Goldy arrived in our home just before Pesach.

Not a grand guest. A goldfish.

My daughter—no longer five years old, but a respected teacher in a prestigious girls’ high school—walked in carrying a small tank. “It’s the class fish,” she explained. “The school is closed—for the war, for Pesach. Someone had to take responsibility.”

My first reaction was practical: Where do we put it? What do we do with it? In the end, the bathroom became Goldy’s temporary home.

And slowly, unexpectedly, Goldy began to grow on me.

But more than that—Goldy made me pause.

We eat fish. We eat meat. It is normal, part of life, part of halacha. Yet when a fish is staring at you, quietly, almost personally, something shifts. It is no longer abstract. It becomes real.

I found myself thinking: how do we eat what we eat? What do we take in—physically, and beyond that, spiritually?

Just after Pesach, I was already planning a healthier diet. Then comes Parshat Shemini, detailing the laws of kosher and non-kosher animals. And I began to wonder: is there a connection between what we eat and who we are becoming?

Pesach is the festival of freedom. But modern language has reduced freedom to something deeply individual—my rights, my choices, my self-expression.

That is not the freedom of Pesach.

Pesach is the birth of a people. It is the covenant forged at the Exodus—not with isolated individuals, but with a nation charged with carrying God’s presence and moral purpose into history.

Freedom, in Judaism, is not just about being released from something. It is about being bound to something greater.

That idea struck me again reading a reflection on the Haggadah: Moshe Rabbeinu is absent. The redemption is not attributed to a heroic individual. It is a Divine act, shaping a nation.

We are not redeemed as individuals alone. We are redeemed as a people—with responsibility.

And that thought led me somewhere uncomfortable.

Have I, in my writing, become too reactive? Too focused on negativity? Too consumed with responding to Palestinianism, to global hypocrisy, to the noise surrounding Israel and the Jewish people?

If the world is obsessed with us, must we be obsessed with responding to it?

Pesach suggests otherwise.

We are not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)