After a short pause in writing —a pause that did not feel optional —I return not to theory, but to a table.

Pesach this year arrived carrying more weight than usual.

For many of us, the story of liberation felt complicated — not only by the events of October 7th and their aftermath, but by a growing sense that freedom itself is under strain in many places at once.

Attacks on Jewish life and safety sit alongside images of women silenced and erased in Iran and Afghanistan, and alongside more subtle but unsettling erosions of freedom closer to home.

Relief, grief, anger, and disorientation coexist.Return does not feel the same as arrival.Freedom, if it comes at all, feels partial and fragile.

And yet Pesach still asks us to gather around a table and tell a story.

The Seder has never been a celebration of uncomplicated joy.

The Haggadah insists on multiple voices, multiple temperaments, and multiple ways of arriving. The wise child, the questioning child, the resistant child, and the one who does not know how to ask are all present.

The text does not resolve their differences.It simply seats them togetherand insists that the story be toldin a way that makes room for all of them.

In years like this one, that insistence feels especially important.

Not everyone comes to the table feeling free, and not everyone understands freedom in the same way. Some bring fear shaped by antisemitism that has become newly visible. Others bring concern about the narrowing of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)