If I were to psychoanalyze the Passover Seder, I’d diagnose it as bipolar. It appears to contain not just one theme, but two colliding ones.

The first recalls our nation’s bitter past; the second celebrates our favorable present and promising future. Half of its text and rituals deal with slavery, and its better half with freedom. We toast the latter with four cups of wine, while the former is commemorated by a diet of bitter herbs (maror), a saltwater dip (for karpas) and “poor man’s bread” (matzah).

So is the Seder a combination of two experiences rolled into one? Not quite.

The revolutionary idea we call Hope provides clarity to the confusing Seder program. Hope is the ability to see the world not as it is but as it should be, and is the driving force that propels what should be into what could be.

Hope is the womb from which the Jewish people were born, and is the guardian of Jewish survival and continuity. It gave the Jewish slave reason to wake up in the morning, to bring children into a world of holocaust, to stand up to a mighty empire, and to walk into rushing waters hoping—no, expecting—a Sea to part…

Hope is what allows a group of human beings treated subhumanly to act human again, and a decadent pack of slaves to become a “light unto the nations.”

So Hope is that place in mind and spirit where Passover’s paradoxes come together; where slave becomes prince, exile redemption, and the bread of affliction a symbol of speedy redemption.

Happy Passover!

Mendel Kalmenson,
on behalf of the Chabad.org Editorial Team