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Celebrate freedom: Passover and beyond — 2 Comments

  1. Neo,

    A well thought and elegant post. I passed it over last night and this afternoon/evening and went straight for the ‘political’ posts, but that was a mistake. This is poignantly political which is the best kind of politics of all.

    “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.”

    Simple, succinct, and oh so true.

    Long may you run. http://tinyurl.com/bwxmfxa

  2. “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, but the message of Passover is there’s no true freedom for any human being without God. The enslavement of Egypt, as well as being a historic event (not legendary as the opinion modern scholarship, consistently heretical, has it), is at the same time also interpreted as an allegory for individual human enslavement to craving material things for their own sake.

    “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 the silver-tongued anti-liberal champions of “liberty” demand be turned to reverse slavery, “atonement” for “sins” at those self-apotheosized deities’ discretion.

    “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.”

    A constitution can’t guarantee anything. Even the Torah is no guarantee, because there is free will to follow it or not. Franklin’s “A republic, if you can keep it” and Adams’ “for a moral people and none other” are far more realistic statements on the power of the American Constitution, or any legal document for that matter, including the Torah, than the belief that mere words can guard against those with evil intent and their method of bribing their opposition out of any effective existence.

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