This Year….Finish the Seder |
Last week, students at the University of Maryland returned from spring break to something unsettling. The main campus mall had been filled with rows of flags commemorating Palestinians killed in Gaza. And alongside them, the now-familiar signs: “From the river to the sea.” The display was organized by Students for Justice in Palestine.
A photo of the scene made its way onto a Jewish parents’ Facebook group. And the reaction was exactly what you might expect: anger, fear, frustration. How is this allowed? Why won’t the university call this what it is? How can Jewish students feel safe in an environment like this?
These are real questions that deserve to be asked. And the administration owes parents an answer.
But what struck me most was not the post—it was the response from the director of Maryland Hillel, Rabbi Ari Israel. Rabbi Israel is a remarkable leader who has built one of the most vibrant Jewish campus communities in the country, and he acknowledged the frustration expressed by the parents. He didn’t minimize the antisemitism. He named it directly.
And then he offered the parents something else—a different narrative, a different way of seeing Jewish life on campus.
Which, in many ways, is a deeply Jewish move: to reframe the story.
Matti Friedman writes in his recent book Out of the Sky about the 1944 mission of Jewish parachutists from Palestine who returned to Nazi-occupied Europe to try to save fellow Jews, including Hannah Senesh. In a recent interview, he described their mission not only as military, but as something else—as a storytelling mission.
Because Zionism (and really Jewish history), itself was, in part, an act of storytelling. He described how it gave Jews a new vocabulary with which to understand themselves and their fate. To the survivors of World War II, it said: you are not refugees—you are pioneers. You are not homeless—you are builders of a future. You are wondering from country to country in Europe. You are making Aliya, you are going up to the Promised Land (Ask Haviv Anything, Episode 100).
That is what reframing looks like.
And that is what Rabbi Israel did. He reminded us of the hundreds of students who gather for Shabbat meals. He spoke about the upcoming Pesach seders, filled with Jewish life. He pointed to the more than 500 Jewish athletes who will soon arrive in College Park for Maryland Hillel’s National Basketball Tournament.
Jewish life is not shrinking—it is thriving, despite the noise, despite the pressure.
And he ended with three simple, defiant words: Am Yisrael Chai. The Jewish people live.
That response has stayed with me because it captures something essential about this moment in the Jewish calendar—the days leading up to Passover, when we begin to think not only about the Seder itself, but about the story we will tell around the table. What story will we choose? How will we tell it? And perhaps most importantly, will we carry it all the way through—to its final, redemptive conclusion?
The Mishnah teaches that on the night of the Seder, “matchil b’genut u’mesayem b’shevach”—begin with shame and end with praise.
We begin our story with shame: We describe our enslavement. We taste the bitterness. We recall the plagues, the degradation, the fear. And we say those haunting words:
שֶׁלֹּא אֶחָד בִּלְבַד עָמַד עָלֵינוּ לְכַלּוֹתֵנוּ, אֶלָּא שֶׁבְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר עוֹמְדִים עָלֵינוּ לְכַלוֹתֵנוּ
for it was not only one man who rose up to destroy us: in every single generation people rise up to destroy us –
Those words ring true this year, as they have through much of Jewish history. And there is something powerful—perhaps even necessary—about saying them out loud. That awareness can awaken us and push us to stand up and defend ourselves.
But here is the danger. The Seder is a long night. And sometimes… we don’t finish it. We get stuck in the first half. We linger in our enslavement. We dwell in the hatred. We repeat, again and again: they are against us, they have always been against us, they will always be against us. And before we know it, that becomes the story we tell ourselves—not a chapter of our history, but its defining narrative.
There is a name for that way of thinking. It is called the lachrymose theory of Jewish history—the idea that our story is nothing more than a procession of suffering: one persecution after another, one tragedy layered upon the next. And it’s a powerful story. It feels true. It gives voice to our fear and our anger. It can even feel virtuous: a sense that there is something noble in victimhood.
But there is not. And if we are not careful, that story becomes a trap. Because it tells only half of who we are.
So, the Haggadah refuses to let us stop there. Yes—“In every generation, they rise up to destroy us.” But the very next line is just as essential:
וְהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מַצִּילֵנוּ מִיָּדָם
“And the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand.”
The story doesn’t conclude with fear—it turns toward redemption. And that is why the second half of the Seder matters so much.
After the meal—when our stomachs are full, the wine has settled in, and our energy begins to fade—that is when we are asked to keep going. We open the door, not only in anger, but in hope, inviting Elijah to join our Seder, trusting he will herald a redeemed world. We sing, and we imagine that future. Because the goal of the Seder is not only to remember what was done to us, but to remember who we became.
I worry sometimes that we forget that. That the content of our Judaism becomes: they hate us. And that is not a message we can afford to pass on. Because if that is the story we tell, then we are handing our children a Judaism rooted in fear rather than purpose.
So…the Haggadah offers a different vision.
It does not deny evil. It does not minimize it. We taste it—in the maror, in the matzah, in the memory of oppression. But it refuses to let evil have the last word. To be a Jew is to tell a story that begins with pain—but does not end there. It is to insist—again and again– that there is a path from suffering to hope. That redemption—however incomplete—is real.
Rabbi Israel at the University of Maryland understood this and sought to communicate it to concerned parents on Facebook. He did not excuse the hatred—but he refused to let it be the headline. The headline was this: students gathering, tradition continuing, young people building, singing, showing up, and taking pride in their Jewish identity.
That is the second half of the Seder.
So, this year, I want to suggest something simple: Finish the Seder.
Stay at the table. Sing the songs. Tell the story all the way through.
Not because we live in a perfect world: we don’t. And not because everything is redeemed—it isn’t.
Finish the seder because against all odds—generation after generation—we are still here. Still telling the story. And still choosing hope over despair.
As we prepare to sit at the Seder table on Wednesday evening, may we have the courage to tell our story honestly—and to move, as our tradition demands, From shame to praise. From slavery to freedom.
And to remember—especially now—that the story of the Jewish people has never been defined only by those who sought to destroy us, but by our extraordinary, defiant, enduring ability to live.