Rabbi Ari Kaiman’s Message for Passover 2026
For our Passover holiday issue, we invited members of our staff and community to share their responses.
G-d has an audacious dream not yet fulfilled. G-d created a world of beauty and diversity. The dream is that the world will flourish in peace and harmony, creativity and love. Humans were created to be caretakers of that dream. The dream is unfulfilled because our ability to hold G-d’s vision is deeply limited. We are terrible at distinguishing what is “good for all” from what is “good for me.” This universal human tendency, sometimes called the yetzer hara, leads us to deplete natural resources, go to war with one another, and unwittingly follow false gods.
When G-d gave us Torah, and brought us into a Covenant of Mitzvot, G-d asked us to harness our yetzer hara by limiting it for the sake of a greater blessing than immediate self-fulfillment. We refrain from work on Shabbat, we limit what we eat, we devote time each day to G-d in prayer – as tools to teach us that what may seem like arbitrary restrictions are actually exercises for holiness. Living in this way helps us see the world not only through the lens of our self-interest, but through G-d’s interest in bringing about G-d’s audacious dream.
In this world, we protect the vulnerable, we treat natural resources as gifts from G-d, we love the stranger. G-d brought us out of Egypt and into the Promised Land to give us our first opportunity among the nations to model that dream in a small way.
Kings, priests, and prophets tried and failed. We were exiled from the land. But they left us a record of their attempt.
Generation upon generation of rabbis built a way of life that survived the exile. We preserve our disagreements with one another in the humility that we are all trying and failing to live up to G-d’s audacious challenge. We will never cease our attempts, or our disagreements for the sake of heaven.
Today, with the miracle of the State of Israel coming to fruition after generations of rabbis, dreamers, poets, statesmen, and pioneers brought it to bear – we have another chance to try and model G-d’s dream coming into fruition. Defending the chance is mandatory. Not squandering it is also mandatory.
Will the generations that follow us see our attempt to live up to G-d’s dream?
Oseh Shalom Bimromav, Hu Ya’aseh Shalom Aleinu. V’al Kol Yisrael, V’al Kol Yoshvei Tevel. May the One who creates harmony on high, bring peace to us, to all Israel, and to all who dwell on Earth.
Rabbi Ari Kaiman is the rabbi for Congregation Shearith Israel.
comments