A Passover Prayer Inspired by Ukrainian Refugees from Rabbi Jonathan Blake

Each year, Rabbi Jonathan Blake fro Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, composes a special prayer that you are invited to share at your Passover Seder. Upon returning from Poland, Rabbi Blake  composed this year’s reading with Ukrainian refugees in mind, as they will be in all our hearts at this Pesach season. We dedicate a symbolic seat at our Seder table to them.

A Prayer for Pesach 5782 / 2022

The Passover story begins like this:

“My parents were wandering Arameans.”
Countless times in our history we have been refugees:

Fleeing tyranny in terror and degradation,
Hoping against hope for something better somewhere else,
Taking only what we could carry on our backs,
With aging parents, frightened children,
And memories of what used to be our homes.

Refugees from Egypt, coalescing as a people at the shore of the raging sea;
Refugees from Canaan, by famine and siege and violent conquest,
Refugees from Jerusalem, ransacked by the Romans;
Refugees, time and again, at the decree of Popes and Kings.

Boarding rickety boats from Iberia to bypass the Inquisitor,
Seeking safe passage to some Sultanate or Caribbean isle,
Tempest-tossed to these American shores,
Or bound for the place we never stopped calling home, Eretz Yisrael,
Embers plucked from the flames of the Shoah,
Strangers in strange lands.

Always strangers.

We know the heart of the stranger.

And when we see mothers and their children, red-eyed from lack of sleep, on a train that departed Ukraine just last night,

We recognize something of ourselves, our story, our spirit.

Our ancestors were forced to wander, and by some wondrous combination of courage and circumstance, of other people willing to help and their own faith, against all odds, in God’s Providence, they arrived in a place called home.

May God give us the strength and determination to do for others what was done for them, and for us.

Amen