The Progressive's Passover

>>>>> "niel" == Niel Bornstein <niel-eVhvBAtfTHk423YV9hPXO9/[email protected]> writes:

  niel> Other comments?

Please find some edits and comments interspersed.

  niel> The Progressive's Passover By Niel Bornstein


  niel>    It's the time of year when Jews celebrate their oldest
  niel>    festival, Pesach or Passover. Pesach commemorates the Jews'
  niel>    escape from bondage in Egypt and their flight to freedom in
  niel>    the land of Israel.  As a nominal Jew, I have observed
  niel>    Pesach with my family for 35 years. Since my father's death
  niel>    and my brother's estrangment from Judaism, and despite my
  niel>    own fall from belief in organized religion [,] 

Add: comma

	   I have been
  niel>    called upon to serve as the leader at my family's Seder,
  niel>    the traditional festive meal of Pesach.
   
  niel>    The rituals of the Seder are set forth in the Haggadah,
  niel>    which tells the story of Pesach and the exodus from Egypt
  niel>    through stories, songs, and readings from the five books of
  niel>    Moses and various learned men from the centuries of Jewish
  niel>    knowledge. My family has, as long as I can remember, used a
  niel>    set of Haggadot published by [1]Manischewitz, makers of
  niel>    many Jewish foods and other products.  These books are
  niel>    showing their age lately, but I still like them because the
  niel>    dog-eared copy from which I lead has my father's copious
  niel>    marginalia to help me know which parts to skip over, which
  niel>    parts to read aloud, and which parts to ask guests to read
  niel>    around the table.

What a lovely image... Using your father's copy while or in order to
or during taking his place. Nice.
   
  niel>    Even as we sat at our comfortable table, stuffing ourselves
  niel>    with matzoh ball soup and gefilte fish, a people continue
  niel>    their struggle to regain their homeland. While we read in
  niel>    the Haggadah about a 40-year journey through the desert,
  niel>    from oppression to the land of milk and honey, we ignore
  niel>    another displaced people who want nothing more than to
  niel>    return to their homes in Israel, née Palestine. As we
  niel>    self-righteously tell the story of Moses' exhortations to
  niel>    Pharoah to "let my people go," we in the United States
  niel>    continue to fund the murder of Palestinian protesters to
  niel>    the tune of US$xxx billion per year. 

	   [s/While/As long as/ the Israeli
  niel>    government kills the Palestinian freedom fighters with
  niel>    helicopters and tanks, I can not read such a one-sided
  niel>    story.

Hmm, you might put in another sentence quoting those casualty and
death statistics that Bijan churned last week. Something like 1,200
Palestinian children killed in the latest, Sharon-ignited intifada
versus < 50 Israeli children.

One thing that I always come back to in order to heighten the
absurdity of this tension is the cultural, religious, and geographic
kinship of the Israelis and Palestinians. They're all, with
Chrisitians, people of the Book, children of the Semitic East,
descended, whether in myth or reality, no matter, of Abraham, etc.

It's not thus more insane or more genocidal; but maybe it's more
tragic?

  niel>    The Jews have a lot to be thankful for on Pesach, to be
  niel>    sure: that the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt, that
  niel>    the Jewish people survived the Holocaust, that there is a
  niel>    Jewish homeland. But there are still oppressed, exiled, and
  niel>    enslaved people throughout the world, and some of them are
  niel>    oppressed as a direct result of the establishment of
  niel>    Israel. What irony, what chutzpah to preach freedom in the
  niel>    midst of such turmoil!

Preach it, brother!
   
  niel>    I'm working on a more progressive Haggadah for next year,
  niel>    one that I won't be embarrased to read. I plan to cite

Maybe s/embarrassed/ashamed/? At any rate, you may not feel shame, but
I suspect if you really think about it, you don't feel precisely
embarrassed either.

You're embarrassed if your dog shits on your neighbor's shoe, or when
your dog humps Peter Singer at a party; but this isn't like that, huh?

(And if it is merely embarrassment, I suggest the version with two rs
and two esses. :> )

  niel>    historical and modern struggles for freedom -- and there
  niel>    are many to choose from, historical and modern. Citations
  niel>    and reading suggestions from our readers would be most
  niel>    welcome.

Hehe, Niel is becoming a revisionary Jewish theologian! I'll only
suggest to you what my ethics professor suggested to me when I told
him that I couldn't abide any extant marriage ceremony: write your
own, but read all of them you can get your hands on first. The idea
was that while we wanted to make sure that our ceremony reflected our
understanding of what we were doing, we wanted to steal as much of the
beauty of the old language as possible.

I bet there are texts from which you can borrow liberally (to make a
happy pun).

Kendall