For Passover: celebrate freedom
[NOTE: This is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]
This evening is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.
In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.
Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.
For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:
“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”
Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”
Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent years has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to secure it in a place with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.
We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country, despite its long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it. I fear those days may be over.
Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.
As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”
Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.
History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have—the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”
Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:
Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?
Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread (just ask the Ukrainians).
Is freedom a “basic need, then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they think of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met:
We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart…
So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen…
I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.
I beg to differ. I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.
Happy Passover!
Je suis libre. Soy libre. Jag ar fri.Watashi wa hamadi. No matter the language, the message remains the same. I am free, no one can take that from me. All they can do is kill me and mine. BFD. We all are born to die. Until one embraces that attitude, deep in the gut, one is subject to persuasion. Happy Passover indeed.
It is far better to die on your feet, than live on your knees because if you’re on your knees, you’re already dead.
If you’re not prepared to die in defense of your liberty, you’ve already lost it.
Only a free man can truly claim self-respect.
Chag sa Meach! Happy Holiday! In my own Passover Seders, I used to say that the Seder plate was “the first multi-media educational presentation”. The Seder is part lesson plan, part participatory and interactive drama, part history, and part dinner.
As the leader of the Seder, you can make a real impression by starting off wearing a leather jacket, hiking boots and an Indiana Jones-style fedora; after all, the participants are supposed to be ready to leave for the Sinai at any moment. It’s only AFTER the initial blessings that we “recline” to eat.
Next year, in Jerusalem!
Gut Pesach, everyone!
A quote from John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus: “the fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own”, and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it.”
Friends invited us to their Seder one year long ago, and I remember coming away thinking how remarkable it is that they (and a very large percentage of Jews in America) are such strong leftists.
I put it down to their sense of social responsibility, but then criticize them for not recognizing the ultimate goal of their leftist dreaming — Socialism and eventually Marxism — does NOT serve that social responsibility. In fact it ultimately stifles the freedom they are celebrating at their Seder table.
John Kerry had exactly wrong (not the first or last time).
When I commuted to a job I had in D.C. many years ago I used to pass a large sign reading “Free Soviet Jewery.” (I thought it said jewelry the first time I saw it and wondered how they could be giving that away. Never mind.) When I figured out it said “Jewery” I remarked to myself that the people who are calling for liberating Jews in the USSR are likely voting Democrat every election in America. For a group that is so smart about so many things, a majority of Jews have it wrong about politics.
Oh yeah, the moon was Bright! last night. But I guess I always figure Passover happens sometime before Easter, for some reason.
On liberty: I’ve mentioned this before, but even some modern- liberals who have traditionally viewed “morals” as nothing more than arbitrary social compromises over culturally established (and necessarily differing and possibly antagonistic) preferences and wants, have begun recognizing, at least in the case of liberal psychologist Jonathan Haidt, that an inherent “taste” for liberty must be factored in as a component of the moral make-up of some portion of the human population.
Strikingly, and contra modern-liberal social dogma, he views these preferences, or foundations as evolved and innate.
The simple modern-liberal binary moral foundation of care/harm; or even the early version of the conservative paradigm which included sanctity, and loyalty, were not enough.
Liberty had to be added, because without it, the moral preferences and evaluations of a large number of people just did not make sense.
Of course immediately Haidt did that, hedonic nihilist modern-liberal collectivists, began frantically staking their own claim to valuing “liberty”. It’s has such a nice ring for propaganda’s sake, and if you can convince people that allowing libertine clubs in an otherwise totalitarian dictatorship is the definition of “liberty”, you have won half the battle for progressivism.
Some will enjoy or find this useful
http://righteousmind.com/presidentialprimaries/
There is another issue too, when it comes to moral action and freedom. It becomes obvious to even an advanced gradeschooler, that compelled “moral” (and in liberal terms that means only “altruistic”) action is not in any sense virtuous on the part of the proximate actor. It is simply compliance.
And for liberals, this is quite good enough, since they are not virtue ethicists in the first place. There is no teleology. We are just historically contingent organisms “coping with the environment”, as Rorty has it. An omelet must be made, and therefore some eggs must be broken. Too bad you could not get into Yale, but that is the game.
Therefore, the interior disposition of the “social element” which has its appetites gratified and gratifies the appetites of others is of no real concern. The element will be managed into a state of more or less satisfaction, or stupefaction, through the intelligent, or at least calculated, direction of its appetites, opportunities, and allowable perspectives.
This of course ins not what we generally think of as a human life; but no modern-liberal would be troubled by that. After all, it’s all ultimately for nothing, anyway.
That is what modern-liberalism comes down to: Nothing. No ultimate meaning, no intrinsic value, no inherent personal teleology, no truth except in the most trivial sense, and no escape but oblivion. What do you need “liberty” for?
Let’s hope that Passover, helps to prove that they are wrong, and it is not all for naught.
Kerry and F,
I should have read your comments before posting up mine.
You said many of the same things, using much of the same terminology, before I did.
Well, great minds … anyway
They used to show the movie THE TEN COMMANDMENTS on Easter Sunday, although more suitable for Passover. In any event, DeMille really “got” it. He even filmed an intro in which he came out on a stage and told the audience, “This movie is about the birth of freedom.”
F Says:
April 23rd, 2016 at 9:29 am
…
the people who are calling for liberating Jews in the USSR are likely voting Democrat every election in America. For a group that is so smart about so many things, a majority of Jews have it wrong about politics.
***
I read Natan Sharansky’s memoir about the time of the refusniks, and the people calling for their liberation were not the Democrat-voting Jews in America; they were advising the Russian Jews to quit rocking the boat, because, diplomacy.
IRRC, it was a small, but vocal, contingent of politically conservative Jews who finally caught Reagan’s attention and support and he pushed the Soviets until they gave in.
John Hayward’s latest piece seems relevant to the discussion of liberty; although the conjunction of the Bathroom Wars and the Passover may seem odd at first, the Escape from the Fleshpots of Egypt has certain cultural similarities to our era.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/23/bathroom-wars-humiliate-normal-majority/
“The progressives’ goal is to humiliate and marginalize the majority–to make normal people feel abnormal, to be alone, to be afraid to dissent from what appears to be an overwhelming, media-magnified, Google-approved, Hollywood-polished, Obama-confirmed, irresistible consensus. As any competent military strategist can tell you, numbers count for less than morale. A demoralized majority can be subjugated by an activist minority when it refuses to fight.
That’s why every new social-engineering crusade is framed as an attack on the moral stature of dissenters. “
Happy Passover Neo!
F -we Jews are brilliant at science, mathematics, law, medicine, business, music, and a host of other things, but we stink at politics and always have, from the days of King Saul down to this very day.
Most Jews (i.e., the liberals) believe in their hearts that Franklin Delano Roosevelt is still President and that he was good to the Jews. The few of us conservative (that’s with a lower case “c”, not a capital “C”) Jews are the ones who know that he isn’t and he wasn’t.
That’s strange, Jesus the Savior did not believe in freedom. God granted people free will and agency, but what Jesus believed in was fulfilling God’s work. And that required that people choose to repent their guilt and crimes against humanity/God, and return to the Righteous path. Even as the house of Israel or the Jews made a Covenant with God, God owed it to those tribes and people to give them a chance. If it was likely/certain that the Jewish leaders would reject that chance to return to the Godly Covenant of their forefathers.
If people were not free, this would invalidate a great many things. But irregardless, once a person chooses to obey the 10 Commandments, I don’t think from that point on, it’s about “I’ll do whatever I feel like” or any other version of Western Enlightened “freedom”. Freedom from what, one’s conscience, one’s duties?
But it wasn’t about individual liberty either, since Jesus the Savior wanted people to Obey God as the ultimate authority. That meant your Leader would be Jesus/God. You obeyed only Christ, the Savior. That is what makes people “Christians”. That’s not even freedom in choosing your own leaders, you already have a leader you must submit and obey.
The Counter I might ask is, “why do people need God, can’t they decide on their own laws and their own family rules to obey”?
And I counter that counter with “the atheists and other religious sects have done so. How have they fared. Some have fared well. Some have not”.
The United States came as close as humanly possible to what people call “God’s Kingdom”. Not necessarily a theocracy, but not a secular state either. Something of a hybrid, in between, a compromise, that allows God’s prophets free to preach and not be persecuted.
Well, there might have been other kingdoms on Earth that got close, but they destroyed themselves, as to be expected from humans. The US is not particularly exceptional in that sense.
Most Jews (i.e., the liberals) believe in their hearts that Franklin Delano Roosevelt is still President and that he was good to the Jews.
Is a Jew still a Jew if they have violated the Commandment against envy and having no other gods before the Old Testament God, of unchanging nature?
That is a peculiar thing for them, because the Jews were a tribe but part of their tribal identity is that God chose their tribe out of all other options at the time. And yet… they are not Godly, not even in the Torah sense.
Br’s comment here was really interesting.
Something just struck me, and I realized we’re not replaying the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.
We’re not going the way of Rome. No, not really.
We’re going the way of ancient Israel.
1 Samuel 8
4 So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah.
5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead[b] us, such as all the other nations have.”
6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord.
7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.
8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you.
9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”
10 Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king.
11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.
12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.
13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.
15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.
16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use.
17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.
18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
19 But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.
20 Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”
21 When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord.
22 The Lord answered, “Listen to them and give them a king.”
http://neoneocon.com/2016/04/21/okay-lets-play-identity-politics-a-ted-cruz-friendship-that-should-be-publicized/#comment-1098840
The issue of people who claim to be Jews, demanding that Laws replace God, is quite well known by now. The Jews in Israel, probably are Godly or attempting to follow the commandments and even Jesus. The Jews outside Israel are a mixed bag. Some have grown into this hybrid tree that produces bad fruit. Others were ignored, but have also prospered and given good fruit.
People wanting Kings to tell them what to do, well that’s not a Jewish thing, that’s just a human thing.
Ymarsakar:
I’m not at all sure what you mean by “claiming to be Jews.” Do you mean secular Jews? Or people who aren’t even Jewish at all, such as Jews for Jesus?
Why distinguish “Jews” in this regard when it’s just a human thing? Do you think “Jews” do this more than other people? If not, why talk about them as some sort of special case?
Lastly, Jews in Israel are not especially religious. So I have no idea why you make a distinction between Jews in Israel and Jews in the diaspora.
Ymarsakar:
I’m no expert on Jesus, but I’m pretty sure you are wrong, or at least you are wrong in the sense of your definition of “freedom.” Jesus believed mankind was free to choose: i.e. free will. People could choose to follow him and the Father, or to be atheists or members of other religions, but that there were consequences to each choice.
Once a person chose to be a Christian (not that Jesus ever used that word, “Christian”), then there were certain ways a person needed to behave and things in which that person needed to believe. But at any point people were free to reject those things.
Calvin didn’t believe in free will, but Jesus was not a Calvinist.
I’m not at all sure what you mean by “claiming to be Jews.” Do you mean secular Jews? Or people who aren’t even Jewish at all, such as Jews for Jesus?
Why distinguish “Jews” in this regard when it’s just a human thing? Do you think “Jews” do this more than other people? If not, why talk about them as some sort of special case?
Late answer checkup:
Claiming as in for any reason. People could also claim to be Americans for their own reasons. But Jewish people claim to be Jewish because of about 3 or so general reasons. Religious, philosophical, or bloodline based. Well there’s also socio economic and cultural.
Because the Jews have an extremely long and well documented history of their relationship with God, Religion, and tyrannies like the Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate. The Jewish tribes, apart from the lost 10-12 other tribes that weren’t chosen apparently, have been under several long periods of dominion.
For reasons of knowledge and wisdom, the behavior of the Jews is directly comparable with how civilizations rise and fall. Because they’ve been through several cycles already and have lasted this long. Of course, the same can be said for the Armenians and Kurdish, but apparently they don’t speak as much English nor write as much English online for Americans to check up on. They are difficult to study without knowing their language or being able to read it.
Once a person chose to be a Christian (not that Jesus ever used that word, “Christian”),
That’d be rather redundant. It’d be like Palin calling her followers a Palinista or Bush II calling his allies a Bushian.
Even for religious cult of personalities, there’s a tendency not to do so. It’s the followers who generally rename themselves and take on new identities later on.
What separates the Jewish and the Christians in 0 AD was that the Jews who believed in Christ as their Savior discarded their Jewish religious authorities and adopted Christ/God as the ultimate authority. Not merely a name change but an entire hierarchy change. Jews still believed in the Torah, old Testament laws, and on the old Covenants. Basically that there would be no future revelations or updates to the commandments nor the Covenant. This meant a rejection of Jesus as a prophet of God. In favor of kings. Who were then false prophets who led the Jews to destruction against Emperors Nero and later on Hadrian too. And later on, the Islam took over the region after a few hundred years, and the Jews became vassals and jizya payers for some time. When Islam invaded Spain, the Jews were there as well, fulfilling their role in society.
Normally culture groups would assimilate or would be rendered ineffective because of a lack of education in a higher/advanced empire. The Jews are smarter and more useful as a result, with concurrently a bigger effect on technology and politics than their numbers would imply. However, that increase in knowledge often leads to a decrease in wisdom.
The fact that Israel has been resurrected, and even takes on a name that implies those who rebelled against God, I find interesting. That would be according to some prophecies even, which means the Jewish success is not merely due to their individual talents but also due to their Covenant with God. But that also means, that those who break that Covenant will have an interesting effect.
But the Jewish people are important precisely because the same thing has been happening with the Christian communities. Apostates and heretics and various other power factional struggles, covers up the underlying historical currents. I do not believe it a coincidence that the Romans had to put down so many rebellions after 30 AD in Judea, who Hadrian renamed to Palestinia just because.
So I have no idea why you make a distinction between Jews in Israel and Jews in the diaspora.
There’s some scriptures concerning scattering the Jews and then bringing them back to their homeland. There are too many interpretations to count, however. I don’t think it makes much of a difference if they believe in the Covenant or not. Because even if they refuse to believe, their people’s bloodline is in a Covenant with God, and if God exists, would that memory have been erased from an unchanging God? Perhaps if God is changing and miracles no longer exist, that would be the case and Israel is merely a human success story. If God exists and the Covenant exists and prophecies were created, then Israel might not necessarily be merely a human invention.
Also, the lost 10 or 12 other tribes, might also be coming back as the Gentiles. Since Gentiles can convert to Judaism now apparently. That directly questions whether the Jews are God’s chosen people or whether the Jews, like anybody else, has specific covenants with God. But the Covenant of the Jews is different from the Covenant Jesus made later on.