So this week we’re continuing our month of re-releasing some of our favorite episodes of Wondering Jews. And this week we’re sharing one of my favorites, which is funny because it’s an episode I wasn’t even actually on.
Yeah, it’s one of my favorite also. No, do remember you were traveling this week and it was the week before Passover. So I sat down with a man I respect so much and a colleague of mine, Rabbi David Wolpe, and I asked him big questions about Passover, about what it means to be a Jew, about the collective Jewish experience. And he gave me and asked some really amazing ideas to think about.
Yeah, the two of you are colleagues at the Maimonides Fund as scholars in residence, Correct, correct. That’s pretty cool. But part of why I loved the episode is it wasn’t just about Passover. It really felt like it was asking and approaching questions about the entirety of what it means to live a meaningful Jewish life.
Yeah, I think it was also just about what is Judaism, what makes us a people, things like that, which was awesome. So it was great. We missed you, Noam. And listeners, just let us know how this resonates with you. Be in touch with us at wanderingjews.mpac.media. And with that, onto the show.
Today we have an extremely special guest here. I’m going to introduce Rabbi David Wolpe, to really discuss together and think about. why is Pesach so important? Why does it resonate for so many Jews? And what can we learn from it in 2025?
Rabbi Wolpe has a very long bio, but I’ll just highlight some of the amazing things that he does. He’s the Max Webb Emeritus Rabbi of Sinai Temple. He serves as the ADL’s inaugural rabbinic fellow. And he is my fellow scholar in residence at the Maimonides Fund. So I am extremely lucky and blessed to call Rabbi Wolpe a colleague and someone that I have learned from and with, which is really exciting.
Rabbi Wolpe has been named the most influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek and one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world by the Jerusalem Post.
Welcome, Rabbi Wolpe. It’s really, really great to have you here.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes, yes it is. Good to see you outside the office.
Mijal: Yes it is. Rabbi Wolpp, I was gonna start with like an easy question but instead i’m gonna shift to a hard one.
Rabbi Wolpe: Okay.
Mijal: I know that in LA, your community has Ashkenazi, sephardi, Persian, all that. Pesach.
Rabbi Wolpe: (laughs)
Mijal: Are you happy being an ashkenazi jew on that’s all is this the holiday where everybody should convert to become a Sephardi Jew?
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes, they all should, but they won’t. Well, since I’m a vegetarian, and many years ago, David Golinkin, who’s a posek, a religious decider, I suppose you would say in English, in Israel, wrote a long teshuva about how the forbiddenness of kitniyot, that is rice, beans, corn, nuts, things like that, all legumes, of how that came about, which was…
Mijal: How Ashkenazim…
Rabbi Wolpe: How Ashkenazim forbade it. And Sephardim don’t, which is really, because Ashkenazim didn’t have it so they assumed that it was like leavened. And so they forbade it. Anyway, he wrote a long teshuvah,, especially for vegetarians who have a hard time getting protein if you don’t eat meat or chicken or fish, it’s permissible. So I went proudly before my congregation and said, this is what the teshuva says and I want you all to know, I wouldn’t do this without telling you, I’m gonna start eating kitniyot.
And there was a lovely woman who has since passed away, Rose Farkas, who was a survivor and told me, Rabbi, it was a beautiful sermon, but you still eat treif.
Mijal: Wow!
Rabbi Wolpe: So I would say, yes, there is a divide there. But a couple of Ashkenazim, having gone now to Persian seders, say, look, I’m not gonna go to someone’s seder and not eat what they make, and so they have sort of gotten acculturated, but it’s still a very strong custom.
Mijal: Right. But I am hearijng from you that on Pesach, you…
Rabbi Wolpe: I do. Yes. I do. Yes.
Mijal: Welcome to our part of tribe on Passover. But tell us a little bit about Passover growing up. I know that you are not just a rabbi, but a rabbi’s son. What are some of the traditions that you grew up with that you still think about?
Rabbi Wolpe: So my, actually, my favorite part of Passover was bedikat Chometz, the night before, when my father would go around with a candle all around the house and try to find Chometz, some of which he had planted of course, because they cleaned the house so well beforehand that he had to plant a few pieces of bread so that we could find it. Just because, the darkness and the candle sort of inaugurated the mystery of it.
And then actually many years later, on my daughter’s bat mitzvah, she had Parshat Bo and I talked to her, instead of giving a sermon, I talked to her, we talked about leil shimurim and that was that was sort of the theme of her bat mitzvah.
So I think that, and then of course all the things that everyone remembers, being the youngest for a while when my younger brother was, there six years between us, so he was too young to do the four questions. And opening the door for Eliyahu, and somebody inevitably kicking the bottom of the table so that the cup shook a little bit. All of the traditions from the Haggadah, including the struggle to stay up till the end, which especially as a little kid, I remember very well.
And then the second night for us was the synagogue seder, every year, because my father conducted the synagogue seder. And I actually remember that with great fondness because it was a really, at least in those days, a lot of people came to the synagogue and it was very much a community seder.
Mijal: Yeah, as a fellow Rabbi’s daughter, I remember one synagogue seder we had in Montevideo in Uruguay. And the reason I remember it so fondly is that we put a play and I got to be God for everybody there. So that was actually a big, big highlight for us.
Rabbi Wolpe: That’s a big step!
Mijal: Yeah, it was a big step. And for me, I don’t know if Ashkenazim do this as well, but we would actually really dress up. We would take pillowcases and like stuff them with things and dress up.
And there’s different customs depending, like Moroccan or Egyptian, of like some questions and answers that you do, like ‘where do you come from?’ ‘I come from Egypt.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To the promised land.’ And something really very, very children friendly and like tactile about Passover.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yeah, I think that there are people walking around and beating each other with leeks and so on. That I know from Sephardic tradition and Mizrahi traditions, but I don’t think exist in Ashkenazi.
Mijal: Yeah, it’s okay. Well, we are really happy for everybody to borrow and use if you want to, and we borrow as well. But you know, I was actually looking at some data and I believe that the Seder, right, of Passover is the most kept Jewish ritual in the world.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes.
Mijal: More than Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, more than any other Jewish ritual or Jewish holiday. What do you think it is about the Seder and Passover that really makes it so extraordinarily popular?
Rabbi Wolpe: So here’s my first answer, since I probably have more than one, is, think about all the times Eliyahu Hanavi, who was the prophet, he doesn’t die in the Tanakh, and so he’s the one that comes back and announces the coming of the Messiah. So think about the times that he’s supposed to come during the year. End of Shabbat, during the Seder of Pesach, end of Yom Kippur, at a brit mila, you have Eliyahu Hanavi. All of those times are family times.
Mijal: Hmm.
Rabbi Wolpe: And I think, and in fact on Pesach, the Haftarah reads, I’ll return the hearts of parents to children and children to parents. And I think Pesach is the most family of all holidays. I mean, yes, on Yom Kippur, maybe you sit with your family, but you don’t, it’s not a family holiday.
For Jews, I think the reason that Thanksgiving is almost the only holiday that Americans celebrate is because it also is a family holiday. And I think more than anything else, more even than the themes, it’s the sociology of Pesach that we’re together as a family.
Then also, the themes of oppression and freedom and slavery and liberation, they are perpetual themes in human life and politics. And so there’s always something both old and new to talk about on every Pesach.
Mijal: I’ve been thinking actually that there’s something both, both really particularistic about Passover and very universalistic. I’ve been thinking that the Exodus story is really universal, right?
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes.
Mijal: Like Egypt, Pharaoh, freedom, Moses, promised land, and it’s actually influenced the civil rights movement, liberation theology, American Revolution. But I think the seder night, that’s really particular.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes.
Mijal: That’s been shaped by Jews, for Jews, really by Jewish families, like you were saying, and really characterizes something very unique about the Jewish experience. And also the Jewish experience in adversity. I keep thinking about the fact that Agam Berger, she was in Gaza for 15 months, and she literally kept Passover in the tunnels of Gaza.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yep. And what makes it Jewish, almost to an extreme, is it is the only meal, I think, that I know of in any tradition anywhere, that is actually guided by a book.
Mijal: Hmm.
Rabbi Wolpe. And that’s very Jewish. It’s like, how do we eat this meal? Well, let’s look in the book. And the presence of the Haggadah is a really amazing phenomenon in religious life.
And one of the reasons why the particularistic and universalistic speak so eloquently to Pesach is, look at the diversity of Haggadot that you can get, from some that are deeply learned and rooted in Jewish texts and then there are some that are very universalistic, because it really does at least allow for both of those.
Mijal: What do you use, what haggadah? What kind of haggadah?
Rabbi Wolpe: We usually use the Rabbinical Assembly Haggadah. So we’re sort of straight down the middle. And when I was growing up, like almost all Americans, we used the Maxwell House Haggadah, which was a phenomenon that somehow Maxwell House published this Haggadah that all American Jews seem to use. How about you?
Mijal: I used like the Sephardic one. I don’t know how to differentiate.
Rabbi Wolpe: There’s one, right?
Mijal: There’s actually a couple of them, depends exactly which one you go to. But we also use one that, like a Syrian specifically one, like a Syrian Egyptian. And it actually has some Arabic parts to it. And my kids go to a Sephardic school, so they learned some parts like in Arabic.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yeah, nice.
Mijal: Now our seder table will literally talk about how my kids’ grandparents, my husband’s parents, left Egypt. Because they left Egypt. So there’s like something very powerful there about like the story of leaving Egypt.
Rabbi Wolpe: That’s amazing.
Mijal: Let me ask you a question because you, I think the first time I ever heard of you.
Rabbi Wolpe: I know what’s coming!
Mijal: Okay, okay. The first time that I heard of you was actually in 2001, when I remember just like reading a news article about this rabbi in Los Angeles, who I’m going to tell you how I remember it. I’m not saying it’s exactly what you said. I remember reading that you said something along the lines of, you don’t need to believe that Exodus happened historically exactly the way that the Exodus said it did to still feel the magic of Passover.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes.
Mijal: And that was like, that went viral back then before things went really–
Rabbi Wolpe: That’s going to be on my eulogy. I’ll give you the very abbreviated version, which is, it was Pesach. And I said, look, we make historical claims and historical claims are different from theological claims. Theological claims are God exists. Historical claims are, this happened, in this place, at this time.
And now that we have a state of Israel and we can actually do archaeology, we have a much better idea of what parts of the Tanakh align and what don’t, and the Tanakh doesn’t view history the same way we do. And so you don’t have to believe that this is a literal historical account. Actually, a huge article had just appeared by a bunch of archaeologists saying, look, this is not, which every modern archaeologist agrees, if they’re not influenced by religious considerations.
And I wanted to say, but I want you to know when you hear this, it doesn’t matter. Well, some people thought it mattered. And so to this day, every Pesach, people will say things like, why should you celebrate this holiday if you don’t believe that this happened?
Mijal: And what do you tell them?
Rabbi Wolpe: What I tell them is, it depends how they say it, but what I tell them essentially is that you don’t have to believe that 600,000 men stood at Sinai to believe that the Torah has a divine origin. And you don’t have to believe that the sea split the way it’s described to believe that in every generation, God liberates Jews. What I said to the congregation is, look, it happened in your generation. Persian Jews in 1980, by the tens of thousands, maybe by the hundreds of thousands, escaped an evil dictator.
Someone once described a myth as something that never happened but is always happening. And I feel like the point of the Torah is not to give you specific historical information. It is to tell you how to orient yourself in the world and what the spiritual truths are that matter to us. And are there historical kernels to much of it? And is some of it historically true?
Yeah, I wrote a book about King David. I think a lot of the King David story is pretty detailed and therefore, in different ways, most likely is based on some kind of historical fact. But I don’t take it as, I don’t take everything that is recounted in the Torah as literally historically true.
Mijal: Yeah, it’s interesting. What you’re saying reminds me of something that Meir Buzaglo says. He’s a Mizrahi philosopher in Israel who does, he’s a professor and he does work on like mathematics, but then he writes about faith on the side. And he speaks about an additional approach to faith, which is both similar and different than what you just presented, in which you don’t even ask, is this truth or false? That’s almost like the wrong question. For him, it’s like, did I receive this from people that I listen to what they’re telling me in a special way?
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes.
Mijal: Did my ancestors share this with me as something they want to give to me?
Rabbi Wolpe: I think that we inherited in a way that wasn’t ultimately good for us, the idea that religion is an agreement with certain propositions. And that’s never what Judaism was. Judaism was a pattern of life.
Mijal: Right.
Rabbi Wolpe: That was what really mattered, was, are you part of the community? Do you support the community? Do you have behaviors that are consonant with the community?
And we didn’t have a catechism. You didn’t have to say, I believe this, and I believe that, and I believe that. It was really, I mean, I think to some extent it was Rambam who decided, you know, there’s a modern actually account of all this. Menachem Kelner wrote a book, Does A Jew Have to Believe Anything.
Mijal: What’s the quick answer? Yes, no, maybe?
Rabbi Wolpe: Depends.
Mijal: Okay.
Rabbi Wolpe: It depends on who you listen to. I mean, there are some obviously Rambam thought so. There are certain things that you have to believe–
Mijal: But he might not have thought we needed to ask people.
Rabbi Wolpe: But I don’t think he would have asked people. I think he would have assumed if you’re part of the community, you’re part of this. I think that’s how Judaism works best.
Mijal: Yeah. So let’s actually take this to a direction. I think right now in Passover, if you were to give this speech around faith and what happened, to be honest, I don’t think it would make a big splash right now.
Rabbi Wolpe: Right.
Mijal: Because I believe that the things that have become divisive right now are really different. So I know that one of the things that I’m hearing a lot about from people is saying, we’re having a seder, right? And we’re celebrating the story of Jewish people. And we are living in the wake of October 7th. And there’s all of these disagreements in Jewish families, in the holiday that is about the family and that is about our spiritual DNA as a people. And I think the main dividing line that I hear would be between, I want to say this loosely, like Zionists and non-Zionists or anti-Zionists, or in a different place it could be like, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, pro-Bibi, anti-you know, politics.
But I’m just curious, first of all, from a practical level, as a rabbi who’s pastored so many and counseled so many, what are your tips for how to do a seder in a way that doesn’t ignore the disagreements but doesn’t let them take over?
Rabbi Wolpe: I think it depends on your family and what the nature of the disagreement is. For some people, it will actually be wiser not to address it at the seder, because that’s the only way you’ll get through the seder without people leaving the table or screaming at each other. And I know certain families where the tensions are so deep that that’s the only way they could have a seder.
For others, I think, it’s probably useful at some point during the Seder to have people just say what they believe without arguing.
Mijal: Just like naming.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes, just to be able to listen to them. But I also, my question would be, what solidarity do you express with the Jewish people and how is that expressed?
And the reason I say it that way is, if the entirety of your approach to Judaism is to be an advocate for Palestinian rights, and I think that there are, if you look, for example, at JVP’s website, that’s basically their approach to Judaism is entirely interpreted through Palestinian rights, then I don’t understand any solidarity that you actually have with your people. So I would like to know, especially on Pesach, can you express what solidarity you have with the Jewish people?
In order for a viewpoint to be Jewish, that’s why I said Jewish Voices for Peace, in order for a viewpoint to be Jewish, it has to have Jewish interests and solidarity in it somewhere. And it cannot only interpret Jewish history through the lens of what another group or people has or hasn’t suffered.
Mijal: So I think you’re establishing, and I would argue Passover is the birth of this, is that solidarity, we’re not just a religion.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes.
Mijal: We don’t have just principles of faith. We actually need to have, now solidarity could look like different things, but there has to be solidarity to fellow Jews as part of what makes us sit around the table together.
Rabbi Wolpe: I think that that is both true and also something that the Ashkenazi world could learn better from the Sephardic world. Because, as I have seen in the Persian community as well, it is the, almost like the ani ma’amin, the fundamental principle, is not the coming of the Messiah, but that you have a tie to the Jewish world and to other Jews.
Mijal: Right, right. Does that mean then that there are certain voices or opinions that… are we drawing limits or boundaries around this other table?
Rabbi Wolpe: Drawing limits around a viewpoint that is Jewish, because views can be expressed by Jews without being Jewish viewpoints. So yes, I think in order to be a Jewish viewpoint, it has to have Jewish history, solidarity, peoplehood, as a part of that viewpoint.
Otherwise, it’s a viewpoint that’s expressed by a Jew. Like I could tell you, I think that Magnus Carlsen is a great chess player. That’s not a Jewish view. But that’s not a Jewish viewpoint. It’s just a viewpoint expressed by a Jew.
Mijal: I would know nothing about that. me. Yes, okay.
Rabbi Wolpe: Trust me.
Mijal: So let me read something to you. So Hannah, I hope I’m saying her name right, Hannah Einbinder, who’s a Jewish actress and comedian on a hit HBO show called Hacks, which I never heard of until I heard about her speech.
But she recently gave a speech at the Human Rights Council Awards Show denouncing Israel and its war in Gaza, and she cited her Jewish values, the ones she learned in Hebrew school. Specifically, she said she cited her Jewish values of asking questions and not shying away from her truth, you know, in the context of why she spoke to speak as a Jew. So how does what you just said about Jewish solidarity being the underpinning of Jewish values relate to something like this speech in which she spoke as a Jew and said that questioning things is what led her to speak in this way?
Rabbi Wolpe: Well, I mean, questioning things is a good thing.
Mijal: A good human thing, by the way, not a Jewish thing.
Rabbi Wolpe: I don’t object to it. Well, most values are human things. They may be Jewish values too. I mean, you know, kindness is a Jewish value. It’s also a human value. I actually think that asking questions is far too neutral an enterprise to be cited as the value that allows you to get up at a speech and speak, you know, against the Jewish state and most of the Jewish people. So I think she would have to do better than that. I would send her back to Hebrew school.
Mijal: Okay, or maybe rethink about how we do some things in Hebrew schools.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes, or maybe rethink the kind of Hebrew school education that we give.
Mijal: Yeah, speaking of education. We have four children at the seder, right? We speak about the wise one, right? The wicked one, the one who doesn’t know how to ask, and the one who’s, how do you say it in English? Innocent?
Rabbi Wolpe: Tam, simple.
Mijal: Yeah, simple, simple. Innocent. I’m just curious, what do you think about the Rasha? So Rasha, the wicked one, is one that kind of comes, according to the text that we read, basically, it’s like, what is this thing that you’re doing? And to me, by the way, what always stands out is that he doesn’t include, like, you know, it’s like what you’re doing. And then there’s like a very sharp response, right? Like, how do you say it English?
Rabbi Wolpe: That well, literally you you hit his teeth but that just means you rebuke him, what they write in in most of the Haggadot is, you rebuke him.
Mijal: Right. So what’s an example of a rasha at the seder table?
Rabbi Wolpe: So in our day, think anyone who does not feel themselves implicated in the Jewish, in what Soloveitchik called the two covenants, the covenant of history and the covenant of destiny. I think if you absent yourself from it, that is the modern equivalent of a rasha.
If you say, I think what Israel’s doing in Gaza is terrible, and I’m grieved by it, but of course, I support the existence of the state of Israel, and I just wish that it had a different government, was doing things a different way. I don’t have any problem—I mean, I may disagree with you or I may not, but I don’t have any problem with that. That’s certainly not a rasha. But if it’s what all of you people are doing, which is often the criticism, that’s absenting yourself from the Jewish people and that in our tradition has not gone well.
Mijal: Yeah, and again I think there’s something there you mentioned before. Sometimes when we speak of Judaism as a religion or as a faith, we forget how much we are actually part of a community.
Rabbi Wolpe: I always tell people about conversion, that Ruth doesn’t say, your God, she starts with your people will be my people and only at the very end does she say your God will be my God because conversion I’ve never, almost never had someone come to me and say I read Maimonides and now I want to be a Jew.
Mijal: It’s not intellectual, cerebral.
Rabbi Wolpe: No! They connect to Jewish people or they’re going to get married to a Jew and they enter a Jewish family and so on. And the truth is the Jews are a sociological as well as a theological phenomenon, right? And that’s one of the reasons that we have all the contention inside of Judaism is because we don’t all believe the same thing and we’re not all expected to believe the same thing.
So I don’t know whether this will come out before or after it’s published, but the site Torah.com asked a bunch of people, what ushpizin would you bring to the Pesach seder–-
Mijal: They’re mixing holidays up.
Rabbi Wolpe: They’re mixing holidays up! I actually wrote back originally a Sukkot thing and they said, no, you didn’t read this. This is for Pesach. And so that means who in Jewish history would you bring? And I chose Elisha Ben Abuya–
Mijal: Hmm.
Rabbi Wolpe: who was the only rabbi that left the Jewish tradition and went to Rome, because I wanted him to come back and see that Rome is gone and there’s still a seder. And I thought maybe he’d be a good ambassador to tell people. But the reason he is so unique as a Talmudic rabbi is not because he disagreed or argued or any of those things, but because he left. And that’s the one thing you’re not allowed to do in our tradition is to leave.
Mijal: By the way, that’s a great activity for the seder, to go around and ask which historical figure would you like to be at the seder with us right now.
Rabbi Wolpe: It is, yeah.
Mijal: Let me ask you a question, just another really big contemporary issue right now in 2025. And I’m also asking, you have been a very public figure in the fight against antisemitism. You were identified for a long time with what was happening at Harvard and then leaving very publicly Harvard. And there is a moment in the seder that I always struggle with, which is when we say in every generation they stand up against us, destroy us. And my struggle is because on the one hand it rings true, on the other hand I kind of like hate that we say it because we expect that it’s going to be true every year. And then I’m like, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’m telling my kids in five years, we’re going to say it as well? So like, how are you approaching that sentence this year?
Rabbi Wolpe: What’s interesting is you know, when someone asks you a question, in your mind you think where they’re going to go. And I thought you were going to say, I have trouble with shefoch chamatcha.
Mijal: We can go there next year.
Rabbi Wolpe: When you open the door and you say, may You pour out your wrath on them. And what I think of is, and I used to tell, I mean, I’ve written about this, is first of all, you’re asking God to pour out God’s wrath on the nations that have done terrible things to Israel. We’re not saying we’re gonna do it.
And second, I always thought of it as a tribute to generations that had suffered terribly. And there I was in Philadelphia living a good life and I wanted to pay honor to their emotions of anger and vengeance as well as their emotions of pain.
But your question is actually a tougher one.
Mijal: Oh, okay. Which is around antisemitism.
Rabbi Wolpe: Which is, do you anticipate that this will never go away? And it’s almost like when the Torah says that the poor will always be with us, which is also a painful thought. Really, we can never overcome this. And so I suppose the way I think of it is that there might come a day when that’s a historical relic.
Mijal: You think so?
Rabbi Wolpe: I hope so.
Mijal: You hope so.
Rabbi Wolpe: I’m sort of hopeful by disposition.
Mijal: You sure you’re a Jew?
Rabbi Wolpe: In the way Rabbi Sacks talked about it. I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful. The distinction, as you well know, that hope is something that you can actively try to bring about. Optimism is just everything’s going to be fine. I have a little bit of the optimism gene too, I must admit.
But in the meantime, I think that it’s actually, especially given what we’ve just seen, it’s actually important as a spur to vigilance. Because when I grew up, I really thought that I was living in a world in which antisemitism was gradually disappearing. And I was obviously ridiculously naive and I think the seder was trying to tell me so.
Mijal: How do we make sure we don’t go the other way, which is, see antisemitism everywhere, and really become almost like, you know, like self-fulfilling prophecy? And not be able to strategically then take it on?
Rabbi Wolpe: Right, which is a real danger and it’s hard because you and I both know that when you go negative, people pay attention.
Mijal: Yes social media is complicated.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes, but not only that. If you want to give a drash on a Shabbos morning and you want to make sure that people are paying attention to you, you don’t talk about Shabbos. You talk about antisemitism.
Mijal: I have to learn more tricks from you.
Rabbi Wolpe: Always go with antisemitism. And so it’s enormously don’t see antisemitism where it doesn’t exist, because then we have no credibility to call it out where it does. And also there’s enough genuine antisemitism, we don’t have to invent it. So that’s why I think that we have to be sometimes more careful than we have been.
And this is why also I tell people I will not entertain any analogies to World War II or Nazis or Hitler, because only the Nazis were Nazis. And as soon as you start comparing other people to the worst catastrophe in human history, you’ve trivialized your argument. People just have to learn a little bit more history. There are a lot of other people in Jewish history, sadly, that you can compare today’s antisemites to.
Mijal: Yeah. So again, there’s so many, I think, questions that we’re going to have this year that people are going to read some parts of the Haggadah that will resonate differently this year than other years.
Another part that I’ve been wondering about is, when we read the 10 plagues, right, which are the 10 plagues that God meted out, am I saying it right?
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes.
Mijal: Meted out. Meted out upon the Egyptians, we take wine and we drop a little bit as a form of actually representing our mourning and to say, I’m going to say it in my own modern words, there were a lot of innocent Egyptians who were caught in this. What can we learn from that today as war continues in Gaza? We’re also recording this in the wake of some strong protests by people of Gaza against Hamas who have just just bring to home the tragedy of so many individuals who are like caught in this hell and who are suffering. So what’s a way that we can take this on?
Rabbi Wolpe: I think that it is entirely appropriate to express compassion for the innocent suffering in Gaza, just like you would express compassion for the innocent suffering in Sudan. I don’t understand the idea that that is antisemitic or that’s bad or that’s wrong. Even if you don’t want to express compassion for adults who are caught in the crossfire, although I would for many, what about the children? The children are children. And it’s almost equivalent to the 10th plague, which is, this is what happened for Israel to be free, but do you not have compassion for the children who were killed? And so I think that that’s an appropriate thing to incorporate in a seder, but I also would say to people it’s appropriate to incorporate other suffering of other peoples around the world.
That’s part of the problem that Israel suffers from in terms of a double standard is it is the only conflict where people feel there are moral stakes over and over and over and over again. And I don’t think that we as Jews should make that mistake.
Mijal: Right. Although we could say that for us as Jews to focus on what’s happening in Israel and Gaza, that might make sense.
Rabbi Wolpe: Makes sense, but I still think if you’re going to express compassion for innocent suffering, that you can show that you have wider compassion than Israel and Gaza alone.
Mijal: And I’m actually afraid that we are developing compassion fatigue from a different perspective, which is that, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, we’re going into Passover knowing that it’s the second Passover we’re celebrating where there’s still over two dozen living hostages in Gaza.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes.
Mijal: Plus, you many others that have been murdered. And, you know, I kept thinking this whole year, by Passover they’ll be out. And we’ll be able to really celebrate Passover fully knowing that they are out. And unfortunately, everything that we’re seeing suggests that it’s not going to be the case. So what can we do to really keep this top of mind and top of heart?
Rabbi Wolpe: So the point of Passover is, in every generation, you should remember that you could have gone forth from Egypt. In other words, empathy. What was it really like to go out of Egypt? What is it like to wander across a desert? I mean, we see that the Israelites rebel again and again and again, but it’s also a miserable and difficult life. If we don’t have some kind of empathy knowing that we can’t possibly imagine what it is, any more than we can imagine what it is to be one of the families whose hostages or relatives were killed on October 7th or after.
You have to try to have that historical and also that contemporary empathy and really take a moment, maybe a moment of silence at each Seder to just remember that there are people in this living hell day after day and now, I won’t say year after year, but certainly after a year. And recall that the whole purpose of having a state of Israel was that there should be a place, our homeland, where Jews were safe. And that that was, you know, it was a crashing of the Zionist dream on that day.
And especially on the holiday that is the birth, in some ways, of the Zionist dream, which is Pesach, we have to remember them in whatever way we can and offer up whatever prayers we can and hope, somehow, that somehow we will find a way to unravel this knot and bring them home.
Mijal: Yeah, and I would just encourage everybody, like you were saying, to make sure that we go into the Seder prepared to remember and to think about this. One of the things that we are going to do is like leave a chair for a hostage. I’m finding ways to speak to my children who are young about this as part of the Seder table. And I think that we can, almost in the same way that the rabbis back then constructed the Haggadah, for all of us to have a script that would inspire more stories that we need to add to it in every generation, the new stories that we have.
Rabbi Wolpe: And we did that for a while for Soviet Jews. People used to have an extra chair for the Soviet Jews when I was growing up.
Mijal: Right.
Rabbi Wolpe: And we kept them in mind until they were free, God willing.
Mijal: Right. Rabbi, I’m just going to ask one last question. You spoke before about being a man not only of faith, but also of hope. If you were sharing a hopeful idea that you hope people take with them into Passover under Seder table, what would that be?
Rabbi Wolpe: So I think that the idea that we’re celebrating a seder thousands of years later, there is nothing more hopeful than the very existence of the seder and the fact that people are still finding new and deeper meanings in the seder year after year and new Haggadot are still being published year after year.
And we were at a trip at one point where we saw the Arch of Titus and they were carrying the menorah from the temple. And I thought, if you had said to anybody at that time, you know, in a couple thousand years, long after Rome is forgotten, long after Latin isn’t spoken anymore, some Jews who speak Hebrew are gonna walk by the Arch of Titus and look at it and remember that that was their menorah, nobody would have believed you. It would have been a pipe dream.
Mijal: Laughable.
Rabbi Wolpe: Yes, it’s a joke. It’s just like I don’t remember who first said this but when you walk downtown city, you’ll never meet a Hittite. And the fact that you meet a Jew who is a relic of antiquity, but also more than a relic, a living breathing example of an ancient people. If that’s not miraculous and that doesn’t give you some Spark that there’s kadosh baruch hu, I can’t imagine what would, because by all rights we shouldn’t be here.
tell people all the time. When people say that Jews are here because they were persecuted, I explain that most persecuted people have done what you’re supposed to do if you’re persecuted, which is disappear.
Mijal: Right.
Rabbi Wolpe: The only reason that people know we were persecuted is because we actually are still here. so living in an age where there is an Israel, for all the problems that Israel has, is a privilege that thousands of years of Jews would, actually did dream of, so we’re living the dream.
Mijal: Beautiful. I think it’s like a toss up, which is the greater miracle, that God took us out of Egypt or that we keep telling the story today.
Rabbi Wolpe: Beautiful.
Mijal: We always finish our episode by just asking like, what? Some of the things that we took from our conversation. There’s so much that I’m taking. I’m thinking a lot about Jewish solidarity as an underpinning for the Jewish story. And I’m thinking also, Rabbi, about your charge to not have like limits to empathy, but to really be able to take that out.
And I also just the last word you just shared about us being actually like a symbol of hope is really very powerful.
Rabbi Wolpe: And I want to say that I learned the meaning, the personal meaning of Pesach from a non-Jew. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, was very influential in his life. And once he told her he was in a hurry, and she said, hurry is for slaves. And I thought, that’s why the matzah is the symbol of Pesach.
Why matzah of all the symbols that you could have chosen? Because to be able to have time, that is to be free. And we, in an age where our time is controlled by technology and demands and so on, to be able to take the time to have a seder, that in and of itself is an expression of freedom, for which we should be very grateful.
Mijal: Beautiful. Yeah, and which we can all choose to take on.
Rabbi Wolpe: That’s right.