The Elephant on Our Seder Plates

Note: Every Jew Instantly Knows the Identity of the Elephant

At my two seders we were all keenly and painfully aware that in addition to the Lamb Bone, Roasted Egg, Parsley, Charoset, Bitter Herb, Horseradish and the Matzah, there was an invisible item.

There was an Elephant, by which I mean the toll on all our souls of the death and destruction in Gaza. It’s in our hearts. It’s on our minds. Too often we shrink in fear of confronting our terrible discomfort. We are afraid of blowing up the Seder because we know how controversial and fraught our feelings are. Still, we must talk. We must think. We must share.

We are comfortable recounting our own pain—the unfairness and horror that have been perpetrated against us. We tell our story from being enslaved in Egypt to being pursued across the Red Sea. Usually, we stop the story when we get to the Jordan River and the taking of Canaan. We therefore skip Exodus 34:14, when God ordered, “Ye shall destroy their altars, break their idols, and cut down their groves.”

We usually have a Holocaust memorial section in our modern Haggadahs where we commemorate the tragedy of the Shoah and the hate that destroyed 6 million Jews in an attempt to destroy Judaism. We mourn their deaths, and we celebrate the Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives and the lives of their families to hide Jews. We wonder at their courage.

Yet many of us are wary about acknowledging the suffering and deaths in Gaza. We tend to start and stop with the horrors of October 7 and how Hamas killed, raped, burned, kidnapped, tortured, held and still hold Jews hostage. We fear, oh hell, we know that bringing this up will start debates at best, arguments almost surely, and we fear that it will cause real fights and splits in our families.

We know that Jewish opinion is divided. There are those who justify all violence in Gaza as deserved because of October 7. Others hold that the fighting and animus didn’t begin on Oct 7 but at Israel’s creation, or the Jewish immigration post WWII or the immigration that came from the rampant anti-Semitism in Europe—from the Middle Ages until today. Wherever one marks as the starting point—even all the way back to Ishmael—October 7^th changed everything for Israeli Jews and the Diaspora. Optimism and hope were shattered. Hearts were broken. Rage was natural. But now what to feel is the question?

We are often afraid of being called self-hating Jews if we pay too much attention to the suffering of Gazans, even if the program of Hamas is the total destruction of Israel. We are also afraid of what inevitably comes into the hearts and minds of Jews at Passover when we read that “God hardened Pharoah’s heart,” and wonder at the armor many of us have constructed to protect, if not harden, our own hearts?

Is it self-hatred or lack of solidarity with the Jewish people, the victims of October 7 and the families of the hostages to weep at the suffering of the Gazans? The Jewish Talmud: Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b, answers this question by recounting that as the Egyptians were drowning in the Red Sea, the Angels were celebrating by singing. God rebuked the Angels by saying “How dare you sing for joy when My creatures are dying?”

In this we are taught that war, violence and even killing may sometimes be necessary, however it is never appropriate to sing, dance or celebrate.

In this troubled season, the elephant is Gazan suffering and the propensity of many either to celebrate or minimalize it. Some would dismiss their suffering by holding that they hardened our hearts and blame the Gazans for their own suffering. Polling data from Gaza, as unreliable as it might be in fear of Hamas retribution, shows only 7% support of Hamas. In Israel 72.5% believe that Netanyahu ought to resign. (Times of Israel March 9, 2025).

The elephant is hard to acknowledge partly because of fear of fighting with each other, but mostly, I think, because both sides are without hope. Fifteen years ago, we could see a two-state solution. Yes, there were those, both Arabs and Jews, who didn’t support it. And yes, we didn’t know how to achieve it, but it was a common, if blurry, vision. Now virtually no one has even a blurry vision of what peace would look like. Any Israeli peace movement was broken on October 7, nor is there any meaningful belief in a two-state solution among the Gazans or the West Bank Arabs.

Yet, a one-state solution is unimaginable. The Arabs will not be able to drive the Jewish Israelis out of the land and into the sea. Nor will the Israelis be able to kill, subjugate or expel all the ethnic Arabs from Israel, the West Bank or Gaza. This is why, however unimaginable any vision might seem, we must not give up. In Proverbs (29:18) it says, "Without a vision, the people perish." We have no shared vision, and people are indeed perishing. It must stop. It will stop someday. Why not today?

What Hamas did and is doing has moved the Palestinian people away from having a state. The policies of Netanyahu are not moving Israel towards security or peace. The peacemakers have been marginalized while those who believe that peace can be achieved through violence seem to be carrying the day—a very dark day in my opinion. Israelis overwhelmingly prioritize freeing the hostages over war efforts. The fact is that only one living hostage has been rescued by the Israeli Defense Force. All others have come by negotiations during ceasefires.

The bottom line is this: The political leadership of both the Arabs and the Jews have failed to deliver in over 70 years of violent struggle and intermittent wars. It may be time to step back and let our tears bank the fierce fires of our rage. Let us weep not only for ourselves but for all who suffer. Let us not be slaves to ancient enmities and traditional hatreds. Let us try, yes with fear and trembling, to see and affirm our common pain and our common humanity. The Seder plate has bitter herbs, a lamb bone, salt water and sweetness. It’s time to banish the elephant by acknowledging it and then go on to open our hearts to each other.

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