Next Year in Jerusalem

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. That's not just a verse. That's a posture. Sitting by foreign water crying for home.

Every Seder ends with the same words. "Next year in Jerusalem." It's a prayer disguised as a toast. A hope disguised as a tradition. For thousands of years, people have said those words in basements and attics and refugee camps and living rooms knowing they might never get there. And they said it anyway.

What's your Jerusalem? What's the place you ache for? The thing you keep hoping for that hasn't happened yet? The wholeness you can almost taste but can't quite reach?

I have my own Jerusalem. The life I thought I'd be living by now. The relationship I thought would last. The version of myself I thought I'd be by this age. And I'm sitting by foreign waters. And I'm remembering. And some nights, I weep.

But the people who said "next year in Jerusalem" for two thousand years eventually got there. Not all of them. But enough. The hope survived. The prayer outlasted every empire that tried to silence it. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? That's the question, isn't it? How do you worship when you're displaced? How do you praise when you're grieving? How do you set a Seder table in a year that broke you?

You do it anyway. Not because you feel it. Because the act of setting the table IS the resistance. The act of telling the story IS the defiance. Every Seder in exile is a revolution. Every prayer in the dark is a declaration that the dark doesn't win.

Lord, I don't know if I'll get to my Jerusalem this year. But I'm going to say the words anyway. Next year. Next year in wholeness. Next year in peace. Next year in the life you've been preparing for me that I can't see yet.

And until then, I'll sit at this table. I'll eat this bread. I'll tell this story. I'll hold the people next to me. And I'll trust that the God who brought a nation home can bring me home too.

Next year in Jerusalem.

Amen.