This is The Day

This is The Day                      By: Sara Lamm

Every Passover eve, before the Seder begins, I cover my table with butcher paper and draw all over it with Sharpies. The whole surface becomes a kind of mural, pictures, brain teasers, visual jokes about the ten plagues, Pyramids, ancient Egypt, little details tied to the night.

The questions start before anyone sits down. Which is exactly what I want, because after all, the Seder is built around children’s curiosity. The whole structure of the night, the strange foods, the reclining, the dipping, exists to make a child look up and ask why. A table that catches their eye before the Haggadah opens is just getting a head start. In the center, I always anchor the table with one verse from Hagaddah (the Passover Prarer book).

This year I chose Psalm 118:24: - “This is the day that Hashem has made— let us exult and rejoice on it” (Psalms 118:24).

At first glance, it seems like an odd choice. This is not a verse about Pharaoh or plagues or the splitting of the sea. It doesn’t sound like the Exodus at all. It sounds almost too bright, too simple, like something you’d embroider on a throw pillow. So why does it belong at a Seder table this year, especially a Seder table in the middle of a war with Iran?

The answer starts with where the verse lives. Psalm 118 is the final psalm of Hallel, the sequence of Psalms 113 to 118 that Jews recite on festivals and on Seder night. This isn’t decorative. Hallel is the Bible’s formal language of redemption, the song Jews sing when they recognize God’s hand moving in history. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called it “the great song of deliverance,” and that framing changes how you read every line inside it.

Rabbi Sacks also drew a distinction that matters here. There is Hallel said as a memory of a miracle, and Hallel said as an immediate response, praise that erupts in the present tense because the redemption is being felt right now. On Passover, we don’t just tell the story of the Exodus. We relive it. We eat the bread of affliction. We taste the wine of freedom. We are supposed to experience ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. That’s what makes the Hallel of Seder night different from every other time we recite it. It isn’t recollection. It is a new song.

That changes the verse completely. Zeh hayom asah Hashem doesn’t mean “What a lovely day.” It means: this specific day, this moment in history, is one where God must be recognized. The Psalm itself makes that clear. A few verses earlier, the speaker calls out min hameitzar, from the narrow place, from the tight spot, from the situation that felt like it had no exit. Later he declares: Lo amut ki echyeh, va’asaper ma’asei Yah, “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.” This is not someone floating above danger. This is someone who came through it.

That is exactly the voice of Passover.

The Exodus did not happen in a calm, settled moment. It happened while Pharaoh still thought he was in control. The Israelites left with their sandals on and their staffs in their hands, bread that hadn’t had time to rise, moving in the dark. Redemption waited for no one.

Which is why this verse belongs at the center of a Seder table in a year like this one. Nagilah venismechah vo, “let us rejoice and be glad in it.” In it. Not after it. Not once the threat has passed and everything feels settled. In this day, the one we actually have, war and all. That is not naivety. That is not denial. In the Psalm’s own logic, it is the only response available to someone who has come through the narrow place and is still standing. Praise in the Bible is not escapism. It is defiance.

The God who redeemed Israel from Egypt is not a historical figure. He is the God of this night, this people, this moment. And if that is true, then the answer to fear is not paralysis.

It is to gather around the table, pour the wine, lift our voices in Hallel, and mean every word of it.