In our home, this was not considered charity. It was memory.
Passover asks us not only to remember that we were slaves in Egypt, but to feel what that memory demands of us. The Torah reminds us again and again:
“ You know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”( Exodus 23:9).
The Haggadah begins with bread because hunger is the most immediate human vulnerability. Before stories, before explanations, before identity, a hungry person must first be fed.
“ Let all who are hungry come and eat.”
Sometimes Jewish memory is preserved not only in books, but in a simple question asked at the right moment:
Do you want bread?
Ilona Levinets, a rabbinical student at AJR, is a Jewish educator and co-founder of Dor L’ Dor, the first Reform Jewish center in The Republic of Georgia. Her work brings together Jewish learning, spiritual leadership, intercultural dialogue, and advocacy for women’ s leadership.
34