Dear Matzav Inbox,

It’s that time again.

The carts are full. The aisles are jammed. The conversations revolve around menus, meats, wines, and which brand of this year’s overpriced everything is “worth it.” Homes are being turned upside down in a frenzy of cleaning, kashering, and preparation for zman cheiruseinu.

And in the middle of all this noise, something is being buried.

Not the chometz. Our conscience.

Because while we are obsessing over every crumb, there are people among us who are drowning financially.

Not hypothetically. Not in some faraway community. Right here. In our shuls. In our neighborhoods. Sitting next to us, nodding politely, saying “Gut Yom Tov” as if everything is fine.

It isn’t.

But they won’t tell you that.

They won’t show up at your local distribution. They won’t sign up for assistance. They won’t let their name be whispered in the right ears. They still have too much dignity for that.

And we, if we’re being honest, are relying on that.

We hide behind the comforting fiction that “the organizations are taking care of it.” That “no one falls through the cracks.” That “there are funds, drives, and campaigns.”

Let’s stop pretending.

There are cracks. Wide ones. And people are disappearing into them quietly, respectfully, and completely unnoticed.

Because they don’t scream.

And we don’t look.

We have built a system that responds beautifully—to those who ask. But what about those who don’t? What about the family that will cut corners on food, on clothing, on basic dignity, just to avoid becoming “a case”?

Do they not count because they suffer silently?

Or is it just more convenient that way?

We pride ourselves on being a community of chesed. We tell ourselves that we take care of our own.

Do we?

Or do we take care of the ones who make it easy for us to take care of them?

Because real chesed is not reactive. It is not a response to a flyer, a campaign, or a publicized need.

Real chesed is uncomfortable. It requires noticing. It requires asking. It requires stepping into spaces we would rather not enter, because doing so shatters the illusion that everything around us is fine.

And maybe that’s the real problem.

It’s easier to scrub a kitchen for hours than to confront the possibility that someone you know—someone you respect—is quietly breaking under the weight of Yom Tov.

It’s easier to check lettuce three times than to check on a neighbor or friend once.

We search our homes with candles and flashlights, hunting down the smallest trace of chometz.

But we somehow miss the most obvious thing of all: people who are struggling to make Pesach with even the most basic sense of dignity.

What exactly are we so busy removing, if not the very sensitivity that Pesach is supposed to awaken?

We speak about cheirus. About freedom. About what it means to leave Mitzrayim.

Tell me: What kind of freedom is it when a family sits at their Seder table with forced smiles, knowing that no one thought of them, knowing that they have growing credit card debt?

What kind of redemption is that?

We didn’t forget them.

That would be too innocent.

We chose not to see them.

And until we are willing to admit that—to let it bother us, to let it disrupt us, to let it cost us something—then all the cleaning, all the preparations, all the talk of zman cheiruseinu is just noise.

Because a community that prides itself on seeing every crumb, but refuses to see its own people, has missed the point entirely.

This Pesach, the question isn’t whether we got rid of our chometz.

The question is whether we got rid of our blindness.

L. G.

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