Possibility Is Enough — R' Steven Sermon

The audio in this sermon starts out rough, but it gets way better after two minutes — we promise!

Hello, and welcome to Contact Chai. Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on Friday, March 27th, when Rabbi Steven delivered a drash on the power of hope embedded in the Exodus story. And yes, he does reference Prince of Egypt.

If you’re still looking for a First Night Seder, Rabbi Steven would love to have you at our annual Learner’s Seder this Wednesday, April 1st. While created for our BluePrint students, this evening is open to all who looking to dine and learn in community.

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/event/blueprint-learners-seder/

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

This sermon was delivered at our service on March 27th, 2026. You can listen to this drash on Contact Chai Podcast or watch it on our YouTube channel.
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There is a tradition on Shabbat Ha’Gadol, the Shabbat preceding Passover, for the rabbi to give their longest sermon. I’m not going to do that. But I’d like to share some thoughts on the holiday.

The rabbis teach that we have not properly observed Passover until we see ourselves as having been liberated from slavery, saying: “This is what God did for me when I left Egypt.” The seder is not meant to be a pantomime. We are not an audience, nor are we actors. We are Jews telling our own story. The bitterness of the horseradish, the crack of the matzah, the heady scent of wine are triggers pulling the ancestral memory of redemption from our deepest subconscious. The seder is indulgent and exhausting, laborious and stimulating so that we remember what it was like to cry out against the shackles of slavery and be answered with the possibility of freedom. Over and over again, Passover reinforces the lesson – learned from our own history – that there can be miracles, when you believe.

(You didn’t think I’d give a sermon about Passover without mentioning the greatest animated feature film of all time, The Prince of Egypt).

But this year, I’m feeling a bit cynical about this message. Which is difficult to admit, because part of my job as a rabbi and as a Jew is to maintain faith in humanity despite everything that is happening in the world. But with everything that is happening in the world (and so much of it by human hands), it’s hard to be hopeful right now. In the haggadah, the rabbis teach that we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, extol, exalt, honor, bless, revere, and laud the One (i.e. God) who performed all the miracles of Passover: bringing us from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from mourning to celebration, from darkness to light – but for the past few years, each time we sit down at the seder table and revisit these words it feels like the world has gone in the opposite direction: darker and sadder and even more broken than it was before. Like our ancestors in exile, sitting by the waters of Babylon, how were we meant to sing words of praise when all we can do is remember everything that has been lost and weep? Where exactly are we meant to find hope?

There is a passage in Leviticus (which we’ll get to in a few weeks), where God says:

וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־חֻקֹּתַי וְאֶת־מִשְׁפָּטַי אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה אֹתָם הָאָדָם וָחַי בָּהֶם
“Keep my laws and my rules, by the pursuit of which humankind will live.” 

This verse serves as the proof text for the rabbinic principle of pikuach nefesh, that the preservation of human life overrides almost every other prescription or prohibition. We do not follow a law if it endangers life – and if a life is in danger, we are allowed to break the rules. Judaism sacralizes the very fact of our existence because sometimes being alive is the greatest act of resistance we can muster against a world compromised by violence and despair. The story of our people, a story that is mostly about surviving at the margins of society, reminds us that being alive should never be taken for granted. We are here today because of the insistence of our ancestors to continue living, sometimes against impossible odds. You are here today because you chose to be and I know that for some of you this has meant overcoming incredible, and often incredibly unfair, challenges. And so we show up to the seder this year, still here – despite (and perhaps in spite of) this dark moment in history.

Before we open the haggadah and tell the story of Passover, there is another account from the book of Exodus – just a few verses long – that sets the stage for this part of our people’s narrative. Despite the harsh conditions forced upon them, our ancestors continue to multiply. And so Pharaoh summons two midwives, Shifrah and Puah, and commands that whenever a baby boy is born they should kill him on the spot. But the midwives don’t follow his orders. Instead, they continue to deliver children in secret. When summoned again, they lie to Pharaoh. They deceive his soldiers. They help parents hide their children. Shifrah and Puah break all kinds of rules (both secular and religious), to help our ancestors defy this edict of death. I imagine them holding the hand of someone in labor, guiding them through the pain and the fear of bringing a child into this world with the reminder that sometimes our greatest act of resistance in the face of those who hate us is to live.

But for what purpose? Why insist on life, when all our ancestors knew and all our ancestors had known and all our ancestors could imagine for the future was slavery? The answer: possibility. The possibility that there might be another way forward, even if we don’t know what it is. Even if we don’t get to see it. The next generation of Israelites will walk out of slavery into freedom. And I don’t know if the midwives got to go with them. I don’t know if Shifrah and Puah were still alive when redemption came. I like to think that they were there, carried in the arms of the children they delivered decades earlier. But maybe this is a future the midwives never got to experience. However, it is a future that only happened because they encouraged our ancestors to keep living on the seemingly improbable chance that things could be different than the way they had always been.

There are two forces at work that try to keep us from embracing possibility: the powerful and powerless.

The powerful tell us: this is the way things are. They benefit from the status quo and they will do everything they can to keep it that way. Pharaoh didn’t want things to change. He had built an entire civilization on the backs of our ancestors. We were the base of the pyramid; letting us go would cause the whole structure to come toppling down (and that is, after all, the end of the story; our departure came at a terrible cost to Pharaoh and his allies). And so he went to great lengths to ensure that we remained enslaved, even as his own people became collateral to his stubbornness and pride.

The powerful don’t want us to imagine a future different from the one that we are living in. And we see it now: among the people in charge of this country, who use their position to punish dissent and dismantle the very institutions that empower us to advocate for change. In their bid to maintain power, they chip away at the foundations of democracy and set this country upon the slippery slope of authoritarianism. And shamefully, we see in our fellow Jews – here and in Israel – those who take the lesson of having been strangers in a strange land and use it as justification for enacting violence against others, as if pointing the gun at them will somehow ensure that we will never be on the other end of the barrel (to be clear: it will not guarantee our safety). Those in power want us to believe that their vision of the future is the only possible outcome, and that whatever means are needed to get us there – no matter how regrettable or unfortunate – are in the end necessary.

And the powerless, they tell us: even if we wanted to, we have no ability to change the way things are. So why try? After centuries of slavery, most of our ancestors could not imagine a future different from the reality that they had been born into – and so instead of acting from a place of hope, they started to make choices from a place of despair. The story goes that the Israelite men began to refrain from having sex with their partners. Why would they want to bring another child into the world, when the only possible life available to them was one bent by hard labor? Not ready to give up on the dream of redemption, the Israelite women would sneak out into the fields where the men were forced to sleep at night. They brought them food to eat. And while their partners were eating, the women would hold up a copper mirror, gaze at their reflection, and say “I am more beautiful than you are.” And the men, goaded by their partners, would look at their own reflection in the mirror and say “No, I am more beautiful than you are.” And with their bodies nourished and their spirits made a little less heavy, the men would remember that they are still alive – and if they were alive, there was still the possibility that things could change. Reinvigorated, if just for a moment, they would have sex – and the next generation of our ancestors were born (fast forward to the building of the mishkan, and these mirrors were used to create the copper wash basin used by the priests to ritually cleanse themselves).

But not everyone met despair with creative ingenuity and an insistence on life. The rabbis teach that, when Pharaoh finally assented and let our people go, only 1/5th of the Israelites left Egypt. Even when the possibility of freedom had finally arrived, most chose to stay in the banal terror of what they already knew. They couldn’t imagine anything else.

But those are not our ancestors. We are descended from the ones who left, the ones who had maintained hope that things might change – and when things did change, were ready to meet that future. And their story is the story we tell at Passover. And the story we tell at Passover is our story.

This is the essential purpose of the holiday: to maintain the imagination that things might be different, that the world as it is right now is not how the world must be. We tell this story in defiance of those in power, to remind ourselves that there is another path forward than the one they argue is inevitable. We tell the story to remind the powerless that as long as we are still alive, there is still the possibility that things might change. More than ever, this is the story we need to tell ourselves right now. So many people labor under the yoke of oppression and violence. Too many are simply trying to hold the pieces of their broken hearts together. A lot has been lost, and there is so much to grieve as we move forward. The world is a very dark place right now, it has been swallowed by shadow that invites us to trade faith for fear, hope for cynicism, and resilience for despair. I understand why, when taking all of this into account, someone might give in and give up.

But that is not our story. Whether it was the rabbis creating the first seder under Roman persecution, or conversos keeping these traditions alive in secret, or Jews reading from their haggadot behind closed curtains in Nazi Germany, or resistance fighters scrapping together a seder plate in the squalor of the Warsaw Ghetto – in all of these hopeless places, we have remembered how to hope. These places are gone. But we are still here. We may not know how, and we may not know when, but we do know that it is possible to move from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from mourning to celebration, and from darkness to light.

And right now, dayenu, knowing that is enough. It is more than enough. We understand that holding on to possibility, despite it all, is enough – because this is what God did for me when I left Egypt.

Shabbat shalom and chag kasher v’sameach; may you have a meaningful, joyful, and hopeful Passover.