RUTHFULLY YOURS

When the sun sets and the first stars appear on Friday evening, more than 6 million Jews in Israel will gather around their Passover Seder tables.

Sitting at beautifully set tables in cities, villages, kibbutzim and outposts, we will tell the story of our Exodus from Egypt. We will describe how persecuted, oppressed, exhausted slaves decided that they were a nation, woke up at midnight, and began the longest journey in the history of mankind, a journey that is still ongoing and will never end. The children of slaves turned overnight into the children of kings, ready and willing to pay the price of freedom.

It has been thousands of years since the Exodus. The call to “Let my people go” moved hearts and nurtured the yearning for freedom. Freedom fighters adopted the songs of the liberated slaves, adding a new dimension to human dignity, equality and basic humanity.

For 2,000 years, the Jews wandered around the world without resting. Tyrants and villains made every effort to wipe the Jews out of existence. No other nation could have survived the pressure, the horrors, the destruction and the genocide.

Under the heel of suffocating tyranny, we became a nation of survivors who will never give up our faith, our religion and our right to live. The Jewish ability to survive finds its source in the same feeling of freedom that has beat in the heart of every Jew since the Exodus. It is impossible to defeat the children of kings, whose spirit rises up even if their bodies are downtrodden. The Jews spoke of the Exodus each day, and their prayers expressed hope to return to Jerusalem, the eternal city.

We have been given the huge privilege of realizing a generations-long dream. The wandering has come to an end; we have returned to our history. The miracles we experienced during the last generation in exile and the first one in freedom and salvation were no smaller than those our ancestors witnessed during the Exodus from Egypt.

There is still no Haggadah that tells the story of our salvation, the ancient hope for freedom that found expression in living Zionism. Since the modern return to Zion, we have been faced with great challenges that have demanded sacrifice. The willingness to give one’s life for independence and sovereignty is, among other things, an expression of the thousands of years during which Jews sat around the Seder table and said at the end of the evening, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

The poet Haim Nahman Bialik wrote in his poem “Harbingers of Spring”: “There was a different sort of wind, higher than the sky … soft lights emerging and rising … he will peer suddenly and discover the vigor of youth, the great, fruitful strength.”

Spring is already here, full of youthful vigor, and a great wind surrounds us and ensures our foothold in the homeland.