We’ve got the egg. We’ve got the shank bone. We’ve got the bitter herbs. We’ll get the wine and karpas and the rest. It’s all happening now, baby. Passover starts at sundown on Saturday.

I used to think of this as an itchy flannel pants holiday. Because it required some patience. The Streit’s Matzos. Manischewitz Grape Wine so sweet it could make your eyes water. The afikomen and endless blessings before you can eat. The prayers and interpretations. And of course, the rousing dayenu song and the awesome recitation of plagues. Frogs, boils, cattle disease…

Over the years, though, grudging respect for duty and tradition gives way to something like joy and enthusiasm. Now I greatly look forward to seeing friends and family. And yes, even if you don’t strictly buy into the religious truth of the occasion, it’s good to hear the ancient words and feel some connection with what’s come before.

It’s also a holiday that keeps reinventing itself and revealing new meanings for new people. Talmudic scholars have debated the Exodus story for centuries. Christianity and Islam have embraced the Moses narrative as fundamental. Freud riffed on the theme in his last book. And his final speech, Martin Luther King Jr. said his eyes had seen the glory because he’d been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land he would never set foot in himself.

Somewhat less exaltedly, I spent twenty years writing a novel called Picture in the Sand, which is about Cecil B. DeMille making his last film, The Ten Commandments, in the midst of Egypt’s struggle for modern liberation. I don’t make any great claims, except to honestly say that if you buy my book, you will be a wiser and wealthier person, more attractive to others, and a better lover.

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There are a couple of reasons, I think, for the Passover story’s endurance. For one thing, the whole “Thou Shalt Not Kill” business seems pretty essential as a basis for most civil societies. Even though every human being on earth can think of someone they would gladly make an exception for.

The other universal aspect is the search for freedom. Everybody wants to be free from tyranny, naturally. Except we all have different ideas about what freedom means. You want to be from discrimination. I want to be free from anti-discrimination rules. And some people want to be free from too much freedom, so they need rules like the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses to tell them what to do. But then the rules get to be too much and all bets are off.

So why is this year different from all other years? Outwardly, everything is about the same. The trees are blossoming a little early, the food is getting prepared, the tables are getting set, and the Haggadahs are getting piled up. So why does it feel more like Springtime for the Pharaohs than Moses?

Maybe it’s because the idea of freedom is changing again. Tyranny is on the rise all over the world. Russia, China, Turkey, Hungary and others are all firmly under the thumbs of autocrats. Meanwhile, certain other nations are leaning that way. With vice-presidents who lecture Germans about free speech while supporting crypto-fascist parties. And techno oligarchs who inveigh against censorship while shutting down opposing voices. And a government that ignores judges’ directives and deports people without due process, even as it admits some of those people have not broken any laws.

Look, I know antisemitism is also on the rise as we head into this holiday. And I’m not crazy about people like Mahmoud Khalil, who played a major role in anti-Israeli protests at Columbia University last year. But it feels more than a little off-key to be celebrating the spirit of freedom when the leaders of a country are using the fig leaf of fighting antisemitism as a pretext to strong arm institutions of learning into subservience, while cutting off funding for life-saving scientific research.

As Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, puts it: “Abductions by government agents; unexplained, indefinite detentions; the targeting of allegedly dangerous ideas; lists of those under government scrutiny; official proclamations full of bluster and bile — Jews have been here before, many times, and it does not end well for us.”

So I’m glad to be getting together with people for Passover. But I’m not taking anything for granted this year. The Haggadah we use was adapted by one Meyer Levin, a Chicago reporter who was one of the first correspondents to enter the Nazi camps after the war and who later helped introduce the diary of Anne Frank to a large audience. Near the end of the book, he recounts the tradition of leaving a door open and setting out an empty cup for the prophet Elijah, who sometimes arrives when his people are in need.

So I’ll leave the door ajar for that part. But if anyone shows up and tries to get in, they better have a warrant.