Time of our Freedom

Throughout my childhood my family were very active in the campaign for Soviet Jewry. I thought everyone had an uncle with a pen that could write in invisible ink who travelled to the Soviet Union smuggling Hebrew books and vital medications for Jewish dissidents captive behind the Iron Curtain.

Every Pesah we had a place setting and an empty chair waiting for our Soviet sisters and brothers to be free to join us.

And then one year the Soviet Union fell and the Iron Gates were flung open. Hundreds of thousands of Jews flooded in to Israel. Our prayers were realised.
The true coda to the story though happened many years later. Pesah 2003 we went to relatives near Jerusalem for seder. My cousin was working as an ICU nurse, she had a shift starting after seder and walked her down to wait for her transport to the hospital.

All of a sudden someone else out for a late post-seder walk rushed over and grabbed my uncle in a bear hug. It was one of the Soviet Jewish dissidents he had visited decades earlier in Moscow. A man he had brought the vital medications for, Hebrew books for.

And here he was, dressed as an openly religious Jew embracing my uncle on seder night in the heart of Israel. And he recognised my uncle whom he hadn't seen since that meeting in Moscow under the watchful eye of the KGB "tail" conspicuously following them.

The coda has another coda because for a couple of years ago my uncle decided to treat himself to Pesah in a kibbutz guesthouse. He arrived erev yom tov to find that he had been assigned a room in a little two room kibbutz chalet. Sitting out in a deck chair outside his room he heard someone calling out to him. Sure enough his neighbours in the nextdoor room where this former refusenik and his wife and they shared seder night together.

I know not every story has such a happy ending. We don't know who of the hostages whom today are held captive in tunnels instead of behind an Iron Curtain are still alive to be reunited with their loved ones. We don't know if the empty chairs that so many will be leaving by their seder will be filled.

But in the 1970s and early 1980s the idea of the Soviet Union falling and the Jews going free seemed fantastically remote. We dreamt of one day sharing the seder with the families my uncle visited in Moscow but I don't know if we truly believed we would see the day when we would all merit to stroll the streets of Israel together.

Seder isn't a celebration of the "happy ending" though. It takes us through the pain and the hardship of our ancestors, their desperation and despair.

Each person must see themselves as though they themselves were brought out of Egypt, to put themselves in the position of those who suffered slavery and persecution to remember also that hope and redemption can come in the darkest hour even when it seems all is lost.

May all those who are missing be found, may all our hostages return home, our thousands of wounded be healed and the souls of all find comfort.

It's not just "rain"

I'm going to mention rockets again. I know, you're bored of me mentioning rockets. What's a few rockets? It's just like rain, right? There's Iron Dome, why are Israelis making such a deal of a few rockets?

Well, first of all, it's not "a few", we're talking more than 13,500 in the last six months.

Second, Iron Dome isn't 100%. It's an incredible system, it's saved countless lives, but it isn't perfect.

For example, during the October 7th attacks the Hamas barrage at Israel's Gaza border region was so intense that a local Iron Dome battery ran out of anti-rocket missiles. More than 3,500 rockets were fired by Hamas at Israel in the first 24 hours of the war on October 7th, as cover for the Hamas invasion. The Iron Dome commander had to drive to a nearby base to restock their munitions and while she was on the road she was murdered in a Hamas ambush. Israel lost an experienced Iron Dome commander and until it was possible to resupply that battery was out of commission.

Iron Dome and Israel's other excellent anti-missile defence systems do amazing work, but they aren't 100%. Each system is a defence against a specific type of projectile, different ranges, different altitudes. And Israel's enemies aren't stupid, knowing Israel has a layered defence framework they attempt layered attacks, different kinds of rockets, different kinds of drones, slower, faster, higher, lower, anti-tank missiles who's trajectory and shorter range make them hard to intercept.

Today in the northern Israeli village of Arab el-Aramshe, right near the Lebanese border, their luck ran out. For months this village has been one of the Israeli communities most heavily targeted by Hizballah from southern Lebanon. Its proximity to the border gives Hizballah easy line of sight to terrorise the residents.

There were several direct hits on the village today, including on their local community centre. While the wounded from that strike were being evacuated another round hit the entrance area outside the building. Fourteen have been wounded, three seriously.

These are far from Israel's first casualties from enemy rocket fire.

For years now Israel has been targeted by thousands and thousands of rockets and missiles, more recently drones, from Hamas, from Hizballah and now also from the Houthis in Yemen.

This isn't rain, it's a growing existential threat which has only increased over the years, exploding into the thousands we've seen in recent months, killing Israelis, wounding Israelis, destroying countless Israeli homes, farms and workplaces.

These rockets were a deadly part of Hamas' October 7th invasion of Israel, keeping millions of Israelis pinned down in shelters, providing cover for the drone attacks which took out Israeli motion sensors and cameras guarding the border fence and herding hundreds of party goers at the Nova festival in to public shelters where they were easily picked off by Hamas gunmen who turned these places of refuge in to death traps. If Israelis had not been conditioned to be so used to rocket fire as just "something that happens" the response to the initial volleys fired at Israel that morning might have been very different.

The potential destruction could of course have been much worse, but this besides the point, If someone is trying to destroy you but you succeed in blocking them most of the time that doesn't remove the murderous intent of those who keep trying to kill you.

Meanwhile Israel has to plough vast amounts of resources, time, people, research and money, into a complex anti-missile defense system. How many hospitals, educational frameworks and scientific research of all kinds could have been funded with this, used to make the world better for everyone instead. But Israel doesn't have a choice, without Iron Dome and other systems we would be sitting ducks for this massive rocket and drone onslaught.

And then this week we had 350 ICBMs, attack drones and cruise missiles fired at us from Iran.

And once again our friends and allies overseas respond with "it's just rain", the anti-missile defence intercepted 99% of the missiles and drones, just ignore it" and "don't respond, it's been and gone, you can always intercept any more missiles". Tell that to the little Israeli girl fighting for her life in hospital after her home was hit by shrapnel from one of those ballistic missiles.

The upshot of all this "don't respond" talk is that Iranian ICBMs and attack drones with their hundreds of kilos and many tons of explosive warheads should just be "normalised" the way Hamas and Hizballah short range rockets have been until now. We should just accept this new deadly "rain".

This is why many Israelis feel there is a need to respond. This time we were "lucky". This time there was a coalition and enough anti-missile defences to stave off the massive Iranian onslaught.

How long can we keep that up now? How many billions do we have to keep restocking these incredibly expensive defences? How many times will Iran now follow the Hamas and Hizballah playbook of gradually testing our defences, upping the number of lethal projectiles until they God Forbid find a chink?

No one wants to talk about it but Israel can't allow this to be normalised because it sets a precedent for more attacks like this and creates an accepted level at which we are expected to just accept that people will shoot missiles and drones at our population.

Would any other country be expected to just accept this?

Israel and the Jewish people continue to give so much to the world to make it better, to save lives.

And no, this isn't an arrogant post about how we're better than everyone else, no human, no nation, is perfect and all humanity was created in God's image. 

Being aware of our flaws is engrained in Jewish culture, the Bible is very clear in its portrayal of our greatest leaders, warts and all, we have no perfect saints or flawless prophets to place on pedestals, their humanity and foibles are a fundamental part of our national epic and the Gemara is just as clear that our sages were not perfect individuals. 

But we are a people who's culture and ethos have led us to contribute breakthroughs in science and medicine out of all proportion to our tiny size. "The Chosen People" is often flung at the Jews like a supremacist slur, and yet what that "chosen" means is a sense of duty and responsibility, an emphasis on creativity and learning, to being a positive example, to doing our part to make the world better. 

Our commitment to education, literacy and tikkun olam helped our people throughout the ages to rise above our lowly status as the world's most persecuted outcasts, reviled by many, exiled, expelled, confined to ghettos, discriminated against in by university quotas at various times and in various places, barred from guilds and professional associations, demonised with blood libels, kept as second and third class citizens because we were so often strangers in a strange land, subjected to pogroms and massacres.

I'm not saying anything new here, but I feel like right now these are important things to remember, both for Jews and for the other nations of the world where so many right now are in the thrall of a new wave of anti-Semitism and a new blood libel that once again scapegoats the Jews as bloodthirsty babykillers.

Across the West this anti-Jewish scourge is driving Jewish scientists, doctors and scholars from their positions, trying to banish Jews from academia, boycotting Israeli universities and research centres, blocking the publishing of research by Israelis and Jews from scientific journals, calling for a boycott and shunning of the Jewish state and all associated with it.

So intent are many on this hate fest that they don't seem to care who or what they are rejecting when they turn Israeli scientists in to outcasts and push diaspora Jews out of academia and professional forums.

Not because we are better than anyone else, but because our culture is so devoted to life and making the world a better place and we have proved our value to humanity as a whole with the wealth of knowledge and scientific breakthroughs we have contributed despite being such a tiny nation.

How many lives will be lost if Israelis and Jews are barred from research projects and from publishing their findings? How many lives could be saved or improved by allowing Israelis and Jews to present their research at international conferences, to be guest lecturers a prominent research centres, to join international collaborations on all kinds of medical and scientific challenges as they have until now?

And it came to pass at midnight

There is a common misconception that Passover is a celebration of freedom.

And yes, it is about the nation of Israel's delivery from slavery in ancient Egypt, and we do call it "Hag Haherut" (the Festival of Freedom), but more than anything it is a lesson in perspective and faith.

Unlike on Purim, where the holiday decreed by Queen Esther and Mordekhai takes place after the Jewish people have been allowed to successfully defend themselves from Haman's genocidal plot to wipe them out, the first Passover seder happened in the middle of the story, while God was still smiting Pharaoh with the plagues to make him release them from slavery.

At the time of that first Passover the people of Israel did not yet know whether they had been saved.

They had not tasted freedom in generations.

They were a battered, downtrodden enslaved people, sheltering in their homes, their doorposts daubed with lamb's blood as a sign that it was a Hebrew dwelling. Meanwhile the hand of death quite literally passed over their houses, smiting the Egyptians in the horrific last, devastating plague that finally convinced Pharaoh to release them from slavery and allow them to return to their ancient homeland.

I'm sure I'm not the only 21st century Israeli for whom this image came to mind last Saturday night, after the news that Iran's massive missile and drone onslaught was on its way to us.

A chill went through me as I imagined how my ancient ancestors must have felt living through that terrifying night all those thousands of years ago.

Here we were, about a week before Passover, in the thick of the traditional Pesah cleaning and preparation, instead sheltering in our homes close to our bomb shelters, waiting for that hand of death to pass over our country and God Willing be intercepted by Israel's layered anti-missile defences before it could wreak destruction.

Like our ancestors, we had no way of knowing how the night would end, whether with our salvation or our destruction. We were instructed to prepare as best we could, be near a shelter, have some emergency provisions, listen to the radio, but really, all we could do as ordinary civilians was sit in our homes and wait, knowing that some time in the middle of the night the missiles from Iran would likely be upon us.

All we had was faith, in our armed forces defending us, in God watching over us, in our knowledge that throughout history many have tried to wipe us out but the Jewish nation always survived, as we recite every year at the Passover seder in "Vehi She-amdah":

And this is what stood for our ancestors and for us

For not just one arose and tried to destroy us,

Rather in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us,

And the Holy One, blessed be he, saves us from their hand.

It's a chilling concept: that our destiny in every generation is for someone to target us, because we are different, because we're in their way, because we refuse to adopt their beliefs or lifestyle, because we won't assimilate, because we did assimilate, because they are jealous that we have been successful and appear strong, because we are weak and so easy to scapegoat, because we look wrong, because they think us arrogant, because they think us humble... Somehow there is always a reason. Because we are the "Chosen People" - chosen apparently to face someone who hates us and wants to wipe us out in every generation.

As I've grown older though, I've come to see this declaration in a different way. Yes, it is a heavy burden to bear, being born into a nation that has experienced so much persecution throughout the ages. A nation where it's normal that so many generations have found it "normal" to have to wander from place to place, country to country, to face exile, expulsion and discrimination and on far too many occasions attempts to wipe us from the face of the earth.

But there is also a comfort in knowing that our ancestors have gone through this over and over again in many different circumstances, in many different eras, but despite this painful history, our nation still lives, we are still here to remember, to sit around the seder table with our families and retell the story from generation to generation.

Even at the very birth of our people we suffered so much, but just as God redeemed us from the horrors of slavery and Pharaoh's attempted genocide in Egypt, so we must always have hope that in each generation our people will prevail.


Sitting in my home awake in the small hours of that night, though, my thoughts inevitably turned to another piece of the Passover seder liturgy: "Vayehi Behatzi Halayla" (It Came to Pass at Midnight):

It happened at midnight:

You brought about many miracles at night.

At the beginning of the night watch

Why is this text included in the concluding songs of the seder? There is a passing reference to the smiting of the Egyptian firstborn during the Passover story, but otherwise this long poem is like an exegesis of "Vehi She'amda", expanding on that concept of divine redemption in every generation with a litany of episodes when biblical heroes and the nation of Israel were redeemed at midnight, concluding with the well known verse, later a popular Israeli folk song, "Karev Yom":

Bring near the day that is neither day nor night.

Most High, make known that Yours is the day as well as the night.

Appoint guards to protect Your city all day and all night.

Illuminate like day the darkness of night.

In the small hours of the night between the ending of Shabbat and the dawning of Sunday morning, that final verse - which always seemed like some distant future mystical prophecy after all those biblical events - suddenly felt breathtakingly immediate, real and concrete.

All over Israel that night was like day, people unable to sleep as we awaited our fate, watched the clock, wondered when and if those missiles and drones would hit.

All around was eerily still. Despite it being a Saturday night at the start of the school Passover holidays there were no teens out in the park, no one out late doing Passover errands, no bustle to be heard of neighbours getting in some late night Pesah preparations.

Some of us tried to catch up on Pesah cleaning or cooking. Some of us obsessively watched or listened to the news. Some of us prayed. Some of us tried to distract ourselves with music or films. But in every home in Israel we waited.

And then all at once it was upon us, wailing sirens all over eastern Israel, Red Alert app lighting up in a way we hadn't seen since the October 7th attacks. From north to south Israelis ran to shelters while those in more central areas tensed, listening and watching the eastern skies, waiting.

Our area was fortunate not to have sirens but through our open windows we heard the loud, thudding booms of interceptions that shook the night. Though it was hours from dawn, the eastern skies over Jerusalem were awash in bright lights that danced with surreal beauty in the sky, as though they were luminous natural aurora illuminating the cool spring night and not a grim battle for survival being waged high above us between the missiles of our air defence and the Iranian ICBMs bent on our destruction.

Bring near the day that is neither day nor night.

Most High, make known that Yours is the day as well as the night.

Appoint guards to protect Your city all day and all night.

Illuminate like day the darkness of night.

It was written in the vein of Isaiah's prophecies of comfort to the Jewish people, in hope that one day we would return from exile to restore our sacred city.

That night, this verse took on an entirely new meaning for me, as though it had been written for this very night. The salvation we witnessed in the skies over Jerusalem was simply another link in the very ancient chain going back to that first seder of our enslaved ancestors in Egypt, even further back to the life of our first ancestor, Avraham.

To my mind this is the crux of the seder, what all the storytelling is building up to. For all that the seder is about remembering the Exodus from Egypt, much of what we recount in the Haggadah service is about our suffering, from Lavan's persecution of Jacob through the hardships of slavery for his descendents.

In times of peace we need the seder to remind us where we have come from. To give us historical perspective and context, along with "hakarat hatov" - gratitude that Hashem rescued us from the misery of slavery - as the Haggadah itself says, if our ancestors had not been redeemed then we ourselves and our children would still be slaves.

We have to be able to see ourselves as slaves, to give ourselves insight into what our ancestors suffered, so that we are able to not only appreciate what we have, but to empathise with those who in this imperfect world still suffer.

In peace time the seder grounds us, ensures that we do not become decadent or detached from either our own history or the wider world around us, even if we belong to recent generations that have been fortunate to live in comfort and relative safety.

But in times of danger the seder is what gives us the resilience to stay strong and have faith in the midst of terrifying uncertainty.

At midnight with the hand of the destroyer overhead we truly do not know for sure what tomorrow will bring for us personally.

But we know that as a nation our ancestors were oppressed slaves at the mercy of a paranoid Pharaoh, a people who seemed doomed to oblivion as this Egyptian king embarked on a genocidal campaign of drowning our first born males, a sure path to assimilate our nation and destroy it.

We know that God saved us then and ever since has ensured that, come what may, the Jewish people live and thrive.

And through the seder we also remember generations of Jews before us who commemorated the seder in difficult, frightening, sad times.

Despite our deliverance a few days ago from one of the many threats around us today, we are very much still at midnight. There is war to the north and the south. Hamas and Hizballah remain a threat. We still face daily short range rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. 133 hostages are still held by Hamas in Gaza.

I know many Israelis and many Jews around the world feel that in the face of all these the idea of the Festival of Freedom this year feels tone deaf. How can we sit at the seder this year knowing that 133 kidnapped from Israel are still captive? How can we feel festive surrounded by so many freshly bereaved families, so many new orphans and widows and thousands of wounded? How can we sit down to a holiday table with the hand of the destroyer still hanging over us?

And yet this is precisely what the seder is, what the seder was from the very beginning.

That very first seder commemorated by our slave ancestors in Egypt was not a "celebration". It was not a party. It was determined resilience in the face of Pharaoh's persecution.

It was defiance.

It was faith.

It was hope.

May we all merit experiencing not only midnight, not only dawn, but the bright light of day to come.

This is what springtime skies should be - flocks of migrating storks not "killer swarms" of Iranian attack drones and ICBMs. The sound of swallows and swifts on the wing, songbirds in the trees, not the sounds of war.

Grateful for these moments of reprieve.

(Photos taken over my home a couple of years ago, view of assorted migrating birds from today while I was out in the garden birdwatching with the kids)

Saturday night just over a week to Pesah. 

We spent the afternoon in the park with our younger kids and local friends. 

We made havdalah, read the little kids bedtime stories, said Shema with them, put them to bed. 

DH started clearing up the kitchen. I sat down to answer some questions from volunteers. 

There was a message from our primary school principal that Home Front Command has updated its instructions and all educational activities are now cancelled - day care, afternoon programmes, youth group outings, Pesah vacation camps. 

The Leket farm volunteer organisation sent out an emergency update cancelling all its activities throughout the country for Sunday. 

Started getting questions from volunteers about whether it was safe to go to farms tomorrow. 

A friend who's a first responder messaged me to stock up on water and essentials, and to make sure my elderly relatives were stocked too. 

While DH was out delivering to a relative the radio announced that dozens of drones were en route to Israel from Iran. ETA around 0200-0400 am. 

Teens are awake. Sit them down for a chat. Israeli teens have by now gone through many rockets sirens, distance learning in wartime, security alerts, terror attacks. They are concerned but calm. We have a shelter, we have some emergency supplies in our shelter. We've done what we can. 

Big kid carries in extra water bottles to the shelter along with some extra snacks and a book of Psalms. 

Other child decides to get a quick shower in case there isn't a chance tomorrow. 

DH starts baking banana bread. It's just over a week to Pesah. Tonight we were going to clean the kitchen, collect up all the hametz to either be used up or donated.

Instead he's baking banana bread so that there will be a fresh treat for our little kids in case they get woken in the middle of the night by sirens. That and it gives him something constructive to do. 

Our kitchen is close to our shelter. The aroma of cinnamon and fresh baking makes everything smell sweet and warm. 

And so we wait and pray. Latest news update is that Iran has over a 100 drones and possibly cruise missiles in the air. Hizballah lobbed some rockets at northern Israel as well, just for good measure.

Conflicting reports from foreign news services about possible launches from Yemen and ICBMs from Iran. 

All the years I was growing up we had an empty chair and place setting at the table for Soviet Jewry, for Syrian Jewry, later for Ron Arad, constant reminders that while we were just "remembering" slavery, there were so many fellow Jews who were still living captivity and oppression, always made me think of smashing the glass at the hupa, there is so much pain and trauma in our people's collective experience and memory, it's even part of our most joyous celebrations. That feeling is magnified a million times this year.