We are more than halfway through the festival of Passover, in these days that are known as Chol HaMoed. Meaning the “everyday of the festival,” these in-between days offer us a beautiful contradiction. Neither entirely sacred nor entirely ordinary, these days invite us to dwell in both and ask ourselves: What does it mean for something to be both ordinary and sacred?
In the Torah, when we first leave Egypt, the journey isn’t neat or linear. There’s no straight line from slavery to freedom. There’s fear and complaining and moments of clarity, and long stretches of just… walking. The middle is where the Israelites learn who they are becoming.
Chol HaMoed of Passover lives in that same space as the wilderness. Not Egypt. Not Sinai. Just the stretch in between—where nothing is fully clear, and everything is still becoming.
I’m writing this while driving through the Mojave—the wide, quiet expanse in every direction. It feels like this moment in the calendar: open, a little disorienting, not much to hold onto except the road ahead. You can’t rush the desert. You just move through it.
The rabbis wrestle with Chol HaMoed because it won’t settle. It’s not fully sacred, not fully ordinary. Like the wilderness, it has no clear edges—only the question: who are we inside of it?
Out there, in this in-between time, nothing announces itself as sacred. There is no seder, no clear markers, no built-in meaning moments. These days are an invitation to pay attention differently.
We have to decide what matters. We have to choose what we notice. We have to make the moment count.
The Torah doesn’t just tell us that freedom is possible. It insists that it is practiced—in days exactly like these.
— Rabbi Sari Laufer