In a few days, Jews around the world will sit at their seder tables and sing a song that is over a thousand years old. Dayenu. Each verse names a gift, and each verse ends with Dayenu. It would have been enough for us (some say “It would have sufficed,” but “It would have been enough for us” was the variation my 1983 Hebrew School Haggadah chose).

If Hashem had brought us out of Egypt but not split the sea? Dayenu. If He had split the sea but not led us through on dry land (a.k.a. “dryshod”)? Dayenu. Fifteen verses, fifteen gifts. Each sufficient on its own. But the accumulation is the point: gratitude, built brick by brick, the sheer weight of it almost overwhelming until we realize that we are not carrying it — we’re standing atop it, ready to add more bricks, more mortar, more chapters, more songs.

Now I want to tell a different story. Not of gifts from above, but of gifts from each other. A litany not of what Hashem did for us, but of what we’ve done for one another over the past three thousand years. Because there’s another pattern that runs through Jewish history, one just as old as the song, just as relentless, and just as true:

Every time they came for us, we came together for each other.

And every time, every single time, it was ultimately enough. We prevailed. Yes, we’ve paid heavy prices. Yes, we will continue to do so. But we WILL prevail.

We were slaves in Egypt. We had been slaves for four hundred years, long enough that slavery had become the only life we knew. And so, we fled. And דווקא not all of us, because when has that ever happened? But our People fled. Not as individuals, not as scattered refugees, but as a People, together, through the desert, toward a land that had been promised to us. We did not know precisely what awaited us there… we went anyway.

Do you see it? Together, we set our sights on a better world. Together.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

They desecrated the Temple. Antiochus erected idols in the קודש הקודשים, the Holy of Holies, and forbade the practice of Judaism on pain of death. And so, a family of kohanim (not soldiers, not warriors, a family of priests who had never held a weapon before that day) picked up swords they barely knew how to swing… and they took the Temple back. They were outnumbered. They were outmatched. They won. And the oil lasted just as the Jewish People have lasted.

אל תירא, כי אתה לא לבד. Be not afraid, for you are not alone.

They gave us a choice. Conversion or exile. And in 1492, the Jews of Spain (some of my ancestors among them), who had built lives and communities and libraries and traditions over centuries, were told: become something you are not, or leave everything behind. And so, we carried Torah scrolls on our backs across borders and rebuilt in every land that would have us (and some that wouldn’t). The Sephardic diaspora scattered across North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, the Americas. We lost Spain, or more accurately, Spain lost us. Yet we retained ourselves.

אל תירא, כי אתה........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)