we sing every Shabbat to this day. Mitzrayim (Egypt in Hebrew) literally translates to "The Narrow Place." A narrow place of subjugation can't sustain life.

There are parts of our moment that I can't see through, and there are parts that I can but it scares me to. As I thought this year about what it means to act as if "I myself had come from Egypt" I tried on the feeling of staring at the sea, but doing it in the company of my community. I remembered that things I'm afraid of on the other side of that sea really are scary and unpleasant. I thought of all of the women (and other people too, but mostly the women) who are already singing the songs of liberation and finding ways to live in hope and joy.

It wont be once and it wont be one sea. More and more I sit in my Friday night services and feel my body practice the feeling of flocking with the congregation. Entering into a split experience of personal prayer and collective awareness. Poems move through in my head during the Amidah (silent prayer) that move so fast I never get the chance to write them down. I look at my neighbor, the rabbi, the baby running across the floor, and we sing:

Let the waves wash over me
Let the waves wash over me
I am already under
Let the waves wash over me ²

p.s. Here's approximately the Haggadah we use that I have grown to love since I started using it 5 years ago