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RABBINIC REFLECTIONS
April 2007
Passover is soon upon us! The first Seder begins on the evening of April second and on the following night our traditional Second Seder will be held at the Temple. Once again we will retell the ancient story of how the Israelites left Egypt to begin a new life of freedom. The concept of freedom is woven into the very fabric of our Jewish and American traditions. That is why it is so difficult for us to comprehend how others can view life so differently.
Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote an article in which Mamoun Fandy, the director of the Middle East program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is quoted: Fandy says that no one “has the guts to say that what is happening in Iraq is wrong—that killing school kids is wrong. People somehow think that killing Iraqis is good because it will stick it to the Americans, so Arabs are undermining the American project in Iraq by killing themselves.” According to Fandy, the fear is not the production of uranium but “the real danger is highly enriched Islam…that is highly enriched Sunnism and highly enriched Shiism that eats away at the Muslim state. The background in the Arab world today is….in the classrooms and newsrooms, that’s where the software programmers reside who create symbolic images and language glorifying suicide bombers and make their depraved acts look legitimate. Only other Arab-Muslim programmers can defeat them.”
It has been said that until the Arab world loves their children more than they hate Israel and the West, this struggle will not end. When we sit down to retell the ancient story of our move from slavery to freedom, we know how monumental it must have been for the Israelites to accept the concept of freedom and to embrace it. It is hard to accept that others do not share our love of freedom. We must come to accept that much of the Arab world does not want freedom for their people. By embracing the Islam of their radical leaders, they are enslaving their people to one view of life. The West must accept the fact that we live in two very different worlds and trying to change them to our way of life is futile.
Maybe as we sit down to Seder this year, we will come to better understand how fortunate our ancestors were in accepting freedom and rejecting slavery as a tenet of life otherwise Judaism would be quite different and perhaps we would be living just like our Arab neighbors today. Hag Samach!
Dr. Jonathan V. Plaut
Read Reflections - May 2006
Read Reflections - April 2005
Read Reflections - June 2005
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