(UNDATED) My favorite holiday is the eight-day festival of Passover that begins this year on April 8 at sundown with one of the world’s oldest continuous religious rituals: the annual Seder meal.

The celebratory Seder features holiday prayers and songs, the recounting the ancient Hebrews’ exodus from Egyptian servitude, and of course special foods like matzo (unleavened bread), wine and pungent horseradish signifying slavery’s bitterness. The Seder links every generation with the inspiring saga of how a ragtag band of slaves gained freedom and ultimately entered the Promised Land.

Passover is always the same because it describes events that took place about 3,250 years ago. That part never changes. However, what’s always in flux is the mental outlook of the family members and friends who gather around the Seder table.

Make no mistake. The extraordinary changes in mood this Passover are radically different from the recent past.

It will be especially poignant this year when my granddaughter Emma chants the opening Hebrew words of the traditional Four Questions –“Why is this night different from all other nights?”

In past years, I offered the customary answer. The Seder night is different because we remember the story of how God heard the cries of the slaves and provided them with a gifted leader in Moses. Against great odds, Moses led the often reluctant people out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, through the wilderness and into a life of freedom and liberation.

But Emma’s question this year will trigger some drastically different answers because of the painful economic downturn we are experiencing.

For more than 60 years, Americans — myself included — were confident, even smug, in the belief that mass unemployment, sharply depleted savings, and severe economic dislocation were things from a distant grim past: the 1930s and the Great Depression. Grainy black-and-white photos of that period depicting bread lines and dazed people selling apples on street corners belonged in the National Archives, not in our national psyche.

We mistakenly believed that we were free from the ruinous bubble-and-burst economics of the past. We were slaves to the false belief that ours was a constantly upward society, free of fiscal downturns and crushing financial pain.

The traditional Seder ritual includes the recitation of the 10 plagues that afflicted the hard-hearted Pharaoh of Egypt who would not let God’s people go. In our collective hubris, we never dreamed that an economically secure America would be afflicted with the devastating modern plagues of our own making: massive fraudulent investments, deceitful money managers and universal insatiable greed.

This year’s Seder will be different because we are now in the midst of our own Red Sea with its crashing waves of enormous personal and national debt. We are keenly aware that, like the ancient Hebrews, we will cross this turbulent sea only to enter a wilderness of lowered expectations, reduced affluence and permanent memories of a painful past.

Some of the Hebrew slaves, frightened of the Sea and the wilderness that followed, wanted to return to the familiar bondage of Egypt. But Moses compelled the people to press on into the great unknown.

We, too, will not — indeed cannot — go back to the destructive economic world that was and is no more. Even as we recite the ancient Exodus story, we must also tell future generations the story of how our avarice and arrogance enslaved us to a poisoned economic system filled with widespread fraud and scandal.

Clearly, this year we are participants in our own Passover story. We are a people trapped in servitude not to Pharaoh, but to the slick, self-important and slippery financial “Masters of the Universe” who ruled over our lives for too long.

Hopefully, it will not require 40 years in a barren fiscal wilderness before we can enter an economic Promised Land free of the excesses and bondage of the past.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)