A letter from Jewish Studies to Gettysburg College Hillel and Jewish students

Chag Pesach Sameach, Hillel!

It’s hard to feel celebratory right now. Many of you are feeling something unfamiliar—like your Jewishness has suddenly become something seen, questioned, or even targeted, an object judged before you’re understood. That can leave you feeling unsettled, even disoriented. If you feel that way, you’re not imagining it. And you’re not alone.

And yet, this is exactly where ritual begins to matter most—not as decoration, not as something we do when things are easy, but as something that holds us when they are not. Judaism has long understood that sacred space is not only geographic. It is created, a sacred space in time, so to speak. The rabbis, after the destruction of the Second Temple, built a world in which study, memory, and shared practice became a kind of portable sanctuary–a “third temple” not made of stone, but of words, rhythms, and return. Ritual is how that sanctuary is entered.

Passover is one of the clearest expressions of this. It is not just a story we remember; it is a story we step into. We don’t simply recount the Exodus, we reenact it, retell it, argue with it, and pass it from voice to voice around a table. And in doing so, something remarkable happens: past and present collapse into one another. The Haggadah insists that in every generation, each person must see themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt. Not because it is historically precise, but because it is existentially true. We know what it means to feel confined, exposed, uncertain, and we know, too, that liberation is not a one-time event but an ongoing human task.

Ritual makes that truth livable, for example, Passover. It creates a structure where you don’t have to wait to feel whole in order to participate. You show up, you say the words, you taste the bitterness and the sweetness, and slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, you are carried into meaning. Ritual does not demand that you feel inspired. It assumes you may not. And it meets you there. That is its quiet genius.

In that sense, ritual is one of Judaism’s most profound responses to crisis. It refuses to let the sacred depend on mood or circumstance. It builds a shared world that can be entered again and again, across time, across geography, across generations. When you sit at a Seder table, whether surrounded by many people or just a few, you are not alone. You are with every ancestor who kept this night under harder conditions and with every future Jew who will one day inherit it. That continuity is not abstract, it is enacted. It happens because you do it.

And there is strength in that. You come from a people who have faced pressure, hostility, and uncertainty before. Our ancestors responded not only with endurance, but with creation: texts, traditions, arguments, songs, rituals that insist on dignity and responsibility. You are all walking summations of over three thousand thousand years of tradition. A tradition that says: remember the vulnerable, because you were vulnerable. Lift others, because you know what it is to need lifting.

So wherever you find yourself this year, whether you feel steady or shaken, connected or distant, know that showing up matters. Observing the holiday, even in small ways, is not a performance. It is participation in something that has always been larger than any one moment, including this one.

No one chooses times like these. But because you are here, because you remember, because you continue, the story continues. Pesach continues. And through it, we are carried—just as those before us were, and just as those after us will be.

Jewish Studies, Gettysburg College

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)