Passover during war: Why is this Seder different from all other Seders?

The most conspicuous and sobering difference between this year’s Seder and those of the recent past will be the horrendous number of empty chairs – those of the hostages yet to return, of the soldiers and civilians never to return, and of the recovering wounded still unable to return. 

In comparison, the difference in the celebration worrying me appears insignificant. 

Still, for many in Israel with relatives overseas, there is a festering wound of another sort that the coming holiday will expose: Seder tables around which relatives will be gathering but barely speaking. Some won’t be there at all, unwilling to congregate with those whose beliefs undermine their very survival. Others who plan to show up are imploring their hosts’ reassurance that they will feel emotionally safe. I have no need for the many polls taken since Oct. 7 revealing the deep and bitter divisions that are threatening to tear Jewish families abroad apart: Mine is one of them.

Families divided during the Israel-Hamas war Passover Seder

We’re not talking criticism of Israel as the source of tension; I’ve got plenty of that myself. 

Rather, it’s the out-and-out denial of Israel’s right to exist that’s the cause of the barely veiled enmity running rampant among cousins, aunts, uncles, children, and parents. 

The unfortunate fact is that within my own clan, there are those unable to voice unequivocal support for Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, including one who has been participating in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and marching with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an organization unabashedly, even proudly, anti-Zionist.

In reference to October 7, its website proclaims, “an occupied people have a right to resist, including the use of force,” and the 2024 version of its Haggadah, titled “Exodus from Zionism,” explicitly calls to free Palestine from the river to the sea while repeatedly accusing Israel of practicing apartheid and perpetrating genocide (nine and 45 references, respectively). That’s crossing a red line I cannot leave uncontested.

If this were only my problem, I’d deal with it privately. But it isn’t. 

Ardent supporters of Israel across the globe will find themselves marking Passover this year together with those convinced that Israel is an apartheid state guilty of perpetrating genocide. That such views have been accentuated by current events shouldn’t obfuscate the fact that they have been taking root for at least a decade. 

Already in 2013, a Pew report on American Jewry found that 20% of those aged 18-29 felt a sense of alienation from Israel, compared to only 3% of those over the age of 65. In 2017, a Bay Area Jewish community survey found that 43% of those between 18-34 were comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state, never mind its policies, as compared to 73% of those over 65. Among this younger cohort, only 32% were more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians. And in 2021, the Jewish Electoral Institute found that a full 38% of those under 40 saw Israel as an apartheid state, compared to 13% of their elders.

The trend is clear, and it is accelerating. This means that on Passover, many avid Zionists are going to be encountering those who challenge everything they believe in. Fortunately, we’ve been rehearsing for just such a scenario for generations. Enter the proverbial “Four Children” of the Haggadah.

While not discounting the importance of relating to the innocent, the curious, and the wise at our Seder tables, the real challenge after the last six months is in responding to those we might describe as, well, let’s settle for “errant” rather than “wicked.”

Their question, 2024: “How can you sit here, celebrating the so-called holiday of freedom while complicit in the oppression of another people whose land you have occupied with no right to be on in the first place?”

The short answer, a Haggadah-style admonition: “This is my holiday, not yours. Had you renounced the right of the Jewish people to a state of its own in its ancient homeland, you would have remained in Egypt, refusing in your self-righteousness to join us on our journey to the Land of Israel. Denying your own people the same entitlement to national liberation and self-determination that you so passionately advocate for others, you would have sacrificed your own freedom, remaining a slave to wokeness and Pharaoh. “ 

THE LONGER answer, for those not too impatient to eat, is a bit more complicated. It goes like this:

“It’s mystifying to me that as an otherwise intelligent, progressive, and caring person, you have bought into the toxic hypocrisy of the JVP and the vitriolic hatred of Jews (not just of Zionists) unequivocally spelled out in Hamas’s charter. I’m not making this up. Check for yourself: The JVP website asserts that it is an organization ‘guided by a vision of justice, equality, and freedom for all people.’ Then, without any appreciation of the irony entailed, continues, ‘We unequivocally oppose Zionism because it is counter to those ideals.’ [sic!] ‘All people,’ it seems, except the Jewish ones, as its chant ‘Free Palestine from the river to the sea’ would erase Israel from the map and its Jewish citizens along with it.

“As to the ideals that you, in your support of JVP, accuse Zionism of running counter to, I can only wonder if this bogus allegation is a consequence of ignorance or deliberate disregard for Israel’s Declaration of Independence – a somewhat more reliable expression of our fundamental values than the offensive canards spread by JVP. 

“Its signatories proclaimed that the State of Israel ‘will be based on freedom, justice, and peace... [and] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex,’ moral tenets virtually identical to those JVP purports to uphold. 

“If you were claiming only that we’ve fallen short of fulfilling these commitments, I wouldn’t bother taking issue with the indictment. 

“But your allegation that we don’t even aspire to them is blatantly untrue and cannot be left unanswered.

“As to Hamas, given the events of the last half year, it’s time you take its charter seriously. 

“It asserts that ‘Palestine is an Islamic Waqf, land consecrated for Muslim generations until Judgment Day’ and calls for the obliteration of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state – not a democratic one – extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea (Article 11). 

“Its fanatical crusade to realize this objective is fueled not only by an offensive belief in Islamic supremacy (any claim of preeminence by one religious or ethnic group over another is repugnant) but also by vitriolic hatred of the Jew. 

“‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’” (Article 7), precisely the harrowing script played out on Oct. 7 – with the added horror that among those pulled from behind those stones and trees were women who were brutally raped before being killed.

“Against this background, I find your request that our Seder be a space where all members of our family can feel emotionally safe rather ironic. What about a space where all members of our loving family can feel physically safe? Those of us from Israel live in a space where we have had to construct ‘safe rooms’ because of the refusal of our enemies to accept our very existence. Honestly, with you supporting/identifying/associating with those who enter those shelters and butcher, decapitate, rape, and incinerate us – abducting the lucky ones to Gaza – I don’t feel very safe at all. More than that, I feel betrayed.

“Betrayed because you express no empathy for what we are experiencing, not just on and since Oct. 7, but for the last 75 years. 

“I have my disagreements with how Israel has pursued its dream of peaceful coexistence, but I have no doubt that is what we seek, without any desire to annihilate others. 

“We accepted the UN partition plan in 1947 that would have left us with only a tiny country. We entreated Jordan to stay out of the Six Day War in 1967, which, if heeded, would have left Jerusalem and the West Bank in Arab hands. In 1978 we signed a peace agreement with Egypt, as we did with Jordan in 1994. And in 2005, we unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, dismantling 21 flourishing Jewish communities and dispossessing nearly 10,000 residents of their homes, signing an agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) that was to have set in motion the establishment of a Palestinian state – only to see the pact rendered obsolete with the bloody takeover of Gaza by Hamas, which then launched a 17-year barrage of more than 38,000 rockets aimed indiscriminately at our civilian population. 

“DESPITE ALL this, the same communities bombarded continuously by implacable Palestinian radicals became the breeding ground for an army of peace activists who worked assiduously to ease the suffering of the Palestinians living under the repressive Hamas regime governing Gaza. On Oct. 7, they were butchered, along with another 1,200 innocents. 

“Even now, horrified by the death of thousands of Palestinians that Hamas had deliberately put in harm’s way, we are struggling (even if not always successfully) to minimize civilian casualties and facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, endangering our own troops in the process and knowing full well that much of what is intended for non-combatants is being diverted to sustain a barbaric terrorist army. 

“You somehow choose to ignore all this. You refuse to hold Hamas accountable for spending billions of dollars in building a massive underground fortress, stockpiling countless weapons, and turning hospitals, schools, and mosques into military facilities – all for the sole objective of eradicating Israel. 

“You refuse to imagine what Gaza might have looked like today had those funds been invested instead in health, education, culture, welfare, social services, industry, hi-tech, and agriculture. And in your refusal, you have become complicit in an orchestrated and unconscionable campaign to frame the victim – Israel – as the perpetrator. 

“Yet here you are at the table. You showed up, and I don’t discount that. But I can’t help wondering why.

“A sense of family? But family is a great deal more than an accident of birth. It is commonly held values, empathy, loyalty, caring, sharing, and love. What it isn’t, is advocating for my demise.  

“A sense of tradition? Echoes of Seders past? It’s not enough to go through the motions. Celebrating Passover without embracing its cardinal message of national liberation is hollow, a sacrilege of tradition, and a betrayal of the age-old charge that we all see ourselves as though we personally left Egypt on the way to the Promised Land.

“Still, I want you to know that I am not unmindful of the essential values that I imagine have led you – however erroneously – to the stand you have taken. Indeed, I dare say I share them.

“I WILL spill a drop of wine in recalling each of the 10 plagues, symbolically diminishing my own joy in cognizance of the unimaginable suffering caused to innocents as a consequence of my own necessary struggle for survival.

“I, like our creator, will reprimand Miriam for dancing in celebration over the drowning of Pharaoh’s soldiers who pursued her, overlooking in her moment of ecstasy that they, too, were God’s creatures.

“I will open the door inviting all who are hungry to come and eat, fully aware of the newly famished, and will resolve to continue supporting every effort to provide them with relief.

“I will partake of the bitter herb, empathizing not only with those in Israel whose lives have become enveloped in bitterness but also with those whose lives we have embittered – however unintentionally.  

“I will break the middle matzah, cognizant of the broken hearts on both sides of the border, of the broken lives, the broken families, and the broken spirits of all those impacted by this war.

“I will declaim that none of us can truly be free until all are free, praying fervently for the release of our hostages, but also hoping for the deliverance of two million Gazans from the tyranny of Hamas.

“Yes, this is my holiday, but I desperately want it to be yours as well. Let us celebrate together, reflecting anew on the sagacity of Hillel’s counsel through the prism of today’s complex reality. ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?’

“Now we can eat.” 

The writer is currently engaged in establishing the Yitzhak Navon Center for a Shared Society. He previously served as deputy chair of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization and was the founding director of the Herzl Museum and Educational Center. breakstonedavid@gmail.com