Dear Friends,

I will begin this email how I have been ending others. I miss you. And I love you. This is extremely hard. I, along with the incredible professional and lay leaders of TBA, are working hard to meet as many communal needs as possible, listening to your feedback, hoping neither to overload or spam, nor deprive you of meaning and content and contact that you want and deserve. It has taken us some time to gather the info and make the initial decisions that are represented in this email, which of course will be followed by many more. Thanks for your patience as we begin this roll-out of Pesa h for the TBA community, during this most extraordinary and confusing of human moments.

As the new month of Nissan begins, we find ourselves in two weeks of preparation for Pesa h that are much more intense and complicated than usual. As a clergy team and synagogue staff, we’re doing our best to anticipate questions and needs that will arise. This email is the beginning of what we hope will be a series of brief, substantive communications that lay out our plans to guide you down a meaningful and accessible path to celebrating the holiday of freedom at this time of upheaval. As always, please feel free to reach out to me or to any of the TBA clergy if you have specific questions.  

Selling H ametz:
Learn how and reasons why we get rid of h ametz through selling to a non-Jew.

Kashering: Kasher your home for Pesa h with a “ how-to” and suggestions for this particular situation of staying home to do all the work (leniencies included)

Food/Shopping Leniencies:
What do we buy, when and where? How-to during “safer at home”

Siyyum Bekhorot (Learning on the Fast of the First-Born): Wednesday, April 8 following the daily minyan at 7:30 AM, our clergy will lead us in a siyyum , a completion, of a tractate of mishnah. (Breakfast will, of course, be on your own!) https://zoom.us/j/908168811

Zoom Into Pesa h with Families of TBA: Pre-Pesa h online gathering for families with kids coming soon!

Passover Seder: Mah Nishtana - such a different year, but how to make it meaningful, connected to TBA community, full of family activities, engaged in learning, yummy food (Balabusta and Rabbi’s Daughter), “Seder-In-An-E-Box” etc. All those resources here
One of the defining dictums of Seder night is the two word phrase from the Torah, והגדת לבנך/ v’higadta l’vinkha , which translates to “And you shall tell/instruct your children.” It is that word, v’higadta , from which we get the word Haggadah. Seder night is a “telling.” A telling of an epic story, still being written. I am so moved by the lengths to which Jews, over time, and through travail and suffering, have efforted to tell this story, our story, no matter what was swirling around them. American Jewish soldiers told it while overseas fighting tyranny during WWII (one of the most poignant artifacts I have seen is a Haggadah used by Jewish paratroopers during a seder on the front lines in Italy, in 1944, signed by all of the soldiers who participated.

Jews in the Warsaw ghetto told it, even as the Nazis’ vice was beginning its final push to liquidate it. Seeing inevitable, immediate death and catastrophe coming, Jews still sang about liberation from enslavement. (Read this piece of liturgy composed by Aharon Carmi, one of the very, very survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: We were slaves in the ghettos of Poland / to Hitler, Führer of Germany, accursed be his name / And we were taken from there… to be killed and enslaved / led naked across the snow and ice, / -- and even were we all were wise and smart / able to work tenfold our strength, / a downright miracle would it be / if from every community of Jews one or two remained, / And those who tell of the suffering of the Jews of Poland / will live to see the downfall of Hitler and Germany. .)  Russian Jews, oppressed by the Soviet regime, risked imprisonment and worse in order to tell this story of Jewish freedom, even as freedom for them remained elusive, even illusory.

This moment is hard. Crushingly hard. And at the same time, this moment demands, and is ripe for, our grit. Our faith. Our song. Our prayers. Our coming together, even physically apart, to tell our children that, yes, in every generation some force awakens that tries to destroy us. But the Holy One delivers us from destruction. So may we sing this year. So may it be God’s will. 

Happy Nissan, my friends. I wish it for you. I will it for myself. I miss you. And I love you.

Rabbi Adam Kligfeld