For us (Ken and Gisela), the story of Pesach is a story of constant struggle at many levels: At the most basic level, struggle between security and certainty of remaining a slave in Egypt

and uncertainty and potential freedom of following the path of faith. It is also a struggle between faith and doubt. Am I willing to leave everything I’ve known for the total unknown? Abandoning a known way of life for something unknown? Many Jews in Egypt remained, and only a minority followed Moshe into the desert. Connected to this tension between faith and doubt is a third struggle between a material dimension of existence and a spiritual one. And finally, Pesach is a struggle between the individual and the collective. The story of the Exodus is a story that connects Jews in a very particular way to each other because it is a story of trust, of commitment, and of a shared experience of persecution and liberation. These are struggles that Jews encounter every day in the modern world, struggles we first encountered as a people during the Exodus. Reading the Haggadah not only reminds us that these struggles are not new, but it also offers us a script to overcome these challenges and to grow spiritually, socially and intellectually as an individual, as a community, and as a people. 

Ken and Gisela Loiselle