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Welcome to Kolot, the podcast of The Ark Synagogue, a bold, experiential and caring Progressive Jewish community in Northwood, London.
Through sermons, reflections and conversations from across our community, Kolot explores Jewish life, learning and values in the world we live in today. Rooted in tradition and open to new perspectives, these episodes bring together voices that inspire thought, connection and belonging.
Whether you are Jewish, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for meaningful reflection, you are warmly welcome.
To learn more about The Ark Synagogue, visit arksynagogue.org.
At the seder, we tell the story of our freedom. We sit around our tables and recall what it meant to be slaves in Egypt and what it meant for God to bring us out “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” But if we listen carefully to the Torah’s narrative, it becomes clear that Pesach is not only a story about liberation. It is a story about what happens next. Because the journey from Egypt to Sinai is not simply a journey from oppression to redemption; it is a journey from powerlessness to power. And the Torah, in its deep moral wisdom, recognises that this moment—when a people first becomes free—is also the moment of greatest danger. Freedom, if it is not shaped and guided, can become something else entirely. It can become arbitrary power, or fear-driven reaction, or moral blindness. That is why, almost immediately after leaving Egypt, the Torah begins to legislate. Not because law is the opposite of freedom, but because law is what protects freedom from becoming its own distortion.
This is a theme that runs deeply through our tradition. Rabbi John Rayner, whose thought has shaped so much of Liberal Judaism in this country, argued consistently that Judaism is never only about our own survival but about our responsibility to contribute to the moral life of humanity.
Freedom, in that understanding, is not an end point. It is a beginning. It is a call to responsibility. And Pesach, perhaps more than any other festival, asks us not only to remember that we were freed, but to ask what we are doing with that freedom now.
One of the central rituals that prepares us for this festival is the search for chametz. On the surface, it is a simple act: we search our homes for leaven and remove it. But Jewish tradition has always understood chametz as something more than physical. It becomes a symbol of what puffs us up, what distorts us, what takes something essential and turns it into something inflated and unstable. The early twentieth-century rabbi and mystic Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel, drew on a kabbalistic image when he spoke of se’or sheba’isa—the “leaven in the dough”—as a metaphor for those internal tendencies within the Jewish people that lead us away from our deepest moral and spiritual purpose. For Rav Kook, the danger was that we might define ourselves through borrowed or distorted ideas, losing sight of who we are meant to be.
In recent days, my teacher Rabbi Michael Marmur, a British-born Israeli scholar, reflected on this very idea in a powerful way. He asked: why is this search for chametz different from all other searches? And his answer was unsettling.
He suggested that today, the leaven we are called to search for is not only in our homes but in our collective life. That under the shadow of ongoing war, Israeli society—like any society under prolonged pressure—is at risk of being overtaken by forces that distort its moral clarity. He writes about the need to confront what he calls the “stubborn rise of destructive forces within ourselves,” and insists that these days are not a time for self-justification but for honest self-examination.
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At The Ark Synagogue, what stands at the core of our relationship with Israel is solidarity with the people of Israel. We stand with those who, day after day, are scrambling for shelter; with families and communities living under the constant threat of rockets and drones; with a society that has endured the trauma of almost continuous conflict for over two and a half years. This is not abstract for us. It is not distant. It is our people, Am Yisrael, and our connection to them is one of love, of history, of shared destiny.
But our tradition does not allow love to become silence. The Torah does not ask us only to remember what was done to us; it asks us to take responsibility for what is done by us. Again and again, the Torah reminds us that we know the experience of oppression—“for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”—and precisely for that reason, we are called to build a society that is governed by justice, restraint, and moral accountability.
In that light, we must speak honestly about developments in Israel that raise profound ethical concerns. In recent days, the Israeli government has advanced legislation to impose the death penalty for Palestinian terrorists. Now, let us be clear: the crimes that this law seeks to address are real and devastating. The loss of life through acts of terror is a tragedy that demands a response. But the Jewish tradition has always approached the death penalty with extreme caution. The Talmud, in tractate Makkot, famously teaches that a Sanhedrin—a Jewish court—that executes even once in seventy years is considered chovlanit, destructive or bloodthirsty. This is not because the rabbis were naïve about violence, but because they understood the moral weight of taking a human life and the irreversible nature of such a decision.
My friend Rabbi Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and Member of Knesset, reminded his fellow legislators of this teaching during the debate on the bill. He argued that Jewish tradition does not celebrate capital punishment but seeks to avoid it wherever possible. And beyond the question of the death penalty itself lies another deeply troubling aspect of this legislation: it does not apply equally. It is designed to apply to Palestinian terrorists, but not to Jewish terrorists.
But the moment justice is applied unevenly, it ceases to be justice. It becomes something else—something that undermines the very moral foundations on which a state claims legitimacy.
At the same time, we are witnessing an alarming escalation of violence in the West Bank, where extremist settler groups have carried out acts of arson, grievous bodily harm, and even murder. These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a pattern that is increasingly difficult to explain away as a few bad apples. And when such acts are not met with consistent and unequivocal enforcement of the law, it creates the perception—and perhaps the reality—of impunity. A state that does not hold its own citizens accountable risks eroding its own ethical core.
These developments do not exist in isolation. They are part of a broader political landscape in which deeply troubling priorities are emerging. In order to secure support for controversial legislation, the government has agreed to allocate increased funding to Haredi institutions, even as many ordinary Israelis are struggling with a severe cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by prolonged war. And at the same time, proposals have been advanced that would criminalise certain forms of Jewish prayer at the Kotel, the Western Wall, including the possibility of imposing prison sentences for practices such as women wearing a tallit or praying in an egalitarian manner.
Here, the issue is not only one of religious pluralism; it is about the fundamental question of what it means to be a Jewish state. What kind of Jewish state restricts Jewish prayer?
And yet, it is important to say—because it is true—that alongside all of this, Israeli society continues to display extraordinary resilience, solidarity, and humanity. There is beauty there. There is courage there. There are individuals and communities working tirelessly for justice, for coexistence, for peace. As Rabbi Marmur reminds us, these days are not about denying that goodness. But neither are they about allowing that goodness to obscure the reality of what must be confronted.
Orly Erez-Likhovski, the director of the Israel Religious Action Center, an organisation that has long been at the forefront of advocating for religious equality and civil rights in Israel, wrote in her Pesach greeting to me: “May we continue to work for freedom for all.” It is a simple sentence, but it carries the weight of our entire tradition. Because Pesach does not teach us that freedom belongs only to us. It teaches us that freedom must be extended, protected, and pursued—for all. As we say at the end of the seder: “Next year in a world where all are free!”
This is the responsibility that comes with freedom. It is not enough to celebrate our own liberation. We must ensure that our freedom does not come at the cost of another’s dignity. We must ensure that our power is exercised with restraint and with justice. We must be willing, even in times of fear and uncertainty, to hold ourselves to account.
That is the deeper meaning of the search for chametz. It is not only about crumbs in the kitchen. It is about identifying those elements within our society—and within ourselves—that, if left unchecked, will distort who we are meant to be. It is about recognising that even a people born in the experience of slavery is not immune to the temptations of power.
Pesach does not ask us to be perfect. But it does ask us to be honest. Honest enough to stand in solidarity with Israel and honest enough to speak about Israel with moral clarity. Honest enough to love Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, and to insist that Medinat Yisrael, the state of Israel, reflect the highest values of our tradition.
Because the true test of freedom is not how we celebrate it, but how we live it. And the story of Pesach reminds us that leaving Egypt is only the beginning. The real question is what kind of society we build once we are free.
Chag sameach.
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