In the coming days, Jewish families around the world will gather at dining-room tables. We will stack plates with parsley and horseradish, pour wine into polished kiddush cups and break matzoth in two. We’ll open Haggadahs, sing ancient songs and tell the same story we’ve told for thousands of years: how we were enslaved in Egypt, and how — through signs, wonders and a hard-earned exit — we became free.

It’s an act of ritual repetition, yes, but also of radical imagination. The central demand of the Passover Seder is that participants individually see themselves as if they personally left Egypt. Not just that it happened, but that it happened to you.

That idea has always been emotionally powerful. This year, it feels almost unbearably literal.

Because this year, as we did last year, Jews come to the table still staggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, staggered by the knowledge that hostages are still held in Gaza — still trapped, still waiting. The Passover story of captivity and deliverance is no longer just metaphor. It’s personal. We are still praying for an exodus.

And like the original story, it is happening amid a rising tide of hostility to Jews. Across campuses, social-media feeds and political spaces, we are once again being cast as suspect, too numerous, too influential. The same ancient script, just with updated language. The strategy is familiar: “Let us deal shrewdly with them,” Pharaoh told his people. The goal, as always, is to isolate and diminish.

The Torah teaches that the Israelites originally lived in Egypt peacefully. Joseph, once sold into slavery by his brothers, rose to power and earned the trust of Pharaoh himself. It was a story of integration, even success. But then — suddenly, chillingly — “a new Pharaoh arose, who did not remember Joseph”.

That line should never be read as history alone. It’s a warning. The favour of one government, one generation, one leader does not guarantee safety in the next. Memory fades. Status shifts. Welcome can curdle into suspicion overnight.

We know this pattern. We’ve lived it too many times.

In the past year, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States have skyrocketed. Nationally, the FBI documented 1,832 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2023 — the highest number in more than three decades. Last month, 54 per cent of New York’s recorded hate crimes targeted Jews, a percentage that held steady with hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks across all of 2024. On college campuses, Hillel International tracked more than 1,400 incidents this academic year alone. And that all follows on the eruption of anti-Semitism witnessed around the world in the months after the October 7 attack.

This is not ancient history. It is our present reality.

Passover also forces us to hold a difficult duality about violence and death. Sometimes wars are just. Sometimes liberation is possible only through force. Pharaoh refused to free his slaves. God struck down the Egyptians’ firstborn. The sea split for us and then closed behind us. We didn’t choose that war, yet we’re told not to celebrate death — even the death of our enemies. In a haunting Talmud commentary, we’re told that when the angels began to sing as the sea drowned the Egyptian army, God silenced them: “My creations are drowning, and you want to sing?”

This is the emotional and ethical tightrope of being Jewish. We are not naive pacifists, but neither are we triumphalists. We fight when we must — and mourn when we do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that balance, between clarity and empathy, between resolve and grief, as I prepare for my first Seder without my grandmother, Masha Greenbaum, a Holocaust survivor who died last autumn — on October 7.

She was the centrepiece of our Seders. When, reciting, we reached the line “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt”, the room would fall quiet, and she would begin her own story: of Jewish ghettos, concentration camps and a Passover conducted with no food, no wine and no books, in the filth of Bergen-Belsen. She told us how she and her fellow Jewish prisoners recited the words “Now we are free”, even though they weren’t.

A week or so after uttering those words in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Masha was liberated. She thought she had died or was delusional when she heard someone speaking in Hebrew over a loudspeaker, reciting Havdalah, the prayer that separates shabbat from the week, the holy from the mundane. She wasn’t hallucinating; the man on the loudspeaker was a chaplain with the British army troops who threw open the camp’s gates. He would later become her husband.

Passover is, at its core, a story of transition. From slavery to freedom. From despair to hope. From silence to song.

But making those transitions is not a given. It requires memory. It requires vigilance. It requires moral courage. And it requires a willingness to see that while we are no longer in ancient Egypt, it is never as distant as we might be tempted to think.

• Daniella Greenbaum Davis is a writer and social-media strategist in New York