Honourable senators, why is this week different from all other weeks? The Jewish holiday of Passover begins tomorrow evening at sundown. It is a festival of freedom, hope and promised new beginnings. It is a holiday where families gather together to sing songs and tell stories of the deliverance of the enslaved Jews from bondage and persecution.

Last year my family, like many, celebrated our Passover Seder dinner via Zoom. The Seder storybook, the Haggadah, recounts with grim detail the plagues that God brought down to help convince Pharaoh to let the Jewish people go. As we faced our first COVID Passover, the recitation of those plagues — the boils, the frogs, the cattle disease — seemed particularly apt. We had no idea then how long a plague we would be facing. We never dreamed we’d be celebrating via video again this year.

Yet here we are, all waiting for the moment when we can truly be free again and our exile over. In Canada, we are lucky to hold in Library and Archives a copy of the first published English translation of the Haggadah, printed in London in 1770 when King George III was on the throne. The English text, as translated by one Alexander Alexander, is remarkably similar to the version my own family recites each year. Last year, when I visited the archives and saw that copy with its pages stained with drops of red wine poured out at family Seders hundreds of years ago, I felt this incredible sense of continuity and connection, of the links that unite us across time and space and of a love and faith that endure in spite of all terrors.

The Likeness of this poor bread did our ancestors eat in the land of Egypt . . . all those who are in want, let them approach and partake —

— reads the 251-year-old text.

. . . at present we are here, but next year we hope to be in the land of Israel, at present we are in servitude, but next year we hope to be Children of Freedom.

The Haggadah tells a story of hope, liberty and defeat of tyranny. It promises that evil cannot endure. For many faiths and cultures, spring is a season of resurrection, redemption and renewal, and of the hope we need when all the world is at war against an invisible enemy.