To all our friends — in Poland, in Israel, in both  Americas, and around the world — we extend our wishes for beautiful, luminous, and peaceful days and nights of Passover.

This is a Jewish festival of freedom. This is a festival of Jewish freedom.

We were taught that freedom is peace.

Yet we still  — from one generation to another — continue to wait for peace.

Like one waits for the Messiah.

But instead of the shofar on the Mount Olivet, we still hear the wail of sirens and the explosions of bombs.

So let there come, at least on the night of the Seder, a Wild Peace — the peace that  the poet Yehuda Amichai prayed for. And let us pray with him.

Amen.

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.o
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds – who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

Translated by Chana Bloch

Designs: Ewa Gordon