What is freedom? Not the dramatic kind that splits seas, but the quieter kind that reshapes a life. How does freedom actually show up in our daily choices, habits, conversations, and at our tables?

When we tell the Passover story, we focus on the extraordinary—the plagues, the sea, the miracle. Freedom arrives all at once. It is loud and undeniable.

But most of life is not lived at the edge of a sea.

Freedom is quieter. It often feels smaller than we expect—and harder than we admit. Sometimes it looks like nothing happening at all—until everything changes.

It lives in small decisions: how we respond, what we hold onto, how we speak, how we show up. It sits at our tables—in how we listen and whether we make space for others.

The Exodus happened once.
Freedom happens again and again—choice by choice, day by day.

Adults: Where does freedom show up in your life? What patterns still hold you? What would it look like to choose differently—consistently?

Kids: What is something new you can do on your own this year? When do you feel most free to be yourself?

And maybe the real question this Passover is not whether we are free—
but whether we are living like we are.

“Ready or not, here I come!”

I can still hear myself shouting those words—equal parts excitement and warning—as my daughters, then seven and four, scattered through the house looking for the perfect hiding spot. Lucy’s favorite was the doll basket—buried beneath stuffed animals, certain she had found the perfect place to disappear. The game was simple: stay hidden as long as possible. Winning meant not being found. And when I finally spotted them—behind a couch or tucked into a closet—“I found you!” marked the end of their victory and the beginning of their laughter-filled defeat.

As Passover approaches, I find myself thinking about a different kind of search.

At our Seder, the afikoman—and even the search for chametz—became highlights for the children. Unlike hide and seek, where the goal is to remain hidden, the afikoman reverses the game entirely—the goal is to be found. After years of finishing second to my older brother Laurence—never once finding it—I made a quiet decision as a parent. At our Seder, the children would search together. The reward would be shared. The experience would be about discovery, not defeat.

Our rabbi at The Shul, reflecting on this week’s Torah portion, Vayikra, brought this contrast into focus. The word Vayikra—“And He called”—ends with a small aleph, written smaller in the Torah scroll. It is a subtle detail, yet one filled with meaning. Many interpretations point to Moses’ humility—his desire to soften the intensity of God’s call.

But there is another way to understand it.

Moses is called by God three times: at the burning bush, at Mount Sinai, and here in Vayikra.

The progression is precise.

The first call awakens.
The second teaches.
The third reveals.

At first, the voice comes from outside, impossible to ignore. Then it gives structure and direction. Finally, it becomes quiet enough to be heard within.

What if the small aleph represents not less communication, but a deeper one?

Not the voice that demands attention—but the one that requires awareness.

One of our favorite children’s books was Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!. Horton hears a tiny voice coming from a speck of dust—so small that no one else believes it exists. While others dismiss it, Horton listens. He protects it. He insists on its reality, even when it seems invisible to everyone else.

“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

As I read to my children, it seemed like a simple story. As I reflect as an adult, it feels much deeper.

The ability to hear what others overlook, to notice what appears insignificant, is not imagination. It is perspective. As Albert Einstein observed, genius is seeing the same thing as everyone else, but thinking about it differently.

Perhaps the small aleph is asking the same of us.

It reminds me of a Hasidic story often attributed to Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa. A poor man dreams that he will find a treasure under a bridge in a distant city. After traveling there, a guard laughs and tells him that he once dreamed of treasure buried under the bed of a poor man with the same name. The man returns home, digs beneath his own bed, and discovers the treasure had been there all along.

Sometimes we travel far only to discover that what we were searching for was already within us.

As children, we play hide and seek trying not to be found. As adults, we realize that the greater challenge is allowing ourselves to be found.

This Passover, perhaps the goal is not to remain hidden, but to step forward.

We spend our childhood trying not to be found—and our lives learning how to be found.

The afikoman follows the same pattern. Early in the Seder, we transform an ordinary piece of matzah into the afikoman with a simple break. The night continues without it. And then, at just the right moment, the search begins. The children look, they uncover, they return with it—and only then can the meal be completed.

The small aleph, the afikoman, the hidden treasure beneath our own bed—they all point to the same truth: the most important parts of ourselves are not absent, but waiting.

To listen more carefully for the quieter voice.
To search more honestly for what we have set aside.
To find the small aleph within ourselves—and bring it back to the table.

Yesterday, my older daughter Caroline successfully matched in her pursuit of medical residency. I have always admired her determination and academic excellence. But what I am most proud of is something quieter.

When Caroline and Lucy played hide and seek, Caroline often chose to be found first—allowing Lucy the joy of winning.

As Caroline now begins her journey as a physician, I see that this was never a small gesture. It was an early expression of something deeper—a hidden strength of kindness. A physician enters the most hidden places in a person’s life—the moments of fear, pain, and vulnerability few want seen. Caroline has been practicing for this her entire life, not in hospitals, but in a house in Boston, in a game of hide and seek, learning that sometimes the most generous thing you can do is let someone else be found first.

As we approach this year’s Passover Seder, we can see the afikoman not as something lost, but as something waiting for us to become the kind of people who are ready to be found.

Hidden all along
We search far for what we hold
Ready to be found

“Yes,” I replied. “It was.”

“Why did you not tell us earlier? Yesterday was such a difficult conversation,” my daughter said.

“I waited a long time for the right moment.”

Yesterday was difficult.
But I have thought about yesterday’s conversation every day for months.
Each day, I told myself: not yet.
I paused myself.
I waited.

“You are such amazing daughters,” I said. “I am so proud of you. I try to help you in any way I can. Sometimes the hardest thing about being a father is not what I do. It is what I do not do.”

There are moments when doing nothing is not avoidance. It is discipline. It is love refusing to force a moment before it is ready.

The sages teach tzimtzum: contraction, the act of making space. God withdraws so the world can breathe. Absence is not a void; it is the cradle where presence can be born. I have come to believe that love is often measured not by how much we fill a moment, but by how gently we step back so another soul can step forward.

You can see this everywhere once you begin to look. A parent pauses before correcting a child, and the child discovers courage. A teacher leaves a question hanging, and a student finds her own voice. In the boardroom, silence after a pitch sometimes allows the best idea to surface without being muscled by volume or title. Presence can be born from absence.

Grief taught me tzimtzum most honestly. When a chair is empty at the table, we learn to set a place in the heart. We do not get over absence, we grow around it.

There is one Torah story that always returns to me: the Binding of Isaac.

The power of that moment is not the drama of the mountain. It is the space inside it.

God could have made Abraham’s path obvious. God could have surrounded him with certainty so complete that choice disappeared. But that would not be faith. That would be coercion.

Instead, God creates space, an uncomfortable and excruciating space, where Abraham must choose.  In that space, something new is born: not obedience as reflex, but faith as decision. The first true faith is not forced. It emerges from the room God makes for a human being to step forward freely.

Tzimtzum is what makes relationship possible. Without space there is only pressure, even when it is wrapped in love.

Shabbat is a weekly reminder of this truth. We stop doing so that being can return.

And the desert teaches it too. No clutter, no cover, just enough emptiness to hear what cannot be heard anywhere else.

Absence is not abandonment. It is a gift of trust.

As I sat with my daughters after that difficult conversation, I understood something I could not have said earlier: I did not wait to avoid the hard thing. I waited so the hard thing could be held with love.

P.S. I woke up this morning to an email from Lucy: “I’ve been thinking a lot about our conversation and your advice… if you want to write a few more thoughts, I’d value them. Love, Lucy.”

Empty chair, full heart,
in what we choose not to hold,
blessing learns to land.

“Would you please wash your hands?” Joan asked.

“I always do,” I said.

“No, I mean, would you begin each morning by washing your hands?”

I didn’t understand. Washing my hands? I had done that my entire life. What could be so important about something so simple?

It was January 22nd, 2026, the yahrzeit of the Baba Sali, Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira. I had written previously about Joan’s family and their connection to him. She told me that if I prayed to Hashem in his merit on that day and committed to begin a new mitzvah, I would invite blessing into my life.

So I began washing my hands each morning when I woke up.

“Did you say the blessing?” she asked. “Did you wear a kippah?”

I said no to both.

The next morning, she handwrote the prayer and taped it to the cabinet by the sink. I read it slowly. I did not fully understand the words. But I recognized one: yadayim — hands.

So I began.

On Shabbat, we were preparing to read Parshat Yitro and the giving of the Ten Commandments. Instead, our rabbi began with the battle against Amalek from the preceding section. I wondered why he was not speaking about Mount Sinai. Then he began to speak about hands.

Our rabbi explained that when Moses raised his hands, the Children of Israel prevailed. When his hands lowered, Amalek prevailed. Moses’ hands grew heavy and required the support of Aaron and Hur in order to remain raised. Even elevation is not sustained alone.

Why would victory hinge on the position of Moses’ hands?

The rabbi explained: lowered hands pull us downward toward the ground. Lifted hands position us toward Heaven.

As an aside, a boxer keeps his hands raised to protect himself. Active hands serve as a shield. But when hands rise above the head, one is  exposed and vulnerable. To lift your hands in faith is to trust protection beyond yourself.

As a Kohen, I realized something more personal. Kohanim lift their hands to bless the people. In the Mishkan, Kohanim also washed their hands before entering sacred service.

I had written elsewhere about the posture of hands while eating: how slavery keeps them reaching downward, how the wilderness trains them to lift, how the Promised Land invites them to reach to the trees for the fruit and to the ground to plant the seeds. Now the metaphor was no longer theoretical, but embodied.

One morning at the sink, I paused over the word netilat in the blessing.

What does that mean? I wondered. I had always assumed it meant “washing.” It does not. It means “lifting.” Al netilat yadayim: concerning the lifting of the hands. Not merely washing, but lifting.

That is why the morning blessing can be a quiet echo of the Exodus. We do not bless Hashem merely “for washing” our hands; we bless for lifting them. It is the spiritual start of the day.

Sleep can feel like a kind of slavery, a temporary surrender of awareness. Waking is a small liberation. When we rise, we wash as though passing through the Sea of Reeds. As we climb out of bed, we enter a wilderness moment, uncertain and unscripted, and lift our hands in praise. At the sink, we receive a silent Sinai. Then the day stretches before us like a Promised Land.

The Promised Land resembles the fullness of the day: work, responsibility, cultivation, blessing. Freedom is not only waking up; it is living forward with purpose once awake.

Each morning, before emails, before conversations, before Zoom meetings…before it all; I stand at the sink and wash and I lift. It is a simple act. Water over skin. My hands raised in gratitude; not for what has already happened, but for what the day may bring.

Such a small ritual. Such a quiet moment at the mountain.

All because of Joan’s simple request: “Would you wash your hands?”

Her handwritten note beside the sink.

A small lift.

My spiritual springboard into the day.

Hands rise from the sink
Sleep loosens its narrow hold
A quiet Sinai

Appendix: The Morning Blessing for the Lifting of the Hands

The blessing recited upon waking and washing the hands:

Hebrew

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם
אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו
וְצִוָּנוּ עַל נְטִילַת יָדָיִם

Transliteration

Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam,
asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav,
v’tzivanu al netilat yadayim.

Translation

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe,
who has sanctified us with His commandments
and commanded us concerning the lifting of the hands.

Further Reading

If the themes of hands, freedom, and spiritual posture resonate, you may enjoy these related reflections:

The Magic Carpet Was Never About Flying

A reflection on Joan’s family, the Baba Sali, and the deeper meaning of faith, merit, and responsibility within Jewish tradition.

What Freedom Tastes Like

An exploration of the Exodus through food. How slavery, wilderness, and the Promised Land are revealed not only in geography, but in what the Children of Israel ate, remembered, and imagined.

Food of the Exodus

Freedom has a taste. Not a single taste, but a progression.  Each stage of liberation is marked by what the Children of Israel ate, what they remembered, and what they imagined. The Exodus story can be traced through food, because food reveals orientation: whether the Children of Israel look backward toward familiarity, experience an initial moment of freedom, or look forward toward possibility and responsibility.

Food of Slavery

Despite reaching freedom by escaping Egypt, the Children of Israel complained bitterly in the wilderness. One of their central complaints was about the discomfort of the present, expressed through longing for the food of the past. They spoke of garlic, leeks, and onions pulled from the ground. All rooted foods from the adama. They remembered what was familiar while overlooking the suffering that defined their bondage, clinging to the false comfort of what they once knew.

The complaint was not really about taste; it was about fear. Slavery, at least, felt known. Even a painful past can feel more familiar, and therefore safer than a future that demands change.

The Torah exposes a difficult human truth: the Children of Israel often complained about the present by romanticizing what once enslaved them. Memory becomes a refuge from uncertainty, even when that memory distorts the truth.

Food of the Wilderness

The wilderness introduced an entirely new relationship with food. Manna did not come from the ground and did not grow on trees. It fell from the sky—daily, exact, and sufficient. It could not be stored. It could not be controlled. Manna forced a newly freed Children of Israel to experience freedom of the present.

Manna was not only nourishment; it was education. It trained the Children of Israel to gather enough and then stop. To live without hoarding, to trust tomorrow’s portion, and to learn what enough truly means.

With manna came the first Shabbat. For the first time, sacred time entered Israel’s life through food. A double portion fell before Shabbat and gathering was forbidden on the day itself. The lesson was radical: survival did not require constant labor. Freedom was marked not by movement, but by restraint and trust.

We continue to celebrate the lessons of the wilderness today. The double portion lives on each week in the two challahs placed on the Shabbat table. They are not decoration; they remind us to pause, to prepare, and to trust.

Blessings reinforce this education. Some foods come from the ground and others from trees, each requiring a different blessing. This practice is explored more fully in Savor the Celebration. Even before interpretation, the act of blessing teaches orientation: earth below (adama), growth above (ha’etz), and beyond both (shehakol), a Source not fully seen. Manna, belonging to neither soil nor branch, completed the lesson. Not all sustenance is earned the same way. Not all freedom is built on control.

Food of the Promised Land

When the twelve spies entered the Promised Land, they did not return remembering what once was. They returned carrying fruit: grapes, figs, and pomegranates declaring: “This is its fruit.” Their language was not nostalgic; it was demonstrative. Not memory, but evidence.

The contrast is deliberate. The Children of Israel remembered slavery in Egypt, using the past to protest the hardship of the present. The twelve spies spoke of the land by pointing forward, holding in their hands proof of what could grow. The food of the Promised Land was not about immediate consumption, but about future cultivation. Trees that bear fruit, seeds that regenerate, and abundance that unfolds over time.

Another way to see this progression is through how we use our hands to eat. Animals eat with their mouths lowered to the ground. The food of slavery—garlic and leeks—were taken in much the same way, with hands reaching downward into the earth.

In the wilderness, the posture of the hands changed. Manna was gathered from the sky and carried with care, training the hands to move between levels. Reaching downward to gather, held at the center with intention, and lifted upward toward the heavens in faith.

In the Promised Land, food comes from trees—figs, olives, and pomegranates—requiring the hands to reach upward, almost in a posture of praise. When the hands return to the earth, it is no longer to clutch, but to plant. To place seeds gently into the ground for future growth.

The Torah’s food story reveals a lasting struggle: leaving slavery is easier than leaving the mindset it creates. Complaining about the present often disguises itself as longing for the past. True freedom begins when desire itself is retrained. When memory no longer anchors us backward and faith allows us to move forward.

When the Children of Israel looked backward, they complained about the present and idealized the food of slavery; when the spies looked forward, they carried fruit from the land.

Every Shabbat, when two challahs rest on the table, the journey is quietly reenacted. We remember the ground, the sky, and the trees. We bless what sustained us, what grows among us, and what we cannot control. We remind ourselves that liberation is not only escape from what was, but the courage to believe in what can still grow.

Slavery fed memory, the wilderness taught faith, and the Promised Land invites the Children of Israel to plant, tend, and believe in a future that will grow.

Hands once reached downward
Then lifted, learning to trust
Now they plant and bless

Appendix: Torah Sources on Food, Memory, and Freedom

1. Food of Slavery — Mitzrayim (“Narrow Place”)

In Egypt, the Israelites ate foods later remembered as the food of slavery, all described as coming from the ground and associated with familiarity and predictability.

• Numbers 11:4–5 (JPS, p. 307)

“The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving… We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt—the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”

1. Food of the Wilderness — Midbar

The wilderness introduces an entirely new form of sustenance: manna, food that comes neither from soil nor from trees, but directly from heaven. It is given daily, cannot be hoarded, and is paired with the first experience of Shabbat.

Manna

• Exodus 16:15–16 (JPS, p. 148)

“When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness lay a fine and flaky substance… Moses said to them, ‘That is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.’ … The House of Israel named it manna.”

Shabbat and the Double Portion

• Exodus 16:26 (JPS, p. 149)

“Eat it today, for today is a Sabbath of the Lord; you will not find it today on the plain. Six days you shall gather it; on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none.”

Spiritual Framing

• Deuteronomy 8:2–3 (JPS, p. 393)

“God subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat… in order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that the Lord decrees.”

III. Food of Freedom — Eretz Zavat Chalav U’Dvash (Promised Land)

The Promised Land is consistently described through abundance, sweetness, and cultivation. Its food grows from trees and fields, requiring time, patience, and partnership with the land.

Divine Promise

• Exodus 3:8 (JPS, p. 116)

“I will rescue them from the Egyptians and bring them… to a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Report of the Spies

• Numbers 13:23 (JPS, p. 312)

“They reached the wadi Eshcol, and there they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes… and some pomegranates and figs.”

Vision of Abundance and Gratitude

• Deuteronomy 8:7–10 (JPS, p. 393)

“For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land… a land of figs and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey… When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you.”

“Did you choose anything from the supermarket?” Steffen’s host asked.
“How could I decide?” Steffen replied with exasperation. “There are fifteen kinds of mustard!”

My friend Steffen was born in East Berlin, Germany. He grew up believing in the virtues of communism and learning about the evils of capitalism. These beliefs were not abstract; they were reinforced daily through education, messaging, and government propaganda.

In November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, Steffen crossed through the Brandenburg Gate to see West Berlin with his own eyes. The contrast stunned him. “They lied to me my entire life,” he later told me. The world he encountered made clear that the system he had trusted was built on scarcity and control, while the world across the gate (Western capitalism) offered possibility, agency, and choice.

Determined to understand that world for himself, Steffen taught himself English and applied to Harvard Business School, which he viewed as the cathedral of Western capitalism. He was accepted, matriculated, and we became friends as section mates in HBS Section H. He also earned a distinction that remains unique: the only East German to attend Harvard Business School.

The supermarket moment occurred within three days of Steffen arriving in the United States for the very first time. Steffen’s employer for his pre-HBS summer internship was based in New York. His employer provided an apartment and took him to a local supermarket to stock his kitchen.

Steffen later explained why he froze in the mustard aisle. In East Berlin, supermarket shelves were almost always barren. If an item appeared, you took it. If there were two or three, you took them all. You never assumed it would be available tomorrow. Scarcity trains behavior. It trains you to hoard. Faith, by contrast, trains you to stop.

While reading the Torah portion describing the first Shabbat in the wilderness, shortly after the Children of Israel fled Egypt, I was reminded of Steffen’s story. Manna fell from the sky, providing physical sustenance. Shabbat provided spiritual structure. The instruction was precise: each person was to gather only one  omer/portion of manna.

Those who gathered more discovered that it spoiled by morning. The lesson was not about food; it was about emunah. Trust meant believing that tomorrow’s provision would arrive tomorrow. Hoarding was not wisdom. It was fear, dressed up as prudence. During the week, manna demanded daily trust. On Shabbat, manna demanded structured restraint.

In the mustard aisle, Steffen faced a different test altogether: abundance without trust. Scarcity is an obvious trial of faith, but abundance may be the harder one.

This was the same challenge that paralyzed Steffen. He had never learned to trust replenishment. He had no lived experience of shelves that refilled themselves. Mustard—or manna—was never assumed to be waiting the next day.

On Shabbat, the rule changed. A double portion was permitted in advance so that gathering would cease. Faith did not eliminate preparation; it defined its limits.

When I was younger, I tended toward excess, often without appreciation. With time, I have found myself drawn instead to the small and the simple. It is hard to explain but easy to feel. A quiet gratitude has replaced urgency.

I can now imagine the daily wonder of the Children of Israel as manna appeared each morning, just enough—Dayenu. I can recognize the same childlike awe in Steffen’s amazement at a shelf filled with mustard.

Faith lives somewhere between paucity and prayer. One portion. One omer. Enough for today and trust for tomorrow.

Empty shelves taught fear
Full shelves ask a harder thing
When is enough—enough?

Further Reading:

This meditation on manna and mustard echoes an earlier reflection, One Small Bite, where restraint itself becomes a form of gratitude.

Before writing about Africa, I should start with why the stories of the Jewish journeys across Africa matters to me. I have a number of personal connections to journeys of freedom and faith that run through Africa. One of my dear friends’ father was directly involved in efforts that helped rescue thousands of Ethiopian Jews. Another close friend’s relative played a meaningful role in challenging and ultimately helping dismantle South Africa’s apartheid regime. My partner Joan’s family carries the legend of the Magic Carpet itself, rooted in Morocco and the Abuhazera tradition, offering not only rescue, but healing and continuity for Sephardic Jews across generations. These are not abstract histories to me. They are relationships. And it is through those relationships that Africa became, for me, not a place on a map, but a living chapter in the Jewish story.

People often ask about the Jewish connection to Africa, or the Israeli connection to Morocco, as if these were recent developments or strategic alliances. In truth, they are ancient relationships woven through exile and return, protection and peril, memory and miracle. They begin with a Torah command that predates borders and diplomacy: Lech lecha me’artzecha: go forth from your land, from what is familiar, before knowing where the journey will end (Genesis 12:1). In the Torah, movement comes before certainty.

In my family, Africa is not an abstraction. It is carried in story. The “Magic Carpet” is not only folklore, but also the name given to an Israeli rescue mission.I It is also the family legend of the Abuhazera dynasty of Morocco, associated with Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira in the nineteenth century. Passed quietly across generations, it was never about spectacle. It was a lived interpretation of Lech Lecha: ascent without guarantees, obedience before clarity, and trust enacted through motion.

Africa itself stood has long stood on the side of that kind of courage. In 1777, just one year after the American Declaration of Independence, Morocco became the first country to recognize the United States. Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah made that decision with the counsel of his Jewish advisor, Samuel Sumbel. This move had risks to trade and diplomacy, defying the British Empire at a moment when convenience argued otherwise. It was an act that echoed a Torah mandate that appears again and again in Jewish history: lo ta’amod al dam re’echa—do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor (Leviticus 19:16). History was moving, and Morocco chose not to remain still.

That same Torah spirit later animated Israel’s rescue missions across Africa. In late 1984 and early 1985, during Operation Moses, Ethiopian Jews made a perilous journey on foot from Ethiopia into Sudan. From there, in a covert series of flights, roughly 7,000 to 8,000 people were quietly brought to Israel. Their rescue was framed not by politics, but by prophecy. Jeremiah’s words: “I will bring them from the ends of the earth” (Jeremiah 31:8) ceased to be metaphor. Jews who had preserved their faith for centuries in isolation were suddenly free to practice it openly.

Seven years in May 1991, as Ethiopia descended into chaos, Israel launched Operation Solomon. In just thirty-six hours, thirty-five aircraft airlifted 14,325 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Israel. One El Al 747 set a world aviation record by carrying well over 1,000 people—commonly cited at 1,088. With two babies reportedly born mid-flight, more souls arrived than departed. Rescue, quite literally, produced new life. My friend Charles’s father, Gene Ribakoff—who would have turned one hundred in 2026—was personally involved in that effort, a reminder that history often turns not only on governments, but on individuals who step forward when action becomes urgent.

I remember meeting members of the Ethiopian Jewish community in Haifa years later. Their stories of determination and earned distinction were profound. They carried Judaism not as theory, but as inheritance. Their traditions were biblical in origin, yet unfamiliar to many who assumed they already understood what Jewish life looked like. Like Abraham before them, they had gone forth without certainty. Like Jeremiah’s prophetic promise, they had been gathered from afar. They had come home not to be sheltered, but to serve. To stand in uniform, to contribute, and to assume responsibility for a future they had crossed continents to reach.

Before that journey came another. In 1949 and 1950, nearly fifty thousand Jews were airlifted from Yemen to Israel in what became known as Operation Magic Carpet. The Torah had promised, “I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me” (Exodus 19:4). For Yemenite Jews, that verse ceased to be poetry. The Jewish story in this region has never respected clean borders. Africa, Arabia, and Israel are overlapping verses in a single narrative of return.

Africa also produced moral leadership shaped by the same ethical imperatives. In South Africa, my dear friend’s great aunt, Helen Suzman, served in Parliament from 1953 to 1989, often as a solitary voice against apartheid. A Jewish woman challenging a system built on silence and cruelty, she lived the Torah commandment lo ta’amod al dam re’echa: do not stand idly by while your fellow’s blood is shed. When told her questions embarrassed her country, she replied that it was not the questions, but the answers that were shameful. She visited Nelson Mandela week after week during his long imprisonment, not because it was safe, but because moral responsibility rarely is.

Morocco occupies a singular place in this Torah-shaped story. During World War II, in 1942, the Vichy regime demanded lists of Jews living under Moroccan rule.  King Mohammed V responded simply: there are no Jews here, only Moroccans. His refusal to participate in persecution was an act of pikuach nefesh: the protection of life above all else. For his resistance, he was later exiled by French authorities from 1953 to 1955. When he returned, the Moroccan people celebrated his reinstatement not as a political victory, but as a moral restoration.

In the decades that followed, Morocco’s Jewish population declined dramatically. Critics accused the monarchy of having “lost” its Jews. The King’s response: “I have gained global ambassadors” echoed a deeper truth of Jewish history: exile does not erase connection. To this day, Moroccan Jews return regularly, not as tourists, but as grateful descendants. I felt this most viscerally at a recent family wedding in Marrakech, when under the chuppah the rabbi and the bride’s father publicly thanked the King for allowing Jews to practice Judaism freely, without fear.

These bonds did not end with memory. They continue, quietly, in modern partnerships across Africa’s shores. What appears strategic today often rests on moral foundations laid long ago by those who answered the Torah’s call before knowing where it would lead.

The Jewish journey through Africa is not a footnote. It is a through-line written in Genesis, echoed by the Prophets, and lived across centuries: Lech Lecha—move before you know. “I will bring them from the ends of the earth.” Do not stand idly by.

The magic carpet it turns out, was never about flying. It was about Torah made real. About trusting the command to go and discovering, only in motion, that home was already waiting.

I always wanted to fly. On my first trip to Morocco, I did.

We traveled there in November 2025, and from the moment we landed I sensed this was not simply another journey but an arrival into something older and more enduring. I had come eager to see the homeland of my life partner, Joan and to truly understand what it means to carry Moroccan Jewish memory as something lived.

On our third morning, we rose before dawn for a hot-air balloon ride outside Marrakech. I was quietly anxious. Flying has always carried a tension for me, balanced between longing and fear. Yet the moment the balloon lifted, the fear dissolved. There was no jolt, no struggle, no sense of conquest. Only an almost imperceptible separation from the earth.

What surprised me most was the silence. We were floating, not forcing. Moving, but never pushing.

Before takeoff, the attendant placed a tray of coffee and French pastries on a narrow board atop the basket. The cups were filled to the rim. I remember thinking this must be a trick, surely it would spill once we were airborne. But as we rose, nothing moved. Not the tray, not the cups, and not even the surface of the coffee.

Suspended in the air, everything remained exactly as it had been on the ground.

Only later did I understand why. A balloon does not fight the wind; it joins it. There is no opposing force, no friction between intention and direction. Cars turn against resistance. Roller coasters thrill us by compressing gravity and speed into conflict. The balloon simply travels with what already exists. When it rises or descends, it does so vertically, cleanly, and effortlessly—guided only by heat and release. One direction at a time. There is no torque nor struggle.

The physics felt like theology.

The Torah opens not with effort, but with hovering: “And the spirit of God hovered over the waters” (Genesis 1:2). Before creation takes form, there is movement without force, presence without collision. Later, when the Israelites cross the Sea of Reeds, they do not engineer an escape. They step forward and the water responds. The miracle is not domination of nature, but alignment with it.

Faith in Torah is rarely about certainty. It is about bitachon: trust. Not blind belief, but the courage to move without insisting on control. Trust that the moment will hold. Trust that the ground will appear. Trust that release, rather than resistance, can be a form of strength.

The balloon ride only works because of community: the pilot above, the attendant beside you, and an unseen team on the ground reading the wind, tracking the balloon, and preparing the landing. No one flies alone even when it feels solitary.

That sense of trust deepened for me because of Joan.

Joan is a direct descendant of Baba Sali, Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira (1889–1984), the revered Moroccan-Israeli rabbi whose name still evokes awe and affection among Jews and Muslims alike. For many generations in Morocco, the Abuhatzeira family carried an older teaching, passed quietly across generations, in the form of a story often called the legend of the “Magic Carpet”.

Family tradition traces the origin of the Abuhatzeira name to a story told across generations, most often associated with Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira (1806–1880). According to the legend, when he sought to journey from Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) toward Morocco without money, passage, or protection, he did not pray for resources or intervention. Instead, he prayed for trust. He was then carried across the sea on a ḥaṣera (a simple woven mat or carpet) an image that later gave rise to the family name Abuhatzeira. In both Hebrew and Arabic, “father” is rendered as אַבָּא (Abba) in Hebrew and أبا (Abā) in Arabic, reflecting a shared Semitic root. The name is often understood as “the father of the mat.” Whether read literally or symbolically, the teaching is the same: the journey was sustained not by means, but by faith.

This story was never meant to be read as fantasy. It functioned as teaching. The “magic carpet” was not an object of power, but a posture of faith: movement made possible not by force, but by alignment; not by control, but by surrender. Jewish tradition calls this bitachon: the courage to move forward without demanding certainty, and to trust that when resistance is released, the way may carry you.

Like Abraham’s Lech Lecha, the story is not about arrival, but about the courage to move before the destination is revealed.

Sitting in that balloon over Morocco, watching my coffee remain perfectly still, sipping without a spill; I understood something quietly profound. I had not learned to fly because I conquered fear. I learned to fly because I stopped resisting movement. Because I trusted the current. Because I trusted Joan. Because I allowed myself, perhaps for the first time, to be carried.

As we entered a new year, I found myself thinking less about what was lost and more about what endured. Wonder endured. Trust endured. The possibility that life can still lift us gently, if we stop bracing for impact.

Faith, I learned, is the courage to move before the path is revealed.

Balloon meets the wind
Nothing pushed, nothing resisted
The sky carries us

“Leap, and the net will appear.”

—-My teacher Cat

Joan and Andy enjoying coffee and croissants among the clouds without spilling

This lived moment of flight echoes an older inheritance—explored in The Magic Carpet Was Never About Flying—and traces back to the Torah’s first call to move before knowing, reflected in They Moved Before They Knew (Lech Lecha). Its quiet wisdom continues in Below the Clouds, where clarity waits beneath what obscures it.