Pesach: A Journey Through Freedom, Memory and Meaning: A curated collection of videos, podcasts and writings for your Seder and beyond
- Dr Tanya White
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
Pesach is not a story of simple redemption. It is a story told in the language of the bittersweet.
The women of the Exodus, in whose merit we were redeemed, understood this intuitively. Miriam — mar yam — carries bitterness in her very name. And yet she is the one who picks up the timbrel and teaches the women to anticipate redemption before it arrives. She is the one who teaches the nation how to put words to unimaginable pain through song.
Redemption, in the Torah, is never pure. It is always entangled with pain, loss, and uncertainty.
You can stand at the edge of the sea, witnessing a miracle — and still carry the memory of slavery. You can sing — and still be crying.
Even the matza holds this paradox. Ha lachma anya — the bread of affliction and the bread we carry out of Egypt on the road to freedom. Same dough. Same bread. The difference is only where you are standing - whether you are walking into the darkness or out of it.
Susan Cain calls this the bittersweet: the holding together of longing and joy, sorrow and beauty—the recognition that light and dark, bitter and sweet, are forever intertwined, and that to fully inhabit both is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them.
Perhaps this is what the women teach us. Not that redemption erases the pain — but that we can learn to live within it. Even to sing through it.
This year, more than ever, we know this to be true.
We are living in a moment where grief and hope sit side by side—where we cry out in pain, and still hold on to redemption. Pesach asks us not to choose between them, but to hold both at once. Because that space—complex, messy, unresolved—is where real authentic freedom lives.
I've gathered here a collection of shiurim, podcasts and writings in one easily accessible place to accompany you as you prepare for the Seder.
Wishing us all a bittersweet chag — where faith is not certainty, but the quiet strength to hold the bitter and the sweet together, in a single frame.
🎥 1. Shiurim & Video Teachings
Source sheet:
🎧 2. Podcasts
Chochmat Nashim podcast (2025): Personal Reflections on why Pesach speaks to me personally as a visceral reminder of the fragility of life.
Women's Gallery with Joanna Greenaway (2025)
Three epsides of my Books and Beyond Rabbi Sacks Podcast series speak to this Pesach moment
Books and Beyond Episode 2 - Natan Sharansky shares his modern journey from slavery to freedom
Books and Beyond Episode 7- Discussion with Prof Sam Lebens on the notion of Freedom
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