No Sirens Allowed at the Seder |
There’s always that moment before the Seder begins when everything looks perfect.
The table is set. The matzah is covered. The first cup of wine is poured. For about three minutes, it feels like this might actually be a calm, meaningful evening.
Then the family walks in.
Someone is already arguing about where to sit. Someone else is asking when we’re eating. The kids are negotiating Afikoman terms before we’ve even made Kiddush. And within minutes, the Seder becomes what it always is: loud, complicated, and full of emotion.
The first question of the evening is not from the Mah Nishtanah, but something far more familiar: Is this what everybody’s Seder is like?
This year, though, there is another layer hovering over the table for those of us in Israel. Operation Roaring Lion. True, the Pesach rituals will stay the same. The same order of events. The same food that we eat, year after year. But our month-long reality dictates the evening’s second question: Will we make it through the night without a Red Alert siren?
We all hope that, maybe, just maybe, the only interruptions will be the usual ones. The talking. The laughter. The debates about how fast we’re moving through the Haggadah or whether we can skip a few paragraphs of Maggid. That the only “alarm” will be a child shouting that someone is cheating during the Afikoman hunt.
The past month, since Purim, has not been easy. Running to shelters. Thinking twice before leaving home. Sleeping lightly, never quite sure when the next siren might cut through the night. Those wake-up calls from Iran are still far too fresh.
And somehow, in the middle of all of this, we are expected to prepare for Pesach.
I’ll admit, I quietly hoped the Rabbis might take pity on us this year. Postpone Pesach. Invoke Pesach Sheni. Give us a little breathing room. Because there is something almost surreal about preparing for a Seder, a night defined by order, while living through days that feel anything but.
We all know that alongside the bitterness of Egypt, our minds will wander to more current irritations, the ones coming from Tehran.
And yet, the Seder does not bend.
We will dip. We will recline. We will sing. And we will eat.
Because no matter how spiritual we try to be, the Shulchan Orech, the meal itself, still anchors the night. The chicken soup with knedlach that somehow tastes exactly the same every year. The dishes that have survived decades of being pulled in and out of the boydem, yet still manage to serve an entire family. And of course, the undisputed staple of the Seder table, gefilte fish.
There is something almost comforting in the fact that, unlike every other holiday, Pesach menus rarely change. They resist reinvention. They stay exactly as we remember them.
This year’s Seder will likely include stories of gap year students who left Israel for Pesach programs in Miami Beach or Panama, only to find themselves rerouted through Egypt of all places. The irony is hard to miss. The very land we are meant to remember escaping becomes, once again, a passageway, this time out of the place we call home.
And then, as always, we reach the end.
“Next year in Jerusalem.”
We say it every year. But maybe this time it should land a little differently. Not as a closing line, but as a real possibility. A call to come home, not as visitors during Yeshiva Week at the Inbal or the David Citadel, but as something far more permanent.
Because beyond all the tradition, beyond the routine, beyond even the food, there is one simple hope this year.
No sirens. No running. Just an enjoyable Seder.