The Discomfort of Passover 2025

This was the first time I have hosted a Seder since my dad died on Thanksgiving of 2023. Last year dear friends took us in, knowing that the experience of Passover without my dad was going to be painful. But this year, largely in honor of my dad, I am back at it. Filled with mixed emotions and overwhelmed with the state of the world, I am determined to keep the traditions that served as the stickiness that held generations of my family together. I am also determined to ensconce my children in that very stickiness, connecting them to my dad and the generations before us.

This is absolutely the right thing for me to do. And wow is there a lot of discomfort in what Passover means to me this year.

There are many reasons for this. The ongoing bloodshed in Gaza, the never ending war, the hostages still in captivity, all of it sits so heavily. And. It is hard to sit with liturgy about liberation when the country you call home is becoming ever more oppressive. It is hard to sing of freedom knowing that rights are being stripped away from so many. And it is so hard to celebrate the deliverance of the Jewish people when Jews and antisemitism are being exploited in service to the subjugation of others.

Every year I have a theme for the Seder I host: banned books, everyday heroes, and of course gun violence have all shaped the content of my Seder. This year I was at a loss. You ever see someone holding something at a protest that reads: “too many issues to fit on one sign”? That was my Seder — there were so many things I wanted to talk about at my Seder table I would never do any of them justice.

(I picked poetry, by the way.)

But my greatest moment of discomfort came as I was cleaning and preparing my kitchen for Passover. If you are not familiar with this process, let me tell you — it is intense. Those who observe the traditions around keeping strictly kosher for Passover do a great deal of work to fully rid their kitchens of any trace of chametz, or leavened food. This includes cleaning and covering the surfaces of your kitchen and using separate cookware and utensils. Have I mentioned intense. It was during this super charged cleaning process that I had such a memory of my dad. One that made me smile, also tear up, and at the same time think deeply about this moment in time.

It’s about boiling water. My dad used to sanitize our metal sink with boiling water. But he had a unique way of doing so. My dad used to store an iron railroad spike on the terrace of our garden apartment. Every year, the day before Passover, he would bring the spike in and heat it on the gas burner until it was red hot. He’d then fill the sink to the very top with hot water from the tap, pick up the spike with metal tongs, and drop the red hot spike into the already hot water. I would watch with fascination, waiting for the moment the spike would hit the water. The sound of the hiss and the site of the water suddenly boiling over to cover the countertops… absolute theater. It was a whole production and I totally loved it. To this day I can vividly picture the water erupting, the steam billowing out of the kitchen and into the living room, and my dad shvitzing and bowing with a flourish at the end of it all.

As I stood before my own kitchen sink this year, I found myself thinking about that iron spike. Not just because I was remembering my dad, but because the imagery of that sink bubbling gave shape to what I was feeling on this Passover 2025.

On January 20th, 2025 a red hot spike in the form of Donald Trump hit a country filled to the brim. The addition of that spike to already heated water made that water impossible to contain. We are boiling over with hate and greed, and the steam not only fills our country, but spills into others. The hiss of the erupting water is so loud the neighbors can’t help but hear it. It is a whole thing, but this doesn’t end with a theatrical bow and the subsequent construction of chicken soup. I don’t think any of us have a clue where this goes and how this ends.

Because the boiling over is still happening.

I’ve long said that while Donald Trump is a huge problem, the possibly bigger problem is that multitudes of people that aided, abetted, condoned, ignored, and/or voted for him. He may be the iron spike, but that spike dropped into an empty sink would not have had nearly the impact. We were already filled to the very top with so much hot, agitated water that the addition of that extra heat made the whole thing explode.

Someday, Donald Trump won‘t be here anymore. Biology, if not the norms of two presidential terms, will dictate that. But we have to remember that only removes the catalyst. The water was already primed for boiling over, and that’s the part that feels even scarier to me. There were too many people in this country holding a worldview that was searching for a figurehead. Too many people awaiting their chance to say the quiet part out loud, or louder than before. Too many people who embraced the opportunity to hate openly, grab power with impunity, and create a narrative of me over we. The sink was full, the iron spike was only the tipping point.

I was grateful just the week before Passover to march through the streets of Boston with tens of thousands of people who think about the world in a completely different way. I thought of my dad then too. The man who drove me to my first anti-war protest in Long Island’s Eisenhower Park, who got up at the crack of dawn to get me to the bus that would take me to my first pro-choice march in DC — he would have been happy I was there. He was always proud of my political activism, and he used to tell me that showing up was a way of speaking out.

As I think about the boiling water spilling and steaming and hissing, a country chock full of that hot agitated energy, that’s what I keep coming back to. Showing up and speaking out.

Trump will eventually be gone but the underlying problems won’t disappear with him. We will still have the multitudes of people whose anger needs an outlet, and whose worldview needs a mechanism for expression.

We have to outnumber them. There has to be enough of us that when the spike inevitably hits again we can contain the impact. I am so lucky to work in deep coalition with so many amazing people. But even so, there are times when it all feels so overwhelming it’s hard to imagine a path forward. It was heartening to walk a path from Boston Common to City Hall with thousands and thousands of people — in the rain! — who also want to push back on Trump and his sink full of enablers. We absolutely have to outnumber them, and maybe what those marches show us is the possibility of attaining that.

I entered Passover discomfited. I can’t say the news of the weekend has left me feeling any better. But I emerge from the Seders a little more connected to history, memory, and family. I come from family that taught me to show up and speak out, and I come from history that teaches us the danger of not speaking. Author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel famously said:

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."

My commitment for the year is to show up, speak out, protest, and grow the movement. And if enough of us do that, maybe there will be a time when we just outnumber them. When we can contain the boiling because there are simply more of us than of them.

And maybe, just maybe, I will get an iron spike to use in my kitchen next Passover.