Media bias is one subject and Passover is another, you might
think. Leftist domination of the academy is one subject and
Passover is another, you might also think. But you would be wrong,
I fear.
The structure of Passover is designed not merely to provide a
fun family get-together, nor is it limited to inspiring a spiritual
holiday in celebration of freedom. It does all of those things
secondarily, but its primary task is to provide the evidentiary
framework for the entire Jewish project. The Bible repeats numerous
times that the first night of Passover must be used by parents to
teach their children the facts of the historical and miraculous
redemption by God of the Jewish People from slavery and oppression
in Egypt.
The great Jewish writer, Nachmanides, expounds
on this by declaring that the founding principle of Jewish
tradition is that “a man does not pass a legacy of falsehood to his
children.” The very fact that in each year in each generation,
again and again and again over three thousand years, every Jewish
father has told every Jewish child the same story with the same
details forms the basis of our certain knowledge of those
events.
Consequently, when the doubters spin their theories of evolving
mythology in an effort to undermine the truth of the Bible,
traditional Jews laugh. They do not rely on belief or on faith but
on a definite knowledge based on the incontrovertible testimony of
a million fathers over thousands of years. All the egghead
philosophizing melts away before the veracity of multiple
eyewitness reports, preserved in a flawless filing system operating
undisturbed over the millennia.
Thus the Jew has a heavy stake in the accurate reporting of news
and the conscientious transmission of history. He cannot afford to
be influenced by a culture that will teach fathers to lie to their
children. Once that begins to happen, the foundation is gone.
On the one hand, Passover 2012 is a very happy time, especially
here in Miami, where we host Jews from all over the world who come
to experience the thrill of freedom in a tropical paradise with
only one flaw: not enough of it has been paved to make parking
lots.
The wealthier class of Jew is here leaving his money at all the
local businesses. Those who stay at hotels have their food catered
but many rent villas here — ten days for a home with a pool costs
$2500; younger locals cash in by pocketing the cash and spending
Passover at their parents — and cook for themselves, buying
thousands in provisions. It is an expensive affair, because all
that cheap bread cannot be eaten for eight days, and the specially
baked matzohs can cost from five to thirty dollars a pound.
These partiers are not selfish and the less fortunate are richly
subsidized. In my North Miami Beach neighborhood alone, anonymous
donors gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars in gift
certificates usable in the stores that sell Passover products. A
truck pulled up on a street corner here and unloaded enormous
quantities of fresh vegetables available free to local families
struggling to get through the holiday.
Yet all this passing off falsehood in place of truth gives me
pause. Nobel laureate
Günter Grass announces in a poem that Israel is a greater
obstacle to world peace than Iran. Authoress Naomi
Ragen lifts entire sections of Sarah Shapiro’s book virtually
word-for-word; when
convicted of plagiarism in Israel, she gets American reporters
to say that U.S.-born Naomi Ragen is being persecuted by a petty
Israeli huckster — concealing the fact that Mrs. Shapiro is not
only U.S.-born herself, she is the daughter of famed American
author Norman Cousins. The
spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department will not state
definitively in her press conference that Jerusalem belongs to
Israel, saying that is the subject of ongoing negotiations. Truth
apparently is a negotiable commodity.
Freedom is great and it should be treasured, never more than on
Passover. But if we foolishly allow truth to be distorted — even
if that is done in the name of social justice or some such chimera
— we will find ourselves once again wearing the yoke of slavery,
and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
