Reading Passover through the Lens of Our Current Crisis
Nisan, 5785 | April, 2025
(Image credit: Nina Callaway)
For centuries every spring, Jews around the world have welcomed the renewal of life with an elaborate home-crafted ritual of freedom, the Passover Seder. This year once again, we will delve into the biblical story of our ancestors’ harrowing bondage and miraculous liberation, reading it through the lens of our current lives. This year we will create ceremonies to find joy and hope, and decry the cynical forces afoot in the world, the chometz factors—those insidious fermenting agents that would sour, inflate, or otherwise, sicken our hearts.
I wish I were exaggerating when I say we are now living in an increasingly authoritarian world, ruled by a ruthless oligarchy that buys elections, disappears students and immigrants, defunds science and universities, and exploits the reality of antisemitism to advance its own sinister aims. We could so easily get paralyzed. But I try to remember that our ancestors lived through such horrors and worse, and lived to bring new generations (us!) into being. Sure, we carry their historical traumas and anxieties—but we also carry their resilience, smarts, and unbreakable values of loving family and friendships.
Speaking of anxieties: Did you know that the word anxiety derives from the Latin angor: to constrict, and angustus: narrow? Anxiety, or Angst in modern German, point to the dread, constricted breath, and tightness so many of us are feeling right now. On Passover, we go right into those tight places to shed light on the Mitzrayim—the narrow straits of oppression that our people suffered in their journey toward liberation.
Let’s challenge ourselves to re-imagine the ancient Passover ritual in light of the narrow, anxiety-ridden times we are living in right now!
Here are a few ideas I will be bringing to my table this year:
Two Seder Plates
The rabbis suggest: In every generation, no matter your origins or class, see yourself as one who has been enslaved and newly freed from the narrows of life. In other words: We must take liberation personally. Ask: What is my deepest anxiety/constricter/Pharoah, and wherein lies my freedom?
Suggestion: Ask your friends to bring a small symbol signifying their experience of Mitzrayim, narrowness, angst, or oppression this year, and place it on a plate alongside the traditional Seder plate, or somewhere in your house. At the Seder, do a show & tell.
Life is Just a Bowl of Queries
Passover is a holiday that elevates curiosity and the power of questioning. Our freedom, the Sages taught, is dependent upon our ability to ask. No question is too lowly, ignorant, or illicit to ask at the Seder table.
Suggestion: Before the Seder, ask your friends to reflect and jot down on a strip of paper their deepest question this year. Deposit all the anonymous Qs in a bowl on your Seder table. Pick a random query from the bowl and read it out loud as a springboard for discussion during your Seder.
Opening the Door to Prophetic Guidance
When we stop to listen more deeply, we can open the door to our ancestral wisdom. In psychological terms this is called invoking the imaginal realm.
Suggestion: At the end of your Seder, open your front or back door and invite in Elijah. Sit and listen in silence for a few minutes to hear what this prophetic ancestor is telling you this year. What are action steps you can take away from the Seder table that keep you from the souring (chometz) influences in the world, and instead strengthen the loving connections that hold life steady and remind us of life’s true joys? Who are the wise prophets alive today in your community from whom you can receive inspiration guidance?
No Nightmare Too Big
My beloved Rebbe, Reb Zalman z’’l, used to say that Passover teaches us: “There is no nightmare so big that we cannot wake up from it.”
Suggestion: As we tell the story of Jewish persecution, let’s ask: Are we strengthening our identity as a suffering-but-ultimately-triumphant tribe? Is this just another “They tried to kill us; we won; now let’s eat!” holiday?! Or are we reinforcing our kinship with, and empathy for, those who are currently suffering and persecuted, as we once did? Because both of these themes are inherent in the Haggadah.
New Symbols on the Seder Plate
You may have noticed that the seder plate above does not look like your bubbe’s plate! Jewish ritual is constantly renewing itself and we have the permission, in fact the rabbinic blessing, to keep our tradition alive and relevant. The orange as you may know is attributed to a teaching by my beloved friend and teacher Susannah Heschel who placed an orange on the plate to symbolize queer people’s inclusion among our people and their liberation. Often the orange is attributed to the feminist movement or women’s inclusion - who hasn’t heard the line, “The day women are rabbis, you’ll find an orange on the seder plate!”
In recent years, olives have been placed on the seder plate as a reminder of the promise of peace in the Holy Land, where Palestinians have planted and harvested olives, as a central part of their livelihood for generations. Our hearts break this year to think of the uprooted olive groves - and uprooted lives - and we place the olives before us as a prayer that in the year to come we will return to our humanity.
Suggestion: This year, place an orange and a handful of olives on your seder plate, and any other symbols that open your heart to the intersecting crises of the moment.
However you choose to celebrate this spring, may the season bring you renewal, joy, and hopefulness!
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