In every generation: who will we be in our story?

At a surface level, it can feel like we do the same thing every year: read the same story, recite the same blessings, sing the same songs. But when we look deeper, we see that each year, we layer more onto this story. It’s that evolution - the layering of our history, of adding more meaning and more stories - that makes this holiday so rich and resonant.

I often quote from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated: "The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks—when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain—that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?"

For Jews, our history and our memory are intertwined, but they are not the same. History is our record of the past; memory is our call to action for the future. And it is this tension that makes the tradition of reading the Haggadah so powerful.

Take the passage Pour Out Your Wrath, which was added during the time of the Crusades, nearly a thousand years after the original Haggadah was created. For centuries, it wasn’t part of the retelling. And then, it was - layered into our collective story, shaped by the memory of persecution, increasingly remembered as a jarring note of vengeance.

In more recent times, we’ve continued adding new layers as Jews found themselves again persecuted: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on the eve of Passover in 1943; the resistance of Soviet refuseniks; the current anguish over hostages still held by Hamas.

We’ve also layered in the stories of others, as we acknowledge the persecution of others. We recall the refugee crises in Syria and Ukraine, the American civil rights movement, and the struggle for Indigenous rights in North America.

Once again, history and memory intertwine. We tell our story, but wrap it in a forward-looking lens, a moral responsibility to both ourselves and others shaped by where we've come from.

Where I have long wrestled is in the tension between the particular and the universal. Passover is fundamentally a Jewish holiday, retelling the liberation of the Jewish people. But what good is learning from our history if we cannot apply its lessons to the world around us?

This is also where much of the tension within the diaspora Jewish community lies, whether in our synagogues, on campuses, or even around our family dinner tables.

There is criticism of anti-Zionist seders, which elevate the suffering of others over that of the Jews, just as there is criticism of seders that fail to acknowledge the suffering of others at all. We often describe our discomfort with either of these versions using a political spectrum, that they are either “too far left” or “too far right,” but what we’re really describing is the imbalance, where particularism has been eschewed wholesale for universalism, or the reverse.

This year, the Jewish community is deeply divided. The horrors of October 7, the ongoing war, the hostages still in captivity, and the devastating death toll in Gaza have pulled us further into opposing camps: clinging to the particular or to the universal, as if we cannot hold both at once.

And we see it in the questions we face around the Seder table: Can we say a prayer for the hostages without acknowledging the thousands of Palestinian children who have been killed, orphaned, or held in administrative detention? On the other hand, how can we open our hearts when the Passover story reminds us that, in every generation, an enemy rises up to destroy us?

For me, I seek balance. Not because of what’s often dismissed as “both sides-ing,” and not because I believe in some mythical “radical centrism.” But because I believe in the story we tell about ourselves, about the people we aspire to be - a people who hold a fierce commitment to our peoplehood, our safety, and our future, precisely because of our fierce commitment to the safety and future of others.

This year, as we gather and tell our story once again, may we do so with this aspiration in mind. May we tell the story of the weight of our history and the beauty of our survival. May we weep for what is lost, rage at what is broken, and still, somehow, find hope in the telling. May we carry both the pain of our people and the pain of others—not because it is easy, but because it is who we want to be. And may the layers we add this year - of sorrow, of resistance, of longing, of aspiration - bring us closer to the world we are still trying to build. A world where we are all a little more free.