Paths That Bend

The kitchen is different this week. Things are not where they usually are. Some things are missing. Some things have been moved, covered, or cleared away. Even a few days in, it still doesn’t quite feel settled.

And that is part of the point.

Because Passover does not begin with arrival. It begins with disruption. With leaving. With not quite knowing where things belong yet. And a few days into it, we find ourselves somewhere in between—no longer where we started, not yet wherever we think we’re going.

And this week, that feeling lands differently. Because some of us are also stepping into a different kind of space today—one we did not choose, one we would not have chosen. A space of loss. Of memory. Of saying goodbye.

On this Shabbat of Passover, we don’t follow the regular rhythm of the weekly Torah reading. We step aside from it. And instead, we find ourselves in a moment from Ki Tisa—where Moses asks something both simple and impossible: “Show me Your glory.”(Exodus 33:18)

And the answer he receives is not what we might expect. Not a full vision. Not clarity. Not something he can hold onto. He is placed in the cleft of a rock, covered, protected. And what he is allowed to see is only what comes after—something passing by.

It is a strange kind of encounter. Close, but not complete. Real, but not graspable. And maybe that is the only kind we are given.

Passover pulls us out of the ordinary—not because God isn’t present in the everyday, but because we so often are not. So for these days, everything shifts just enough that we might notice something we usually miss.

But the Torah is honest about what that noticing feels like. It is not always comforting. It is not always clear. It does not resolve everything. Sometimes it is just the sense that something holy has passed nearby.

There’s a line in Psalm 23 we often translate as “straight paths.” But the Hebrew—ma‘glei tzedek—is closer to paths that bend, that circle. Which, if we are honest, feels closer to the truth.

Because life does not move in a straight line. It turns. It returns. It brings us to places we never would have chosen. And sometimes—it brings us here.

And still, the tradition dares to say we are being led. Not only when things are clear, not only when the path is easy, but even in the turning, even in the disruption, even in grief.

So for now, we remain here, inside a week that has unsettled us just enough to notice what we might otherwise miss. Not because we understand the path, but because we are willing to keep walking it.

And perhaps that is what it means to be led: not to walk a straight line, but to trust that even in the turning, we are being held.

,שבת שלום

Student Rabbi Ben