Elijah’s Visit: A Passover Reflection from Rabbi Brawer

By Rabbi Naftali Brawer Ph.D. 

One of my most evocative childhood memories is about opening the door of our home to the Prophet Elijah on Passover eve. This is part of the Passover ritual, and it takes place towards the end of the Seder close to midnight. 

Elijah, a character who as the Hebrew bible describes it, never died but ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot, features prominently in Jewish culture and ritual as a harbinger of redemption. Invoking his memory, indeed opening the doors of one’s home to symbolically invite him in is particularly apt on Passover, a festival associated with redemption, both past and future. 

It is customary to have a child open the door for the prophet and in our family this ritual involved the added drama of bearing a lit candle. I was seven or eight years old that particular year and my brother, a few years younger. When we reached the critical moment in the Seder my father handed me a candlestick with the lit candle, and I proceeded to carry it down the narrow, dark stairway from our second-floor residence to the first-floor landing and our front door. The flickering candlelight cast eerie outsized shadows along the walls, and I felt a shiver of trepidation as I approached the doorway. Previous experience had taught me that an embodied Elijah was highly unlikely to be standing on the other side of the door, but then again, to my young mind it wasn’t an impossibility. The closer I got to the door the more certain I was that I did not want to meet this prophetic ghost on our doorstep. Our front door had a thick opaque window and as I put my hand to the doorknob a dark figure suddenly loomed in the window frame. I dropped the lit candle and ploughed right into my younger brother who was two steps behind knocking him over as I scrambled back up the stairs in terror.  

It turns out the looming figure distorted by the opaque glass was not the biblical prophet but rather our diminutive Hungarian downstairs neighbor Mrs. Weiss. She had run out of some Passover staple and had come to see if she could borrow more.  

Years later I came across the following story. 

One year, at the Passover Seder the Hasidic Master Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787-1859) promised his disciples that they would behold the Prophet Elijah. Bursting with anticipation they couldn’t wait to get to the end of the Seder. When the moment arrived, Elijah was not standing on the doorstep. They returned to their places crestfallen. Their Master, however, was ecstatic. “Why the long faces?’ he chided them, “Did you think that Elijah comes through the door? He comes through the heart!” 

It dawned on me then that perhaps I had met Elijah all those years ago. He appeared in the guise of a neighbor asking for help and my parents’ generous response. Elijah isn’t necessarily revealed through mystical visions, but through the simple yet profound act of seeing someone in need and responding with compassion. The divine is alive in our concrete actions toward others – actions that invite love, understanding, and connection. And in these moments, we, too, become a doorway for something sacred.