Page 26 - Harlem Pesach Companion 2021

What Can We Celebrate at Passover?

By Sarah Tenenbaum

Pessah was not always a significant holiday on my calendar. In
fact, growing up in Paris, the land of bakeries, it was sometimes
sheer torture. Going to school in the morning I could smell the
baguettes out of the oven and had to eat matza bread instead.
Growing up between a Sephardi, more observant family, and an
Ashkenazi, almost atheist one, many of the Seders I
participated in were timed and cut to last thirty minutes tops.
The idea was to get to the core, do the essentials, and enjoy a
meal together. Within those essentials though, were some
prayers praising G-d for delivering us from slavery and freeing
us out of Egypt. I noticed a few times that my father did not want to say those blessings.
He told me that it was a difficult prayer to say as G-d did not free most of our family
from the Nazi’s concentration camps and his mother died at a very young age, probably
in part because of what she endured there.

When I came to the US, I had the chance to connect with the part of our family who
emigrated here after the War and, more specifically, with my grandfather’s cousin who is
an Auschwitz survivor. In a random discussion, we started talking about Pessah and she
confessed it was the most special holiday to her as it celebrated freedom, and she felt she
had been freed as well.

To this day, I still do not know how to approach this question and I do not think anyone
really does. On the one hand, our people have suffered many persecutions, culminating
with the Shoah not even eighty years ago, on the other hand, we have continued to thrive
and the Jewish people are still standing. Should we be angry? Should we be grateful?
And what are we celebrating then at Passover? What can we celebrate?

To this, I only have a partial answer. For me Passover is about celebrating the ideal of
freedom that we must fight for. It is also about faith, not necessarily in G-d, but more
broadly in the belief that better days are coming if we keep on fighting for us and those
who are not yet free. You can be angry at G-d, fate, or the universe for all the
persecutions the Jewish people and so many others have suffered and still suffer. In my
opinion, it is all the more reason to celebrate. You don’t have to be grateful to celebrate
Passover, but I hope we can all take it as a reminder of an ideal we should strive for and
continue to fight for.
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