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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)