Still Leaving Egypt: A Personal Challenge at Passover

by Rabbi Bridget Wynne

March 4, 2026 • 15 Adar 5786

Haibat Balaa Bawab, Immigration Collage, 2016, Lebanon

Every year we retell the same Passover story: slavery in Egypt, the plagues, the parting of the sea, the journey toward freedom. And that is part of the point–to remember the story, to teach it to future generations, keeping it alive for thousands of years.

Yet there is a Hasidic teaching that challenges us to learn something new each year:

In every generation, a new form of slavery must be discovered, a new type of oppression must be overcome. If we are not actively engaged in coming out of Egypt, then we are still in Egypt, still enslaved.

This insight is not only an invitation. It is a challenge, addressed to each of us.

The Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, is related to meitzar, meaning "narrow place." Our ancestors' bondage was literal, but our tradition also understands Egypt as a spiritual condition. To be in Mitzrayim is to be constricted: by fear, by habit, by the stories we tell about ourselves, about others, about what is possible.

This teaching calls us to look beyond those constrictions, beyond our past understandings of what Passover demands. We know that the holiday calls on us to "love the stranger," words that carry urgent weight today, as we witness immigrants and citizens alike being detained, jailed, or worse, targeted by the very fear of the stranger our tradition warns against.

Yet we must also ask, who around us is oppressed in ways we have never noticed, or never allowed ourselves to notice?

History shows that expanding our moral vision is harder than it sounds. Oppression can hide in plain sight, normalized by culture, rationalized by law, invisible to many who are not experiencing it. Look back ten, fifty, a hundred years: women and Black Americans unable to vote; rape within marriage legal in parts of the U.S. until 1993; LGBTQ+ people forbidden from having custody of their own children, from being teachers, or even rabbis. The list, as you know, goes on.

The Hasidic text I shared above reminds us that the list continues into the present. Each generation is called to see and name forms of suffering that have been accepted as simply the way things are, even the way things should be. And sometimes that suffering becomes acceptable again, and we must fight the same battle over.

At the seder table, we are called to pose questions. This year, I invite you to ask: Where is there oppression that my vision has been too narrow to see? Where have I been taught to look away?

These questions may be uncomfortable, but wrestling with them is a meaningful way to be "actively engaged in coming out of Egypt."

Discomfort can be where new forms of liberation begin. The exodus is always happening. We can be part of it if our eyes are open, if we are willing to look.