This year, Passover does not feel like a celebration of freedom. It feels like a test of whether freedom can survive at all.

Across Israel, families will gather at Seder tables with one eye on tradition and the other on the nearest safe room. The distance between ritual and reality has rarely been this small.

Freedom, in theory, is about dignity, purpose, and the ability to build a future. But in a year of war, freedom is reduced to something far more basic: staying alive.

Jewish holidays have always carried an uncanny relevance. They do not sit quietly in history they confront the present. And this year, that confrontation is impossible to ignore.

Purim, the story of a Persian plot to annihilate the Jewish people, arrived as Israel faced a modern Persian regime that openly calls for its destruction. This is no longer metaphor. It is continuity.

The massacre of October 7, 2023, shattered lives on Simchat Torah the day after Sukkot, when Jews are meant to reflect on the fragility of life. That fragility is no longer symbolic. It is permanent, visible, and raw.

Tisha B’Av, the day mourning destruction born of internal division, came as Israeli society itself was tearing at the........

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