Pessach 2026: That Big Space in Between

We are entering this holiday in what people have started to call an “emergency routine.”

It is an oxymoron, but a very accurate one.

There is, in some sense, a routine. People are working, meetings are happening, kids are playing video games and attending bar and bat mitzvot. But nothing about this routine feels stable. 

Nights are interrupted by sirens, sometimes two or three times, and sleep is fragmented in a way that slowly wears you down. Children are not really in school; they are on Zoom, as they were during Covid—and one might assume that practice would have helped. It didn’t. It is still just as chaotic, only now we are less surprised. Even something as simple as a playdate at the park is no longer simple. It is planned around proximity to a shelter.

Life continues, but it does not feel like life as it should be. It is no longer the acute shock of the first days, but it is also far from normal life. It is something in between; structured, but unsettled; functioning, but fragile.

When we arrive at the Seder, we tend to tell a very simple story. Slavery then redemption. From oppression to freedom. 

But the Torah itself tells a much more complex story. If the goal were simply to leave Egypt and arrive in the Land of Israel, the journey could have been short. Instead, the Torah stretches out the middle and returns to it again and again.

That middle is the desert; forty years long, which has led more than one person to suggest that perhaps Moshe simply didn’t want to ask for directions.

But the joke only works because the question is real. Why so long?

Already at the moment of leaving, the Torah hints at the answer (Exodus 13:17):  “וְלֹא־נָחָם אֱלֹקִים דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ פְּלִשְׁתִּים כִּי קָרוֹב הוּא… פֶּן־יִנָּחֵם הָעָם… וְשָׁבוּ מִצְרָיְמָה.” “God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near… lest the people change their mind…and return to Egypt.”

A people can physically leave slavery and still not yet be able to sustain freedom. Leaving is an event. Living with what comes after is something else entirely.

The Ramban, in his introduction to Sefer Shemot, sharpens this point. He explains that the redemption from Egypt is not complete at the moment of departure. Even after leaving, the people are still in a kind of exile, wandering, ungrounded, not yet living in a state of stability and presence. Redemption is not defined by exit, but by arrival into a different kind of life. And that takes time.

If that is true, then the desert is not a delay. It is the work. And the Torah describes that work with remarkable honesty. Again and again, the people express a desire to return. 

“נִתְּנָה רֹאשׁ וְנָשׁוּבָה מִצְרָיְמָה.” “Let us return to Egypt.”

 “זָכַרְנוּ אֶת־הַדָּגָה…” “We remember what we had there.” 

Not because Egypt was good, but because it was known. Because it had structure. Because uncertainty, even when it carries the promise of something better, is deeply destabilizing.

The Sfat Emet teaches that Mitzrayim is not only a place, but a condition of meitzar, of narrowness, that exists in every generation, which is why leaving Egypt is not a one-time event but an ongoing process. And that is why this exodus is something we evoke daily. To recognize the ongoing movement from narrowness into expansiveness. That movement is not immediate. A person, or a people, can leave a narrow place and still carry that narrowness within them.

And this is where something deeper becomes visible. The desert is not only unstable. It is also too early.

In psychology, growth after trauma does not come from the event itself, but from the ability to process it: to face it, integrate it, and allow it to reshape you. But that process has its own timing. It cannot be rushed. There are moments when the full weight of what has happened is simply too much to hold.

There are moments when the full weight of what has happened is simply too much to hold. In those moments, the mind does something necessary: it creates distance. It deflects. It uses humor. It focuses on what needs to be done next. It pushes certain things aside; not because they are unimportant, but because engaging them fully would be destabilizing.

This is not denial. It is survival.

Only later, when there is enough stability, can deeper processing begin. Only then can something like growth emerge.

Seen through this lens, the desert takes on an additional meaning. It is not only the space between slavery and freedom; it is the space in which a people is not yet ready to fully process what it has lived through. Egypt is too recent, too raw, too overwhelming. And so the people oscillate; moving forward, then looking back; expressing hope, then fear; stepping into freedom and retreating from it.

Not every stage of the journey is meant for processing. Some stages are meant for surviving long enough to be able to process later.

Perhaps this is also part of what we are living now. There is pain that we have not yet fully processed; and perhaps cannot yet fully process. To do so, in the middle of what is still unfolding, might weaken our ability to continue. And so we build routines, even if they are fragile. We focus on what needs to be done. We make space for humor, even when it feels out of place. We keep moving.

This is where the Haggadah’s formulation becomes especially powerful: “בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים.” In every generation, a person must see themselves as if they left Egypt. 

Most years, this is an act of imagination. This year, it feels like recognition. We are not in Egypt. But we are not yet in a place that feels like full freedom. We are in between.

Some are calling this war a second war of independence. And beyond the phrase itself, there is something true in what it is trying to capture. Independence is not achieved at the moment of leaving Egypt. It is achieved when a people becomes capable of sovereignty, not only surviving, but living with dignity and shaping its own reality.

A sovereign nation does not simply adapt to a life in which missiles fall regularly and call that normal. It does not organize its children’s lives around shelters and accept that as a permanent condition. At some point, it says: this is not how we are meant to live.

And something is shifting. A generation born here does not experience Israel as one stop in a long history of exile. For them, this is home in the deepest sense. And when something is truly home, the threshold for what is acceptable shifts. The question is no longer how to endure, but how to live.

Rav Kook, in Orot, describes the return to the Land of Israel not as a moment of escape, but as a return to full national life, with all the responsibility that it entails. Building a society, holding power, and shaping a collective life. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks later calls this “difficult freedom,” a form of freedom that is not defined by what we are released from, but by what we are called to build.

And that brings us back to the desert. The desert is where this capacity is formed, slowly and unevenly, through disorientation, uncertainty, and the long uncomfortable process of becoming.

So when we sit at the Seder this year and say that we are obligated to see ourselves as if we left Egypt, perhaps we can hear it not only as a return to the beginning of the story, but as an invitation to locate ourselves within it.

We are no longer where we were. But we are not yet where we are meant to be.

And that space in between, in the desert, is not a pause in the story. It is where the story is being written.