Robert Garber’s Passover Message for 2026

I heard a story a few months ago from Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, Chief Rabbi of Uganda, about the early days of the Abayudaya, the Ugandan Jewish population who began their practice as a purely Biblical form of Judaism in the early 20th century. They were visited, one Passover, by rabbinic Jews from Israel who witnessed in shock as they performed the Paschal Sacrifice. The Abayudaya, conversely, were surprised at their reaction. Each, according to Rabbi Sizomu, wondered of the other, “Are they really Jewish?”

What makes a good Jew? It is a difficult and potentially dangerous question to answer, as to define a “good Jew,” in many ways, must mean to define a “Jew,” and then to judge to what extent someone does or doesn’t fit that criteria.

I personally think that, if such a judgment can indeed be made, simply how someone asks these sorts of questions may make for a good criteria itself. After all, do we not have a proud history of questioning and argument, going back not just through the centuries of Talmud and Mishnah, but to the millennia of the Torah itself, at whose exact center we find two words: darosh darash – question thoroughly?

But the sages teach there is a right and wrong way to question – that some arguments are productive and for the sake of heaven, while some are only for the sake of advancing the power or perspective of the people who ask them (Pirkei Avot 5:17).

An AJT writer, Dave Schechter, recently wrote a fascinating column about the phrase “self-hating Jew,” a label thrown at others the speaker wishes to demonize or dismiss, a term which “presupposes that some Jews feel qualified to pass judgment on other Jews.” What strikes me here is the assumption of the one using the term that they are exempt from the conversation; that this is about the people they are deriding and does not involve themselves.

Passover is a holiday of questions, asked both well and poorly, and I am reminded in the latter sense of the wicked child, who asks, “What is this service to you?” As the Haggadah says, “He asks, ‘to you,’ and not to himself. He sets himself apart from the community.”

So, what makes a good Jew? Perhaps, one who asks that question of themselves before they ask it of others.

May your seder this year be filled with good questions. Hag Samaech.

Robert Garber is the Online Content Coordinator for Atlanta Jewish Times.