Pesach is usually about what we clean, prepare, and eat. This year, for me, it begins with something simpler: gratitude to G-d, for being alive, for family, for this land, and for the freedom to notice all of it.

It would be so easy, in my current condition, living with a terminal illness called PSP, to focus on what I am missing from Pesach. I can’t really take part in the physical preparations. I can’t help out the way I once did (although my kids and my wife would argue how seriously I ever took that part). I can’t eat the matzah. I can’t eat the maror. I can’t eat the egg. And yet, paradoxically, I feel Pesach more deeply than I ever have.

This may be the first time I’ve truly understood what Pesach is about, and perhaps our generation, more than most, should feel it.

Because this year, Pesach has taught me its meaning on two levels: personal and national.

On a personal level, I am grateful beyond words that I lived to see my daughter’s wedding, and even to dance, without embarrassment, simply because I could. Because I was free. That short video, attached for no other reason than I love it, has become one of the most precious things I own. Despite travel and gathering restrictions, which prevented loved ones from joining us from abroad, we celebrated a wedding in the only place on the planet where it feels entirely natural that a very Ashkenazi girl from London marries a Moroccan boy from the south of Israel.

But this was more than a wedding. It was Pesach in motion. My daughter is now part of a Sephardi family, sitting at a new Seder table, in a new home, with different customs, and the same story. I love it. When I saw them together this Shabbat as a newly married couple, I felt overwhelming pride: not only in my child, but in the Jewish people’s quiet, stubborn ability to keep building, blending, and putting down roots in this land. That continuity, lived rather than spoken about, is freedom.

And this is not abstract. We are fighting, quite literally, for the places where my daughter is now sitting at a Seder table (in Sderot) with her new family. On that terrible day, three years ago, my son, serving in special forces, was in the same area fighting a pitched battle alongside too many colleagues who fell, saving countless lives. For our family, Pesach is not metaphorical. It is bound up with real places, real danger, and real courage, with defending Jewish life so that families can live, gather, marry, and pass the story on in safety and dignity. We have friends who lost loved ones, and our hearts are with them.

And because of the freedoms we have fought so hard to maintain, we are raising a generation of proud Jews who are not closed off from the world but deeply engaged with it. I look at my youngest child (at 16, I am not sure “child” fits) studying physics on one side, Gemara on another, and Arabic on the third, and I feel hope. Not naïve hope, and certainly not hope born of weakness, but the Jewish hope that insists on learning broadly, living fully, and contributing to a better future, while standing firmly in our own identity and strength. I am so proud of all three of my kids!

The Exodus itself was not a march of the young and the strong. It was all of us. The old left Egypt. The infirm left. The frightened left. Some leaned on others. Some were carried. Some moved forward however they could. And yet they all left. Freedom was never reserved for the able-bodied.

So yes, I could approach Pesach focused on what I can no longer do. After all, I genuinely have many reasons to feel entitled to do so. But Pesach does not ask us to deny reality, it asks us to draw hope from it, and to add gratitude. I will enter Pesach celebrating freedom, personally and nationally, for what it truly is.

Understanding Pesach is about far more than the matzah or the familiar trappings of the night. The rituals are not the point; they are the instruments, a choreography designed to help us remember what slavery felt like, how quickly dignity can be stripped away, and how easily people forget to be grateful when life feels stable. The Seder refuses to let us forget.

And if those tools do what they are meant to do, they lead to one destination: saying thank You to G-d. This is something we do far less than we should. Yet when we strip everything back, He is the One we thank for all of it, even for the free will that allows people to challenge our freedom itself. We see this clearly in the very first words we say at the Seder.

I have chosen to show the beginning of the first prayer, the Kiddush. Truly, I bless G-d for choosing to have faith in us and bring us out of slavery to fulfill His commandments in love, and to give us freedom.

Hebrew בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, אֲשֶׁר בָּחַר בָּנוּ מִכָּל־עָם, וְרוֹמְמָנוּ מִכָּל־לָשׁוֹן, וְקִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו. וַתִּתֶּן לָנוּ יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ בְּאַהֲבָה מוֹעֲדִים לְשִׂמְחָה, חַגִּים וּזְמַנִּים לְשָׂשׂוֹן, אֶת יוֹם חַג הַמַּצּוֹת הַזֶּה — זְמַן חֵרוּתֵנוּ, מִקְרָא קֹדֶשׁ, זֵכֶר לִיצִיאַת מִצְרָיִם. Blessed are You, LORD our G-d, King of the Universe, who has chosen us from among all peoples, raised us above all tongues, and sanctified us through His commandments. You have given us, LORD our G-d, in love this Festival of Matzot, the time of our freedom, a sacred occasion in memory of the Exodus from Egypt.

Hebrew בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, אֲשֶׁר בָּחַר בָּנוּ מִכָּל־עָם, וְרוֹמְמָנוּ מִכָּל־לָשׁוֹן, וְקִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו. וַתִּתֶּן לָנוּ יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ בְּאַהֲבָה מוֹעֲדִים לְשִׂמְחָה, חַגִּים וּזְמַנִּים לְשָׂשׂוֹן, אֶת יוֹם חַג הַמַּצּוֹת הַזֶּה — זְמַן חֵרוּתֵנוּ, מִקְרָא קֹדֶשׁ, זֵכֶר לִיצִיאַת מִצְרָיִם.

Blessed are You, LORD our G-d, King of the Universe, who has chosen us from among all peoples, raised us above all tongues, and sanctified us through His commandments. You have given us, LORD our G-d, in love this Festival of Matzot, the time of our freedom, a sacred occasion in memory of the Exodus from Egypt.

“Chosen” doesn’t mean superior. It means entrusted. It means that G-d invested in us, sanctified us, gave us a heritage, and asked us to carry a story and a moral responsibility through history. We have done this despite the toughest of environments.

For this night, the line that speaks most loudly to me this year is the simplest one: zman cheiruteinu, the time of our freedom.

The war is on both the national and personal front, to remain free. And we should take strength from the Seder that is ahead of us this week. We have our issues, too many to list, but we always have, and somehow we go on. Again, for this, I am grateful to G-d.

If the only thing that comes from the Seder this year is a genuine sense of gratitude to G-d for the beauty and blessing of life, that is enough for me. I don’t need the matzah to understand Pesach. I don’t need the maror to know bitterness. I need to look up, and to say thank You.

Obviously, those who can eat it should, but as you bite, lean, and inevitably complain about the hard bread and lettuce leave, let it combine with a sense of gratitude that we are free.

I wish everyone a kosher and happy Pesach, wherever you are. And to our non-Jewish friends: walk with us for a night. We do not believe our faith supersedes yours, in fact, we discourage conversion, because we believe all people are created in G-d’s image. But be with us, because we should all believe in loving our neighbour and loving strangers, and because in fragile times, friendship matters.

Chag kasher v’sameach.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)