A Passover prayer, to safeguard the modern miracle of Israel

This Editor’s Note was sent out Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Pesach, that annual reminder of freedom’s splendor, arrives this year with staggering resonance.

We will recall the 10 plagues inflicted upon our ancestors’ Egyptian enslavers as we make a tentative exit from that modern affliction, the COVID-19 pandemic, hopeful but uncertain that it is gradually becoming safer to spend time in simple proximity to each other.

We will recite an invitation to “all those in need” to share our good fortune and celebrate our historic tale of liberation while acutely conscious of the oppression of other nations, and especially, Ukraine, and our responsibility to open our doors and assist.

And we will celebrate our ancient exodus from bondage, our journey to peoplehood, and our establishment in our homeland, in the midst of a wave of terrorism and wider, strategic efforts to uproot us from here — a time, as so often before, when the deadly hostility of our enemies poses a direct challenge to our independence and our very lives.

But as the Passover story underlines, and our modern experience confirms yet again, we Israelites are a resilient and a capable people. And we are inspired by a faith, and equipped with a life code, that provide a unique moral and practical compass.

This Pesach, as always, may our leaders be granted the wisdom to safeguard the modern miracle of Israel — to use that compass to ensure Israel’s survival and advancement as a thriving Jewish and a democratic country, a true light unto the nations.

We Israelites are a resilient and a capable people. And we are inspired by a faith, and equipped with a life code, that provide a unique moral and practical compass

May they and all of us be guided to muster the strength and the skill to thwart our modern enemies, led by the tyrants of Iran.

And rather than fall prey again to vicious internal intolerance and hatred, may we all internalize the darker lessons of our millennia of Jewish history, when we were brought lowest by our own internal divisions, and lost sight of our core obligation to respect others and to treat them as we ourselves would wish to be treated. How bitterly ironic that the current Israeli government is in the process of tearing itself apart in a broad long-running religious dispute in which the back-breaking straw ostensibly relates to the entry of hametz, unleavened bread, into the country’s hospitals on Pesach. And how dismally predictable and dangerous that a purportedly religious opposition leader, on the eve of the festival, has called for coalition MKs to be barred from our synagogues.

At the Seder, we are instructed to retell the Exodus, the journey to our liberation, as though we too were slaves in Egypt, and we too were freed by divine will and power. Because, of course, the transition to freedom is still incomplete. May this year bring it a little closer.