Wednesday Evening – Beginning of Passover
One of many wonderful aspects of Passover is the ritual retelling of the Jewish freedom story. Ellen Blum Barish explains why the story never gets old.
The Retelling
By Ellen Blum Barish
At my seder table,
I learned that some stories need to be told more than once
to make us stop, gather together and tell it aloud
though we have heard it many times before
so we remember.Every spring, we read the same story of our exodus from Egypt
but it is never the same twice.
Every spring, someone is missing for work, move, illness or death.
Every spring, there’s a new mood or geo-political incident.The annual retelling is like the sharing of all hard stories,
never told the same way twice.
never heard the same way twice.
It is a crossing over a desert of shifting sand
that allows us to see something that we hadn’t before
as if for the first time.
Previous Passover Posts
Ellen Blum Barish: The Hard Stories Are Never Told the Same Way Twice (April 1, 2026)
MAGA Reenacts the Enslavement of Joseph (April 14, 2025)
Marge Piercy: Open the Door for Elijah (April 12, 2025)
Chaya Lester: Ask Not for Whom the Bush Burns (April 20, 2024)
Adam Zagajewski: Passover, a Time to Remember Refugees (April 5, 2023)
Harvey Shapiro: Passover Originated in Poetic Vision (April 14, 2022)
Marge Piercy: Choosing the Dessert over Bondage (March 27, 2021)
Henry Weinfield: Passover, A Ritual for Wanderers (April 7, 2020)
Harvey Shapiro: Drawn Forth to Eat the History Feast (April 19, 2019)
Norman Finkelstein: This Bloody Flesh, Our Only Food (March 30, 2018)
George Moses Horton: Must I Dwell in Slavery’s Night? (April 8, 2017)
Norman Finkelstein: Blood on the Door Posts (April 16, 2016)
Norman Finkelstein: Death and Miracles and Stars without Number (April 23, 2016)
Nicole Krauss: Replacing the Temple with the Torah (March 29, 2015)
Muriel Rukeyser: The Journeys of the Night Survive (April 13, 2014)
Yehuda Amichai: Finding Peace, Along with a Lost Goat (April 21, 2013)
Primo Levi: A Night Different from All Other Nights (April 17, 2011)
