April 04th, 2025

My father’s charoset and matzah ball soup, afikomen fondue and the full moon. These are a few of my favorite (Passover) things. Part of me is very much looking forward to the songs and flavors of seder season. But another part of me is feeling quite anxious and avoidant, even fearful. (I have uncharacteristically not started my Pesach cleaning).  

As one of the three pilgrimage festivals, Passover is designed to bring us all together, across time and space. That is its legacy. Seder night connects me to all the other seders I have been at and all the people I have told this sacred story with. The year I wandered Istanbul searching for matzah, the year I dressed up as a wild beast, the years we were in quarantine. 

Perhaps one of the most profound moments for me as a Jew is sitting down to seder on Erev Pesach and imagining a web of Jews all over the world also sitting down to their seders. On every continent (except maybe Antarctica), tables will be set, stories will be told, questions will be asked. Even Jews who consider themselves secular find themselves celebrating Passover. Even under duress, even during the Holocaust, Jews found ways to make seder. Passover traditions are one of the most palpable expressions of clal yisrael / the entity, the entirety of Israel. 

But this year I am really struggling. The concept of clal yisrael has never been easy for me to swallow whole, but these days it feels indigestible. The chasm is deep and so painful. The image of settlers sitting down to seder in the West Bank, rifles around their chests, young Jewish soldiers at checkpoints, Palestinians captive in their homes on their ancestral lands, I can’t stomach it. Death of the first born, death of 10,000 children in Gaza. Will they use the plagues to justify it? Will they claim them as liberation casualties?

And then there is the rising fascism here in the US, and its manipulation of antisemitism to silence free speech, deport immigrants and disrupt democracy. I am sick watching so much of
clal Israel respond with indifference and in some cases actively cheering on extralegal deportations of people for writing op eds. This administration's explicit manipulation of antisemitism to undermine democracy and the Jewish establishment’s collusion with it is deplorable and dangerous (I highly recommend Rabbi Sharon Brous’ Purim Sermon: I am not your pawn! on this topic.)

On April 12 1941, 84 seder years ago to the (seder) day, Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, known as the Esh Kodesh, the rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto, was teaching about exactly this. He wrote, “No Jew is a separate individual. He belongs to the entirety of the congregation of the Jewish people. Thus when one person learns Torah and worships God, he thereby illuminates all Jewish people.” 

He explains that when one Jew does teshuvah, it benefits all Jewish people. But then I suppose the inverse also applies, when one Jew strays horribly from the path of righteousness, it affects all of us. On my recent road trip to Detroit for Shosh’s grandma’s funeral, I opted to take off my kippa at the rest stop. I am still unsure, did I not feel safe or did I not feel proud?

The Esh Kodesh goes on to explain that there is a kind of clal in which the whole is composed of separate parts. As any whole thing, take a car or a book, is made up of many smaller parts (metal, words, etc). But then, he elaborates, “There is another kind of clal that constitutes an essential, simple unity from which the details are branches that diverge…When we reach the source or root of such a clal, everything has become one. An example of this is fruit that has fallen from a tree. When we cut it off from its source, we watch it decay. The germ of the tree unifies and sustains all the disparate parts…”

For the Esh Kodesh, this is how it is with the congregation of israel. The whole is not comprised of individuals. On the contrary, the individuals are branches of the whole. “The Congregation of Israel exists not because of a decision to join together and unify, but because the germ is the Jewish soul that includes all Jews and from which individual Jews branch out.”

As I read this I felt so much grief and disconnect from his romantic vision of clal yisrael. This year, we are more like a broken down car than a tree of life. 

For the Esh Kodesh, it turns out Passover is also a pinnacle moment for clal yisrael. The Haggadah explains that the wicked child is wicked because he excluded himself from the clal. He asks, “What does this ritual mean for you?” and not “for us?” And the Esh Kodesh takes that to mean that the wicked child has cut himself off from his source, he is like a piece of fruit fallen from the tree, rotting on the forest floor.

I am in a bit of an existential spiritual crisis, imagining seders across the Jewish world. This year I’m feeling both part of them and not part of them. I want to feel connected to them, and I want not to feel connected to them. All of this has me wondering, am I the wicked child? Are they? What might it take to feel part of the whole? What might I risk? What might I lose? 

It is yet unclear to me if I believe in an essential Jewish soul, though it's a soothing image to see us as connected in such a Sinai way. I know it feels bad to fray from my Source, to fear my own people, even my own family. I know I am not alone in this existential discomfort. 

I know that a big part of what keeps me tethered to clal yisrael is you all. This community makes me believe in a Judaism worthy of our children’s children and the earth itself.

I can tell you I plan to clean for passover and brave seder night. To sing songs that have been sung for more than a thousand years. To allow myself to hope it might be healing. To hope it might widen the narrow places in my heart, to taste the tears and bless them.