What Is This Drudgery of Yours

Every year, on the first night of the festival of Pesach (Passover), Jews gather around the world to celebrate the night that they were delivered out of bondage in Egypt, and fashioned into a nation. We recount the drowning of the Hebrew babies, plagues, signs, and wonders. The story of the enslavement and liberation of the Israelites is so engrained in the DNA of the Jewish soul that we recount the tale declaring that we ourselves were liberated, that we were at Sinai to receive the Creator’s law from the Divine Presence itself. Out of this event began the transmission of the Mishnah, the Oral Law, which Moses transmitted to Joshua, and then tribal elders, until it was disseminated through the population. This line of transmission remained unbroken until the exile of the ten tribes of Israel, which were taken into captivity in Babylon. It was in Babylon that the Mishnah was written down and codified into what is collectively known as the Talmud, the Jewish legal codex that is the basis for American civil law, which was studied at Harvard by such notables as John Adams.

It is an incredible time line from Sinai to 18th century Massachusetts, but the line exists nonetheless. Am Yisrael, the Jewish people are but one of many nations with a rich oral history. Indigenous cultures around the world have kept track of years, and events in such a manner. It is as engrained in their DNA as our story is engraved in ours. Some cultures, the Maya for instance, have a written codex to which we can refer. These histories are studied. They are honored. They are respected. Not so with Am Yisrael. In fact, there is a great deal of money and effort placed into deconstructing and devaluing ancient Jewish history as well as the modern, to, which the culture of Holocaust denial can attest.

In recent years it has been fashionable to attempt to debunk, and classify as myth, the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. It begins with the usual application of science to attempt to explain whether or not the ten plagues could have taken place. From there it grows into determining how the Red Sea was parted (it is commonly known among scholars that Yam Suf is not the “Red Sea”, but the “sea of reeds,” a shallow body of water that was perhaps the scene of a tidal bore phenomenon, or possibly a wetland area that withdrew temporarily as the result of tsunami. Perhaps the Midrash is correct that the natural events that took place at the time of the exodus were set in motion at the time the universe was created. Perhaps it is entirely legend. But some feel a great sense of urgency to present evidence that nothing related to any of these events ever took place. I will not be entertaining the various theories here, just this need to debunk the exodus story.

To my mind it speaks to an ability to nullify the Jewish people. Our national identity begins with the exodus. Prior to this we were a group of family clans claiming ancestry from Abraham and Sarah, his son Isaac and wife Rebecca, and from the twelve sons of Israel (Jacob), Rachel and Leah (the origins of the twelve tribes of Israel). It is also in the exodus story that we find the binding of the Jewish people in covenant with God, when we consented to receiving and upholding the law and way of life that came with it (with varying degrees of success and failure throughout our history).

What many (I will go so far as to say most) people do not understand is that the Torah is not supposed to be accepted at face value based on the text of the story. In fact, it is considered foolish, if not on the level of sinful, to accept the Torah literally without examination of its inner meanings.

What does it mean to be enslaved in Egypt? Is it to say that the Hebrews were in fact slaves in Egypt, or were they spiritually and morally enslaved? Who were the masters, the Egyptians, a region rife with corruption, perversion, and wars? What does liberation from bondage refer to? Is it physical, spiritual, or cosmic entrapment? What enslaves a person? Vice, greed, excess, self-deprecation, immorality, addictions; all of these things enslave us.

And the battles of the Torah; did they take place, or are we looking at a battle of more cosmic proportions that borders on the mystical and lies at the very essence of the conflict humanity faces to overcome its faults and reach a purer state of existence?
[I'd like to note here that it is ironic that some commentators are fond of pointing out that the Jews invaded Canaan and went to war with the idol worshipping peoples there. But often these are the same people claiming there was no Jewish presence in the land...most illogical Captain.]

These are very deep matters of great importance to the Jew who becomes immersed in unraveling the mysteries within the Torah. I think it’s safe to say that a majority of Jews, and virtually all non-Jews have little or no understanding (my knowledge, though considered relatively vast by some, is cursory at best, relative to those whose lives are immersed in the study of Torah). As it says in the Tehilim (the Book of Psalms), “The ignorant man does not know, nor does the fool understand.”

In terms of archeology we have a great deal of evidence as to what went on in the Middle East, particularly in the Greek and Roman eras. But still the Palestinian Authority excavates the Temple Mount in an effort to strip away any evidence of a Jewish presence there, despite the overwhelming historical record.

Why the convenience of erasing our past? To make the past more easily palatable to the agenda of the present I suppose. Alas, a fool is a fool and is always the last to know. I think the same can be said of a hateful bigot who feigns a lack of opinion on a subject, such as say, Israel and the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, along with the history of the region. I am stunned at how people thinly veil an anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish agenda (we’ll present that as a distinction for idiots who think that there actually is a distinction between the two) with a claim to have no opinion, or comprehensive knowledge. These people actually think they are masking themselves. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so fucking pathetic.

One of my personal favorite uses of historical evidence at the hypocrisy of Israelis is the bombing of the King David Hotel. Ah ha! The Jews were terrorists too, just like Hamas, the PLO, the PFLP, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs, etc. But an ignorant idiot is in ignorant idiot. An act of terror is an act of terror. I can see that argument. But as long as we’re making distinctions; let’s make one here.

The King David Hotel was not a civilian target. It was the Headquarters of the British Military and British Mandate. A series of warnings were issued to the hotel switchboard, the French Consulate, and the Palestine Post newspaper. The terror groups mentioned above almost exclusively target civilians. They give no warnings, and they are typically timed to kill the greatest numbers of people. A further distinction is that the Irgun was not an organization dedicated to a genocidal policy, despite what revisionists may say. So yes, Jews adopted methods of urban warfare developed by Michael Collins in Ireland against the British (which does not seem to be vomited in the face of the people of Ireland). Call it terrorism if you like. But let’s not call it or equate it with radical jihadism and genocide. You might serve yourself better stamping “Obtuse” on your forehead. At least that would be more honest.

And so we have history’s rewriters and editors. Holocaust denial walks hand in hand with the utterly false notion that there was ever an independent country called Palestine, or even a Palestinian governing body (this is not to say that what became Israel did not have an historical Arab population. To contend this was the case is just as false). It’s amazing to me that in a region where there was no Arab nationalism until the British created it, just family controlled tribal territories, but miraculously the Palestinians had a nation that was invaded by Israel. What’s even more hilarious (and pathetic) is that people actually look at maps of the region prior to partition, see the word “Palestine,” and hold that up as evidence. “See? I told you there was a Palestine.”

So while we’re playing “Erase That History” let’s make like the Spanish Inquisition never took place, or that the Czars never sanctioned pogroms against Jews, or that the United States didn’t turn away Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Let’s also pretend that the Arabs in British Palestine didn’t massacre Jews, and that Arabs drove out the majority native Jewish population of Jerusalem in bloody rioting. But the “I think I don’t remember moment” that I love most of all is when people say that bad things have been done by both sides, but it’s the Jews’ fault. That’s a classic.

So why not attempt to nullify the totality of Jewish history? Why not delegitimate the Exodus? Isn’t it easier to erase a people by conjecturing that they in fact never existed? Isn’t post modernism awesome?

A central story related in the Haggadah, the ritual text used for the Passover seder, is of a father and his four sons. The wise son asks, "Teach me the story and the laws pertaining to the Pesach." The simple son asks, "What is this?" The youngest does not yet know how to ask questions. The hateful son asks, "What is all this drudgery of yours?"

We are celebrating our liberation from bondage. Perhaps next year we will celebrate our liberation from the ignorant.