As we gather around our Seder tables this year, we revisit the foundational story of our people, in which God sees and grants freedom to a displaced, powerless community, once dismissed as strangers in a strange land.

Passover refuses to let us forget our humble beginnings. We were ivrim – outsiders – without a voice, without protection, and without legitimacy. And it is precisely from that place that Torah commands, no fewer than 36 times, to love the stranger, to protect the vulnerable, and to remember—not abstractly, but morally—what it felt like to be unseen.

This year, that memory feels particularly urgent.

In this politically dissonant era, we will have guests and family members at our Seder tables with increasingly different visions of justice, security, and responsibility. Passover does not demand uniformity of opinion. But it does insist on a shared moral starting point: that the experience of oppression should sensitize us, not harden us; that our People’s journey should expand our empathy, not narrow it.

And so, we widen our circle of concern, thinking of those, across our own society, who continue to struggle for dignity and recognition. And we turn our hearts outward, to those beyond our borders who still cry out for freedom, in places like Sudan, Iran, and elsewhere, as well as our loved ones in Israel, who have been forced, yet again, to gather for Passover not in comfort at their tables, but in trepidation inside their bomb shelters. We pray that deliverance may yet be at hand for them and for all who seek acceptance and human dignity.

The Passover story teaches us that liberation is never inevitable – but it is always possible. That even in the narrowest place, mitzrayim – a place of constriction – there exists the seed of redemption.

And so, as our Seders draw to a close, we will lift our voices in a familiar hope: l’shanah ha’ba’ah b’nai chorin—next year, may we be free. Not only we who recline at our Seder tables, but all who remain in the narrow places of this world. Next year, may we be freer—more courageous in our empathy, more expansive in our concern, more committed to the dignity of every human being. And next year, may those who are still waiting—for safety, for recognition, for the simple right to live with decency—taste the freedom we are commanded never to take for granted.

– Rabbi Josh Knobel