The following is an abridged Passover sermon.
I have always been fascinated by museums, by the quiet decisions behind them.
Who curates them? What stories do they choose to elevate, and which details do they place at eye level to shape what a visitor will carry home?
On our congregational Civil Rights trip to the South, we walked through museums and memorials that refuse to let suffering dissolve into memory. We stood before names and photographs of people who were lynched, and we traced the courage of those who marched across bridges, who sat in at lunch counters, who faced dogs and fire hoses and the blunt force of “state power” — and still insisted on human dignity. Museums, at their best, teach us how to remember.
And stories — told with care — move us in a way that facts alone sometimes cannot. Stories awaken empathy, provoke moral imagination and shake loose deep feelings.
Lately, as I watch the news and feel that familiar tightening in my chest, I keep thinking: what story are we writing right now? And then, I picture a museum that will one day be built to explain this chapter of American life.
I imagine a future exhibit, a room filled with artifacts that speak of how power is wielded: headlines and slogans, policies and orders, images of families separated, maps of raids and detentions, and the chilling banality of paperwork.
I also imagine an adjacent room: an exhibit on resistance, perhaps with a photograph of clergy — rabbis among them — standing between demonstrators and armed forces, not as a performance but as a form of pikuach nefesh, the protection of life.
When I imagine this museum, I wonder: whose names will be included? Whose courage will become part of the national story, and who will be erased by the passing of time?
We know, as Jews, how fragile memory can be — and how sacred. We also know how much history depends on the “ordinary” people whose names do not always make it into textbooks. You cannot tell the story of President Truman and the founding of Israel without speaking of Eddie Jacobson. You cannot fully tell the story of desegregation without speaking about Brown v. Board of Education and the local forerunners who helped lay that groundwork long before the case reached the Supreme Court. Kansas, too, is not a footnote in the American moral narrative; we have always been part of the story.
As we plan our Seders, we already know what story will be told around the table. The heart of the Seder is Maggid: the retelling of the Exodus. The Haggadah insists on something radical: not that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt, but that we were slaves. We tell the story in the first person because freedom is meant to become a present-tense obligation.
Passover does not allow us to romanticize redemption. The Torah is honest about the suffering that preceded liberation, and the tradition is equally honest about what freedom requires after the sea splits: responsibility, law, compassion and community.
That is why, alongside “Love your neighbor as yourself,” the Torah repeats an even harder commandment: love the stranger.
“When a stranger resides with you… you shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:33–34)
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (of blessed memory) wrote that he once thought the Torah’s most important line was “Love your neighbor as yourself,” until he realized that it is often easier to love the neighbor who is like you. What is hard — and therefore what the Torah emphasizes — is to love the stranger, “one whose color, culture or creed is different from yours.” That is why the call to love the stranger “resonates so often throughout the Bible,” and why, he said, it is “summoning us now.”
This is not abstract theology. It is a demand placed on us by our own sacred story.
So what does it mean to live Jewish values in the world as it is today — especially when many in our wider community feel afraid, targeted or uncertain of what tomorrow may bring?
First, it means we do not let fear shrink our moral universe. Jews have learned that when one minority group is scapegoated, the circle rarely stays small. Injustice does not remain contained.
Second, it means we practice a holy combination of clarity and care:
- Clarity about what our tradition asks of us: to pursue justice, protect the vulnerable, resist dehumanization, and love the stranger because we know the stranger’s heart.
- Care in how we respond: with wisdom, attention to safety, the discipline of nonviolence, and a commitment to act in ways that help rather than inflame.
In recent trainings with security professionals, one of the recurring themes has been situational awareness — knowing our surroundings, reporting concerns through appropriate channels, and documenting what we see. In a sense, we are living in a time when memory itself is contested. Jewish tradition answers contested memory with witness: we tell the truth, we keep records, we refuse to let human stories disappear.
And that brings me back to the museum.
One day, a curator will decide what to place behind glass. They will choose which images become “history” and which people become “statistics.” The question Passover asks us is: What will we contribute to the stories told to our future generations?
At the Seder, we open the door for Elijah — not because we are naïve about the world, but because hope is a Jewish discipline. We practice hope both by acting as if redemption is possible, and by doing the work that makes it more possible.
Passover begins with bread of affliction and ends with the possibility of song. That movement — from constriction to spaciousness — has shaped the Jewish soul for millennia. The Exodus story does not promise that the world will always be kind. It promises that we are not powerless, and that God’s call can still reach us in the narrow places: Do not oppress the stranger. Love the stranger. Remember who you are.
“It is not upon us to finish the work, but we are not free to ignore it.” (Mishna, Ethics, 2:21)
May our Seders this year be places where memory becomes moral courage. May our community be a shelter of compassion and a source of steady strength. And may the “museum” that the future builds have reason to tell a story not only of fear and fracture, but of people who refused to look away and who chose the path of justice and human dignity.
