Rabbi's Chayva's Chat

On Tuesday night, we filled the social hall - packed it, really. I had planned on walking through the tables during the seder, but there were too many of us! The room filled to the brim with the buzz of joy, love and connection. What a beautiful Am Tikvah community seder we had!

Joy, community, and tikvah - hope… These are the feelings of redemption. Rabbi Steven Cohen teaches that the Jewish definition and experience of redemption is when your back is against the wall, and you still find a way out. Maybe it was divine intervention, maybe it was courage, or maybe a bit of both. But somehow, some way, you go from a narrow, trapped place into something more spacious, more free.

The rabbis of the Talmud teach that Egypt was called Mitzrayim not because it is a narrow strip of civilization along the Nile, but rather because Egypt was the narrow place for us. We’ve all been there, communally and individually. And we can only get through it by being a people of hope, an Am Tikvah. 

I hope that this Passover is a holiday of hope for you. Hope that buoys you, sustains you, and feeds your soul. Hope is strongest when it is not naive and yet remains determined. Acclaimed Israeli author David Grossman wrote recently, “Hope is a noun, but it contains a verb that propels it into the future, always to the future, always with forward motion. One could look at hope as a sort of anchor cast from a stifled, desperate existence towards a better, freer future. Towards a reality that does not yet exist, which is made up mostly of wishes, of imagination. When the anchor is cast, it holds on to the future, and human beings, and sometimes an entire society, begin to pull themselves towards it. It is an act of optimism. When we cast this imaginary anchor beyond the concrete, arbitrary circumstances. When we dare to hope, we are proving that there is still one place in our soul where we are free.” I wish you a happy and hopeful Passover, Z’man Cheiruteinu, our time of freedom.