THE HOLIDAY OF PASSOVER offers us the opportunity to look back at a particularly poignant moment in our Jewish people’s history and trace the passage from oppression to redemption, from suffering to exultation. We gather with family and friends for festive Passover seders replete with good food and traditional rituals, discussion and music and enjoyment. Our Passover celebrations are generally marked by great joy.

But this year, in 2024, as we approach Passover, things feel qualitatively different. Many of us are still reeling from the brutality of the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. The bombing of Gaza rages, and the world is raging in response as Israel tries to bring back the many remaining hostages still in captivity and drive out the leaders of Hamas. In this turbulent era, we are contending with anti-Semitic acts by the thousands in the US and around the world in places where Jews had previously felt safe. As a result, for many Jews, this is a time of feeling traumatized; with the passage of time and with each new report in the news, it feels in some ways like the trauma is increasing rather than subsiding. When will we experience the cresting of this wave? When will we feel some sense of safety, some sense of stability? When can we hope that healing will begin?

Embedded in our Passover holiday rituals, we find many resources that offer a possibility for healing. I am grateful to Rabbi Stephanie Dickstein for her teachings on the power of Jewish rituals in healing from trauma; her work as a chaplain and educator inspires me.

First on the list of items that help heal trauma is telling our story. We go to great lengths in the Passover Seder to tell the story of the Exodus from slavery, and we tell it in many different ways: we tell the story outright, and we encourage children and adults to ask questions, both those on the pages of the Haggadah and those in their minds as well. We eat special ritual foods and we enact age-old rituals that evoke experiential aspects of the storytelling.

For survivors of trauma, telling one’s story, reclaiming the narrative in one’s own voice and with one’s own slant, can be very powerful. While some survivors experience a reliving of the trauma as they tell of a traumatic event, there is also something powerful that happens when we feel heard and also feel accompanied in the telling. Knowing that others are holding in their hearts the story of our trauma, we might feel less alone in the experience. We may also find different vantage points from which we can tell it, and sometimes as we tell a tale of pain we have experienced, the trauma itself can begin to lose its sting.

Those who work in the field of bereavement counseling will often turn to an image from Passover of acknowledging a loved one who is not present by setting an empty place at the table. In the months since the October 7 attacks, there have been communal Jewish gatherings with tables set with empty chairs, each holding the name and image of a person taken hostage on October 7 as we prayed for their safe release. This year, as we set our seder tables, we too may leave one place setting empty, to remember our own deceased loved ones and also to note both our grief for those who were slaughtered in that horrific attack in Israel and our hope for those whose safe return we still pray for.

One of the hallmarks of a post-traumatic experience is feeling immobilized, both in remembering a sense of helplessness during the traumatic event and in feeling stuck in a repeating loop of the memory afterwards. So when we are able to take some action and do something—almost anything—I can give us a feeling of agency; we may gain a sense that we have some power in a situation where we otherwise feel, and may in fact be, powerless.

With our Passover rituals, one important action we can take is in helping others. Some will host a seder and undertake the important task of telling the Passover story and feeding and nurturing loved ones and friends; others will assist with the various aspects of someone else’s Passover seder, in bringing food or flowers or teachings or in helping with set-up or with cleanup. Our Jewish tradition offers another lovely opportunity to help: we give ma’ot chittim, special charitable gifts that will allow even those of diminished financial means to be able to celebrate the holiday with great joy. As we find ourselves back in the driver’s seat, so to speak, and able to take some action, even if small, we counter the terrible post-traumatic narrative of feeling helpless and stuck.

The egg on our seder plate is a representation of life, of rebirth and spring and the cycle of the seasons. At the same time, it is an image prevalent in our Jewish mourning rituals, where eggs are central to the meal following a Jewish funeral; here the roundness of an egg stands as a symbol of the cycle of birth and death and the power of memory. After a death, at a time when mourners may be feeling profoundly powerless, our tradition reminds us that we do have power: we have the ability to hold the memory of a deceased loved one alive, among the living—which is one way some Jews conceive of life after death. Imagine having the power of life after death in one’s own human hands!

We can reflect too on the many ways in which an egg is remarkable. When cooked, an egg offers us nourishment. Fertilized and kept warm, it offers the basis of new life. And remarkably, an egg is able to withstand the forces of boiling water. In fact, when placed in hot water, an egg will grow stronger. It offers us an object lesson: when we find ourselves in trouble, in “hot water” in life, may we too grow strong, may we too know the power of our own resilience.

We find on our Seder table other symbols that have meanings, often multiple in nature. Matzah is the bread of our affliction, the poor people’s food that our slave ancestors ate as they were rushed out to the fields to work, and it is at the same time the bread our Israelite ancestors ate as they left Egypt and fled for freedom, with no time to let their bread dough rise. Traditionally Jews eat matzah for the 8 days of Passover and then we go back to savoring yeasty soft bread. The image of leaving the hardness, the harshness of matzah behind and returning to soft and pillow-y breads holds hope for a trauma survivor that the difficulty and pain will not last forever; there is a possibility for healing and a sense of comfort ahead.

On our seder table we find charoset, symbol of our Israelite slave ancestors’ backbreaking work as they built store cities for the cruel Pharaoh—but wherever Jews have lived around the world since that time, we have generally made this particular holiday dish out of the sweetest of the fruits we knew of, the most delectable nuts and the sweetest wine. We mix these ingredients together, saying as we eat them that this represents cruel harsh labor—but the taste that lingers on our tongues is sweet. It may inspire us to remember that we can, after much time and distance from a traumatic event, transform what had been terrible and make of it a memory devoid of pain. In some far-off time, we may even reach a point of focusing less on the paralyzing pain of the past and more on the fact of our having survived, lending sweetness to our experience in the present moment.

When we tell the Exodus story at the seder and arrive at the recitation of the ten plagues, we enact a powerful ritual: we remove a drop of wine for each plague from our wine cups. We do this to remember that while we may legitimately feel anger at our adversaries and those who make us suffer, we are able to rise above the baseness of that anger and can find a way to bring some compassion into our world. As any trauma survivor can relate, compassion may be a difficult emotion to access, especially in the immediate aftermath of the traumatic event; it is a legitimate human response to feel anger and be spurred toward revenge. But our tradition holds hope for us that after some time has passed, we may arrive at a point of not being consumed by our anger, and we might find a way to feel some compassion for others who suffered as well.

And as we near the end of our Seder, we come to our counting songs, seemingly simple songs in numeric or alphabetical order, or songs telling a cumulative story. From a spiritual perspective, these songs emphasize order and the reassurance of the expected. In their position at the end of the seder, these songs serve as a closing bracket to our recitation of the order of rituals at the start of the seder. For many trauma survivors, what is left in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event is chaos. Perhaps these counting songs help us hold hope that our lives will one day be in order once again.

And when we arrive at the beloved Chad Gadya story, where so many successive verses end in death, we find in the last verse a portrayal of a Godly power so great that it has overcome death itself. What a wishful image this is, that death itself would not hold the ultimate power in life! How very protective and comforting an image, and how powerful an image this might be for those who are contending with the aftereffects of trauma.

As we reenact our Passover rituals this year, may we do so with an awareness of the power that our Jewish traditions offer in healing our wounded spirits. May we reach for that which can provide safety and comfort, and may we be blessed with a sense of healing and wholeness, of celebration and of peace.

Wishing you a zissen Pesach, a sweet and happy holiday!