A Reflection for Shabbat Hagadol:

There is a moment at every Passover seder that no one fully rehearses.

The meal is winding down. The children are restless. Someone has found the hidden piece of matzah and is negotiating aggressively. And then someone says it’s time. Time to open the door for Elijah.

And the room goes quiet.

After all the noise — the questions, the songs, the four cups of wine — silence descends the moment that door swings open. As if the room instinctively knows that something larger than itself is being asked of it.

What exactly are we doing when we open that door?

The custom is rooted in the last words of the Hebrew prophets. The book of Malachi — the final prophetic voice in the Hebrew Bible — ends with one of the most haunting promises in all of scripture:

Hineh anochi shole’ach lachem et Eliyahu hanavi lifnei bo yom Adonai hagadol v’hanora.

“I am sending you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and awesome day of God.” (Malachi 3:23)

Not triumph. Not arrival. A promise not yet kept. We enter the seder holding a divine IOU — that Elijah is coming, that redemption is near, that the world will one day turn toward wholeness.

We open the door because we take that promise seriously.

He doesn’t come. He never comes. We close the door. We sing the closing songs. We go to bed.

And next year, we open it again.

I want you to remember last year’s seder.

Do you remember what it felt like to open that door while our people were still underground in Gaza? While mothers were lighting candles not knowing if their children would ever come home? While families were setting a place at their seder table — not out of tradition, but out of defiance, out of refusal to let go?

We opened the door last Passover and the absence was unbearable. The cup sat full. No one came.

This year is different. This Passover — for the first time since that terrible October morning — there is no one left to bring home from Gaza.

Say that slowly. There is no one left to bring home.

I am not saying the world is healed. I am not saying the wounds are closed. But something has been returned to us that we were not certain we would ever hold again. And this year, when we open that door, we open it from a different place. Not from within the darkness, but from its threshold. Somewhere between grief and gratitude. Between what was and what might still be.

The question pressing on me — the question I think Passover is really asking — is this: What do we do now, on the other side of the door?

Because the door does not open onto a peaceful world.

Israel is at war with Iran. As Jews around the world prepare their seders, families in Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem are running to safe rooms between missile alerts — marking the festival of freedom under the threat of bombardment, the way an earlier generation once hid and waited in a different kind of darkness.

And for those of us in the diaspora, the world has also shifted. Many of us walk into our synagogues differently than we did three years ago. With more awareness. More alertness. The easy assumption that we are safe everywhere has been quietly retired.

I want to name one more thing, because the prophetic tradition demands it. In the West Bank, as the wider war rages, there are Jews — settlers — terrorizing Palestinian civilians. Torching homes. Burning cars. Invoking God’s name while doing it.

I will say plainly what I believe Jewish tradition requires: this is a chillul Hashem — a desecration of God’s name. We cannot open the door for Elijah and look away from Jews committing acts of terror. The same moral clarity that names October 7 as evil must name Jewish terrorism as evil. These are not competing statements. They are the same statement.

Elijah, remember, is the prophet of justice. The door we open at the seder is not only a portal to redemption. It is a moral summons.

Which brings me to a phrase that has been troubling me, and that I think sits at the heart of what this moment is asking of all of us.

Hope is not a strategy.

You’ve heard it in boardrooms and briefings. And those who say it are not entirely wrong. Was the war with Iran launched with a clear strategic endgame? Or was it built on hope — that Iran would fold quickly, that the region would stabilize on its own? Hope without strategy can get people killed. The hostages did not come home because we hoped. They came home because of relentless diplomatic pressure, organized advocacy, and families who refused to let the world look away. Hope without strategy would have left them underground.

But here is where I push back. Because the people who say hope is not a strategy are working with a definition of hope that the Jewish tradition has never accepted.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks — of blessed memory — drew a distinction that I believe is among the most important in modern Jewish thought. He distinguished between optimism and hope.

Optimism is a prediction — a temperament about the future. And predictions can be wrong. Optimism does not survive history’s darkest chapters.

Hope is something else entirely. Hope, in the Jewish sense, is not a feeling. It is a commitment. The Hebrew word tikvah — hope — shares its root with kav, a cord, a line. Hope is not a wish. It is a lifeline you hold onto and pull. It is the decision to act as if the future is open — not because you can prove it, but because the alternative is to surrender the future entirely.

Let me tell you how we fill Elijah’s cup in my home.

We don’t pour it from the bottle. Each person at our table — children, guests, grandparents, whoever is there — pours a little from their own cup into his. The cup of the prophet is filled from what each of us gives of ourselves.

My family has done this for years, and every year it stops me. Because what it says is exactly what Sacks was pointing toward: redemption is not delivered from outside. It is assembled — from each person’s contribution, each person’s willingness to pour something of themselves into a vision larger than their own glass.

When we fill Elijah’s cup from our own, we are not waiting for a miracle. We are becoming the miracle, one small pour at a time.

The Talmud records a disagreement between two great sages: one says redemption will come only if humanity earns it through repentance and repair. The other says it will come regardless — at the appointed time. (Sanhedrin 97b.) I have always thought they are both right. The seder holds the tension deliberately: the divine moves, and we move. The sea splits, and we step in. The door opens, and we walk through.

The Passover Haggadah makes an extraordinary demand: B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza miMitzrayim — in every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as having personally left Egypt.

Not as a history lesson. As a living reality. You are being installed into a pattern — a multigenerational commitment to refuse despair, to keep moving toward freedom even when freedom feels impossibly far.

This year’s seder carries a weight unlike any in recent memory — not the weight of pure grief, but the stranger, more demanding weight of partial return. Some came home. Not all of them whole. The world is not healed. What stands outside that door is still complicated and frightening and unresolved.

And still — we pour from our own cups into his. We open the door. We say: we expected you. We held the future open even when the present was unbearable.

That is not naïveté. For Jews, it never has been.

Hope is not optimism. Hope is not passivity. Hope is not a strategy — but it is the ground from which every real strategy must grow. You cannot build toward a world you have stopped believing in. You cannot work for peace in a region you have written off. You cannot raise children into meaning if you have quietly surrendered to meaninglessness.

Malachi understood this. He ended the prophetic canon not with arrival but with promise — trusting that the people holding the book would know what to do with an open ending.

Go into your seder holding that promise. Pour from your own cup. Open the door.

And then work as if the rest depends on you.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)