Every year the youngest child at the table asks: “why is this night different from all other nights?” This year the question is clearer than ever. Here are seven ways this Passover is different. The first four name the hardships we carry. The last three point toward what endures.

מַה נִשְּתַנָּה הַלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה מִכָּל הַלֵּילוֹת

This is the holiday of freedom, and we cannot leave.

The skies above Israel are not safe. There are almost no flights. And yet, within that constriction, a different kind of freedom: a freedom of thought, stripped of everything that is not essential. We are fighting for our survival, for the most fundamental freedom there is. Sometimes, it takes a siege to know what you are truly free for.

This is not a Passover of spring, of lightness, of relief. It is a Passover of what is essential.

This Passover connects us to the hardest moments in our history: to the Jews who held a seder in the Warsaw Ghetto knowing it might be their last; to the conversos in Spain who whispered the prayers behind bolted doors during the Inquisition. They, too, had only the story — and they held onto it anyway. So do we. The Haggadah is not a relic. It is the thread.

This is not only a Passover of the ten plagues of Egypt. It is a Passover of our own plagues.

This year we are naming the plagues of our present: terrorism, missiles, the poison of polarization, self-hatred, rotten political maneuvers, division, the hatred spreading in the streets of New York and Paris and Sydney, the clocks counting down to death, the hollow slogans that turn our grief into slogans others can use. We dip our finger in the wine for these too. We do not look away.

This is not a Passover of habit. It is a Passover of conscious choice.

Every year we pass the story to our children and grandchildren. This year we are acutely aware of what we are transmitting, and why. Not out of habit. Not because it is written. Because we have looked at what is happening and decided what we want them to carry. That decision is itself the inheritance.

This is not only a Passover of matzah. It is a Passover of living with uncertainty.

We know what it is to run to a shelter. To leave the table mid-sentence. To count the seconds between the siren and the impact. The unleavened bread  baked in haste by people who could not wait, who had to move before the dough could rise is not ancient history. And paradoxically, that proximity makes the matzah more itself than it has ever been.

This is not only a Passover of telling the story. It is a Passover of choosing it.

The Haggadah commands us to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. This year, that is not a stretch of the imagination. We are inside an exodus with no far shore yet. And we are making choices, every day, about how that story will be told. What we emphasize. What we refuse. What meaning we make of this. The story is not yet written. We are writing it now, at this table, tonight.

This is not only a Passover of singing next year in Jerusalem. It is a Passover of singing: we are here, and we will keep building.

For two thousand years we closed the seder with a longing: next year in Jerusalem. We say it now from Jerusalem, from Tel Aviv, from the north that is still under fire, from the south still healing. We are here. And being here, under these conditions, is not a given. It is a choice, renewed every morning. The choice has a name. The Torah gave it to us long before this war: ve’bacharta ba’chaim. Choose life. We chose it when we first entered this land. We choose it again tonight. We will choose it again tomorrow.

Ma nishtana ha’layla ha’zeh. What is different about this night? Everything. And we are here to tell it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)