Tonight’s going to be an emotional night for millions of Jews around the world. A thread on a very unique Passover:

During the seder, we sing “let all who are hungry come and eat.” But this year we won’t be opening our doors for anyone.

We sing of our past enslavement, and our current freedom. Some of have suggested that this year, unlike others, we are in fact not free. I take issue with this.

Throughout jewish history, many have had seders in far worse and far more trying times than ours. My grandmother is one of them. Born in Lithuania, she was enslaved in ghettos and forced labor camps, and finally put by the Nazis into the concentration camp Bergen Belsen.

This is the story of her seder, in true captivity. https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/200645/once-we-were-slaves-now-we-are-free-the-passover-seder-in-bergen-belsen-that-shaped-my-family

Elsewhere in Bergen Belsen, jews had taken it upon themselves to write this prayer. On Passover, jews are absolutely forbidden to eat any leavened bread. In Belsen, and in concentration camps around Europe, there was no option of baking matzoh, and in order to survive, jews

Were forced to eat their meager bread rations. This prayer is a Holocaust-era creation. It is counter intuitive on some level- a blessing over bread on Passover, something jews are forbidden from doing. And yet, it is incredibly poignant:

It reminds us all that we also have a mitzva to live. That for jews, the preservation of life comes before almost everything. It certainly comes before not eating chametz on Passover. And so the blessing says we are eating this bread precisely because we want to live.

On Passover, we also sing a song commemorating that in each generation, we have faced an enemy who has risen up to kill us but that god has each time saved us. People usually talk about the inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust, and much else.

This year it’s not about jews but about the whole world. This year the enemy is not a person or a persecution, but a disease. And this time too, we pray, god will save us from its clutches.

The seder is all about transition: about starting one way and ending another. May it hasten our transition from quarantine and isolation back to normalcy true connectedness. Next year in Jerusalem!