Imagine this for a therapy: Tell somebody to stop eating bread and his life will be transformed. Crazy, no? Then again, that’s true only if it is I, a human being, who is doing the telling.

It’s remarkable, isn’t it? With G-d doing the telling, the Torah puts down one simple command: Stop eating bread for the week of Passover. Presto. One’s life is transformed.

My late and lamented mentor and friend, Rabbi Yisroel P. Gornish of Brooklyn, used to say: “Pesach (Passover) is a different world.” He was encapsulating my more labored, imprecise feelings as to why I found Passover an unusual time, unlike any other. “Pesach is a different world,” is how he put it.

It’s not the technically complicated and long process of ridding one’s household of all bread and leavened products. It’s more than that. And it’s more than putting the alternatives in place: different dishes, utensils, pots and pans; different tablecloths and kiddush cups. It’s the seders, of course, but it’s even more than the seders. The majestic seder evenings of re-lived redemption — with tactile assistants, from wine to bitter herbs — dominate. But Passover is a whole week, extending beyond the seders. If one lives in the Holy Land, there is one more “intermediate” day of Passover than in the Diaspora — still more time to experience the holiday past its dramatic opening night.

Why, then; or, perhaps better said, how then, is “Pesach a different world?” Something is built on the seemingly simple, practically cumbersome, commandment of putting aside bread and bread products.

For starters, I think the unique prism of Passover is this: The consciousness of how long it has taken to get to the point where one is able to make the seder — the relief from the long days and weeks of preparation, of turning over one’s kitchen and of ridding one’s entire household of all the products that contain leaven. Passover is a gift in the sense that it marks a relaxation, an end to the preparations and the strategizing — like figuring out how to feed the kids while simultaneously putting away the foods they need. Like figuring out which small space is still clear for non-Passover products in a kitchen that is being transformed into kosher-for-Passover.

But all this is only for starters. Pesach is a different world intrinsically. It is a space created by a deceptively simple food restriction. It is a mental space, a spiritual space, beyond the food restriction. Passover shares with the other two festivals of Judaism — Sukkot and Shavuot — special prayers, but it is different from these holidays, too. Somehow, the liberation from bread fosters a mental liberation, a freedom from customary thought patterns. Passover has a buoyancy, a lightness, a clarity that enables us to see our world and ourselves through a kinder lens.

The remembrance and reexperience of liberation from Egypt, concretized in our dietary imitation of the ancient Exodus, imparts a sense of freedom, right now, in our lives.

All of us live with one kind of bondage or another. Economic. Physical. Psychological. A bondage of health, of resources, of inner turmoil, of wartime — something. On Passover, that bondage lifts to a noticeable degree.

For Passover, the Torah designs a separate world. Note: There are not a lot of commandments about Passover. On the biblical level, the seder has only two positive commandments. The week of Passover has only the proscription of leaven. By contrast, Shabbos has 39 prohibitions. The number of business-related prohibitions in the Torah, needed to keep one honest, is vast. But Passover? Change the diet. Make a seder. That’s about it. That’s about all there is that distinguishes Passover. Yet, somehow, the holiday ascends to its own space — in time; and somehow, in more than time.

Passover takes us to a different place.

I am full of regret when Passover ends. A sadness comes over me that extends beyond the sudden need to reverse engineer the Passover preparations; to get everything that is kosher for Passover cleaned and packed away, and everything that is used year round back in place. I help with this depressing task almost on automatic pilot. But mentally? To go back into the regular world from the different world of Pesach? That weighs me down. The deeper the love for the holiday, and the more precious the mental space it occupies, the tougher it is to let it go.

But . . . there is hope. There is promise.

“Next Year in Jerusalem.”

© IJN 2026