This year, we’ve lost a lot, we’ve endured a lot, and we’ve learned a lot. But our prayer remains the same

Those last few nights of cleaning and scrubbing, taping and covering, we’re a nation moving to a rhythm.

It’s not just the actual music vibrating in kitchens and wafting out windows everywhere you walk. It’s an anticipation for our shared holiday of redemption. What we sometimes forget is that the very first Pesach was an act of faith. The redemption had not yet happened.

Back on that evening in Egypt, we celebrated freedom while still technically enslaved. We celebrated Hashem passing over us, sparing us from suffering, before the selection had begun. We celebrated our deliverance from the bitter times before our cruel master had declared them over.

Many Pesachs have been celebrated since that first evening in Egypt, when a nascent nation sat down to mark a liberation yet to occur. During those subsequent Pesachs, we were able to retell the thrilling miracles that accompanied us on our journey out of enslavement. We could revel in our liberty to answer only to the Creator. We celebrated our privileged position of firstborn son, apple of our Father’s eye.

But there were other Pesachs too — Pesachs spent underground or in hiding, Pesachs spent in chains literal or metaphorical, Pesachs when we understood all too well that our eternal existence is a bond sealed in blood. During those years, we said the same words and reenacted the same story — but it was an act of faith more than a celebration of salvation.

Living in the 21st century, we’re so spoiled in so many ways. We don’t know what it means to be hunted or enslaved or marked for slaughter. We read of these experiences and we know people who lived through them. But we are so free. We can come and go, buy and sell, host or visit, protest and demonstrate, chart our paths and make our own decisions.

Last Pesach we got a small taste of a different existence. With the arrival of a brutal and bizarre pandemic, every day brought more horrific news, more loss and tragedy. And with every day we also grew more constrained, more isolated, until we were effectively separated from the wider context of community, workplace, friends, neighbors, extended family. When Pesach arrived, our worlds had shrunk to the confines of our homes and immediate family.

But we sat down at our tables and once again spoke of liberation, of freedom, of promises kept and wide-open vistas. We sang with overflowing gratitude and overwhelming praise.

Yes, we had our Amazon deliveries and choices of meat on the supermarket app and shul emails and Internet shiurim. At no point could we claim to know the persecution or desperation of our ancestors. But as we drank our Four Cups, we tasted what it means to celebrate Pesach as an act of faith — to harmonize about gratitude while aching for salvation and to relive a long-ago exodus while craving an escape from the dismal present. We followed the glimmer of that very first Pesach, and clutched a capacity born of that initial act of faith — to celebrate a redemption that has yet to arrive, to keep dancing in the dark.

We’ve lost a lot, we’ve endured a lot, and we’ve learned a lot since then. But our prayer remains the same. May this Pesach bring light and joy and the fulfillment of that long-awaited promise.

—With appreciation to Mrs. Esther Wein for sharing some of the themes referenced here.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 854)