Shabbat Shalom ~ Shabbat HaGadol 2025

Shalom WJC Family,

And Happy Passover! Just a quick note as we all prepare for this very busy and meaningful holiday! Passover, with its universally recognizable values of freedom, redemption, and purity, is one of those rituals that may mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but generally means something important to everyone.

Whether it is reflections on the significant Passover seders of our past and the people who made them matter or reflections on the ups and downs of Jewish history and our place in it, something about the seder touches us deep down inside.

Though the basic text of the haggadah which guides the ritual meal remains the same, every time we gather for a seder, we are a little different, the world is a little different, and the state of the Jewish community locally and around the world is a little different. And so, each seder is a unique experience linked to all those that have come before, those celebrated in unusually good times and those celebrated in the worst of times, and the vast majority somewhere in between.

From the podded seders of Covid to the torturous contradiction of celebrating seder while Israel is at war and the dozens of hostages remaining in captivity in Gaza, these last few years of seder have been challenging. How do we celebrate freedom, even while being forced to appreciate it in new and novel ways, even when suddenly facing questions that until recently seemed only hypothetical? The Four Questions of our youth hardly prepared us for the difficult questions of the moment.

And yet, the seder was created for moments like this in a moment like this. This ritual was created by the rabbis reeling from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and still living under their brutal regime. It may not be designed to answer all the questions, but it does help us learn to live with the questions, and maybe even find some joy and freedom in the ability to question.

And so, this Passover, I wish you good questioning and a joyful pursuit of answers and truths. If we can’t always find comfort in the answers, let us find it in the ability to ask. That, as much as anything, may be what the rabbis who gave us this complicated and involved ritual had in mind in the first place.

Wishing you a Chag Kasher v’Sameach,

RJA

PS: And here’s a perhaps easier way to feel a little joy for the holiday – the latest Passover video from the a cappella group Six13: Six13 PSVR.

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Mazal Tov to Past-President Mark Jacoby who will celebrate his second bar mitzvah in shul on Saturday!