April 14, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Pesach II
Not Four Questions: Just One
April 14, 2025 – 16 Nisan 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
How is this Passover different from all other Passovers? How is the seder we are doing tonight different from all the other seders we have ever done? Let me share a recent conversation I had with a good friend.
We have a beloved member of our shul whose mother was born in Londorf, Germany. She was taken with all the other Jews of Londorf to Auschwitz. She was the only survivor from her town. Every other Jew of Londorf perished in Auschwitz. But his mother would go on to survive and thrive, to live a beautiful, joyful life and to build a family with generations of love. Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. Which meant that this past January 27, 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He and his wife went to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the occasion, where they recited Kaddish for all those who perished. And it turns out that that very day was also his own mother’s yahrtzeit. Their words of Kaddish were filled with multiple meanings.
I was talking to him about the unreal intensity of this experience, and he asked me a question that I had never thought about before. He asked: Can you imagine the Jewish story without suffering? A Jewish history without hatred? My initial response was no: The suffering comes with our story. As we say in the Haggadah, b’chol dor v’dor omdim aleinu l’chaloteinu, in every generation, our enemies will arise to try to destroy us.
But I suspected that to fully answer his question I was missing something. I finally realized what I was missing when Mishael Zion spoke here last week. The crucial part of his speech for me, the pivot point, was when he was talking about the difference between his 12-year-old daughter Elah and his 8-year-old daughter Sapir as they encountered Israel today.
He shared that when he was walking home from dinner at a friend’s on a Friday night at 10:30, and the sirens went off in Jerusalem because the Houthis had fired missiles, and they had to find a shelter immediately that they shared with strangers, his 12-year old daughter asked: mah zot, what is this? Something is off here. How can this be happening? A sharp question for which Mishael Zion acknowledged he did not have a good answer. By contrast, his 8-year old daughter emerged into awareness during the tumult of Covid, unprecedented political instability frequent elections, unstable governments, deep civic strife, October 7, 18 months of war, and the ongoing hostage saga. His youngest daughter has only known this unstable reality. She does not ask mah zot, what is this? She gets instinctively that it just is, and that our job is to figure out how to deal with what just is.
When I heard Mishael Zion tells these two stories, I remembered my friend’s question: Can you imagine the Jewish story without the suffering? And the fuller answer is: For 2000 years we couldn’t. From the destruction of the Second Temple to the Holocaust, the suffering came with. But after the founding of Israel, especially after the 67 war, we were living in a holiday from Jewish history. We went from having no home to having two homes. A home in America. A home in Israel. That holiday from Jewish history coincided with our own lives. But because that is all we knew, like the fish that does not know it’s wet, many of us did not realize that we were living in a holiday from history.
How is this Passover different from all other Passovers? Because we now all know that our holiday from history is over. This Passover is about our owning this reality.
Which means that our religious life just got a whole lot more urgent. There are a lot of beautiful internal reasons to go to shul and to participate in a seder. Friendship. Community. People. Love. Song. Prayer. Learning. Both shul and a seder, if they work right, leave us with an afterglow.
But in our new world, where the holiday is over, both shul and seder have an urgent additional purpose. Our Quaker friends have a saying: After the benediction is over, the real service begins. Our seders are over. Now our real service begins.
In last week’s Torah reading, we read about the asham sacrifice, the offering that Israelites would offer to atone for their guilt. Rabbi Kushner’s comment is so on point:
We are held responsible not only for the wrong things we do but for the things we should but do not do. During the Sho-ah, as well as in other circumstances, bystanders who did not act to oppose evil caused enormous, irreparable harm. In Jewish law, one who has knowledge about a crime or legal dispute and does not come forward to divulge it is “innocent before a human court but liable in the sight of God.” The asham (reparation offering) is how the Torah seeks to resolve that conflict.
We are living now in the age of the asham offering, because who among us cannot think of things we should but do not do? I plead guilty. I so plead guilty. When Donniel Hartman last month gave a sermon at Bnei Torah in Boca Raton, he talked about how in the face of this unstable and frightening reality, all too often we shrink. We shrink from the unpleasantness. We shrink from the fear. We shrink from the divisiveness. We are on our screen, we see something awful, and we click. We click. We click. We click. We run away to the next article. We seek refuge in the sports pages. We change the channel. I do that every day. I don’t think I am alone.
Usually the Pesach seder is famous for four questions, but in this new season when our holiday from history is over, we have only one question. What should I be doing now, that I have not yet done, to make our world better?
I am not going to offer my answers. You will come up with your own. I recently heard an NPR piece about its spring fund raiser. The speaker said: We do not tell you what to think. We do not tell you how to feel. You our listeners are smart. You are committed and caring. Our job is to bring you the news so that you can come to your own conclusions. So too at our shul. Our job is to bring Jewish values to the conversation so that you can come up with your own answers.
I recently saw a television show that suggests the kind of impact our seder can have on us so that we can have our impact on the world.
HBO is streaming a medical drama called The Pitt about a trauma center in Pittsburgh. And the Pitt is the pits, because the doctors and nurses there see the most urgent cases. The main protagonist, played by Noah Wylie, Dr. Rabinovich, known as Dr. Robbie, is this brilliant, caring, hard-edged emergency room physician. One day there is a mass shooting at a big musical event. Huge numbers of people are brought in by ambulance in desperate shape. His stepson Jake’s girlfriend, Leah, was shot, a woman in her late teens. Dr. Robbie tries his best to save her, but alas to no avail. His stepson says to Dr. Robbie, you didn’t save her. Dr. Robbie says I did my best. He had been a tower of strength. But now he crumbles to the ground sobbing. That is how that episode ends. In the next episode, the ER is filled with these desperate patients. Other ER physicians want to know: where is Dr. Robbie? A younger doctor named Whitaker finds him on the ground, still sobbing, and unable to summon the energy to get back up. At last we see Dr. Robbie start saying the shema. We did not know that he was Jewish. But he is saying: Shema Yisrael Adonai eloheinu Adonai echad. Whitaker asks him: what are you doing? He says I am saying the shema I learned from my grandmother. Whitaker, a Christian who grew up on a farm, resonates to prayer, and quotes Isaiah ch. 40: Those who have faith in God will have their faith renewed. They will run without growing weary. To which Dr. Robbie answers: I am not sure I believe in God. But I remember saying the Shema with my grandmother, and it helps me now. He gets up, he gets out, and he resumes his healing work in a broken world.
That is what our seder can do for us now. We share so much. We share a broken world. We share a holiday from history that is over. We share a growing awareness that our move is no longer to pine away for the holiday that is over. Our move is to take seriously a single question at our seder tonight: What should I be doing now, that I have not yet done, to make our world better? May our seder inspire us to get up, to get out, and to do our part to heal our broken world. Shabbat shalom and chag kasher v’sameakh!