My youngest child recently celebrated his bar mitzvah and thereby became an adult in the eyes of Jewish tradition. And, right on cue, he has also hit his developmental stride as a teenager: he is much more interested in hanging out with his friends than with his parents. (As a dear family friend once put it, the essence of parenting at this stage might be described as being around so your child can ignore you—which, in my experience, is both true and important.)

Yet, miracle of miracles, Toby still likes us to read to him before bed. And before the window on childhood closes completely (which I presume will likely happen when he comes home from camp this summer), this year we’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books together. We’re up to number six, The Silver Chair, which (spoiler alert) tells the story of two children on a mission to rescue a prince from his imprisonment by an enchanting witch deep in the underground.

The climactic moment of the book comes when the witch is about to successfully enchant the children and their guide, a “marsh-wiggle” (frog-like human creature) named Puddleglum. As the witch strums on her magic stringed instrument and hypnotizes the heroes, she gradually gaslights them into believing there is no world above: there is no sun, there are no trees, there is only this world below the surface.

Just when the light of their consciousness is about to be fully extinguished, however, Puddleglum accesses some inner psycho-spiritual strength, sticks his foot in the fire burning in the witch’s fireplace, and makes a rousing speech that turns the tide:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.

C.S. Lewis was, of course, a believing Christian, and Puddleglum’s speech is a thinly veiled sermon about religious belief. Aslan, the lion of witch and wardrobe fame, is meant to be a Christ-like figure. So when Puddleglum says, “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia,” he is clearly not just talking about Aslan or Narnia.

Yet just as important in this speech is a related word, the capacity upon which Puddleglum’s belief rests: play. “Four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world.” Lewis isn’t only making a case for religious belief, he’s trying to rouse his readers to imagination. And in this, he’s espousing something deeply Jewish—and deeply woven into Passover.

One of the very first things we do during the Seder is initiate a game. During the yachatz step of the Seder, we break the middle matzah and hide away the larger half—the afikomen. This kicks off a game of hide and seek that concludes at the end of the Seder meal, with the tzafun step (tzafun means “hidden”).

Commenting on yachatz, Rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin observes: “The Haggadah allows us to discover an essential dimension of humanity. A human being is not defined, as Descartes thought, by his or her capacity to think (“I think, therefore I am”). A human being is not “homo cogitans” (a thinking being), but rather “humo ludens” (a playing being).” Ouaknin goes on to describe the dual relationship between order (“seder”), which is embodied in ritual, and play: “Ritual establishes and creates structure; play, by contrast, changes and destroys structure.”

Further on, commenting on the Maggid section of the Seder, Ouaknin describes the Haggadah as “playful,” particularly in the way it approaches text, language, and history. “At any time,” he observes, “one may compose an astonishing diversity of interpretations… of any single event.” This is an essential, even foundational aspect of freedom in Jewish life: the freedom to think, to imagine, to play. And in marking the Festival of Freedom, the Haggadah reflects this all over: In its multiple answers to the Four Questions, its meandering and tangential stories, and perhaps most obviously in the Mishnaic imperative lidrosh, to make midrash on the Torah text. “In this interpretive pluralism,” Ouaknin concludes, “no interpretation is rejected.”

No interpretation, that is, “except those resulting from violence or that produce violence.” In Ouaknin’s commentary, this line almost comes across as an afterthought. I mean, obviously, right?! And yet, reading it this year (and I read Ouaknin’s Haggadah every year), I find myself caught on the sentence. Because we live in violent times, and words—including words of Torah—are being used to underwrite violence: towards human beings, towards Jews, and by Jews towards other human beings, by Jews towards other Jews.

The Exodus, of course, is not a non-violent series of events. Moses’s own story is born in violence, and his adult life commences with his killing of an Egyptian taskmaster. When we gather together on Seder night, we are re-enacting an historical memory of our people trusting in divine protection from the Angel of Death unleashed upon Egypt. And we justify that violence by saying it was necessary for the cause of our liberation. Similarly, the Rabbinic tradition tells us explicitly that if someone seeks to kill us—i.e. do violence to us—then we are authorized to commit violence to defend ourselves. The Torah should not be misunderstood as a pacifist document, or our tradition as a pacifist tradition.

But that brings me back to Ouaknin’s line about violence and interpretations. In its local context, I understand Ouaknin to mean that there are limits to how far we can massage the text. Returning to the idea of play: A game requires rules, a theater production depends on the imaginary fourth wall. An interpretation must be plausible to be legitimate, i.e. within the play space, and is unacceptable if it is so forced as to be violent. Yet I also understand Ouaknin, who is a student of Levinas, to be evoking the history of twentieth century wars. Which suggests to me that the violence of which he speaks is not only rhetorical or aesthetic, but embodied and political.

The stakes here are high. On Seder night, Ouaknin observes, “everyone has the obligation to tell. What is at stake in this telling is the creation of a narrative identity in every participant, reader, or simple listener to the text.” In other words, on Pesach we encounter the opportunity—and the requirement—to narrate ourselves into and within the story of the Jewish people. It’s gametime.

Fundamentally, we aspire for our story and our play to be peaceful and non-violent: “Her ways are pleasant ways, and all her paths are peace” (Proverbs 3:17). This is Torah in its ideal state, the Jewish life we sing of every time we return the Torah scroll to the ark. Perhaps that’s a reason that children, and their capacity for imagination, are so central on this holiday—because in our tradition children are, by definition, incapable of willful violence. What makes this night different from all others, perhaps, is that we are invited, and even required, to re-enter a state of nonviolent play—and thereby to re-member ourselves within our story and our people.

For Reflection & Conversation

• What do you remember about playing as a child? When, if ever, have you experienced that kind of playfulness as an adult?

• What does it mean to you to play with a text or an idea? Who or what sets the limits to that play?

P.S. I will be taking time off next week for Pesach and won’t be sending a Friday Reflection email on April 3. The next one will be sent on Friday, April 10.

I can remember a period of my life when the melancholy of a waning Shabbat afternoon really hit me hard. This was in my early twenties. I was single, just back from a year studying in yeshiva in Israel, and most often spending Shabbat with friends on the Upper West Side (in a desire to end my singlehood and find a partner). As the sun would sink into the western sky and the shadows of those Manhattan apartment buildings would grow longer, I would often feel a kind of heartache, some combination of yearning to be elsewhere (back in Israel, perhaps) and longing for Shabbat not to end.

While not as intense and qualitatively different, I still feel a bit of creeping wistfulness late on Shabbat afternoons. I often find myself drawn to our family photo albums (among the gifts of finding that partner many years ago: she is a scrapbooker by nature). Or I’ll go find a book from the shelves that store the books of my younger years—sometimes that even results in taking out an old orchestral score from my musician days and mentally working my way through it. But the impulse is most often the same: a desire for this not to end, a reluctance to confront what I sense awaits me the moment I dip the havdallah candle into the kiddush cup and listen as the flame sizzles out.

In recent years, I feel like that anxiety has taken on a new, more urgent color, as coming out of my Shabbat cocoon has thrust me into a world turned upside down. October 7, of course, was Shabbat. The assassination attempt against Donald Trump happened on Shabbat. Just two months ago, the U.S. military went into Venezuela and took its president on Shabbat. And, of course, just last week the United States and Israel began a massive air campaign against Iran on Shabbat.

There are practical issues for those of us who don’t use our phones and computers or watch TV on Shabbat: how to get caught up, for instance. (There’s a niche market for a news summary just for shomer Shabbat people.) But, more seriously, I find that the increasing feeling that big things are happening in the world over Shabbat has an effect on my experience of Shabbat itself. I feel a greater urge to check the news. I find it harder to access the feeling that Shabbat is the sacred island that I’ve long known it to be.

And, of course, these are a version of “First World problems.” To my relatives and friends in Israel, for instance, this is not some aesthetic question of the flavor of Shabbat—it’s about running from missiles and reporting for army service, about life and death. As Maimonides teaches, Shabbat is pushed aside (dechuya) in the face of danger to life, i.e. physical existence, just as all other mitzvot (Laws of Shabbat 2:1). The very fact of my reflecting about Shabbat in this way, worrying about… worrying, is a reminder of my privilege of living in a nuclear armed superpower bounded on either coast by an enormous ocean. But still, it has an effect.

Parashat Ki Tissa mentions Shabbat in the midst of the instructions for building the Mishkan. Rashi offers a reason: “Even though you may be bound up in the mitzvot of building the Tabernacle, do not push away (al tidacheh) Shabbat” (Rashi on Exodus 31:13). That’s a remarkable statement, actually. Because building the Mishkan is not, I imagine, work we would wish to escape from. It’s holy, sacred service, work with purpose that connects us to the Divine and one another—an ideal form of labor. And yet, the Torah comes to tell us that even then, or perhaps especially then, we can’t push away Shabbat.

In an 1886 homily, the Sefat Emet infers a lesson from Rashi: “So great is the spiritual level of Shabbat that it exceeds even the six days of God’s original Creation.” And, he adds, “The ideal form of Shabbat has no limit,” a mystical, poetic comment which I register as an invitation to ground ourselves in the infinite through Shabbat, even as we are limited, material beings in a limited, material world. Shabbat, the Sefat Emet repeats so many times in his writings, is the means by which we experience, and even prepare ourselves for, the limitlessness of the World to Come. In the midst of these Torah portions devoted to the paradoxical, profoundly challenging idea that the Infinite could be at home in the finite, of course Shabbat must be at the center.

The world is heavy these days. There’s yet another war on (or perhaps it’s really just one long war). Institutions, our repositories of trust, are fraying and breaking. As are the boundaries that many of us have come to take for granted: between nations, between home and street, between land and sea, between Shabbat and the workweek. All of which makes practicing Shabbat feel like an even greater act of resistance.

Many Buddhist teachers I know will conclude a meditation sit with some version of the blessing, “May all beings be happy, safe, peaceful and free.” There are a lot of ways I might translate that in the language of Torah, but the simplest might be: May it be that our world allows all of us to practice Shabbat. Or, even shorter: Shabbat shalom.

For Reflection & Conversation:

Our tradition describes Shabbat as “a taste of the world to come.” What does that mean to you? Does your Shabbat practice help you experience it? Why or why not? What might you want to adjust in your Shabbat practice to strengthen it?