Celebrating Passover feels futile with hostages in Gaza. But we must.
A dinner table is set for the return of the hostages at “Hostages Square,” Feb. 21 in Tel Aviv. Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Sruli Fruchter April 19, 2024
“In every generation,” the Haggadah states, “a person is obligated to view themself as if they left Egypt.”
I used to fawn over this teaching. It invited me to contemplate my own “personal slavery” and my need for “inner liberation.” Estranged from real enslavement, I mined Pesach’s themes for relevant meaning to my own life and found avenues of insight. But when I think about that type of introspection for this year’s Pesach, all that comes to mind are the hostages trapped in Gaza.
This Monday night, as Jews around the world celebrate our national liberation from biblical Egypt by God, 129 hostages — most of whom are feared dead — will lie captive in Gaza, over six months since Hamas terrorists abducted them on Oct. 7. Rejoicing in a freedom they so desperately lack feels cruelly inappropriate.
This Pesach will be the most challenging I have ever experienced, and I imagine that will be the same for other Jews. I feel ill-equipped to face it. Carefree living feels offensive to the hostages’ harrowing reality. A part of me wishes we could all skip Pesach this year and avoid confronting our failure to return them.
And yet, Jewish law does not capitulate so easily.
I feel unworthy to rejoice in my freedom. When I envision myself alongside my family this Pesach, I know it will be inexplicably different from past years. How can I participate in raucous Seder meals filled with laughter? Are tranquil mornings of kosher-for-Pesach pancakes appropriate? What right do I have to enjoy drives in the New York countryside?
Throughout the ages, however — whether under Roman oppression, the Spanish Inquisition or Soviet persecution — Jewish resilience exemplified an undying commitment to tradition. The festival of freedom arrived every year in the Jewish calendar, irrespective of the freedom Jews were denied that day. God’s word is immutable, so we cannot simply discard what we do not want.
“In this redemption” of Pesach, the 19th-century Hasidic leader Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter writes, “all redemptions are rooted.” Ordinarily these words would energize me with spiritual fervor, reeling with dedication to alleviating oppression — on individual and global scales. But this year, I feel like it taunts me: Where is the hostages’ redemption?
Months praying and advocating for the hostages’ release wore down my hope. As early dreams of daring Entebbe-like rescues were squashed, as rumors of deals dragged on, as reports revealed more and more hostages dead, despair consumed me. Today, Hamas cannot even locate enough living hostages to meet Israel’s negotiating demands. If my hope has not completely died, it feels like it is in its death rattle. Awaiting redemption every day has wearied my spirit.
But then my mind wanders to all the generations past, how Pesach’s liberatory and religious force is accustomed to mobilizing eras of change. Take the Soviet Jewry movement as an example.
In 1962, Moscow suddenly banned matzo for Russian Jews, which was, as one congressman framed it, “aimed at the destruction of all things Jewish within the Soviet Union.” The crackdown on Jewish religious liberty worsened over the next decades.
But Jews outside of the former Soviet Union responded by leveraging the festival of freedom to fight for their Russian brothers and sisters’ freedom. Beginning on a local level with special Seder prayers and empty Seder seats, it evolved into a mass campaign championing Soviet Jewry across the world.
“Through activities like Passover marches and ‘Freedom Seders,’ which brought Jewish rituals out to the streets, and ‘Matzoh of Hope’ rituals, which brought political protest into the home,” professor of Jewish sociology Shaul Kelner wrote in a 2008 paper focusing on American Jewry, “Jews enacted and thereby advocated the idea that an authentic religious Judaism was one that was engaged in ‘redemptive’ political action in support of other Jews.”
By the end of the ‘90s, over a million Jews successfully emigrated from the Soviet Union, marking the final success in this global movement that, as Kelner says, “brought citizens of Western nations together in solidarity with Soviet Jews” to free them from Russia’s stronghold.
Pesach is not deafened to the subjugated’s cry, and its values are not hollow and performative. As evidenced through Soviet Jewry, the holiday compels us to action. And it does so by placing us in the enslaved person’s world, to sensitize us to the desperate plea for freedom.
The Seder night ritual, the historian and professor Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter taught, identifies us with the slave on the cusp of freedom: Matzo is the free man’s bread and the enslaved; the haroset dip evokes the hope of a future and the misery of labor; the Four Cups connote four themes of redemption and Jewish blood.
In order to fight for the afflicted, we must viscerally experience their plight. Pesach punctures our indifference to injustice and propels us to liberation. In that regard, it could not come at a more critical time.
“This year, more than ever in our lifetimes, when we eat the bread of affliction, taste the bitter herbs, or envision what it feels like to be enslaved, each act will take on a deeper, a more profound intensity than we have ever experienced,” Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin who was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, write in a new hostage-centered Haggadah. Despite this pain, they say, “Hope is Mandatory.”
I keep imagining this year’s Pesach in split-screens: As I burn bread on Pesach eve, the hostages hunger for scraps; as I sit with my family at the Seder, the hostages sit alone; as I reenact subjugation, the hostages live it; as I celebrate eight days of freedom, the hostages suffer nearly 200 days of captivity.
Initially, this dual awareness debilitated me. But then I remember that Pesach is the antithesis of passivity. I have no right to abandon hope, to cry helpless, to forsake the hostages’ plight. Instead, I have an obligation to fight for their freedom — and to believe that, with the same sudden ferociousness of the Exodus, we can bring the hostages home today.
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