Local rabbis turned to the lessons and inspiration of Passover this week as they prepared for seders in the wake of the fatal shooting Sunday of three people outside Jewish facilities near Kansas City.

“Coming as this did leading up to Passover, it helps us to understand freedom and bondage in a more inner spiritual sense,” Rabbi Yosef Landa of Chabad said. 

Landa expressed sadness for the victims and recognized the dichotomy that the shooter lived in a nation with such great freedom yet was apparently enslaved by hatred.

“It is very possible to live in a free country and still be spiritually held captive by all sorts of unworthy notions, ideas and afflictions,” he said. “To break free from those is what the message of Passover is. That is experiencing true freedom.”

Rabbi Carnie Rose of Congregation B’nai Amoona said he was “shocked and saddened” by the news.

“It reminds us that our world is as yet unredeemed,” he said. “As we enter the Passover, the Passover story is not only a recollection of what transpired in the past but also an attempt on the part of Jewish tradition to point us in the direction of a future.”

Rose said he looks forward to a time when a perfected world will make worrying about such horrors unnecessary. However, he said, such a day will take great effort from everyone.

“Coming on the heels of this event, [Passover] reminds us that there is still an awful lot of work that needs to be done,” Rose said.

Rabbi Ze’ev Smason of Nusach Hari B’nai Zion found himself dwelling on the attack’s timing, which he believes may have been intentional. He said it fit a historical pattern of anti-Semites, launching attacks on Jews during holy times.

“One of the things that anti-Semites, and the Nazis in particular, historically did, especially in the ghettos, concentration camps and labor camps, is deliberately try to demoralize the Jewish people by bringing certain actions against them on the holidays,” he said.

The goal was often to get Jews to violate the laws and traditions of the holiday.

“The other thing they tried to do is to create an aura of fear and dread so whenever the holidays would come around again that we would remember … they would be prone to attacking us,” Smason said.

As such, he said, it is vital to practice faith without fear.

“By going on and living, that’s the greatest refutation to Hitler, the Nazis and the sickos who wanted to eliminate us and want us to stop practicing our faith in God,” Smason said.

Rabbi Randy Fleisher of Central Reform Congregation also invoked biblical imagery to express his feelings.

“I think it speaks to the fact that we still are facing plagues, the plagues of hatred and violence,” he said. “Passover is about changing the status quo, taking the things that are wrong with society and believing that we can make a difference, make it better.”

Fleisher noted that despite the shooter’s apparently anti-Semitic motives, all three of his victims were not even Jewish.

“Even at a Jewish Community Center, you will not have exclusively Jews,” Fleisher said. “That’s true in every aspect of our society. We are not a country that believes in sectioning people off according to their religion, culture, race or nationality. We all live and blend together.”