“Our heart a prisoner in Gaza” with no political horizon and no foreseeable way out of this terrible war and civilian suffering. Under the pall of a deep collective political and moral crisis, Passover this year was unlike any other in recent memory. “Redemption” is a bitter word that sticks in the throat. Facing implacable and wicked enemies, the ones who rise up to destroy them, the people in Israel are led by callous political leaders who, in their own wickedness, abandon them to perpetual war. In Israel, they are the sovereign co-creators of the ugly and narrow-place or mitzrayim, the dungeon they have built for the people of Israel in the Land of Israel.

Here are the key points that stood out for me this violent and unhappy year from the Passover Haggadah

–The 4 cups of wine and fearsome Haggadah illustrations by Leonard Baskin.

–My mother reads “seder of the simple” from a hasidic tale by Martin Buber. She reads this every year. “My wife said, ‘Why don’t you make a seder like all the other Jews?’ So I said to her, ‘What do you want from me? I am an ignoramus ad my father before me was an ignoramus and I don’t know what to do. The only thing I know is this –that our fathers were in exile among the gypsies. But we have a God who took us out from there and made us free. And now we are in exile again, but God will bring us out. Then I saw on the table before me matza and wine and eggs. My wife and I ate the matzoh and eggs and drank the wine, And I said, ‘You God –look down at us make us free.'”

–The horrendous violence of the 10 plagues, 50 plagues, 250 plagues; fiery anger, wrath, indignation, trouble and messengers of evil. The bitter herb, the suffering and death. And the terrible fate of the innocent children, the first born of an enemy nation, the bitter cries of the Palestinian people, the doom their own leaders draw upon them. Concluding the Seder is the grim world of the Had Gadya. It consumes itself in a violent chain reaction. With the Holy One nowhere in sight, there is only the one little goat, and the cat, and the dog, and the stick, and the fire, and the water, and the ox, and the butcher, and the Angel of Death.

–The Haggadah is presupposed on basic inversions: from slavery to freedom, anguish to joy, mourning to festivity, darkness to great light, enslavement to redemption. Everything is stuck. None of the inversions are firing this year. Israel remains unfree in an unredeemed world. A stifled  Hallelujah marks the non-passage to great light, with no new song to sing to God.

— After 4 cups of wine are the folksongs: the Temple songs and Who Knows One and Had Gadya. We sing them not because we are joyous, but because we our unhappy. Not because we are righteous and good, but the opposite. At this moment, the essence or ikar is the klal of Jewish life, the one that “the wicked son” rejects. Absent the salvation of God, if there is such a thing, is the being together with each other across our own differences at this moment of grief, shock, fear, and rage.