Haganah fighters celebrate the Seder night in a military camp in Jerusalem, 1948. Another Once Upon a Time In Jerusalem.
Every Jew, wherever they may be on this earth, marks the same day each year, year after year, for more than 3,300 years: the holiday that tells the story of our birth as a people, our journey from bondage to freedom.
In the photograph, the men and women of the Haganah celebrate Passover, the Holiday of Freedom, under British rule in Jerusalem. They do not yet know that freedom is already on its way, that the State of Israel is about to rise – just around the corner, a matter of mere weeks.
The Haganah fighters of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel stood guard over Jerusalem’s Jewish residents. They secured the roads leading up to the city from the lowlands and protected the convoys from attacks and acts of terror by the Arab Legion.
They came from every corner of the Jewish story – pioneers of the early aliyot alongside Holocaust survivors who had endured the inferno and reached these shores after the fall of Nazi rule. In their place emerged a new kind of Jew: no longer the diasporic Jew dependent on the mercy of a landlord or ruler, but a Zionist Jew, standing on his own feet, defending himself with his own hands, in a Jewish state, the only place in the world where Jews could live without relying on the goodwill of others.
A few short weeks later, the State of Israel was declared. Representatives of the British Empire packed up their belongings, and themselves, and departed the Land of Israel.
We stepped into freedom after 2,000 years of exile. We returned to the land of our ancestors, to our historic home. But freedom never comes without a price.
And all of this happened only 78 years ago – not distant biblical legend, but living history unfolding before our eyes, each and every day.
Yet in every generation, there are those who rise against us to destroy us.
The day after independence was declared, the armies of the surrounding Arab nations launched a brutal war, driven by a clear and determined intent to annihilate us. And ever since, through different eras, under different guises, our enemies have continued to do all they can to bring about our destruction.
Even this Passover, as citizens of the open miracle called the State of Israel, with science, technology, a strong and independent army, and a nation rapidly growing, we are still fighting for our freedom, even now, against the Pharaoh of our time.
That same Pharaoh, in different forms – from Egypt to Suez, from the Litani to Hormuz.
Bayamim H’hahem Bazman Haze
And in these days as well, days of struggle for our freedom and our future, as we move in and out of shelters, we still find ourselves in a meitzar, a narrow place, unwilling to pass up even a single chance for internal division and baseless hatred. A people delivered from Mitzrayim—Egypt, the narrow place-yet still wrestling with the narrowness within.
And so, the time has come to clear out the chametz from within us, each person with their own inner leaven. That swelling of pride and ego, the dismissal of another’s voice, the certainty that only we are right and see the world as it truly is.
May we all merit, as a people and as individuals, to break free from the bondage and the narrow places we still inhabit, even today, between ballistic missiles and rockets, and step into a true freedom, both personal and collective.
Shabbat Shalom to those far and near from Jerusalem, and a Chag Pessach Sameach.
Beshana Habaa Biyerushalayim.
Photo – The Zionist Archive
