About

Thoughtful debate elevates us all. In For Heaven’s Sake, Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the future of Zionism in Israel and on the global stage.

The podcast draws its name from the concept of machloket l’shem shemayim, “disagreeing for the sake of heaven” and is part of the Institute’s iEngage Project.

Israel at War – The State of Our Freedom Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi friends, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, day 551. We’re a few days from Pesach, Passover, a holiday which is called our holiday of freedom. And Yossi, you and I, we had an existential need to be free from analyzing the troubles of Israel.

Yossi: Yeah, but we both know that that’s an illusion.

Donniel: That’s true. We know it’s true, but we had this need. It’s like, so we want to talk about Pesach. We want to talk about this holiday that is soon to be upon us and what it means this year. But the minute we say what it means this year, we’re not completely free because the feeling that I get from so many, not the feeling, the actual conversations that I’ve had with so many different Israelis is saying, How am I supposed to celebrate Pesach this year? What am I supposed to do? Some don’t know how to celebrate it. Some don’t know what to feel.

We had one celebration a year ago. And that had its meaning. And now with hostages and the ongoing war, we’re more broken, we’re more divided. There’s so much stuff going on. But as I said, we don’t want to talk about that so much today. So our goal is to talk about Pesach and to see, what does it mean to us this year? How do we intend on celebrating it with our families and our friends? And it’s… how is this Pesach different from Pesach every other year? What’s different this year? What are the parts that we’re going to find meaning in? What are the more important parts? What, this year, are the least important parts? And maybe escape a little bit because it’s not an easy time.

It seems like it just, you know, last week we did our session on Believe It or Not. As we were preparing for today, we said we need Believe It or Not 2. So we’re not going to do Believe It or Not, because, you know, we love Israel. we don’t want, even though it’s a troubled country, I think we need a break from analyzing our troubles for one week. And I apologize to our audience. Let’s call it the masochistic Zionists that many of us have become. So this week we’re gonna talk about freedom and all that it might mean, what this holiday is about. Just so much happened that before we even get there, you know, maybe it’s a yetzer hara, it’s an evil inclination.

Still, yesterday the Supreme Court overturned the Netanyahu government’s attempt to fire the head of the Shin Bet for no cause. Or what they called a cause was we lost our confidence. And they said you could fire him, but you can’t fire him the way you fired and for the reasons you fired. So they put the government almost in a penalty box and said, okay, now come up with a new system and a new way of talking about this. There is some rule of law. There is some process with which we get rid of the people who are supposed to be the gatekeepers of democracy and law and law and order in our country. And you can’t just get rid of them at whim because all of a sudden one day they’re running an investigation into Qatar gate.

So this was a huge, huge loss for the Netanyahu government. It was huge and the responses were huge. Maybe just some thoughts that you have. We can skip over this and then we’re going to truly be free. So Yossi, take us.

Yossi: Look, I think it was a very good day for Israeli democracy. And it did help reinforce the struggle to protect our freedom in Israel. In that sense, I think it was a terrific prelude to Pesach. What I think the Supreme Court was affirming were really two principles. And you touched on both, but I would just like to elaborate a little bit on both. The first is that there’s due process. You can’t substitute due process for hiring and firing within the civil service, within the security establishment on the basis of a prime minister’s whim. Suddenly, I don’t like this guy, suddenly… That’s not how it works. The prime minister does have the ultimate right to hire and fire, but within limits. It’s not capricious.

Donniel: Yossi, technically by the way the prime minister doesn’t, the government does.

Yossi: The government. Even more important.

Donniel: The government, yes. Much more important, yes.

Yossi: So the second principle that the court affirmed and here it was more delicate, but nevertheless, I think in some ways more powerful. And that is telling the government you can’t fire the head of the Shin Bet while the Shin Bet is investigating the prime minister.

Now, if you look at the pattern of how Netanyahu has behaved toward the judicial system, all these years he was a stalwart of an independent judiciary. Then he gets into his legal complications and suddenly the court is overreaching, the court is overbearing, it’s a threat to democracy, doing a 180-degree turn. And what he’s trying to do, even as he tried to fire the head of the Shin Bet, is to fire the attorney general who is presiding over his corruption trial. So what the Supreme Court did yesterday is draw a red line and said, we are not going to allow you to tamper with the system.

Donniel: But what I wanted, the context that you gave to this was very helpful to me. Because instead of kvetching about Israeli society, about all of this, you said this was a good day. And it really was.

Yossi: It’s a magnificent day. The court was courageous and the conservative justices on the panel supported the decision.

Donniel: It was a good, this was, right, this is, I want to speak about that for a moment. There were justices here who were the darlings of the right. One of them was the person who they wanted to appoint as the head of the court, the chief justice. And he also joined. It was unanimous. Because the rule of law is not supposed to be a left-wing and right-wing issue. Decency, not firing the head of the Shin Bet while they’re investigating you, that’s not the country we want to live in.

And that’s, these are people of conscience. And so the fact that it was unanimous, it was actually interesting. You kept on sending me all these social media posts, which, you know, cause I’m not on social media, so you’re my source of information of literally hysterical criticisms of the court, hysterical criticisms. There was a staged demonstration in the Supreme court. Imagine having a staged demonstration by members of Congress trying to disrupt a proceeding of the Supreme Court. They staged, led by a Knesset member, it was the whole thing. It was just this strange day. And at the end of the day, they said, what are we talking about? We’re not going to buy into this left-wing, right-wing divide on every issue. That that’s not what it’s about. This is a rule of law. And so this really was a good day.

Yossi: You know what the most telling moment for me of how good a day it was? There was an interview with the commander of the police who has not been a stalwart of democratic norms. He was the appointee of the far-right minister, Ben Gvir, and he’s who vetted him and who…

Donniel: Who vetted him, who before he hired him, he vetted him to make sure you’re to be my guy.

Yossi: And he showed every indication of falling into line. Yesterday, he gave an interview in Ben-Gvir’s presence saying, of course, we’re going to follow the ruling of the Supreme Court. We will defend Israeli democracy to the last ounce of our blood. And Ben-Gvir shut him down. he turns to Ben-Gvir and he says, let me finish. Let me speak. I said, whoa.

Donniel: And then he returned. Right.

Yossi: Whoa, all you have to do to affirm the rule of law is stand up to the bullies. That’s how it works. It’s not the autocrats or the would-be autocrats who determine the fate of democracy. It’s the people who are supposed to be defending democracy.

Donniel: So if we go back, so thank you. I have a feeling that you and I could talk about this the whole podcast, but we’re going to stop because we want to. So if today’s, the first freedom is it’s, today’s a day of freedom from some degree of insanity of, of, this insanity. And if you look at the discussions around it, it’s like this, the chief of police had to say this because members of the government were overly calling on, on, on, us to ignore.

Yossi: Yes, and a literal and it’s a…

Donniel: If the Supreme Court doesn’t decide with us, we have to ignore the Supreme Court. This was a crazy moment, so we’re free from that. You want more, Yossi? OK.

Yossi: Yes. And so, it’s, but even more deep, yes, yes, because this is an affirmation of the structure of law that guarantees our freedom.

Donniel: Right, great, okay. Can we go now to Pesach?

Yossi: All right, let’s do it.

Donniel: Okay, it’s coming. I think my soul needs it. And I like this was positive, it was a good day. There will be not good days, but today was a good day. But as I said in the introduction, so many Israelis are saying, how do I celebrate? What ambivalence are you coming with? We’re all ambivalent. You’re coming to this Pesach. How are you coming to the Seder, Yossi?

Yossi: Like all of us, in a state of brokenness. And the brokenness for me has multiple layers. The first and most obvious is that we’re stuck. Even last year, there was a feeling on Pesach that there’s movement. There’s some hope about the hostages. Maybe the war in Gaza is winding down.

Today, everything feels stuck. We’re still in a no-win war in Gaza. The hostages are still chained in their dungeons. This government of October 7th is still in power. The assault on democracy has been somewhat stalled, but nevertheless the government is still determined to push ahead on its assault. There’s also the sense of the unraveling of Israeli society, of the Jewish people. Pesach is in some ways our most unifying holiday. There’s no holiday, I don’t think, that draws in more Jewish participation than Pesach. You could be the farthest removed from Judaism and somehow you may find your way to a seder.

Much more so today, I see Pesach as much more of a unifying force than Yom Kippur. It’s much easier for you, if you’re a secular Jew, not to show up in synagogue. But Pesach isn’t about the synagogue. Pesach is about the home. It’s about family, friends, the story. And yet at this moment we are in a process, or so it feels, of unraveling. And the final, you know, yeah, no, no, go ahead.

Donniel: You said broken. I don’t feel broken. I feel punched. I feel punched.

Yossi: So no ribs are broken, but you’re aching.

Donniel: There’s an achiness that I’m feeling this year. You know, all of us, we now know more what the hostages are going through. you know, what is it that we’re celebrating? You know, Pesach needs a certain myth of redemption. It’s, now maybe it has to be in our mind. And I look back at Jews who celebrated Pesach while we were in much worse conditions than we are today. Maybe we’ve just become spoiled, but our challenge this year is to celebrate, tell this story and celebrate our freedom. You’re feeling broken. I’m just feeling punched. I don’t feel I have as much residue of redemption. It’s a hard year. It’s a hard year.

And my first recommendation to our listeners is, your job is not to ignore your feelings. Your job is to create a Seder which resonates your feelings and speaks to them. And so let’s begin that journey. At your Seder, what, after talking about where you were this year, like what for you is the most important aspect of this story, of the way you think about it, that you celebrate it, that you want to share with our audience, precisely this year. Like, is there an aspect of this story? You know, we are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. What’s your story of Pesach this year that could maybe help us on this journey towards freedom or towards feeling freedom?

Yossi: So, Donniel, when you asked me what it is I’m feeling, this Pesach, my first response was this sense of being stuck. And yet Pesach is, for me, the antithesis of being stuck. Pesach is all about movement, action, a sudden rupture in history where new possibilities emerge.

First, there’s the literal movement of a whole people suddenly being summoned to change its condition. But more deeply, I think that Pesach has resonated for so many people, so many cultures around the world, not only Jews by any means, because it’s the promise of not just renewal, but of breaking the seemingly immutable. It’s the first instance where people born into a condition of slavery suddenly emerge into freedom. That it’s the promise that caste, the conditions of your birth are not permanent. There’s a fluidity about Pesach, a fluidity in history that’s the promise of Pesach.

And so for me, Pesach comes at exactly the right time this year, precisely because I’m feeling so stuck and feeling so, you know, still, we’re still with Netanyahu, we’re still at all that stuff. Well, Pesach comes along and reminds me that none of this is permanent. Pesach is about, it’s, and it’s not necessarily about change in an easy or pleasant way, the story of Pesach is very complicated. It’s morally complicated. There’s trauma built in. And yet, the essential promise of Pesach is things never stay the way they seem to be.

Donniel: We don’t live in a world that’s predetermined and predestined. Radical change and transformation and redemption is possible.

Yossi: Right. Exactly. That’s the promise.

Donniel: Okay, I have to connect to that. I think that’s important. You know, when I think about Pesach, there’s so many different stories about it, but there’s a part that I’ve always resonated with and I feel this year is doubly and triply important to me. And it connects, also to what you said when you mentioned that Pesach is shared by so many other cultures. It’s not just a Jewish holiday, but it really is the ultimate Jewish holiday. You know, okay, the giving of Torah is also pretty particular, but if you think about it, this is like God’s marriage and love affair with the Jewish people.

Yossi: This is where we’re formed as a people in this moment.

Donniel: This is our day of independence, not our day of sovereign independence, but our beginning as a people because we were a people before we were sovereign in our land. This is our day of independence and freedom but it’s a day in which God promised to Abraham that I’m gonna look out for your descendants. I’m gonna look out for them. I got your back. Wherever you go I’m gonna go and I’m gonna make your name great. I’m gonna save you. I’m with you.

And on Pesach we… It’s God bestowing a huge amount of love on us, care, and using all of God’s almost infinite powers to bear, to save the Jewish people, and as our tradition says, to bear us on eagle wings, you know, to freedom. It’s the most private, personal Jewish story. It’s about God’s love for the Jewish people. It’s about our beginning as a community. It’s a very particular Jewish story.

A very natural part of when you tell this story is to look inwards. This is my celebration. You know, it’s my time. This is our holiday, our story. And just to look at your own salvation, your own, like to talk about what slavery meant to you and how you feel redeemed from it. It’s all a very personal, internal story. And the fact that you mentioned that it’s done in the family setting makes it even more so. It’s done. It’s literally just a private Jewish conversation about God’s love for the Jewish people and our beginning as a people. Our pain and how we started with pain and how we ended in many ways winning, defeating the superpowers of the world.

But what I always love about this story is that our tradition didn’t allow this height of particular personal family dimension to become narcissistic, to become navel grazing, to become self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing at all. One of the remarkable things is that in the Bible, half of Pesach is a particular story and the other half is challenging us to ask what are your moral responsibilities to others, to the disempowered Jews, to strangers who live in your midst, to people who work for you. It’s not that it just became universal. It became a story of growth. It became a story of saying that if you are free, what do you learn from this? How do you become more? How does Pesach fight mediocrity and become a catalyst for you to ask, if you are a slave, what type of person do you want to be?

And so I just love this idea, Yossi, that we could have been such, you know, it could have been just, you know, like banging each other on the head, drinking wine, you know, like just like with, just celebrating, you know, like this. Yom Ha’atzmaut in Israel, they have those stupid hammers where they used to. And it just doesn’t do that.

Yossi: I love those hammers. I miss those hammers.

Donniel: You miss those hammers, they scared, when we made Aliyah, and we went down into the streets, I thought we were petrified, we didn’t know what we’re supposed to do. People are beating, are hitting us with hammers, with these plastic little beepy hammers. So there’s something about that, again, we just aged ourselves.

Yossi: I love that. I just love what you’re saying, Donniel. And it’s so beautiful because if you, let’s stay with that for a moment because what you’re, one of my takeaways from what you’re saying is that what Pesach models for us is that the more we enter the particularity of our story, the more true we are to the essence of our own story, the more universal appeal it has.

And this is really important, I think, for the Jewish people today because our greatest fault line is the particular universal divide, those who are pulling in a tribal direction, those who are pulling in a tikkun olam direction. And what you’re saying, you’re saying two things. First is that the more, and this is my interpretation of what you’re saying, is that again, the more deeply we go into our tribalism, the more that that story has universal resonance. But it isn’t only going into our tribalism. That’s not enough because that’s the second part of what you’re saying, which is that what Pesach demands of us is to see our tribal story as a way of relating to the other. And when we model that, that’s the power that the Jewish people contains.

Donniel: We don’t just, it’s not just about, Pesach was not just about our suffering. And you know, and it’s very interesting. What I was speaking about almost doesn’t exist in the whole Passover Haggadah. It’s the Passover story in the Bible. And it’s our Passover Haggadah in the traditional sense is a very limiting Haggadah. And it only tells the tribal victory. It tells very briefly the story of suffering and then immediately goes into all the miracles. There were 10 miracles, now there were 50, now 250 miracles.

Yossi: But I think we have to understand the historical context of that. The Haggadah is written at a time when we are losing our sovereignty, when we’re going into exile. And so in that sense, the Haggadah is telling a story, a relentlessly tribal story that would sustain us in exile. But we’re not in exile anymore and we need a postscript in a way to the Haggadah.

Donniel: Maybe. Good, I appreciate that. A victory. Fair. Fair enough.

So we have to go back to the Bible. The biblical story of Pesach has a richness. And today, I can tell you how many times I go and I’m speaking to various Israeli Jewish groups. And just yesterday I spoke at a program at the Institute which is working with young Israeli Palestinian leadership who could help us try to forge new possibilities for shared society. And each group after October 7th is so concentrated on our, each one of us, is concentrated on our victimhood, on our tragedy.

And Pesach says, as bad as it is, you have to be able to see something bigger and to ask who are you and what does it mean to be free? And to be free is not only to be free from your suffering. It’s to be free to combat all suffering. There’s something about that, like our people, that we were able to do that. For me, it’s a commercial on why to be a Jew. It’s just, so for me, this is a very deep part of the story. And as I read the Haggadah, I’m very alienated from it. But let’s then shift to the Haggadah itself. What is your favorite part? Do you have a favorite part that you love?

Yossi: So it’s interesting, I do. I do. But it’s interesting because here is a perfect illustration of how you and I diverge. What our kind of natural default Jewish identity is. For me, my favorite part is matzah, which is in some ways the most prosaic, self-evident part of the Seder, but not in the way that the Haggadah itself speaks about Matzah. For me, it’s not about our poverty. It’s not a reminder that we were slaves in Egypt. It’s not a reminder that we need to be kind to the stranger. That’s not where I take this. For me,

It’s more in the direction of the Jewish mystics, the early Hasidim. And their teaching of Matzah was that this is a metaphor for the qualities that we need to develop in ourselves to be receptacles for God’s presence, that God enters into history. When I spoke earlier, about the fluidity of history and how Pesach really is a rupture in history. For me what that means as a religious person, it means God entering history. And it’s God’s presence in the story that’s the center point. Now I understand for many Jews that’s a problem. For many Jews the…

Donniel: But before you do that, Yossi, how does that connect to matzah?

Yossi: So, matzah is the metaphor for the work that we need to do on ourselves in order to experience God’s presence, the reality of God’s presence. So, for example, matzah is seen by the Jewish mystics as a symbol of humility. It’s the bread of poverty, but they don’t mean material poverty. They mean the necessary impoverishment of cravings, of the senses, of transforming yourself into a higher spiritual state. That’s one element of how they understood Matzah as a metaphor for humility. And you can’t bring God into your life if you don’t make space for God, if you don’t confine the self to a smaller space to allow the greater self.

Donniel: You know the rabbinic saying where God says to a person who is boastful, he and I can’t live in the same world.

Yossi: Yes, exactly. And he and I can’t live in the same being. Yeah. And so that’s one element of how the mystics understood Matzah. The other is that Matzah symbolized the haste with which the people of Israel were prepared to respond to God’s command. That God says, leave Egypt at midnight, and they don’t have, right, that’s the story we tell. They don’t have time to bake bread because they are responding to God’s command. And so the matzah becomes a metaphor for alertness, spiritual alertness, for a keenness to follow God’s will.

So for me, the matzah is, it’s one of those wonderful ways in which ritual works because ritual in one sense, ritual is symbolic. It’s a kind of a poetic act. But for the mystic, ritual is actually a literal act. It’s transforming the metaphor into actual reality. And the more that you adopt a ritual with the intent of living that ritual, of absorbing the essence of that ritual into your life and into your being, the more that ritual becomes real.

Donniel: So first of all, I don’t know why you say there’s differences between us. You don’t know the depth of my mystical soul. Stop laughing.

Yossi: You know, Donniel, you know something, I actually think that that’s true and you’re in a state of denial, but I do believe that it’s true.

Donniel: So I don’t know if I should say thank you about that or not, but beautiful. So it’s just an example of how during the Passover Seder we’re put in front of so many symbols. And to try to be creative and what do they mean? What do they mean for each one of us? And what are we looking to experience in our lives?

There is a part of the Seder that for me, I’ve ignored for the last number of years. It’s not that I’ve ignored it, it’s there. But I’m usually so tired by the time we get there, it almost feels like a burden. It’s like a slavery. The seder goes long and you have all the words, there’s the words and the words and the words, and then you eat. And then after you eat, you’re done. Even if you want to, you’re done. And everybody who says, oh, let’s talk about this after we eat, it’s false. Because there’s nothing to talk about after you eat. There’s more words and you’re tired now and you’re full.

And then you come to these four songs at the end, three or four songs. I forget the exact number. And so much a part of my upbringing was that Pesach was the time at the Seder that my father and mother want to engage us in the essence of the Jewish story as they understood it. How are we Hartmans going to tell the story of the Jewish people? And it was a very, very cerebral Seder. It was intense. It was challenging. There was always tension involved. But it was a family learning experience. You might want to call it a family graduate seminar.

Yossi: Ha ha ha! Let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s, hold on, wait, wait, that’s too good a line. Let’s just linger there for a moment.

Donniel: For all the good and problems that it had. But there’s no doubt that the Seder was the pinnacle of our family year. And then my parents left New York in 1960 when I was two. And my father’s parents were still in New York and we never saw them. But they would come to us once a year on Pesach. And my father’s father was in old Jerusalem. He was born in Jerusalem. His father was born, his grandfather was born, they moved here in 1830 from Hungary. And this was his world, it was a very primitive, impoverished Jewish Jerusalem experience. And he moved to the United States and he never made it in the United States, very poor man. But his great skill was, he was Shalom, Shalom Hartman comes from his name, Shalom. He was the Jerusalemite and he knew how to sing.

And almost the only memories, I don’t remember ever talking to my grandfather. But the only memory I have of him is when we came to these songs, he would sing them in Arabic, as they would learn it in Jerusalem. And it was magic. It was magic. And the beauty of these songs is that, you know, there are Jews who try to find and to interpret the meaning of the goat, who’s, who I don’t know is eaten by the cat, who’s destroyed by the dog and the psych and all. Like one who knows, one knows how great. All these repetitive songs and they try to give them different interpretations.

And it turns out that you know what these songs were? I was just hearing a report on the radio the other day. Somebody who has a doctorate actually wrote a doctorate on Chad Gadya, on the goat. That there is a genre of, I think they’re technically called cumulative songs where each verse builds on the next. And it turns out that this is not a Jewish thing, this is a general thing. And they were very often drinking songs in taverns and very, very joyful.

Now, our challenge in the Seder, and this I remember from my grandfather, and then I remember my father who didn’t speak Arabic pretending to speak Arabic. And he would be singing like he thought he was fooling. But he was like, it was like all the intensity of the Seder was dissipated and it was just joy just like forget the interpretations. These songs are insane. They’re not meant to have meaning. They’re meant to just be joyful songs, especially after you’ve sang, you’ve already drank four cups of wine.

And so this year, you know, as I’m feeling beaten, I really want some of that joy and let’s not, let’s not come, let’s not complicated. It turns out that when I have, when now I have to ask, what is the sum of the stories that we Hartmans have told? The thing that one of the things that I remember the most is this, is, is the simple joy, the joy of my grandfather, the joy of my father at these songs. And so this year I want to get to them early enough, that we could experience the joy without being too tired.

Because maybe part of what we need this holiday of freedom, Yossi, needs to have also some joy. We need to, you know, we have to get back to some joy. Without that, Yossi, what does it mean to be free if you don’t have some joy? So I want to get there this year.

Yossi, any last thoughts?

Yossi: Yeah, you know, I think that one of the most remarkable characteristics of Pesach is its malleability. I mean, you can take this story in so many different directions. And one of the things that I love about Judaism in modernity is the freedom to take this story in so many counterintuitive directions. Think of the multiplicity of Haggadot, of Haggadahs that have been produced in this last generation. The different themes, there’s feminism, there’s the universal liberation, there’s the Haggadah of the land of Israel, the unbelievable proliferation of Haggadahs that the kibbutz movement produced. And each Haggadah has its own particular flavor.

So Pesach in our time is an opportunity, I think, to balance the deep foundations of tradition with our own eccentric inclinations, whether as individuals or as families or as communities. And there’s something liberating about being able to liberate the tradition. And that’s that in some ways that is something that I really cherish about Pesach in our time.

Donniel: So Yossi, thank you. It’s a complicated Pesach. We’re not going to forget that 59 members of our family aren’t free. We’re not going to forget that we’re still at war. And we’re not going to forget that there’s a lot of killing and dying happening right now, also in Gaza.

We’re not going to forget all the pain and we’re not going to forget that our world isn’t liberated, but I’m going to go back to what you said. It’s not determined. We’re not stuck. It doesn’t have to be that way. And maybe with that hope and with the challenge that you also gave at the end for us to be creative, to tell our own story, by the way, also to skip certain sections.

There’s no mitzvah. There’s no people don’t, there is no mitzvah anywhere which says that you have to say everything. Actually the Haggadah itself tells you you don’t. When it says, there’s the section which says, these are the three things that you have to say. That means these things. Pesach, Matzah and Maror. You don’t have to say everything. Skip, give yourself time to breathe. Be free.

Yossi: Donniel, between us, and if you quote me, I’ll deny that I said it, I skip most of the Haggadah and focus on the essence.

Donniel: Yeah, can’t, can’t, Yossi, you’re too, I can’t handle that, it’s too much of me. But in any event, people, be free. Remember that our people and many people in our area aren’t free. And may next Pesach be a holiday where we could celebrate never complete, but a more full freedom. Be well, be well, Yossi, be well to our audience. Chag sameach, happy holiday, everyone.

Yossi: Chag Sameach.