Juda Honickman is Spokesperson for One Israel Fund
Something is wrong with the world right now and everyone knows it.
Nations that stood for something can't define what that something is anymore. Evil gets rebranded. Victims get blamed. The clearest moral questions of our lifetime are treated as genuinely complicated, as if the complication itself is sophisticated, as if certainty is the embarrassing position.
For anyone paying real attention, none of this is complicated. It is a plague.
The Torah tells us G-d hardened Pharaoh's heart. Repeatedly. The question everyone asks: if G-d hardened Pharaoh's heart, where was the free choice? It's a fair question. One answer is that Pharaoh used his free choice, and exhausted it, long before the hardening began.
By the time G-d intervened and “hardened Pharaoh's heart", Pharaoh wasn't being denied a decision. He was being denied an escape from the one he had already made. There is a version of that happening today too.
People have made their choices. What's being removed is the ambiguity that let them avoid owning up to them.
The people, institutions, and governments that have aligned themselves against Israel, against the Jewish people, against basic morality, are not being manipulated into those positions. They are being revealed in them. G-d is not creating the confusion. He is using it. The confusion is the clarity.
The Berditchever asks a question about the plague of darkness. The Torah says the Jews had light in their dwellings. Why mention the light? We already know Egypt was dark. Isn't mentioning the absence of darkness enough?
His answer: it wasn't simply that the Jews were spared. They received something that had no natural source, a taste of the light of the world to come. A glimpse into the Messianic era, delivered in the middle of total darkness, right before their redemption.
Egypt was pitch black. And inside that darkness, the Jews were shown what was coming.
We are in that moment.
The darkness is not hard to see - the chaos, the inversion, the moral abandonment is visible across the world. You don't need to be religious to see it. You just need to be honest.
But something else is also happening.
Israel, a country that by any logic should not exist, fighting on seven fronts, is still standing.
The Jewish people, written off by every empire that tried to erase us, are still here. Still building. There is light in these dwellings that has no rational accounting.
Those who can see it know exactly what they are looking at.
This is not the darkness before despair. This is the specific darkness that comes before something irreversible. The Berditchever's darkness. The kind that means you are close.
Awe is the correct response. But awe without movement is just external.
The Jews in Egypt didn't only receive the light, they had to walk into it. Leave. Move while it was still dark, before the redemption was visible, before it was rational or obvious or safe.
The question this Pesach is not whether the world is confused. Everyone agrees it is. The question is whether you can see through the confusion to what it actually is - the particular darkness that precedes particular light.
Choose the light. You don't need to fully understand it to walk toward it.
Just start walking.
Chag Pesach Sameach.