There are moments in marriage that no one really prepares you for. Not the wedding, not the smiles, not the pictures under the chuppah. The quiet moments. The tense conversations. The long silences that say more than words ever could. The realization that the person you thought would complete you sometimes feels like the one who challenges you the most.
You expected warmth and you got tension. You expected support and you got silence. You expected to feel understood and instead you feel unseen. And somewhere deep inside, a quiet voice begins to whisper: This wasn’t part of the script.
We don’t always say it out loud. We smile, we function, we keep going. But the question lingers beneath the surface, heavy and honest. Why is this happening to me? Why does something so right sometimes feel so wrong?
In a deep yet unexpected way, the Passover seder and the spring season in which it must occur actually holds the key to unlocking this enigma and helping us find our balance. It holds the key to helping us disarm our traumas and channel them into growth and healing.
The Torah insists that Pesach must always fall in the spring. Not sometimes. Not ideally. Always. The Jewish calendar bends and stretches, adding an entire extra month when needed in a leap year, just to ensure that the festival of our freedom happens in the season of renewal. Jackie Mason famously observed that the Jewish holidays are sometimes early, sometimes late, but somehow they’re never right on time.
And it begs the most obvious question: If you are being freed from slavery, do you really care what season it is? If someone walked out of captivity today, would they say: I wish this had happened in April instead of January?
The answer is that the season is not a detail. It is the message.
The Jewish people left Egypt after 86 years of crushing slavery. They were physically exhausted and emotionally depleted. They had every reason to ask where G-d had been all along. And instead of offering a philosophical explanation, G-d chose a season. Spring.
Because spring teaches something that no words can.
In the winter, everything looks dead. The trees are bare, the fields are empty, the world feels frozen and lifeless. But anyone who understands nature knows that nothing is dead. It is hidden. Beneath the surface, something is forming, strengthening, preparing. The roots are deepening. The system is stabilizing. The life is not gone, it is gathering.
Spring does not create life. Spring reveals the life that winter was building.
That is the Jewish answer to trauma and suffering. The Freedom of Passover can only be experienced in the spring, once we gain awareness of the deeper truth beyond what meets the eye. You can only understand redemption when you understand what winter was doing.
We tend to think that pain is a sign that something is wrong. But often, pain is a sign that something is happening. When a muscle grows, it does not grow despite the strain. It grows through it. The tiny tearing of the muscle fibers feels like damage, but it is the very process that leads to strength. No strain, no strength. No pressure, no progress. If it doesn’t stretch you, it won’t strengthen you.
Pain is not punishment. Pain is information.
If we did not feel pain, we would place our hand on a burning stove and never pull it away. Pain is the alarm that tells us where to focus, what to fix, where to grow. The discomfort is not the enemy. It is the educator.
And nowhere is this more real than in marriage.
No relationship makes us as vulnerable as marriage does. No one can trigger us like the person we share a home and a life with. And when those triggers come, the instinct is to say something is wrong with them or something is wrong with us or something is wrong with the whole thing.
But what if the friction is not a flaw. What if it is the design.
The Torah in Genesis describes a spouse as “ezer kenegdo,” “a helper against you.” It sounds contradictory until you realize that the opposition is the help. It’s through challenging you that your spouse actually brings out the best in you. The very areas where your spouse challenges you are often the exact places where you are meant to grow. The tension is not proof you chose wrong. It may be proof you were chosen precisely right.
In a world of “Hashem Echad” — “One G-d,” nothing is random. Not the place you live, not the challenges you face, and not the person you marry. The discomfort you feel may not be there to break you. It may be there to build you.
Like the negatives of a photograph that looks dark and inverted, the moment itself may seem meaningless or even painful. But within that negative lies the full picture. If you discard it too quickly, you lose everything. If you develop it with patience and reflection, you begin to see what was always there.
Pesach comes in the spring to remind us that what feels like winter is often preparation. That what feels like absence may be incubation. That what feels like an ending may be the earliest stage of a beginning.
At the seder table, the mitzvah of the night is not just to tell the story of what happened then. It is to see yourself in that story now. To look at your own life, your own struggles, your own relationships, and ask not only why is this happening to me, but what is this building in me.
Because just like then, G-d is redeeming us now. Not always by removing the struggle, but by revealing the strength it was creating all along.
Rabbi Dovid Vigler is the spiritual leader at Chabad of Palm Beach Gardens, with over 85,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, youtube.com/jewishgardens. Email him at [email protected].
