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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)