This isn't the first Passover Jews will be celebrating during times of affliction and pain.

What the wisdom of our ancestors can teach us about this moment.

1/x Thread.

This isn't Jews' first experience of widespread pandemic. The Talmud warns of staying home when there is a “plague in the city,” and of course, the Black Plague was devastating to Jews when it ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351 — both in terms of deaths from the disease and +

from the hundreds of anti-Jewish pogroms and massacres that came after scapegoating Jews for the disease.

The 14th-century Talmudist Nissim of Gerona, known as the Ran, suggested that the “unusual afflictions which it is impossible to attribute to the workings of nature” must be some sort of divine punishment. The only meaning he could make of the horror —

as many did in a time without the scientific knowledge we have today — was to seek a theological message.

In Northern France, the scribe Yaakov ben Shlomo Hatzarfati also drew parallels to biblical interventions, leaving a haunting note in the margin of his Wolff Haggadah next to the names of the 10 Plagues of Egypt.

He referred readers to the book in which he had recorded, with heartbreaking detail, his daughter Esther’s final moments before her death from the Plague. It serves both as a reading of his experience into the Torah and a grief-filled bearing of witness.

At other times, Jews’ suffering has led to, as writer Roi Ben-Yehuda put it, “vent[ing] their indignation by sublimating & spiritualizing their desire for vengeance.” In the wake of the massacres of the Crusades, a section of the Haggadah was expanded in 11th & 12th centuries

using verses from Psalms and Lamentations to ask God to “pour out Your fury on the nations that do not know you.....” Many contemporary Haggadot are uncomfortable with and even omit this section, and a 16th-century manuscript from Worms, in what’s now Germany, added