Passover and liberty
[The following is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]
Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.
I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not solely 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.
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 decades has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to foster it in places with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.
We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country – more potent in the last couple of years and especially in 2020 and now. This is happening despite our long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it.
Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Some of them are cynical and power-mad; some 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.
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 even of bread.
I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.
Happy Passover!
A happy Passover to all those celebrating! I hope you can be with your friends and family this year.
I suspect that Passover is the most recognizable of the Jewish Mosaic festivals to many non-Jewish Christians. In conservative evangelical churches, kids grow up hearing about Moses and the plaques on the Egyptians who would not let the Jews go free and the tenth plague . Any preacher worth his salt points out the symbolism of the blood of the lamb over the door post and the judgement of God passing by , or “ over”, that house and the cruxifixction and substitutionary blood of Jesus as applied to individuals. 1 Corinthians 5:7. When I read Zechariah chapter 14 , it is quiet clear that the Fall Mosaic Feast of Tabernacles will be a really big deal in the future Messianic kingdom.
Distinct Peoples have their tales and traditions which echo and persist down the ages. And what is more group-binding than the recitation of past travails and triumphs by fire or candle or lamp light over a meal? This is deeply-baked into our human genes.
Melting Pots of Misch-masch Mystery Meat Nations do not have or do any of this.
And this is why there will still be Jews and (say) Koreans still busy at being Jews and Koreans come the heat death of the universe, but zero Citizens of an American Proposition (it is to laugh) Nation.
Universalism is a Death Cult with Nukes. For all its faults, Israel is a Life Cult with Nukes.
Choose Life.
Neo, to perhaps better emphasize the fragility of our rights and their retention, when you said “… 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.” I suggest that our rights are not Protected by a constitution but rather Defined by it (along with selected legislation and court rulings). And then the dedicated defense you mention next is what provides a mode of protection, as otherwise there are no guarantees. Plus you do next say that even such efforts of defense may prove inadequate to achieve real liberty when the culture is not in place to support and promote it.
Most of the time such language nits do not really matter, but in this context I believe they do.
Egyptian and Babylonian Captivities resonate throughout many of the national stories in what was once Christendom.
e.g. the very old lyrics of the Dutch National Anthem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwBrR_G70RE
What gets me is how did Dostoyevsky see so far? Who amongst us could have spotted the Managerialist Bugman 100+ years out?
“Who amongst us could have spotted the Managerialist Bugman 100+ years out?” – Zaphod
Well, not exactly amongst us – more like, way above most of us.
Thomas Sowell
Friedrich Hayek
C. S. Lewis
Kafka
Probably a few more.
Saw this in time to edit my comment –
https://townhall.com/columnists/jaredwhitley/2021/03/27/how-cs-lewis-predicted-woke-education-could-turn-democracy-into-dictatorship-n2586801
We now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.” -C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
@AesopFan:
Whilst I’ll happily admit that those you name far surpass my/our abilities, all they had to do was look with clear eyes in front of their noses (an uncommon talent, too). Dostoyevsky extrapolated A->B->C. To me this makes him an uncommonly rare Seer == a whole nother rung up the hierarchy of genius. YMMV.
It’s probably true that the more social a species is, the less each member desires freedom. Social urges=1/Freedom urges. We are pretty social creatures. I think we are right on a watershed. Some of us desire lots of liberty and some like to fly like the starlings in murmuration, in unison with flock.
The Enlightenment comes along and John Locke shows us how wonderful and practical it is to be free; and wow, how productive Adam Smith has pushed us! But this new insight is not quite fitting for our old social and equality instincts; and we have been chafing ever since. Science tells us to shut up and be happy because we’ve found a better way, but the ancient genes tell us to accept the strong man and join the flock behind him.
It seems that current scholarship is determinedly, in fact somewhat militantly and dimissively, on the side of “legendary”.
In fact, what I found peculiar in my casual review of some of the popular-ish material this last week, was a debunking mindset that appeared to be agenda driven, and which well exceeded the modest principles of “epistemic humility” or reserved judgment in the face of uncertain evidence, that is touted in the analytic manuals.
Of course, if you can prove someone never did something – and one can in principle prove certain kinds of negatives – it is honest to do so. But we have seen much of the same debunking impulse strongly at work in the prehistory of Europe; with the cultural diffusionists taking the crowing lead … Now to fall flat on their faces as genetic analysis has resurrected the Beaker Folk (more or less) and other population migration concepts.
At any rate, my point was going to be that a calm and slow reading of the entire Exodus narrative beginning with the birth of Moses reveals numbers of subtleties which tend to be glossed over by skeletonized popular or dramatic recountings, but which in fact announce and stipulate the existence of some contextual conditions surrounding the events; which later debunkers then seize upon as new and disconfirming evidence.
In fact one should probably go back to the arrival of the Hebrews in Egypt in the first place in order to straighten out some of our overblown, or unjustifiably casual and therefore vulnerable, assumptions.
I am thinking particularly here of the archeologists’ idea of a pre-existing population (or branch?) of Israelites in the hill country; and also the Bible stated inclusion of foreigners in the Exodus narrative. The former does not seem to be categorically ruled out by the Biblical narrative, and the latter is outright implied.
Goshen, now having been discovered to have had so-called Minoan populations in Avaris is an interesting aspect of this era’s history. As we all know, the Mycenean fresco style was essentially Minoan with variations. Thus, when some Israeli TV host starts enthusiastically rambling on about an “Aegean” component to early Israel in Dan, they may not be completely off their rockers. Nor, in reality, contradicting the Scripture per se. LOL
On the other hand, if you naively believe everything the latest progressive minded archeologist in the media says, you will be forced to conclude that England never had an Anglo-Saxon population to amount to anything, that the swords were all ceremonial, and what there was in the way of an elite was a heretofore undiscovered matriarchy running it all.
@DNW:
Why must you allude to Mary Beard while I’m eating my breakfast? Not cool! 😀
My father was raised Jewish but married a Christian. We were brought up without religion, and I still have no need of it.
Yet, when I was exposed to the Seder, I was moved emotionally. You are right that it isn’t really religious or political. It is a human story. And it is a story that should never be forgotten.
Mary Beard….
It is apparently an important element of at least one class of media friendly historian in the British Isles, male or female, to be slovenly, overweight, have long stringy unkempt hair, and long dirty fingernails. Especially the males. There are other varieties of course, the short bald guy host variety, or the cleavage display model. They all stink for the most part.
As for Seder plays, I don’t know how they go, but a re-reading of the actual text of the Bible, especially the negotiating dance that was going on during the escalating plagues, is instructive.
It’s obvious too that not all the Hebrews were all that enthused about departing, any more than Pharaoh was about cooperating with the “We’re just gonna go worship in the desert and then we will be right back” pretext he was being presented with.
His attitude being, if you have time on your hands to fill, you can gather your own straw too for making the bricks.
The last plague involving the death of all the firstborn in Egypt, seems a bit harsh, until one recalls that it was the policy of the Pharaoh to have the newborn Hebrew males killed by the midwives. Hence Moses in a basket.
The midwives report back to the authorities that the problem is that those sturdy Hebrew women keep dropping the babies on their own before we can get there to assist in the delivery and kill the male.
Seems too insane to be true. Until you think of the direction our own society is, and has been, headed. Pretty easy to imagine those British historians shrugging at the murder of babies. A cultural practice, don’t you know.
@DNW:
One is on one’s best behaviour and attempting with moderate success to not rain on the Passover Parade, but I will state that I think Simon Schama is the most pernicious popular historian at work in the UK today. All the more dangerous for appearing presentable and ‘reasonable’.
See this, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Birth_of_the_Hero
Had to google it up, but had come across mention of this myth in relation to Sargon of Akkad in Moscati’s excellent Face of the Ancient Orient.
I guess putting in a good word for Otto Rank gets me off the hook for dumping on Simon Schama. Gotta keep score!
Some cultural practices that the Philistines (cough, cough child sacrifice to Baal) were especially repugnant to the Jews of Israel and Juda IIRC. It would be called “choice” now a days.
Everything Old is New Again.
A few years ago I ran across a truly wacky music video based on the seder song, “Dayenu”: You gotta watch this one.
–Maccabeats, “Dayenu”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZgDNPGZ9Sg
I once attended a seder and a Jewish friend explained it to me. Dayenu, if you don’t know, means “It would have been enough…” and the Dayenu song is a recitation of all the miracles God gave the Jews. It is about deep gratitude to God.
That’s about all I remember from the seder except that it was long and then the part where they leave a cup of wine for Elijah. (That’s the joke at the end of the video — Elijah shows!)
Right… you all asked for it!
The Red Sea Shanty: A Pirate Passover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQON0ipv6iI
“…it isn’t really religious or political…”
And that might well be precisely the problem.
IOW, what happens when one removes “God” from the Exodus story?
(Or from any story, or from society? Or “from the equation”, generally.)
Keeping in mind that a “vacuum” is usually filled quickly…. (but with what?)
And also keeping in mind that some (or many?) of the Founders had their doubts but nonetheless defined themselves as “Deists”. (Cf. Einstein, as well.)
And it is precisely in the context of “God” that the political thinkers of freedom and liberty were able to formulate a theory of…freedom and liberty.
IOW, freedom, BUT!
Liberty, BUT!
But within a context of belief (though with an absolute rejection that an absolute monarch rules by divine right).
They rewrote “the rules”; redefined “the givens”.
But it’s all a bit tricky, since how does (or can) a skeptic truly believe in God?
Perhaps to be skeptical about one’s agnosticism (if one defines oneself as such)?
Or to be skeptical about one’s atheism (which is of course much harder, if it even possible at all—i.e., it might be impossible by definition.)
In earlier epochs (perhaps from the time of Spinoza), it was revolutionary to insist on the need to “free oneself” from the shackles (and abuses) of God—or, as Spinoza did, to expand one’s definition/view of God so as to be for all intents and purposes pantheistic (while rejecting the idea of a single, omnipotent/omniscient deity).
It seems that for the past century or so (more, actually), the “revolutionary” will insist on the need to “free oneself” from the shackles of atheism/agnosticism.
But how?
To be skeptical of one’s skepticism?
To embrace a “pragmatic” (if perhaps less than inspiring) Pascal-ian attitude?
To approach the topic gingerly by dipping one’s feet in the methodological waters of “good deeds” (or more broadly (“good thoughts”, “good words”, “good deeds”)?
To truly try to develop a relationship with the Almighty?
To declare oneself a “Deist”?
Alas, what’s a modernist to do?
(Even more so, what’s a pomo to do?…. A po-pomo?)
At the very least, one must focus on LANGUAGE. For if “God” (whatever that might involve) is the God of Truth, then one MUST be forced to acknowledge the way language can be twisted and perverted for certain—let’s call them “unholy”—ends; and therefore try to use words accordingly.
“Must”?
But then, “what is Truth”, etc….
Which seems to be the core of the HUMAN problem with or without “God”.
(One might claim the at least religions provide a template…. On the other hand, “not all templates are equal”….)
@ Barry,
As you indicate our traditional concept of God is embedded in a fabric of concepts core to the western way of being. Notions of objective truth, order, goodness, beauty, and the informing power of the Logos as reason. That is the most neutral way I can put it offhand. Metaphysically minded theists or atheists might arrange the conceps in either a descending and emanating way, or a Feurerbachian projective, outward and upward, way.
But in the postmodernist era even the notion of being itself is under assault.
The one remaining vector of orientation seems to be “liberation”. But of liberation from what and to where, seem problematic questions in a reality with no intrinsic natures, cardinal points or absolute directions.
What then exactly, is that noise emitting bag of urges that cries out for “liberation”? From what does it wish to be liberated? Itself? Whence arises its claim upon my attention and non violent reaction to its annoyance?
Why not just kill that mincing theatrical smart aleck nuisance boy with the pink hair? Is it still objectively wrong in some sense? Or is it just a matter of practicality?
The situation seems to be this: A “self” that has no nature, demands reality – and that includes others- adapt to its desire to create itself according to some more or less random whim bubbling up from who knows where, for no one knows, or cares, why.
So: It has an urge? So what?
It never seems to occur to the postmodernist thing-person to ask itself why another self also inhabiting that same reality stipulated as having no objective value structure, should nonetheless bother to include, affirm, humor, or even tolerate the vainglorious little godlet’s demands.
These godlets seem to imagine that everyone else will remain bound by the rules which they have themselves cast off and declared as obsolete and mere conventions.
The whole idea is quite literally so illogical as to be crazy. Once the normal people abandon their inhibitions and begin reacting to the provocations as their own unmoderated impulses direct, the game will be over for the crazy.
But at that point, it will all have become a ruin. And perhaps that is really the only result the crazy are, ultimately, aiming for: to subvert, ruin, and destroy what they can neither be, nor create.
Beauty, truth, strength, and goodness are a constant reproach to their own existences. Thus these virtues must be turned into social vices and destroyed, in order for the morally insane to feel comfortable and accepted in their derangement. God, or at least reality, must reflect them.
Feuerbach had that much of it right, at least.
A manic obsession and fixation, typical of the “breed”