Parashat Chola Hamoed Pesach: Ma nishtana? What makes this Passover different from all other Passovers?

Every year at Passover we sit around the table, dressed in our finest clothing, and we tell a story with a hopeful ending: we were oppressed, God redeemed us, we left Egypt on our way to freedom, and with successes and failures, with fears and certainties, we walked through the wilderness until we reached the land of our ancestors. 

But this Passover — like the Passovers of 2024 and 2025 — carries a bitterness deeper than the maror we taste so that we never forget the bitterness of Egypt. Bitterer than the heart of the lettuce, which reminds us how life can move from sweetness and abundance on the outer leaves toward the sharp bitterness hidden at the core.

During the past two Passovers we placed an empty chair, a yellow ribbon, and special words at our table. Remembering our ancient redemption, we prayed for the release of the hostages taken on October 7. We believed that this Passover we would once again claim the right to celebrate the end of the nightmare — the return of the living and the comfort of being able to bring home also the bodies of the dead.

But that did not happen.

Another year passes, and it is still not so.

This year I will take the matzah and break it during Yachatz, the fourth step of the Haggadah. I will explain that we break it because one part is hidden, to be searched for later as the Afikoman. We break it while saying:

Ha Lachma Anya — This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.

But tonight I want to suggest another tense for that broken piece of bread:

Ha Lachma Anya — This is the bread of affliction that our people are eating now.

It is eaten by those who suffer through war once again.

By those who are persecuted simply for living their identity in cities around the world.

By those who live in fear of the consequences of the war of information and hatred.

Bread of affliction — not because it is flat or poor or without flavor, but because what afflicts us most is the brokenness itself: as we are, as the world is, as our people are — fractured and divided.

And in the face of that brokenness, I feel the need to heal it. I will ask the Afikoman to allow me to search not only for a hidden piece, but for a whole matzah — united, restored, healed. Or at least to help gather every fragment into the bag we carry in our search. Because even in disagreement, we have learned over two thousand years to remain a people, walking together while scattered across distant lands.

Perhaps the prize we seek is not a material gift, but the restoration of the dignity we once achieved when we chose freedom and embraced the promise that made us a people. That dignity is what unites us and allows us to stand firm against the forces that threaten us.

At this moment, the teachings of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who in 1922 wrote his seminal work I and Thou, offer a profound light to help us understand what it means to be broken — and what it means to heal.

Buber taught that there are two fundamental ways we relate to others. One is the relationship of I–It, when we treat another person as an object — something to use, measure, control, or discard. An object without face or story.

But there is another way: the relationship of I–Thou. In this encounter, the other is no longer a thing among things. No longer a number, a tool, or an obstacle. In the I–Thou relationship, we meet the heart and soul of another human being.

We often feel more comfortable in the world of the It, because it offers security and demands little commitment. But the price of that comfort is high — the loss of our humanity.

The story of slavery in Egypt begins precisely there.

When Pharaoh decided to limit the growth of the children of Israel, he commanded the Hebrew midwives:

“When you attend the Hebrew women at childbirth… if it is a son, you shall put him to death; if it is a daughter, she shall live.”

To the tyrant, his subjects were not people. They were numbers. Labor. Economic resources. An It.

Every system of oppression begins when someone stops seeing a Thou and begins seeing only an It.

Buber came to understand this not only as philosophy, but as painful personal experience. It is told that when a young student came to him with a heartbreaking dilemma — whether to serve in the army during World War I or refuse on grounds of conscience — Buber, absorbed in his own thoughts, failed to listen deeply enough to the young man’s anguish. A few days later, overwhelmed and alone, the student took his own life.

The guilt Buber felt for failing to see in that young man a Thou, rather than a distraction, moved him to write I and Thou.

That story reminds us that slavery does not begin with chains or bricks. It begins when the heart hardens and stops recognizing the face of another.

Perhaps that is why the generation that left Egypt struggled so deeply to trust the redeeming God. After generations of being treated as It, their souls had begun to rust. Their hearts, worn down by dehumanization, struggled to believe again in the possibility of relationship.

And perhaps today, when we break the matzah, we are acknowledging that very danger: the danger of turning one another into fragments, into objects, into enemies.

So again we ask:

Ma nishtaná? What will be different?

What will be different is this:

We celebrate as an act of resistance.

The smile, the song, the joy, and the preservation of our traditions are the strongest antidotes to fragmentation and despair. Every act of genuine encounter — every moment in which we see another as a Thou — becomes a fragment of matzah restored to wholeness.

Searching for the Afikoman is not only a child’s game.

It is the search for the possibility of seeing one another again as a people, as human beings, capable of recognizing dignity in one another.

It is the search for healing.

Shabbat Shalom veChag Mevorach — May this be a festival touched by blessing.

Rabbi Gustavo Geier