Why This Year We Dip Twice: Who Would We Invite to This Year’s Passover Seder?

I was recently asked the following question. If I had a choice, who in history would I choose to have join me at my Seder. Normally, a question like that would be a great prompt, an opening for what might be a great segue into a thoughtful conversation. I declined.

This year is different. Why? Why is this year different than all other years? It's very different. How so?

Normally we get to alternate between being a victim because we are powerless, or being powerful and then being branded as victimisers. This year we dip twice. The first time we dip is as victims of a throwback to our victim days, a modern day reenactment of the holocaust. Rape, coldblooded murder of innocent men, women, and children of all ages, while a hostile population cheers and participates with the release of a degree of gleeful hatred that was equally shocking in its venom.

As if a Vampiric society, denied its bloodlust for so long is suddenly revitalised. I imagine a collective face dripping in it. Bathing in it like the ancient story of the water of the Nile turning to blood, only this time it's not considered a plague, but a blessing! "Please, more blood!" Oh the Joy of once again bathing in Jewish blood. The thin veneer of whatever, turned out to be thinner than we could have imagined. The second dipping is in the instantaneous robbery of grief from the true victims.

A new chorus of hate arose from the walls of Academia. Even before the IDF began ANYTHING. We were stunned. You might be able to reconcile a group of people raised to hate Jews and Israel from childhood. A collective bathing of children in the bloody waters of hatred from infancy on—we shrug our shoulders as if to say " is there any real surprise there?" But this? Harvard, Columbia, Yale, the vanguards of civilisation, erupting with a vesuvian degree of hate that no one could have ever fathomed?So how is this year different? Usually it's one or the other. This year we were victims and got slaughtered and instantly got branded as victimisers.

Thanks civil society. You outdid yourself. Shehecheyanu will never sound the same again.

So here's what I answered my friend. I can't think about who I would want to share the Seder with in the shittiness of a world that has spun out of control to the point where there is a willing deafness to truth, and a willing blindness to injustice. A world that has turned ugly, and a society that has replaced, also the thin veneer of civilisation, much thinner than I ever imagined, in exchange for the mindless heat of a collective lynch mob feeding its own momentum.

Why would anyone in their right mind want to travel through time to this madness? Stay home Rebbe. Stay home Moses. Stay home Rabbi Shimon Ben Yochai. We will all manage to get by without finally getting to scratch that two thousand year old itch of Who actually wrote the Zohar. It can wait. Taiku. The world doesn't deserve to know. Elijah will come and drink from our wine, and he will once again be the sole time traveler. Because we can't get through this without him. He will show, but everyone else will stay home.

Lshana Habah to a world of Justice that we must each pray for this Pesach. Next year G-d willing the world will be more suitable to be graced with the presence of the greatness of our ancestors.

Lshana Habah to a world where the present can host the past without being ashamed.

Much love,

Rabbi Yossi