For most of my adult life, I celebrated Jewish festivals in relative peace. The festivals arrived in their familiar rhythm, the preparations began, and the community gathered. There were always anxieties in the background, of course. Jewish communal life has never been entirely free of them. But the festivals themselves felt safe. They belonged to us. We could inhabit them without looking over our shoulders.
That assumption has been shattered.
Since October 2023, some major Jewish festivals have been shadowed by violence, grief, or fear. The sequence is now engraved into our collective memory. The Hamas massacre fell on Simchat Torah (7 October 2023), the day we celebrate the completion and renewal of the Torah cycle, a day of dancing and joy. On Yom Kippur 2025, a terrorist drove a car into worshippers and stabbed congregants outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, killing two men, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, on the holiest day of the Jewish year. On the first night of Hanukkah that same year, gunmen opened fire on a public menorah-lighting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, killing fifteen people, including a ten-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor. Each attack targeted Jews at prayer or celebration. Each fell on a festival. The pattern is not accidental.
We are now approaching Pesach 2026, and the question I am hearing from congregants, in different forms but with the same underlying anguish, is this: how do we celebrate? How do we sit at the Seder table and tell the story of liberation when the world feels so hostile, when Israel’s conduct troubles some of us deeply, when antisemitism is rising in ways we did not expect to see in our lifetimes, and when the very act of gathering as Jews in public has become, in some places, dangerous?
I want to take the question seriously, because it deserves more than simple reassurance.
The festivals were never designed for easy times
The first thing to say is that Jewish festivals were not created for periods of safety and comfort. They were forged in displacement, exile, persecution, and uncertainty. The Seder itself is a ritual born of precarity. The Israelites ate in haste, sandals on their feet, ready to move. The rabbis who shaped the Haggadah did so under Roman occupation. Jews in mediaeval Europe conducted Sedarim behind locked doors, aware that Pesach was the season when blood libels were most likely to surface. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto held Sedarim in 1943, weeks before the uprising, knowing there would be no liberation for them.
This is not a comfortable heritage, but it is a true one. The festivals have always carried grief alongside gratitude, fear alongside hope. The Seder, in particular, is structurally designed to hold contradiction. We eat the bread of affliction and call it the bread of freedom. We spill wine from our cups to diminish our joy as we name the plagues. We open the door for Elijah in hope and close it again in reality. The Haggadah does not pretend that the world is whole. It insists that we gather and tell the story anyway.
The dissonance is not a reason to stop; it is the reason to continue
Several congregants have shared with me their sense of moral dissonance this year. Some feel unable to celebrate Jewish nationhood when Israel’s actions in Gaza have caused such devastation. Others feel unable to speak about the Jewish experience of being refugees while Palestinians are being displaced on a massive scale. Still others simply feel exhausted by the weight of it all: the exhaustion that comes from a war that does not seem to stop, the grief for the families of fallen soldiers or civilians, the horror of destroyed buildings, the rising hostility on the streets and online, the sense that Jewish identity has become, once again, a site of conflict.
I understand all of this. I share much of it.
But I want to suggest that the dissonance is not a reason to abandon the Seder. It is precisely what the Seder is for. Pesach has always been more than a celebration of Jewish survival or power. At its heart, it is the opposite. It is the ritual by which Jews are commanded to remember what it is to be vulnerable, displaced, and subject to the will of others. The ethical core of the Exodus narrative is not “we won”. It is “We suffered, and therefore we must never be indifferent to the suffering of others.” The Torah makes this explicit, returning to the point with remarkable insistence: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).
One of the most important lines of the Haggadah is not about power but about obligation: “In every generation, each person must see themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt” (Mishnah, Pesachim 10:5). That is not a licence to do whatever we want. It is a discipline of empathy. To come out of Egypt is to know what oppression feels like, and therefore, to refuse to become morally numb in the face of suffering wherever it occurs.
How to hold the Seder this year
My advice, for what it is worth, is to keep the Seder. Keep the family gathering, the songs, and the food, and tell the story, our story. But allow space this year for lament, for complexity, and for prayer. Consider the following:
Tell the story of liberation as an unfinished human task, not as a completed Jewish achievement. The Exodus is not behind us. It is ahead of us, for everyone.
Acknowledge the suffering of Israelis and Palestinians alike. Hold in mind the bereaved families, the displaced, and all innocent people caught in violence. Hold in your hearts the Israelis who have their lives interrupted so many times a day by sirens and who do not know if they will be able to hold a proper Seder this year. The tradition gives us the spilling of the wine as a ritual form for exactly this kind of moral seriousness.
Name the dissonance rather than hiding it. The Seder is a table of memory, questions, arguments, discomfort, gratitude, and responsibility. It has always been those things. This year, perhaps more than in other years, it is the right place to be honest about what we are feeling.
Insist that Jewish memory must never become indifference to the suffering of others. This is not a betrayal of the tradition. It is the tradition at its most demanding and most necessary.
Let this year’s Pesach be an expression not of certainty, but of conscience.
There is a teaching attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov which I find myself returning to often: there is no such thing as despair in the world. He did not say there is no suffering, no darkness, no narrow place. He said, ‘There is no such thing as despair.’ The future is always open. The covenant always holds. The narrow place is not our permanent address.
Chag Pesach sameach to you, to all those you love, and to the entire House of Israel.