Every year, when we get to the moment in the Seder where we open the door for Elijah the Prophet, I think of this picture.

It was painted by my grandfather, Zalman Kleinman, and to me it has always been one of the most powerful Pesach images I know.

Two children stand there, small and real. And in the doorway is Elijah, not as a cartoon, not as a sentimental holiday picture, but as something vast and ethereal, almost impossible.

My grandfather somehow put two worlds into one frame. Real children and a mystical visitor. A real doorway and a presence from redemption that somehow comes through the door even though it does not fit at all.

That picture feels especially true this year.

Because this is the impossibly strange world we are living in right now. We are watching the news and seeing soldiers, pilots, radar systems, interceptors, intelligence, and brilliant military operations. Everything is concrete. Everything seems to fit inside a physical reality.

And yet any honest Jew also sees something more. We are seeing miracles upon miracles of Divine protection and military success beyond any statistical likelihood. One sided success far beyond what any other nation has ever accomplished with so little loss.

We are watching the natural and the miraculous standing in the same doorway. Heaven and reality have joined together into one powerful picture.

Which brings me to the custom of leaving the Seder table to open the door for Elijah. This is not based on the Talmud’s guidelines for the Seder, or a remembrance of our leaving Egypt during the Exodus.

As the Alter Rebbe writes, “the custom is to leave the door unlocked because it is a propitious night for the Jewish people to be redeemed from this exile. And if Elijah the Prophet comes (to announce the coming of a........

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