Day: March 25, 2026

לע”נ אילנה חנה בת יוסף אברהם ז”ל

Each year, we sit at the Seder and say words that are both familiar and demanding: בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים. We are not asked to remember the Exodus. We are asked to see ourselves inside it. In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he personally left Mitzrayim. That requires a certain kind of imagination and a certain kind of internal alignment that we don’t always fully appreciate.

But before even getting there, there is a basic question about the way the Mishnah is formulated. The Seder is something we experience each year. The mitzvos of the night, matzah, maror, the four cups, are all annual obligations. So you would expect the Mishnah to say that each year a person must see himself as if he had left Mitzrayim.

But that’s not what it says. It says: בכל דור ודור. In every generation. And that’s difficult to understand because this isn’t something that applies once in a generation. It’s something we are meant to engage with every single year. So why frame it that way?

Perhaps the answer lies in the kind of mitzvah this is. There are mitzvos that ask us to do something, and those we can do regardless of how we feel. A person may not be in the mood, may be distracted, may be dealing with a lot, but he still eats the matzah and drinks the ארבע כוסות. The action stands even if the feeling is not there.

But this mitzvah is different. It is not only about what we do, but about how we see and how we feel. And that makes it far more demanding. Some of the greatest giants have noted that this may be among the most difficult mitzvos of the night, precisely because it asks a person to enter into an internal reality, not just perform an external act.

And yet, it remains an obligation each year.  A person is expected to try, to engage, to open himself to that perspective, even if it does not come easily, and even if it cannot be fully realized. The mitzvah does not disappear simply because the feeling is not there.

At the same time, Chazal understood something very real about life. There are years when a person sits at the Seder, says the words, fulfills all the actions, and still does not feel as if he is leaving Mitzrayim. Life can be heavy in ways that are not easily set aside, illness, financial strain, family challenges, or simply an internal sense of being stuck.

That is where the language of בכל דור ודור becomes so important.  A דור is not just a stretch of time. It is a vantage point. It allows a person to look backward a bit and forward a bit, to see where they have come from and to have some sense, however limited, of what may still lie ahead. It places a person not only in a moment, but within a story.

And when a person looks at their life that way, something begins to shift.  If you look only at the present, it may be hard to speak about geulah. But if you step back, five years, ten years, twenty years, you begin to notice movement. Things that once felt fixed were not as permanent as they seemed. Situations evolved. People grew. Even difficulties that did not disappear often changed in form or in weight. And that is true not only for individuals but also for families and for our people as a whole.

When we think about a דור, we are also thinking about those who came before us and those who come after us. We can look back at what earlier generations endured and what they built, and we can look forward to seeing how things continue to unfold beyond us. Over that span, there is movement, uneven, sometimes slow, but real.

And within that broader view, it becomes easier to recognize something that may not be visible in any single year: that there are moments of יציאה. Not always dramatic, and not always complete, but real. Moments when something that once held us no longer does, when a situation opens even slightly, when a person finds a bit more space than they had before.

There may be years when a person sits at the Pesach Seder and simply cannot feel as if they are leaving Mitzrayim. You can go through the motions, say the words, do everything you’re supposed to do, and internally, it’s just not there. But the avodah of the Seder is not to force a feeling that isn’t there. It is to try to move toward it, even in a limited or partial way, and to place ourselves within a larger story in which that feeling can, over time, become more visible and more real. Because בכל דור ודור, over time, across the span of a life, it is possible to look back and say: I have known something of מצרים, and I have also, at times, moved beyond it. Not always in any single year. But within the unfolding of a דור.

And perhaps that is what is being asked of us, not to create a feeling on demand, but to continue showing up to the story, year after year, with honesty and with openness, until we are able to see ourselves within it.

At times, we each wonder what it would have been like to be there. Standing at the shore of the Yam Suf, watching Egyptian archers draw their bows, only for the arrows to shatter against a cloud that has no business being there, a pillar of divine fire and glory, exactly as our rabbis described it. And we imagine: if I had been there, if I had seen that with my own eyes, everything would have been different. I would have known. There would have been no question, no doubt, no wondering.

And yet, in a certain sense, we are standing there.

Over the past two and a half years, we have witnessed wave after wave of events that, taken together, are genuinely difficult, if not truly impossible, to explain away. Missile barrages numbering in the hundreds, carrying real destructive potential, repeatedly intercepted in ways that limit what could have been mass casualties. Operations reaching individuals long considered untouchable, in environments presumed secure, executed with a precision that defies ordinary expectation. The pager operation, which effectively dismantled terrorist communication networks overnight and led to the neutralization of large numbers of terrorists. Moments of potential escalation across multiple fronts that by every strategic logic should have widened into something far larger, and yet, again and again, stopped short. Rockets that misfire, land in empty fields, or are neutralized at the last possible moment. Hostages returned under circumstances that would have predicted something far more tragic.

Each of these moments, taken alone, can be explained (perhaps, anyway). Taken together, though, they accumulate into something that presses for a different kind of accounting.

And yet, many of us still find ourselves waiting. Not ungrateful, but still waiting. As though what we are witnessing does not quite match the image we carry of what unmistakable clarity is supposed to look like. We imagine it arriving differently, more overt, less open to interpretation, impossible to dismiss.

Which is precisely the question that the opening of Sefer Vayikra places before us.

וַיִּקְרָא אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיְדַבֵּר ה’ אֵלָיו מֵאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד לֵאמֹר

Rashi, drawing on Chazal, highlights two things in close succession. First, the voice of Hashem reached Moshe, but the rest of Bnei Yisrael did not hear it. And then the detail that Rashi cannot let pass without comment: מִלַּמֵּד שֶׁהַקּוֹל נִפְסָק וְלֹא הָיָה יוֹצֵא חוּץ לָאֹהֶל

The voice stopped at the boundary of the Ohel. It did not pass through.

But this was not a quiet voice. Chazal describe it in the language of Tehillim: קול ה’ בכח… קול ה’ בהדר… קול ה’ שובר ארזים. It was a קול גדול, a voice of shattering force, not diminished, not fading, not limited in its strength.

Reb Moshe Feinstein zt”l, in Kol Ram, presses on what seems like a contradiction. If the voice was going to be contained anyway, if it was not meant to reach beyond Moshe, why structure it as a קול גדול at all? Why not simply a קול נמוך, a quieter voice proportionate to its limited reach?

His answer does not merely resolve the question. It reframes a fundamental aspect of how revelation works.

The power of the קול and the boundary of the קול are two entirely separate matters. One does not determine the other. The voice can be of immense, world-shattering force, קול ה’ שובר ארזים, and still not pass through the wall. Not because it is weak, but because that is how the world is structured. Presence does not force recognition.

We tend to imagine otherwise. We tell ourselves that if we had stood at Yam Suf, if we had witnessed the מכות, if we had lived in the דור המדבר, surrounded by ענני הכבוד by day and אש by night, clarity would have been inevitable. The evidence would have been impossible to dismiss. But the Torah does not allow us this assumption.

The דור המדבר did live in that world. The קול was not faint. The presence was constant and overwhelming. And still they struggled, complained, and fell. Not because the evidence was insufficient, but because human beings are not passive recipients of reality. We are interpreters of it. And interpretation depends on something the evidence alone cannot determine.

Which returns us to where we began. The accumulation of these past two and a half years is not small. The pattern is not subtle. Repeated missile barrages that fall far short of their intended devastation. Defensive systems operating with remarkable consistency under relentless pressure. Operations that reach individuals and networks thought to be beyond reach. Disruptions that dismantle coordination and neutralize large numbers of terrorists. Escalations that appear poised to spiral into something far broader, and yet repeatedly stop short. Outcomes that, again and again, land on one side of what might have been.

Each individual moment can be explained. Taken together, they begin to press on us. But the question was never whether the קול is powerful enough.  

מִלַּמֵּד שֶׁהַקּוֹל נִפְסָק. The voice stops at the boundary, not because it lacks force, but because that is how this world is built. A קול גדול can fill the space and still not pass through. Not because it is absent, but because it does not impose itself beyond its set limits.

And so the question is not what else needs to happen. It is what we imagine we are still waiting to see.