After a short pause in writing —a pause that did not feel optional —I return not to theory, but to a table.

Pesach this year arrived carrying more weight than usual.

For many of us, the story of liberation felt complicated — not only by the events of October 7th and their aftermath, but by a growing sense that freedom itself is under strain in many places at once.

Attacks on Jewish life and safety sit alongside images of women silenced and erased in Iran and Afghanistan, and alongside more subtle but unsettling erosions of freedom closer to home.

Relief, grief, anger, and disorientation coexist.Return does not feel the same as arrival.Freedom, if it comes at all, feels partial and fragile.

And yet Pesach still asks us to gather around a table and tell a story.

The Seder has never been a celebration of uncomplicated joy.

The Haggadah insists on multiple voices, multiple temperaments, and multiple ways of arriving. The wise child, the questioning child, the resistant child, and the one who does not know how to ask are all present.

The text does not resolve their differences.It simply seats them togetherand insists that the story be toldin a way that makes room for all of them.

In years like this one, that insistence feels especially important.

Not everyone comes to the table feeling free, and not everyone understands freedom in the same way. Some bring fear shaped by antisemitism that has become newly visible. Others bring concern about the narrowing of rights, safety, or dignity elsewhere in the world — or closer to home.

Many bring exhaustion, uncertainty, or a sense that familiar moral anchors have shifted.

The work of the Seder is not to harmonize those experiences, or to rank suffering, but to hold them without forcing them into a single emotional register.

Many of us feel pressure to make Pesach uplifting, meaningful, or redemptive. We worry about saying the wrong thing, or about saying too little. We worry about how children will absorb what we ourselves are still struggling to process.

But perhaps Pesach is not asking us to offer answers.Perhaps it is asking us to offer presence.

Over the past few years, I have spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about how people live with rupture — how meaning is rebuilt without neat endings.

What continues to draw me back to Pesach is its refusal to tidy the story.

The Israelites do not leave Egypt healed or whole. They leave in haste, carrying what they can, stepping into uncertainty without maps, timetables, or guarantees.

Liberation begins not with clarity,but with movement.

That feels especially resonant at a moment when freedom itself seems increasingly precarious.

When basic safety, speech, and bodily autonomy are threatened in different ways across the world, Pesach resists abstraction. It pulls freedom back into the realm of the human:

Who can move.Who can speak.Who can gather.Who can tell their story.

Travel has taught me something similar.

Being away from home sharpens our awareness of what we carry with us. Distance can bring perspective, but it can also make absence more acute. We notice which rituals travel easily, and which depend on familiarity, shared memory, and the quiet language of a particular table.

Pesach, wherever it is observed, always seems to ask the same question:

What are we bringing with us into this moment?

For me, Pesach is no longer only a festival or a story.

My father was called Pesach, and he died just after the festival three years ago. Since then, the Seder has held a different texture.

Alongside the language of liberation sits memory. Alongside the invitation to imagine ourselves leaving Egypt sits the knowledge of someone who is no longer there to tell the story in his voice.

I’ve come to recognize this kind of presence-in-absence elsewhere too: places where what is no longer there speaks as loudly as what survives, and where meaning is carried in silence rather than declaration.

Loss has a way of sharpening ritual.

It strips away performance and leaves us with what is essential.

In those moments, the Seder becomes less about reenactment and more about relationship: who is here, who is missing, and how we acknowledge both with honesty.

Freedom, in that context, is not triumph.It is the permission to be present with what is real.

Pesach does not ask us to deny pain in order to reach joy.

It asks us to tell the truth about where we are — and to keep telling the story anyway.

The matzah we eat is called the bread of affliction, but it is also the bread we carry into the future. It is both memory and sustenance.

It reminds us that what we holddoes not have to be resolvedin order to be shared.

Pesach reminds us that freedom is not a permanent possession, but something that must be tended, defended, and reimagined by each generation.

Making space at the Seder table means allowing complexity to sit alongside ritual. It means letting questions remain open, and resisting the urge to resolve everything too quickly.

It means recognizing that freedom can look like rest, restraint, or simply surviving another year with compassion intact.

It also means accepting that the work of meaning-making does not end when the Seder does.

Like the Israelites in the wilderness,we move forward slowly,learning as we go.

Perhaps this Pesach, making space means trusting that the act of gathering, of telling, and of listening is itself enough.

Around the table, we are not asked to be healed or hopeful.

We are asked to be human.

And that — quietly, stubbornly —may be the most enduring form of freedomthe festival offers.

This blog is dedicated to 3rd Yahrzeit of my dear late Father, Peter Isaac Silverstone, Yitzhak Pesach Ben Michael – who died suddenly 2 days after Pesach. 

After Pesach, London 2026 – a version of this article was originally featured in The New Londoner – the magazine of New London Synagogue, UK

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