Rabbi Jonathan Sacks imagines the moment when the Israelites were about to go free. Moses gathered the people and gave them instructions. It was, according to Rabbi Sacks, an epic moment – a time for a speech that be remembered for generations.

Moses could have talked about freedom or the end of the journey – the land flowing with milk and honey. But instead, he spoke about children.

At the moment when the people were about to gain their freedom, Moses talked about the distant future, and the duty to pass on memories to generations yet unborn. He told the Israelites that they were to become a nation of teachers.

“What Moses taught,” writes Sacks, “and what the Jewish people came to discover, is that you achieve immortality not by building pyramids or statues, but by engraving your values on the hearts of your children, and they on theirs, so that our ancestors live on in us and we in our children, and so until the end of time.”

Passover is a time to tell our story, to pass our values down to our children. But more than that, it is a time to teach our children about hope.

The great lesson of Passover is that suffering ends. No matter how dark life is, no matter how much we suffer, we can always find hope. Tomorrow can be better than today.

Netivot Shalom, one of the last Chassidic masters, wrote:

The obligation of Passover is not just to remember the Exodus long ago, but to remember that God can bring us out even now. We remember the Exodus from Egypt in every prayer service, but on Passover, we do something different. We tell each other the story, and we remember that even now, God can bring us out of our narrow places.

Everyone has their own time when they can be redeemed, their own time when their fortunes can turn to the good. This is the truth that ia revealed at every Passover. Just as the entire people was redeemed, so every individual will find their time of redemption.

This, perhaps, is the greatest obligation of any parent: to speak to their children’ hearts, to teach them that the world is safe, that life can be trusted, and that eventually, we will find a way out of the narrow places in our lives. In their darkest moments, our children need to know that they, too, will be redeemed.

And so, each year, we gather at our seder tables, and we read the story of redemption. We go from degradation to hope, and finally to freedom. And finally, at the end, we say “Next year in Jerusalem,” a reminder that the world is not yet whole. But we have come a long way from Egypt. The world is better than it once was.

The past – with its suffering and its joy – gives us hope. If our people have come this far, then we can continue the journey. Our children can build a better world. And they will pass on our hopes and our values until the end of time.