By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in ABC

31 March 2026

When people talk about freedom, they tend to picture a holiday on which someone else is doing the cooking and the cleaning, when the ordinary pressures of life fall away and the days feel light and unstructured. Freedom, in that sense, is imagined as absence — the absence of responsibility, of stress, of obligation.

Passover, the Jewish festival that commemorates the liberation of the Jewish people from Egypt, demands almost the exact opposite. In the weeks leading up to it, there are cupboards to empty and scrub, kitchens to overhaul, meals to plan, guests to host and a long list of rules that can feel, at times, exacting and inconvenient. Passover is not at all effortless, and it is not relaxing in the traditional sense. If anything, it can feel like the least free time of the year.

Which leaves the question: Exactly what kind of freedom are we celebrating?

This year, that question feels harder to answer than usual. In Australia, it is impossible to approach Passover without also thinking about the Jews who were killed at a Hanukkah gathering in Bondi just months ago — an event that has left many in my community feeling a lingering sense of vulnerability.

With the pain of the recent tragedy as the backdrop, freedom feels different. It is not simply about ease or comfort, but about how we live with the knowledge that tragedy has struck our community, and much of what happens around us, is not within our control. The question then becomes: So soon after tragedy, how do we continue?

Jewish tradition insists that in every generation, a person should see themselves as though they personally left Egypt, as something that still feels close. Egypt is not only a place. It is whatever keeps us stuck. Fear can be its own kind of Egypt. So can grief, or anxiety. To leave it each year is to ask ourselves, with some honesty, what is still holding us back.

As we are obligated to leave our own personal Egypt each year, the Seder, on the first and second nights of Passover, is where that work happens. Once again, it does not look like freedom as we might imagine it. The Seder is all about structure. A set order and instruction about what to eat, when to drink, how to sit, how to tell the story. And yet, it is inside that structure something opens up.

The ritual of Seder and going through the motions that our forebears have done for thousands of years, no matter the conditions, forces us to pause. When a child asks the Ma Nishtana, the “Four Questions”, it breaks the rhythm of the evening in the best possible way.

In a year marked by violence that has felt too close to home, the insistence that our festivals go on is more important than ever. Celebrating Passover this year does not ask us to ignore what has happened, or to pretend that it has not changed us. It is to creates a space, however small, in which meaning is still made, in which we can celebrate our most important festival while still mourning those who will not be here.

Passover does not offer the kind of freedom people dream most of. It offers something more demanding and, ultimately, more durable. Freedom, on Passover, is not about escape. It is about continuing the chain of our tradition and choosing, despite the grief, despite the pain, despite the state of the world, to live meaningful Jewish lives anyway.