Passover 2022: Next Year in Kyiv

by David H. Schanzer

Each spring, just as the blush begins to appear on the trees with the promise of a fresh start and renewal, Jews gather with family and friends to remember and celebrate our flight from oppression many millennia ago.

Unfortunately, as old as the story is, virtually every year, parallels are far too easily drawn between the days of Moses and the Pharaoh and modern times. Both tyranny and yearning to be free are endemic to the human condition. The clash between them will forever be our shared history.

History, however, has its many odd twists and turns, and none more so than this year. In the Ukraine which centuries ago witnessed bloody pogroms, oppression and virulent antisemitism, a modern Jewish Moses has arisen and is hearkening the call for freedom with clarity the world so desperately needs to hear.

The horrific war we have witnessed for the past seven weeks is very much the same conflict we recount during Passover — Ukrainians strive for freedom, Russia is using mass violence to oppress them.

And like unmistakable cruelty and injustice of Egyptian slavery over the Jews, there is no doubt, where justice lies in this modern conflict.

No amount of propaganda and misinformation can the blur unmistakable truth. Ukraine is a sovereign nation with full independence from Russia. This has been so not since 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved into thin air, but since 1945, when Ukraine was one of the 51 sovereign nations that formed the United Nations with a full vote equivalent to that of every other member state. Ukraine has a right to be free.

The people of Ukraine have been seeking the freedom to economically integrate with the West since as early as 1994 but have been stymied by the power and influence of Russia and the modern Pharaoh, Vladimir Putin.

Just as the Egyptian Pharoah could not allow a cadre of Jews to escape bondage as doing so would undermine the foundation of slavery, Putin deeply fears allowing the people of Ukraine to integrate with the West, because a successful westernized Ukraine would expose the failures of Putin’s corrupt authoritarianism to the Russian people.

Ukrainians openly cried out “Let My People Go” in Maidan Square in 2014, with many martyred for the cause and have been marching steadily toward a more democratic, more prosperous future since then.

But tragically, there has been no divided Red Sea through which Ukraine could escape to the West, or waves of salt water that could coming crashing upon the Russian Army. The fleeing Jews ultimately did not have to fight for their freedom, but today, the battle between tyranny and freedom has been joined in the heart of Europe.

The modern Moses, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has become more of warrior than the ancient Moses ever had to be. His small Army’s success and personal determination has inspired a world that has too often in recent years seen many modern-day Pharaohs rise to power and too many forces of oppression reign victorious.

As we celebrate our annual ritual of human freedom, we need to ask ourselves, at this time of great peril, what are our obligations as citizens of the modern world, and as Jews.

We cannot simply read about and rejoice in our escape from Egypt and then close the Haggadah until next spring.

As Jews who “once were strangers in the land of Egypt,” we must always be a voice for the oppressed.

This means speaking out and supporting the efforts of America and its allies to fund and equip Ukraine’s armed forces and giving money to aid the people of Ukraine who are risking their lives to form a people’s army against Russia’s tanks and missiles.

We need to help the less fortunate, here and around the globe, absorb the economic hardship resulting from this horrible war and the sanctions being imposed to weaken the oppressive Russian state.

We should applaud and support the countries and families who are sheltering massive numbers of refugees in Europe and urge the U.S. government to admit more refugees from Ukraine and other conflict zones around the world.

We need to help support those refugees who arrive on our shores to build a new life here in America. We must “love him as yourself” as God has commanded, and fight against the forces of xenophobia in our country that too often are directed against “the stranger who sojourns” with us.

And at our Seder tables, we pray for God to look over those striving for freedom in Ukraine and all over the world, as God did for the Jews in escaping slavery through the Egyptian desert.

So, with freedom on the line more than at any time in most of our lifetimes, this Passover, we adjust our traditional aspiration that next year will bring us to the universal, beloved city of Jerusalem and instead say:

B’shana habahah b’Kyiv — Next year in Kyiv.

B’shana habahah nochal l’hiot chofsheem — Next year may we all be free.