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As I write this, I am looking at a heart-stopping picture of five people baking matzo in 1943, in a secret oven they built beneath the Lodz ghetto. These were Jews made slaves again in modern times, insisting on celebrating their God-given right to freedom even as they were being denied their earthly equivalent. But what I really can’t get over is the smile on the face of one of the women. There it is, again, still: the joy and the sacrifice. It is the smile of someone who knows she is doing something miraculous by making Passover her own.

Our circumstances are much less dire than hers, but our task this year is the same. Last week, a group of major Orthodox rabbis in Israel announced that they would permit people to use Zoom video conferencing for their Seders — a previously unimaginable accommodation to stringent Jewish law. But that’s the point. We may be away from loved ones, or shut out of communal spaces. We may not be preparing with the same vigor, or shopping with the same zeal. But we will do what millions of Jews have done before us: manifest our hope for liberation.

That is our obligation, and our privilege. All the more so in moments when the taste of freedom — from oppression, from want, from disease — is not yet ours.

—nicolas kristoff, nytimes March 30 “The Power of Passover During a Plague”


 


haggadah Section: Introduction