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💡 Think:
It’s a tense time for the Jews. Six months after the horrors of October 7th, our fellow Jews are still hostages, war rages on, and the specter of antisemitism still looms large…
How can we sit at the seder when there is so much ugliness in the world?
Passover 19161, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson2, the Rebbe’s father, addressed the Jewish community of Dnipro, Ukraine. When he spoke, Dnipro (then known as Yekatrinoslav) was filled with displaced Jews3 from across the Russian empire. It was a fraught time: World War I raged around them and the empire crumbled in civil war.
Looking to the words of the Hagadah4, he shared a powerful lesson for Jewish survival:
“Rabbi Eleazar ben Azaryah said”
Within each and everyone of us is the spirit of Rabbi Eleazer… A man whose very name symbolizes the support and protection of G-d. Without that seemingly miraculous support, we would not have outlasted every despotic and wicked empire from the Egyptians to this very day.
"‘I am like a man of seventy years old’”
Yet when we look around us, we see young men aged with the destruction and persecution around them, aged as if they were seventy years old. For even when they find safety, the inner Rabbi Elazar, the effects and world-weariness remains with them.
“yet I did not succeed in proving that the exodus from Egypt must be mentioned at night”
And so we wonder, how can we sit at the seder, celebrate with the regal grandeur of the holiday, feel the awe and majesty of the exodus of Egypt, when we feel like we’re in the dark of night?
“-until Ben Zoma explained it:”
until we remembered a different lesson from the Haggadah:
"It is said, `That you may remember the day you left Egypt all the days of your life;' now `the days of your life' refers to the days, [and the additional word] `all' indicates the inclusion of the nights!"
The nights are there for a reason! That even in the darkness of night, we can forge and feel the bond with the infinite creator. Right here, right now, we have a power to be in touch with that inner point of redemption in our lives. We can leave our self-imposed limitations, our inner Egypt, and reach transcendence.
“The sages, however, said:”
And the truly wise extrapolation of this moment is
"`The days of your life' refers to the present-day world; and `all' indicates the inclusion of the days of Mashiach."
We’re here for a truly profound purpose: the transform and uplift the world for good… to reveal its divine potential and transform it.
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📚 Read:
✊ The 1929 Struggle to Send Matzah Into the Soviet Union. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn’s international campaign for the Jews of the USSR
🫓 Of Matzahs, Majorities, and Talmudic Magnificence. A Case Study of How Rabbinic Theorists Adjudicate Uncertainties:
🔥 Lit:
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Or 1917. A synopsis of the speech was preserved in the notes of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Edelman, and printed last year.
“Following the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s 1927 arrest and subsequent exile from the Soviet Union, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak became the leading rabbinical figure in the Soviet Union. He urged colleagues across the country to remain steadfast. In the early 1930s he led the Ukrainian rabbis’ refusal to sign pro-Soviet statements. From the pulpit, he called on his community members to keep their dedication to the Torah and its mitzvot. He collected funds to support the families of Jewish prisoners, ran a network of underground Jewish schools and oversaw the distribution of matzah he received from abroad. In 1936, he was involved with the construction of an “illegal” mikvah, and in the run-up to his own arrest, having refused to rubber stamp his kosher certification on matzah baked by the government, forced them to follow his stringent kosher standards.
In all this, he was undaunted and even brazen. Before one Passover holiday he gained a meeting with Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, who granted the rabbi permission to bake matzah how he saw fit for Passover use.“
- The KGB’s Belated Apology for the Persecution and Death of the Rebbe’s Father
Indeed, the Rebbe would later recall his mother’s work with the refugees in the city.