This year we celebrate an unusual Passover, the most terrible Exodus in our generation. The eighty years that have passed since the last war have accustomed us to comfort, peace, and security. To medicine, which has learned to save more or less from everything. To a cheerful, colorful world, arranged with reason. To the pharaoh - liberal, as much as possible. Of course, he built his pyramids, but it was possible to live. And then the Lord embittered the pharaoh's heart. And it began... Suddenly there was no peace, no city, no home. Death and war returned to us from the past. Suddenly it became necessary to get up in the middle of the night, throw away property and roof, run under shelling to nowhere, grabbing the most important things: children, parents, a dog, and a package of documents. Remember the dough that did not have time to rise before dawn? It is again baked into a dry cake by a fierce fire. Matzah, the bitter bread of our poverty… And then – Exodus. How scary it must be to enter from the solid shore to the bottom of the sea that has parted! How scary to the point of fainting, to the point of nausea, to overcome this slippery, bumpy, strewn with fragments and debris road in the dark, carrying in your arms children who are silent with horror, encouraging old parents who cry for the abandoned comfort. How cold, Lord, how cold it is to walk along the bottom of this endless night. To walk, looking at the walls of dark water held back by an unknown force, through which monsters so terrifying that they have never dreamed of before stare at you with empty eyes. To walk, not knowing how long this corridor will last in the middle of the merciless sea, how much time it will take to reach that shore. And you can’t not walk. Behind, behind, the chariots of Pharaoh's army rumble, the sky is ablaze with their arrows, the air is buzzing with the roar of their trumpets. We must go, go out ourselves and lead our people out. Because sometimes we don't choose freedom, but it chooses us. But in every exit, God goes among the crowd of frightened, wounded, utterly confused refugees. And when the last of those leaving steps onto the safe shore, God will turn around, and at his glance the waters will crash onto Pharaoh's chariots, and a heavy wave, saltier than blood, will close over them. And spring will come again, and the future will come. As it was written long ago. As we read to children on the evening of the Seder, on the holiday of freedom, on the most important night of every year, and this one especially. And Pharaoh, what is Pharaoh? Pharaoh also read the Haggadah. He knows how everything will end. He understands everything perfectly. About his rivers that have become blood. About the terrible ulcers that are exhausting his people. About the rain of sulfur and stones, about poisonous frogs, about predatory animals, about the dead firstborns who will be mourned in every house. He knows. But he decided to take a risk anyway. Although it is clear to the blind that it is impossible to steal freedom from those with whom God is. Even when there is so much fear and so little choice, it goes in a crowd again and again across the vast sea, and a pillar of light goes ahead, so that we all have time to get out from under the power of darkness.
It was at this time that we celebrated the Seder Pesach in the women's group of the Kesher Project in the city of Khmelnytsky. After all, we cannot lose this connection under any conditions or circumstances. On the contrary, right now we must strengthen it and bring closer our Victory over darkness and the Kremlin's filthy pharaoh.
