What we should sing for at this year’s Passover seder

The seder concludes with psalms of praise, singing, and hopes for next year in Jerusalem. After a full evening of storytelling, familiar rituals, eating, and drinking, we wrap up the seder with sleepy satisfaction.

The songs are the coda to the symbolic journey we have traveled over the course of the evening: from despair to joy and from slavery to freedom. Our singing reenacts the children of Israel singing Shirat HaYam (the “Song of the Sea”), after they had already managed to traverse the miraculously split waters, with the pursuing Egyptians already engulfed and drowned. The Song, in a simple reading of the text, is a song of celebration after salvation.

The Ramban, however, offers a different interpretation (Ramban, Shmot 15:19). Commenting on the phrase “ובני ישראל הלכו ביבשה בתוך הים” (And the children of Israel marched on dry ground in the midst of the sea), Ramban suggests that this phrase comes to teach us that “at the very moments the children of Israel were walking through the waters, they sang.” In other words, the singing took place as they were fleeing the Egyptians, before it was clear that they would indeed survive. It was, in this reading, not an exalted song of celebration, but an act of faith.

The Ramban’s insight is true in a broader sense of the entire Exodus story: We did not emerge from slavery to immediately enter the promised land. Rather, before us was desert, the vast unknown and the unfamiliar, and an as-yet unfulfilled promise of return to the land of our ancestors. And it was in the very midst of that journey that we were tasked with creating a people worthy of the promised land.

The moment the Jewish people find themselves in today is not dissimilar. We are still in the middle of war, turmoil, and profound uncertainty. We do not yet know how, when, or if our dreams of peace and security will be fulfilled. They feel too distant for any song of celebration.

And yet, like the children of Israel, in the midst of the sea, we must summon the courage to sing now. Surely not as an act of celebration, but as an act of faith and commitment.

We need to be, as our tradition charges us, “רודפי שלום”, ever pursuers of peace, even before we know exactly how or whether we will achieve it, and even as we defend ourselves forcefully against its enemies.

This year, as we stumble bleary-eyed through the end of the seder, let us pause and sing with a different intention. Singing songs of celebration might feel premature and even inappropriate. Rather, we sing to show that we believe, that we are committed to our ideals, and that we accept our responsibility to create and re-create a world where peace is manifest.

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This piece is excerpted from the 2025 Haggadah supplement, created by the Shalom Hartman Institute and Alliance for Middle East Peace.