What Kind of People Does Pesah Call Us to Be?
This year we approach Pesah at a time of war for our country and for Israel. Millions of people across Israel, Iran, Lebanon, and throughout the Middle East are living with fear, uncertainty, and danger. Entire societies are submerged in anxiety, grief, anger, and loss.
Pesah is the festival of freedom, but its story is also filled with plagues, violence, suffering, death, and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the sea. Neither the Torah nor the Haggadah masks this, and our tradition does something truly remarkable with this story: it refuses to allow us to celebrate our liberation without remembering the cost in human life.
At the Seder, we perform a strange ritual: as we recite the ten plagues, we remove drops of wine from our cups, diminishing our joy. Wine is a symbol of celebration, and we deliberately reduce it, drop by drop, because our freedom came at a price: the suffering of others. Even as we celebrate liberation, we are asked to acknowledge that for our ancestors to go free, other human beings suffered and died.
The rabbis highlight this idea with a famous midrash: when the Egyptian army was drowning in the Sea of Reeds and the angels began to sing, God silenced them and said: “My creatures are drowning in the sea, and you sing songs?” Even at the moment of redemption, God does not permit unrestrained celebration over the death of the enemy. Victory does not erase the humanity of the other.
The religious thinker and pacifist Rabbi Aaron Shmuel Tamares (1869–1931) asked a pointed question: Why did God not allow the Israelites to go out of their homes during the final plague and witness the death of the Egyptian firstborn? He suggested that God deliberately removed the Israelites from that moment so that they would not see the suffering, would not rejoice in it, and would not build their identity on the death of their enemies. Freedom, he argued, must not be born out of cruelty or vengeance—a free people must be grounded in ethics and compassion.
This is a deeply countercultural idea. We are living in a moment when the language surrounding war has become cruel and dehumanizing. Civilians are spoken of as abstractions; war is framed in terms of brute force, total obliteration, or even spectacle, rather than as a last resort carrying real human cost. Our tradition insists on something different: that every act of war claims human lives and bears profound moral consequence.
And so Judaism holds that even during war, we must never lose our humanity; that even when our enemies fall, we do not rejoice; that even when we use force, we remember the image of God in every human being.
That is why we remove drops of wine from our cups. That is why God silences the angels. That is why the Israelites do not witness the final plague. The Torah is trying to shape a people who understand that power without moral restraint is dangerous, that victory without compassion is corrupting, and that the true measure of freedom is not power but humanity.
As we prepare to retell the story of our liberation, may we remember what kind of people freedom is meant to create. Not a people that worships power, but a people that understands the responsibility of power. Not a people that celebrates destruction, but a people that values life—all life. Not a people that sees the world in simple categories of good and evil, but a people that knows that every war is a human tragedy.
This year, when we sit at the Seder and remove the drops of wine from our cups, that ritual may feel more real than ever before. As we diminish our joy, may we think not only of the Egyptians of long ago, but of all the human beings—on all sides—who suffer in today’s wars. And perhaps we will remember that the ultimate goal of the story of Pesah is not the defeat of Pharaoh but the creation of a society built on justice, dignity, compassion, and the recognition that every human being is created in the image of God.
Shabbat shalom and hag same-ah,
Rabbi Roly Matalon