A Seder at the Edge of Eternity |
A few weeks ago, I stood in the middle of my synagogue, surrounded by screaming, happy children, the whirring sound of greggors, and the smell of popcorn, and I just stared dimly at the chaos, wondering what on earth we were doing here.
I am one of many in mourning this year, still grappling for a way through the grief of unexpectedly and tragically losing my mother less than a year ago. Perhaps, being in aveilut, I should have taken an ‘out’ this year. But aside from my own personal tragedy, as we celebrated Purim, we were only 48 hours out from the beginning of another war with Iran. Missiles were raining down on Jerusalem. My in-laws were popping in and out of their shelter like one of those nightmare jack-in-the-box toys from the previous day’s carnival. And yet the dizzying whirl of happy people and tired parents continued, unabated by the threat of a modern Haman who would soon be pulled, dead, from his bunker.
Beating a hasty retreat, I was left to ponder the inexplicable juxtapositions and contradictions of modern Jewish life: at once a people of grief and celebration, a tradition rooted in both past and future, a ritual life that demands that one does not postpone joy, even in the hardest moments.
Tonight is the first Seder; in other years – we are normally in Israel – it would be the only one. The idea of doing two Seders in this year of years is not a happy one. A year ago, when I got on the plane to Israel for Pesach, my mom was in treatment and ostensibly fine. 12 days later, when I returned, she could barely walk. Pesach was the beginning of the end, of her end, and this year, as it persists in inching closer, grief seems to have paralyzed me. Paralysis has been the defining word of the last year, as I search in vain for who I am going to be on the other side. I do not know yet what that reinvention looks like, but I do know at least that the Seder itself offers all of us perspective on what it means to be a grieving Jew facing an uncertain future. Which, in many ways, almost all of us are.
Picture the scene: it is the year 135 CE. Betar has fallen. The destruction is complete.
A mere 65 years earlier, Jews in Jerusalem lay scattered and dying, victims of two simultaneous wars — an external one against the Romans, and an internal one that pitted the Sicarii and other zealot groups against everyone else. But this, perhaps, is worse.
The revolt of the previous three years, inspired by the false messiah Bar Kochba, has laid waste to Judea. In the words of the Roman historian Dio Cassius, more than a million had died in the fighting, and those who died of famine and disease were “past finding out.” More than 525,000 towns, cities, and villages had been razed.
In the aftermath, the Roman emperor Hadrian — spurred on by revenge for heavy Roman losses — outlawed Judaism, banned Jews from Judea, and renamed it Syria Palaestina in an attempt to strip the land of its Jewish character.
This loss came on the heels of another devastating blow only two generations earlier.
In the years between revolts — after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and before the failure of Bar Kochba — the Rabbis attempted to reinvent Judaism. This desperate gamble, to recreate a version of Judaism that could exist without Temple worship, was only ever meant to be temporary.
When the Second Temple fell, the Rabbis were guided by hope for a future rooted in the past. After all, when the First Temple was destroyed, it had been rebuilt. The prophet Jeremiah had foretold this in his letter to the Babylonian exiles, promising that within 70 years God would return the people to Jerusalem. That prophecy came true in the form of Cyrus the Great, and in 538 BCE Jews began to return from Babylon and rebuild.
In the years after the Second Temple’s destruction, the Rabbis convened at Yavneh to create a form of Judaism that could survive without the Temple. This holy place had been everything: shul and school, court system and social centre, the entire world in one place. To imagine Judaism without it was almost inconceivable.
And yet Judaism adapted. It refashioned itself.
Part of that reinvention was the creation of the Pesach Seder — a replacement for one of the thrice-annual pilgrimage sacrifices. But more than that, it was a radical reimagining. The Rabbis did not simply preserve the past; they rewrote how it would be experienced. Without an altar, without pilgrimage, without sacrifice, they shifted the centre of Jewish life into the home — into conversation, into memory. They transformed a national ritual into an intimate one, and in doing so, ensured its survival.
Under Emperor Trajan, there was an attempt to rebuild the Temple. When he died in 117 and Hadrian came to power, many still believed restoration was only a matter of time. When Hadrian outlawed circumcision — viewing it as akin to castration — and attempted to erect a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount, Jewish desperation surged. It had, after all, been nearly 70 years. God had promised once through Jeremiah. Perhaps He would do so again.
But it was only when Rabbi Akiva declared a Jewish revolutionary, Shimon ben Kosiba — renamed Bar Kochba — to be the Messiah that the final spark was lit. The revolt that followed would consume hundreds of thousands, including many of Rabbi Akiva’s own students — not dead of plague, after all.
And then Bar Kochba failed.
Whatever hope remained that exile was temporary — that the Temple would be rebuilt, that Judaism could return to its previous centre — was extinguished in the ashes of Betar. There would be no quick return. No Cyrus on the horizon. No seventy-year promise to cling to. Judaism, if it was to survive, would have to stop waiting to go back and instead learn how to move forward.
The Seder, then, became something even more profound. It was no longer just a reenactment of the Exodus. It became a blueprint for survival after destruction.
Every year, we are commanded that “in every generation, each person must see themselves as if they personally left Egypt.”
But I have never felt further from that moment than I do now. Redemption and freedom feel abstract. What feels immediate, what feels real, is loss. Disorientation. The sudden and violent rupture between the life that was and the life that is.
In grief, I do not see myself leaving Egypt.
I try, instead, to see myself in Yavneh.
My grief is personal, immediate, all-consuming. But we, as a people, are perpetually caught in cycles of destruction and rebirth.
In the past six years, we have watched a global pandemic upend our social fabric. We have seen the collapse of the illusion that we lived in a post-history age. The opening salvos of October 7th — and the celebrations of October 8th — shattered that completely. Like the Jews of 70 CE, we now find ourselves entangled in both external and internal conflict. The war with Iran is simply the latest blow.
Perhaps we should all try to see ourselves in Yavneh — among those Rabbis who sat in the aftermath of catastrophe and asked an impossible question:
How do you rebuild a life, a faith, a future when the center of your world has been destroyed?
How do you perform ritual in a world where everything is suddenly possible and nothing is safe?
How do you find redemption when you are still drowning in grief?
The Seder is, as Yehuda Amichai once observed about Jerusalem, a meal on the edge of eternity. It is at once saturated with grief and hope, rooted in both past and future. It exists simultaneously in Egypt, in Yavneh, in the ashes of Betar, in the academies of Babylonia, in a shtetl on the edge of the Russian Empire, on the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, on October 6th, 2023 — and somewhere in an unknowable future.
It is a celebration of something that is missing.
A ritual built around absence.
Judaism has continually reinvented itself — and continues to do so. From Temple to destruction, from sovereignty to exile to return, from powerlessness to power. It has done so through moments of profound collective suffering.
And perhaps that is what the grief of today demands of us as well.
There is no returning to who we were before. Those people are gone. There is no neat arc of healing that carries us back to our old lives. What remains is something messier, more uncertain, and more honest: the slow, disorienting construction of a new self from the ruins of the old one.
I haven’t met the new me yet. I would wager that whether that grief is personal, communal or national, none of us are who we were three years ago.
But perhaps, for the next two nights, as I sit at Seders I struggle to connect to — as the gravitational pull of grief drags me back toward a darkened room and a backlit Kobo — I can try to accept the brokenness.
To see myself not as having left Egypt, but as one of those people sitting at Yavneh in the aftermath, surrounded by fragments, beginning — however imperfectly — to build again.
To see in the impossibility and inevitability of tomorrow the most Jewish of lessons: perhaps we are not redeemed, we are not whole, but we are still here. And still we set the table.