On Grief & Kindess: Pesach 5786

I’ve been sitting with a poem all week. I couldn’t put it down after a friend sent it to me, as we were trading possible readings and poems for our Passover Seders back and forth.

It’s by Naomi Shihab Nye—a Palestinian-American poet, which feels worth naming on a night like this—and the excerpt she sent begins with this line:

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

I keep thinking: that’s just Passover.

That’s exactly what Passover has always been trying to tell us.

These festivals arrive each year, and with them, a rich abundance of texts and rituals meant to attune us to the import and meaning of the season. Pesach, also called Zman Cheruteinu, is a perfect emotional arc: preparation and a physical transformation of our homes meant to direct us toward a spiritual transformation.

And then, L’eil Seder. The night(s) of the Seder. The order of our ritual storytelling is filled with blessing—and with ingesting the metaphors of our story. We recline. We taste the tears and the bitterness. We are generous—inviting all who are hungry to come and eat, even as the lechem oni is the centerpiece of our meal.

We ask questions. We take on the obligation of living k’ilu—as if. As if we had been slaves. As if we had been freed. As if we personally knew the feeling of going from Mitzrayim to freedom. From the narrowest of places to the greatest human expanse.

And then: our Seders end, and the festival days lie before us, rich with interpretive possibilities. Here, in the midst of the festival itself—as we observe here at Hevreh—we observe Yizkor. One of the four times of the year that we engage in a service of memory, where anyone who has ever been a mourner re-engages that grief.

Grief. That strange companion that arrives without warning and stays without permission. Grief—a word that carries its meaning in its bones, born from the Latin for heaviness, shaped by the French for injustice, and arriving in English as burden before it finally settled into what we know it to be: the specific, irreplaceable weight of love that has lost its home.

I’ve been thinking about grief a lot, because there is just so much of it in our world right now. Poignant and personal griefs, born of loss and illness. Heavy communal griefs, born of hopelessness and fear. And perhaps the hardest to encapsulate—a global grief, for a world that is filled with war and suffering.

It is impossible to ignore. No one is immune. Some of us bear the weight of these griefs with ease; others carry it with greater effort—effort that exhausts and numbs. Thinking about all of those roots for the word grief, I am struck by the way in which grief is described only as a feeling: physical, emotional, and mental.

The Hebrew language, on the other hand, lacks a specific word for grief. More commonly, where we might use the word grief in English, Hebrew speakers would use the word tza’ar, which means sorrow. Surely grief and sorrow are close companions. But what feels different to me—and worthy of note—is that the word tza’ar comes from a root that means narrow or constricted. Grief is a tight and narrow place to be in. Tza’ar is also connected to the word Mitzrayim, sharing that same three-letter root. Mitzrayim—meaning Egypt.

Our grief, our sorrow—it all relates back to that idea of narrowness. Of being in a place where it feels like there is no way out.

Grief is the very narrowest of places.

So what do we do with it? Where does it take us?

The rest of that poem by Naomi Shihab Nye reads:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

Grief and sorrow are tremendous teachers. They remind us of how much we have loved. Of how much we were seen. They remind us of just how much is at stake in being human. Not the promotions, or the bigger house, or the bigger name—but the time. The time when everything and everyone you love is okay. That’s the size of the cloth.

The three festivals, which include Pesach, are wise. They know that joy is always tinged with memory. That our holiday tables morph over time, and we cannot help but remember who used to fill the seat next to us. And maybe that is the deepest wisdom of this season.

That Pesach does not ask us to leave our grief behind.

It does not pretend that freedom erases loss, or that redemption cancels sorrow.

Instead, it insists that we carry it—with awareness, with tenderness—and that we refuse to let it close us off.

There is a midrash, drawn from the rabbis’ reading of our journey through the wilderness, that teaches that as the Israelites wandered in the desert, they carried not one ark, but two.

One held the luchot—the tablets of the covenant.

And the other held the bones of Joseph, fulfilling the promise made back in Genesis: “And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him…”

Side by side:

Covenant and memory.

Future and past.

Hope and grief.

Because to be a free people is not to forget what we have lost.

It is to know how to carry it.

Grief, like Mitzrayim, is a narrow place.

But the story we tell on Pesach is not only about how we got there—

it is about how we move through it.

How we make our way, slowly and imperfectly, toward something wider.

Toward kindness.

Toward the ability to look out at a world so full of sorrow—personal, communal, global—and still choose to soften rather than harden.

To open rather than contract.

To say: I know something about narrow places. And because of that, I will help make this world a little less narrow for someone else.

We carry the bones.

We carry the covenant.

We carry the memory of who was at our tables, and the responsibility for who still might be welcomed there.

That is the work of this season.

That is the invitation of the Seder table.

That is what it means to live k’ilu—as if we ourselves went out from Mitzrayim.

Not just that we remember the narrowness—

but that we become people who widen the world.