Every great story has the same shape: a beginning, a conflict, and a resolution. We feel this instinctively. We lean forward during the tension and exhale when it breaks.

We are living inside a story right now. Not a metaphor. An actual story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that is coming whether we can see it or not.

Passover puts this in sharp focus. The Exodus isn’t just a historical event. It is the story we are still living. The Haggadah puts you inside it. You taste slavery and freedom at the same table. You don’t observe the Exodus. You relive it.

The plagues demonstrated that something larger was operating in history. But the sea was different. They had to walk in before it split. That is the foundation of the trust the Haggadah is asking us to carry. Not watching miracles happen to someone else. Stepping into the water before there was a reason to.

We are in a later chapter right now. And anxiety is the signal that we know it.

When you feel anxious, something in you is registering correctly. There is conflict. The stakes are real. History is unresolved.

The world is not yet what it is supposed to be. You know that. Anxiety is not weakness. It is the honest response of a person paying attention.

But anxiety is not the destination. The Haggadah doesn’t leave us sitting with the weight of the conflict. It shows us what to do with it.

The Haggadah models something remarkable in Dayenu. Before the story was finished, before they reached the land, before the endpoint was in sight, the people stopped to say: each step was enough. That is not denial of what remained. It is trust operating inside an unfinished chapter.

That trust was not optimism. It was not denial. It was grounded in what they had seen, and survived, and walked out of. We are not at the end yet. But we have been told how it ends. And we have seen enough to believe it.

Passover comes every year not to comfort us but to orient us. The conflict is real. The anxiety is honest. And that trust is still warranted. Not because the next chapter will be easy. Because the Author is good.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)