Dear friend,
As Passover approaches, I am moved to ask four questions:
• How can we sustain each other during the pandemic?
• How can we celebrate Passover safely?
• How can we sing together in community?
• How can we inspire each other to creative action to build a better and more beautiful world, a shenere un besere velt?
Just before Passover last year, our world changed. We could no longer have our usual intergenerational Seder at the Hellenic Center, so we got creative. We scrambled to set up a virtual Seder and ended up having our biggest Seder gathering ever, with friends and family attending from around the world!
Our wonderful Shule students created videos of the four questions. Our talented singers pre-recorded songs. Our dedicated staff applied their artistic and technical skills to create beautiful videos. Our volunteer Haggadah readers mastered some novel technology called Zoom, even learning to unmute themselves when it was their turn to read!
Our first major community-wide virtual event, put together with only two weeks’ notice, was a great success!
A fifth question:
• Who would have thought that we would be doing this again a year later?
But here we are, looking forward to the day when we can be together again in person. In the meantime, our community will gather virtually and ask many more than four questions at Passover.
Together, we will find the answers that will lead us to collective liberation. Hope to “see” you there!
Zayt mir gezunt un shtark (be well and strong),