Victory and Resilience alongside Despair: Passover 2025

Count the number of Passover Seders held this year in Israel and the Diaspora (and the latter get two, one for each side of the family) and that is a measure of our victory.

Not our final overwhelming victory that I hope we will finally achieve over Hamas and other jihadists in this existential war that we are fighting right now — but the victory of our spirit.

Even if the Seder this year is sad, overshadowed by the huge losses we have already suffered since Oct 7th, by the vicious in-fighting among us, by the worry over the hostages still in jihadi grips — stiff-necked as we are, we refuse to give up.

Religious or not, most of us respect our traditions and even if we don’t all come back to the table after the meal, leaving some Chad Gadya voices to waft out to where, if yours are like my family Seders when I grew up in Canada, the rest of the “party” is watching the second half of the hockey game — even if that, the youngest kids recite the four questions, we open the door for Eliyahu, we have four classes of wine, sing Dayenu, drip wine off the tips of our little fingers to commemorate the plagues.

Image of the Passover plate from Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gastronomie_juive_en_%C3%89gypte_(cropped).jpg

It really is unique to do this in Israel where the kids speak the language of the four questions every day of their lives.

Some are talking about how we as a nation cannot heal from the trauma of Oct 7th and its aftermath unless all the hostages come home. As a former trauma therapist, let me mention that it is too soon to talk about healing. We are still in the throws of the trauma — the “aftermath” is not “after” yet. It is still ongoing.

So we will talk about healing later.

Right now, let us count the number of Seders being held around us. Let us hear Dayenu and Chad Gadya as the echoes of these tunes from our table join the echoes emanating from our neighbours’ tables. Let that uplift us as we remember we were slaves in Egypt and we are still slaves to something even today (each in his or her own way), and at the same time, we are resilient — as a nation and as a People.

Am Yisrael Chai!

Chag Sameach!