Don't let all the grim news keep you from a happy Passover

     Rabbi Meir Moscowitz stopped by the house Monday. On a traditional pre-Passover mission: to drop off shmura matzo — special hand-baked unleavened bread.
     Of course we talked — that's what Jews do. Moscowitz is regional director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois. The Chabad are traditional, old-school Jews — the ones you see in beards and black hats, walking from synagogue down Devon Avenue on Saturday afternoons — and joyous cheerleaders of the faith.
     We have history. He inquired after my sons — I brought him up to speed on the weddings, the pending birth. I reminded him that his father, Daniel, had been at my younger son's bris, at our condo in the city. I was working on the new book when he arrived and had a line in Hebrew I'd been puzzling over. I hurried upstairs and got a century-old postcard. He translated the passage for me.
     Passover starts Saturday evening, and Jews around the world are getting ready. Tuesday morning my wife picked up a half of cow's worth of brisket — OK, 11 pounds. I've been pondering readings and tracking down attendees. RSVP people! It's only polite. Just 15 this year, a light crowd. Some years we're nearly double that. My brother-in-law, Alan, typically leads the service, being older, wiser, and understanding Hebrew. But he's in Oregon, visiting his daughter Rachel, a young rabbi installed with a new congregation. So the responsibility falls to me.
     I'll do my best, aided by my brother-in-law Jay. Some families blast through the Seder in 15 minutes. We take ... let's see ... close to seven hours when Alan leads, more like five when I do. We bog ours down by piling on additional material. Last year, the pall of the Oct. 7 attacks hung over the Seder. We had a chair kept empty, with the photo of a hostage on it. A poem was read explaining why Elijah won't be coming this year — the tardy prophet busy tending to the truly bereft.
     It all got a bit much for me. Later, I wrote in the paper:

     "Mostly, I'm a go-along-to-get-along type of host, so I smiled and nodded at almost anything anybody brought to the table. Though the smile grew tight as the Seder progressed. At one point I felt compelled to point out that this is not our first rodeo, suffering-wise, that Jews held Seders in concentration camps, and that while I'm all for recognizing the crisis, I would hate for Passover, at heart a celebration of freedom, to lose its sense of joy, obscured by current events."

     Which is a deliberately protracted way of saying I was fertile ground when Rabbi Moscowitz shared a column by Rabbi Mendel Teldon, "Can we please stop talking about antisemitism?" In it, he argues that Jews think we're honoring past suffering and avoiding future pain, when in reality we're letting the people who hate Jews deform and define us.
     "Here’s the truer truth," Rabbi Teldon writes. "This narrative isn’t ours. It’s a story written for us by others. Clinging to it keeps us in their grip — always reacting, always haunted."
     Makes sense to me.
     "When I was growing up," I told Rabbi Moscowitz, "the Holocaust was so present, Judaism seemed like a death cult." And between that, war in Gaza and antisemitism, sometimes it still does.
     Antisemitism shouldn't be the main topic, for a variety of reasons. First, President Donald Trump is gaslighting it into a club to bludgeon free speech. Second, there are more important issues, like creeping totalitarianism. In our email inviting the flock to Seder, my wife and I wrote:
     "Given the national circumstances that greet this year's Seder, let's discuss how freedom is imperiled in America today and how we can face these challenges."
     That's a tall order, if you want to also sing "Chad Gad Yad" before 11 p.m. But if you can't fix things, at least you can discuss them.
     Small acts. When frantic readers ask me what to do, I tell them to do what they can.
     The passage I'd asked Rabbi Moscowitz to read was a play on Proverbs 27:10. "Better a friend nearby than a brother far away," meaning the people close to you are your family.
     We pretend that religion is changeless and eternal, but the truth is it's plastic and mutable. We mold it to our own purposes, picking and choosing what suits the moment. That's why faith can both hurt and heal, why the Seder can run an hour or seven or not at all.
     I told Rabbi Moscowitz that I would read the column he recommended. He had other weak tea Jews to visit, and departed with sincere wishes for a happy Passover.