Passover 2025 in Israel

Passover, the Festival of Freedom

The Passover holiday, which begins this year on Saturday night, April 12, is the holiday of freedom. It begins with the ancient Hebrew slaves being redeemed from Egyptian servitude. 

That redemption was, as the Hebrew Bible says, done directly by God: plagues, miracles, and Divine protection from the pursuing chariots of Pharaoh.

The usual explanation for God taking such an active role in freeing the Hebrew slaves is that they were unable to free themselves: in fact, it took centuries of slavery for them to find the strength to even cry out to God. But that crying out was the act that set their redemption in motion.

If you'd like to learn more about Passover, check out my Passover lesson.

Passover 2025

There is a special joy in modern Israel on the holidays, because everyone does them. Jews are not a minority in the Jewish homeland. In our neighborhood, and in most, everyone has been busy in the days and weeks leading up to Passover cleaning their homes in the only religiously-mandated spring cleaning that I'm aware of. The Torah says that not only may we not eat hametz - leaven - during the week of Passover, we may not even possess any. So we've been eating down our supplies of bread, cereal, cookies, and more. We've been cleaning our kitchens and dining rooms, and more. We arrange to sell any hametz that we've missed for the duration of the holiday. And before the holiday, we also recite an ancient formula renouncing ownership of any hametz.

The Passover seder is a festive meal, as we read the Haggadah and ask questions about what freedom is all about.

And this year, like last year, there is someone missing at the seder table: the hostages, taken from their homes and from dance festivals on October 7, 2023, by terrorists from Gaza. Some were dragged into Gaza alive and are alive today. Others were murdered and then taken hostage (no, that's not a misprint - Hamas raped and murdered and took the bodies back over the border). And some were murdered in captivity in Gaza.

This is the second Passover that the hostages are in captivity.

And the meaning of Passover, which is never theoretical (we read in the Haggadah that, in every generation, we must see ourselves as personally being freed from slavery in Egypt like our ancestors were), becomes all the more palpable.

May the hostages be freed!