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Jews across the world will gather around their Seder tables on Wednesday night. Families, friends, and strangers who become family for the night will open the Haggadah, follow a structure thousands of years old, and tell a story that changed the course of human history. They will do this while missiles fall on Israel and armed guards stand outside American synagogues.
Passover has always carried weight. It is the story of a people enslaved under Pharaoh, a dictator willing to murder Jewish children. But the Jews rose up and walked out of Egypt into freedom with God guiding them. That story has echoed across civilizations for thousands of years.
But this year, the ancient story feels less like history and more like a mirror.
In Israel, the last few weeks have been brutal. Iranian missiles and Hezbollah rockets have sent families running to bomb shelters in the middle of the night. Schools have been closed. Houses of worship have been forced to limit attendance under Home Front Command directives. Holy sites without adequate shelters have been closed, including the Western Wall, Al Aqsa, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and more. Some strikes have hit holy sites in Jerusalem itself.
In America, the picture is different and, in some ways, more unsettling. After a targeted attack on a synagogue in Michigan and rising threats tied to the Middle East conflict, Jewish communities are celebrating Passover under the watch of extra police. Europe has dealt with this reality for years. Now it has come to America.
The antisemitism we are seeing in the streets and online, from the extreme Right and the extreme Left, is distressing. A shared impulse is forming between the fringes to come after Jews and blame us for our own victimhood. On October 7, 2023, Jews were slaughtered in the worst massacre since the Holocaust. None of us imagined that in the aftermath, we would be the ones portrayed as aggressors.
In the 1990s, American Jews felt a sense of safety, and that has changed dramatically. The Jewish community has, unfortunately, often turned a blind eye to our youth and those who are on the outskirts of mainstream Judaism. The more these Jews on the fringes felt there was no place for them in mainstream Judaism, the more they became isolated and easily susceptible to the messaging of those espousing anti-Western values of hate and intolerance.
Over the past two years, I’ve seen young Jews join anti-Israel and anti-American protests because they think they are making the world a better place by doing so. I’ve been approached by older members of the Jewish community who’ve pleaded with me to help reach out to their Jewish grandchildren who have protested against the Jewish people. This is something that we need to fix, and we need to fix it soon. Passover teaches that every Jew has a place at the table, no matter their background or status of religious observance. Every Jew is a part of the family. We all need to remember that and work toward making each and every Jew feel included.
So, we will not hide. We are going to go to our synagogues. We are going to pray. We are going to be publicly Jewish. We are going to wear the chai, the Star of David, and the kippah and walk into our Seders with our heads held high. We are going to invite all of our fellow Jews to join us and to participate. We are the Jewish people, we have been through worse, and we are still here.
Fear is a real thing. I do not dismiss it. But fear comes from a feeling of being alone, the sense that the world is closing in, and no one has your back. The most important thing for every Jew to know right now is: You are not alone. Being Jewish is being part of a family. Whether you are in Israel, in France, in Argentina, or in New York, we are going to come together and stand with each other.
That is how we fight fear: not by ignoring it, but by showing up together.
I think about Jews in Soviet gulags who risked everything just to mark Passover. They had nothing, yet they held onto the idea of freedom because that idea was stronger than any prison. I think about Jews during the Holocaust who would risk their lives to bake a small piece of matzah or whisper the words of the Haggadah. Surrounded by death, they chose to remember freedom. I think of former Hamas hostages such as Agam Berger, who maintained faith and honored the holiday as best they could in the depths of hell in Gaza tunnels. Memory carried them. It gave them strength to endure, to survive, and, for some, to rebuild everything.
Jews have disproportionately won Nobel Prizes. That is no accident. Those prizes changed the world. They created vaccines. They advanced science and peace. We do not build only for ourselves. We build to improve the world. Passover reminds us that this mission depends on freedom. Only a free people can bring light to the nations.
So, where do I see hope? I see hope in God. I see hope in a people who, on October 7, 2023, were devastated and who, two and a half years later, have caused Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran to stagger on their heels. I see hope in Jewish families sitting down tonight, opening the Haggadah, and doing exactly what their grandparents did.
Hope is not the absence of pain. Hope is the ability to look forward, to believe that tomorrow will be better and so will the next day and the day after that. It is the refusal to get stuck in the present or the past.
We are living through challenging times. There is uncertainty, and there is real danger. But we have been here before. Every single time, we have come out stronger.
We finish off the Seder by saying, “Next year in Jerusalem.” This year, I invite everyone to ponder that and mean it. Not someday. This coming year — because Jerusalem is here. Israel is here. The Jewish people, as always, are still here, and we aren’t going anywhere.
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Rabbi Steven Burg is the international CEO of Aish, a global Jewish educational movement. He formerly served as eastern director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where he oversaw the Museum of Tolerance in New York City.
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