[Editor's note: Born in Toronto to Sidura Ludwig and Jason Shron, Boaz plans to attend McGill University next fall

to study Political Science. Sidura Ludwig is the daughter of  Maylene and Israel Ludwig]

Here in my gap-year program’s building in Jerusalem, everyone is hard at work sweeping, scrubbing and cleaning, which can only mean one thing: Passover is coming. Passover is the most widely-celebrated Jewish holiday in the world. According to a poll by Pew Research Center, over 70% of Jews in the United States attend a Passover Seder annually. Here in Israel, 89% of Jews hold a Seder annually, and a further 9% will attend if invited to one, according to one Israeli survey. Interestingly, the numbers do not fluctuate when looking at specific levels of religious observance: the Passover Seder is a fixture in almost every Israeli household, from secular to Haredi. 

This begs the question: what is it about Passover that brings Jews together, to the extent that even someone who does not believe that the Exodus happened will, year after year, tell its story? Something about Passover is so foundational to the Jewish story, that almost every one of us can identify with it. 

There is only one story that the Bible commands the Jewish people to tell, in every generation, and that is the story of the Exodus from Egypt. For as long as we can tell, Jews have come together every year on the eve of the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, to tell this story. There is something really powerful about telling and retelling a shared story. The Talmud, a compilation of Jewish law written down between 200 and 500 CE, wrote that in every generation, we must see ourselves as though we personally came out of Egypt. The story of the Israelite liberation is a story that we are meant to make our own. This is the only way for the story to have meaning.

An important nuance of the commandment to tell the story of the Exodus is that it is explicitly a commandment to tell the story, rather than hear it. When we tell the Exodus story, we emphasize the aspects of the story in which we find meaning. Some Jews are inspired by the Exodus to empower the oppressed and downtrodden, just as we were empowered to become a free nation out of Egypt. Some Jews see a special significance in the fact that we were led from Egypt to Israel, and draw connections between the ancient story of our freedom from Egypt with the modern story of being a free nation in our land. No matter what speaks to us the most in the Passover story, we actively tell it rather than passively listen to it, and this helps each of us connect to the story in our own way. As the noted Winnipeg Jewish author Sidura Ludwig (who happens to be my mother) once told me, “Art is not complete until it has been received by an audience; their own experiences shape their understanding of the art piece.” While the Passover story is more than a piece of art, the relationship between us and our story works in the same way. Our own connections to the Passover story complete it: they keep the story dynamic and living, as though we personally experienced it. This dynamic, unifying, multifaceted sense of belonging to a shared story is what keeps Jews coming back to the Passover Seder every year. Or rather, that as much as we belong to the story, the story belongs to us. 

On my gap-year program, the non-Israeli students are heading to university next year, outside of Israel. All of us are worried about what will meet us there. All of us have heard terrible stories from our friends about the rampant antisemitism on campuses. People trying to tell us our own story: that we have no history in Israel, that we skew the media in Israel’s favour, and an assortment of other fantastical accusations that I’m sure you are all familiar with by now. Our best response to antisemitism is to do what we do every year at the Seder: to own our story. To stand up in the face of all the lies, the silencing, the suffocation, and proudly say: I am a Jew, and this is my story.