Do we remember ourselves in the week after October 7? Do we remember the promises we made to ourselves? Do we remember how quickly it became clear to us that what had been could not continue? Do we remember swearing to find a new path, to rise and shake off the dysfunction that was plain to see, to abandon the rotten assumptions at the foundation? Do we remember saying, in every conversation, that we needed a fundamental change, that the entire system had to be overhauled?
That memory has faded, but it has not disappeared. Its fading accompanies Israel's current campaign against Iran and the Hezbollah terrorist organization. Because alongside the successes on the battlefield, the rare partnership and understanding with the US, and the resilience of the home front, we also keep encountering, at every turn, the things we pledged to change and did not change, the things we wanted to achieve and did not achieve.
We remember what we declared, in a rare moment of clarity and immense pain. And we know that if we do not eradicate the false rhetoric, the fake view of reality, the arrogance, the evasion of responsibility, the absence of strategy hiding behind a drunken sense of power, the promises handed out freely and never kept, the constant attempt to undermine trust rather than build it, then we have done nothing at all.
Sharpening the memory
And we still encounter all these ills around us at every moment. At the top of the government and political leadership, in the army's leadership, in the media, in online discourse. And every time one of these evils rises before us, it stings, sharpening that old memory, that old promise.
That weighs on us. It clouds the successes against Iran. It settles in our consciousness as the battle to destroy the Hezbollah terrorist organization advances. It casts a shadow over the historic moment now approaching. Because the true historic moment will not come with the destruction of an external enemy of the Jewish people, important as that may be. That moment is internal. It is ours. It depends on us.
Today, millions of Jews in Israel and around the world will gather around the Passover Seder table, from Dimona and Avivim to Sydney, Los Angeles and Kyiv. The guiding principle of the Haggadah is to begin with disgrace and end with praise. Not only as a textual structure, but as a matter of consciousness. One cannot skip over the disgrace, but one must not remain trapped in it.
Stuck in the middle
And we, it seems, are stuck in the middle. We were in disgrace, deep, painful, destabilizing. We looked at it without blinking, at least for a moment. But the move to praise, not the praise of military victory or diplomatic achievement, but that of inner repair, of building new foundations, of truth replacing pretense, that transition has not yet happened.
In the Haggadah, praise is not only release from bondage. It is also a change in consciousness. It is the ability to tell a different story about yourself, not as a reaction to a threat, but as a definition of who you are. And that is the moment now before us. Not whether we defeat the Hezbollah terrorist organization, and not whether we defeat Iran. All these things are critical to our survival here, but they are not the story. They are the conditions that make the story possible.
The real story will be written the moment we decide to move from disgrace to praise, when responsibility once again becomes a condition for leadership rather than a recommendation, when truth stops appearing only in moments of crisis and becomes a method, when memory ceases to be vague and once again becomes binding. If we fail to make that transition, we will be left with the journey out of bondage, but without the redemption of freedom.
