On Passover we recline. Why? Because our ancestors couldn’t.
Each of us, as Jews, relates to this differently. For some of us, it might be the biblical mixed multitude that left Mitzrayim (Egypt). For others, it might be Jews fleeing Europe and Russia who ventured to worlds anew. And for some still, it will be a closer relation to enslavement, one actively that is now being erased from history books. All are peoples who know well what it means to live without rest.
My kids will happily pick their favorite pillows to bring to our dining-room table ready to bask in a dinner that is unlike others throughout the year. For me, that posture of leaning to the side — as instructed — sits with me differently this year and that will likely continue for each year following.
In August 2023, I decided that I was done being a professional volunteer. It was time to become an actual Jewish professional. When Oren Jacobson at Project Shema created a role for me, neither of us could have known the pressure test our work was about to face. Within months, the urgency of the work grew beyond anything I had imagined. Unexpectedly, rest became far from reach.
Grind culture
It was not until October 2025 while in Accra, Ghana, that I began to unwind from the months, years and decades of the unrelenting work ethic stored in my body and mind. This is when I was first introduced to the words of Dr. Tricia Hersey, which made me question my entire relationship with “grind culture.” As she writes in Rest Is Resistance, “grind culture is violence and violence creates trauma.” It is the mindset that if you just push a little harder, wake up a little earlier, compromise a little more, you can somehow do it all.
As the first person in my family to return to the continent of Africa, I sat in a hotel lobby and tried to think, really think: When was the last time I relaxed? I ran frantic through a library of scenes and images that led me no closer to a restful state for myself. An audit that produced no easy memory, no matter how far back I searched. Growing up, summers weren’t thankful reprieves from the endless school year. They were simply an opportunity to prepare for the next grade. My parents had a belief that echoes in Black homes across this country: “You must be at least twice as good, work twice as hard, just to be basic.” I was never in honors classes, never picked for gifted and talented. Only later did I understand that no standardized test could capture the gifts I carried.
My parents had a belief that echoes in Black homes across this country: “You must be at least twice as good, work twice as hard, just to be basic.”
This is the work ethic in which I was raised. Passed down from a people who survived enslavement in Wake County, N.C., and neighboring parts of South Carolina. Where how hard you worked wasn’t measured and mailed in a state envelope. It meant life or death. How exceptional one was had implications well beyond the mundane.
Pressure to work harder to relieve oppression
Endless, tireless work is the seeming inheritance from my oppressed people. It’s a responsibility many of us feel when we are given the gift of bodily autonomy and circumstances that allow us to do something about the horrors we see around us. That pressure is real, and the stakes we take on are understandable.
I recently came across the enslaved narrative of James Curry, of Person County, N.C., where he talks about his mother. A woman punished harshly for imagining freedom so clearly that she made it 15 miles before being returned to her plantation. There she was locked in a room, unclothed, with a sewing wheel and made to work from daylight until “12 or 1 o’clock at night.” Even her name didn’t really belong to her. She sat cold in that room and stayed up even later — depriving herself of more sleep — to finally sew a dress for herself.
While reading, I could feel an energy in my body that just wanted to sew that dress for her. I wanted her to lie down and let me finish the work. No one can know what she would think if we met today, but I can imagine she would look at my bedroom in awe and wonder why I carry such a weight, such pressure on my shoulders.
That I continue to see myself only through what I produce is, in many ways, a betrayal of her. This is precisely why, on Passover, we recline. Our ancestors could not imagine what it feels like to relax and lean.
Rest is subversive
In today’s capitalist world, real rest is the enemy. It interrupts deadlines and deliverables and threatens the productivity we now treat as normal. An economy that still echoes the logic of slavery: kings at the top and those at the bottom barely surviving. Never mind liberation. Never mind the pursuit of happiness, however defined. And yet every week, as Jews, we are invited into something radical: Shabbat.
A day not to create. A day simply to be. And every year on Passover we are reminded why.
Our people once built wonders in the desert, and a Divine imagination insisted they deserved more. They imagined a value far beyond what they could collectively produce for someone else. Imagined freedom. And most importantly, imagined rest. An insistence captured directly in Mishnah Pesakhim 10, which teaches “even the poorest of Jews should not eat the meal on Passover night until [they] recline on [their] left side, as free and wealthy people recline when they eat.”
That I continue to see myself only through what I produce is, in many ways, a betrayal of my enslaved ancestors. This is precisely why on Passover we recline. Our ancestors could not have imagined stopping to lean back.
We recline to remember we are human. We recline because no matter the stories told about who we are or what we represent, we are Divine and deserving of a rest as deep as that denied us for centuries. No matter how loud the intergenerational trauma that insists that we do more, the quiet is where true resistance and insistence exists.
Retell the story of an enslaved person
This Passover, I encourage you to include a narrative from someone who was enslaved. When we declare “remember you were slaves in Egypt,” do we understand what that existence required?
When we proclaim, “Remember the stranger, for you were strangers,” do we fully understand what that stranger’s existence was like?
When we eat the bitter maror, do we understand the bitterness we hope to remember?
And if not, I share this testimonial, recorded in Slave Testimony, edited by John W. Blassingame:
Yes, sir; the most shocking thing that I have seen was on the plantation of Mr. Farrarby. I went up to his house one morning to work for drinking water, and I heard a woman screaming awfully in a room downward. On going up to the fence and looking over I saw a woman stretched out, face downwards, on the ground, her hands and feet being fastened to stakes. Mr. Farrarby was standing over and striking her with a leather trace belonging to his carriage-harness. As he struck her the flesh of her back and legs was raised in welts and ridges by the force of the blows. Sometimes when the poor thing cried too loud from the pain Farrarby would kick her in the mouth. After he had exhausted himself whipping her he sent to his house for sealing wax and a lighted candle, and melting the wax dropped it upon the woman’s lacerated back. He then got a riding whip and, standing over the woman, picked off the hardened wax by switching at it. Mr. Farrarby’s grown daughters were looking at all this from a window of the house through the blinds. This punishment was so terrible that I was induced to ask what offence the woman had committed and was told by her fellow servants that her only crime was in burning the edges of the waffles that she had cooked for breakfast.
The sight of this thing made me almost wild that day. I could not work right, and I prayed the Lord to help my people out of their bondage. I felt I could not stand it much longer. — Solomon Bradley, age 27, blacksmith, cook (interviewed 1863, South Carolina [pp. 371-373])
Our Jewish tradition has created a story where the powerful fall and the oppressed rise, a story told and retold for centuries until it no longer belongs to some, but to all. There is a reason the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began on the first night of Passover. The Exodus story was read by James Curry (above) as a reminder that “it was contrary to the revealed will of G-d, that one man should hold another as a slave.” It is a story that has inspired and re-inspired generations.
Our reflection and pause are critical even now, as urgent as the world feels. Because the truth of quicksand is that it requires stillness. Until we are still and present, there is no empty space to which our lost humanity can return.
So in the rushed preparation of meals and the many details that fill the spectacle of seder, let us keep presence to the goal. To remember our humanity. To promise among family and invited friends that we will continue to choose liberation.
When we open the door for Elijah, remembering it is not only metaphorical.
It is a promise that the world can still be different.
