This Passover, my family was whole |
“In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt” — The Haggadah
This Passover, my family celebrated apart. The war with Iran made travel difficult, and so I stayed in New York while my parents, my sisters and their families were scattered across Israel. We did not sit together at one table. In New York, Passover arrives without the stillness I grew up with, the city does not pause, and the holiday must be held from the inside. We read the same Haggadah, sang the same songs, and asked the same questions. For the first Passover since October 7, we felt whole again.
The day before Passover, we celebrated my niece Alma’s third birthday, the first she has ever shared with her father, Omri Miran. He was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, from his home in front of my sister Lishay and their two baby daughters, Roni and Alma. Alma was six months old, too young for words, too young for memory, too young to understand what had been taken from her. She spent her first two birthdays in a world that contained his photograph but not his voice, his image but not his arms. This year, he was there to hold her. She will carry that morning with her for the rest of her life. But now she also carries this: that the table can be full again, that the story the Haggadah tells is not only ancient history.
For two Passover Seders before this one, Omri was sitting in a tunnel beneath Gaza. While he was gone, Lishay recited the words of liberation while living their opposite. Roni and Alma sat at the Seder table without their father. On each of his two birthdays in captivity, which fell around Passover, Hamas released a video of him. On each of his two birthdays in captivity, which fell around Passover, Hamas released a video of him. The last one was especially painful, Omri in darkness, lighting a candle, alone, a propaganda tool in his captors’ hands.
This April 11, Omri turned 49 as a free man.
And yet, as Maimonides understood, liberation from bondage is only the beginning. The harder work is what comes after.
Omri spent 738 days in conditions designed to break a person. In tunnels barely large enough to crouch. Bound and chained at times for weeks. Moved in darkness between tunnels and houses. Yet when he sat before the cameras of Channel 12’s investigative program Uvda for his first televised interview, the week before Passover, he did not speak like a broken man. He spoke like someone who had found a form of inner sovereignty in captivity.
Without naming it, he described what the Stoics understood: that some things are in our control and others are not. What remained was his love for his daughters and his wife, and the life he held in his mind outside. He accepted what could not be changed, and tended what could not be taken. And when the sea parted for him, when the deal that brought him home was struck, he walked through it. That is the hardest form of courage: knowing the difference between what you must endure and what you must seize.
I sat in New York this Passover, the city loud and indifferent outside, piecing the celebration together across time zones and phone calls. There is always grief in that distance, especially when Israel is at a state of an active war, rather than the typical state of alert. Since October 7, there is also always the concern that something terrible may happen on this holiday. But this year, our family’s ache was lighter than it has been since October 7. Omri was there, breathing free air, sitting at a table with Lishay, Roni and Alma. In the days that followed Passover, Omri walked in the March of the Living in Auschwitz, a free man in a place where so many were not.
Six months ago, on the second anniversary of October 7, I published here a letter to the Israel I lost, opening with the first verse of Psalm 126 as a lament, a prayer not yet answered. I wrote it in Washington, where my sister and I were advocating for Omri’s release with the Trump administration, one day before the deal that would eventually bring him home was announced and we had the opportunity to thank the President for his efforts.
In that piece, I wrote that Israel could not breathe again until the hostages came home. Between October 2025 and January 2026, all 48 returned home, the living to their families, and the fallen to burial in the Land of Israel or in their home countries. They are home. And yet the Israel I wrote about, one rebuilt not from strength alone but from moral clarity, from the knowledge of what was nearly lost, is still becoming. This past Passover, despite another war raging and a public exhausted by political infighting, I felt more strongly that, come what may, it eventually will.