We had been in and out of the mamad, our reinforced safe room, four times in one hour. At a certain point, I gave up on the chicken soup I was planning for Shabbat and grabbed a Haggadah — the book that guides the seder — off the bookshelf instead. Passover was two weeks away, and if I was going to be stuck in a concrete room, I might as well be productive.
I flipped it open and started reading.
The Passover seder — the festive ritual meal that Jews around the world conduct on the first night of Passover — is one of the most elaborately structured events in the Jewish calendar. It follows a fixed sequence of fifteen steps, designed to guide participants through the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Jews have been conducting this same ceremony, in essentially the same order, for over two thousand years.
The very first step is called Kadesh.
During this step, we recite Kiddush — a prayer sanctifying the day over a cup of wine. This is something Jews do every Shabbat and every Jewish holiday. The name Kiddush comes from the Hebrew root meaning sanctification, holiness, separation from the ordinary.
But on Passover night, it is called something else.
Rabbi Yosef Zvi Rimon, one of Israel’s leading contemporary halachic authorities, points out something that is easy to miss: the seder doesn’t call this step Kiddush. It calls it Kadesh — a command form of the same root. Not “sanctification,” but “sanctify!” Not a noun but an imperative. We are not merely describing what we do; we are being commanded to do it.
Why the difference?
The answer starts with a distinction most people don’t think about. Shabbat is not sanctified by human beings. God sanctified Shabbat at the end of creation:
And there is nothing we can do to move it, change it, or affect it. It arrives on its own, every week, on a schedule set by God Himself.
The Jewish holidays are different. They are sanctified by human beings.
This is not a metaphor. In Temple-era Israel, the Sanhedrin — the supreme rabbinic court — was responsible for officially declaring the new month. Each month, witnesses who had observed the new crescent moon in the night sky would come before the court and testify to what they had seen. The judges would examine their testimony, and if it was accepted, the head of the court would formally declare it sanctified. The new month began. And because the Jewish holidays fall on specific dates within specific months, the court’s declaration of the new moon determined exactly when those holidays would arrive. The calendar was, in the most literal sense, in human hands.
Now go back to Egypt.
Before the Exodus, before the Ten Plagues had finished, before the Israelites had taken a single step out of their chains, God gave them a commandment. Not the Ten Commandments — those came later, at Sinai. This was the very first instruction delivered to the Jewish people as a nation:
The first commandment God gave to Israel was about the calendar.
There were so many commandments waiting to be given — Shabbat, honoring parents, the entire legal system. Why did the calendar come first?
Because a slave does not own his time.
A slave wakes up when he is told to wake up. He works when he is told to work. His hours, his days, his years — none of it belongs to him. Time is one of the first things slavery strips away. The experience of being enslaved is, in part, the experience of watching your life happen to you rather than by you.
The moment God handed the calendar to Israel — before the sea split, before the cloud of glory descended, before they received the Torah — He was making a statement about what kind of people they were about to become. Free people. People who sanctify their own time. People who do not merely watch the days go by but consecrate them.
That is why the first step of the seder is not called Kiddush. It is called Kadesh — a command. Because Passover is not just a history lesson about what happened to our ancestors in Egypt. It is a yearly reckoning with the question of whether you are free.
Not free in the political sense. Free in the deepest sense. Do you own your time, or does someone else? Are you consecrating your days — your hours, your choices, your attention — or are you just watching your life happen to you?
The seder begins with a command to sanctify because that is what free people do. Slaves have their time taken from them. Free people take ownership of it. And the whole point of Passover — every song, every cup of wine, every piece of matzah — is to remind us that we were freed for a purpose: not just to leave Egypt, but to become the kind of people who sanctify their time rather than squander it.
That’s the invitation of the seder. Not just to remember freedom, but to claim it.
Want to learn more about Passover? Passover from the Inside: A Jewish Guide for Christian Readers walks you through the entire holiday — the rituals, the rabbinic debates, the songs, the theology, and the living tradition behind all of it. Order Passover from the Inside today!
