Tablet Magazine accused Fenzel of extreme pro-Palestinian bias which resulted in President Joe Biden issuing an excessive and unnecessary Executive Order based on misinformation and propaganda. Biden’s Executive Order sanctioned four “settlers” and prohibited Americans from doing business with these four Israeli individuals who perpetuated violence, but not murder, against Palestinians. Biden has not sanctioned any Palestinians for violence, even though Palestinians killed 30 Israelis in 2023 even before the October 7 massacre in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered and over 250 were kidnapped to Gaza. Biden hasn’t even sanctioned members of Hamas.

Natasha Lyonne for Tablet magazine, 2016

Tablet Magazine

“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews. For more unambiguous actors such as Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, freeing Palestine simply means the total eradication of Israel without qualification. This is not a polemical point, but a basic reality and fact of our lives that demands scrutiny. Consider the ideological milieu in which many Arabs and Muslims have been raised, including me. Growing up as a Muslim in Egypt, the concept of Palestine was never a geopolitical issue; it was a deeply ingrained part of our collective moral identity, the unifying element of both our religious and secular Arab nationalism. It was, and remains, a cause that resonated with us politically, socially, and spiritually, often approaching a fervor that defies rationality. This emotional charge, embedded in the political and religious narratives of much of the Arab Muslim world, has made rubbish of the idea that the Palestinian cause is merely based on anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism. This milieu, however, is not in any way essential to what it means to be Arab or Muslim—it is a thoroughly modern phenomenon shaped largely by the influence of European revolutionary ideologies on Arab intellectuals and political activists. Among these imported systems of thought is a strain of revolutionary antisemitism that casts Jews as the eternal enemy not just of Arabs but of all human beings. Not every Arab or Muslim subscribes to these views, of course, but when fused with preexisting religious and cultural biases, they have infected almost every institution, pattern of thought, and aspect of life in the Arab Muslim world. Modern Arab political and religious literature is filled with the claim that Jews are hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind—a classical European libel, and a French revolutionary cry. The problems of this poisonous strain of thought are compounded by the concept that “freeing Palestine” is a species of resistance against foreign settler colonialists, a Fanonian revolution in which violence against civilians is defended as a legitimate means of achieving racial justice. The wholesale labeling of Israeli Jews—the vast majority of whom are refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab Muslim dictatorships and Soviet totalitarianism—as colonizers, settlers, and imperialists is in fact a type of collective ethnic punishment, nonsensical even on its own twisted terms, which recalls the medieval Christian denunciation of Jews as moral abominations, as a group and as individuals.

You might have noticed in the last few days that those committed to liberating Palestine can’t seem to avoid the abject dehumanization of the Jews as a people—and that their aim is not for Palestinians to simply live in peace, dignity, and freedom alongside Israelis, but a state that is necessarily established upon the ruins of Israel. Hamas is explicit in its intention to murder the Jewish population of Israel and enslave any survivors; its partisans in the Middle East and the West are coyer on this point.

Islamists articulate the fantasy of Jewish eradication in the language of jihad, framed in eschatological terms, and imbued with a sense of divine justice and cosmic warfare—what Westerners would ordinarily recognize as a type of religious fascism. But while the Islamist version of this idea is potent for the purposes of mobilizing the impoverished and uneducated masses, the “left-wing” or secular version—couched in the language of Fanon and Karl Marx, of human emancipation, equality, anti-capitalism, and social justice—is the more effective means of mobilizing opinion among the Western intelligentsia. The point is that they are two sides of the same coin, the value of which is set in Jewish blood.

For those who are shaped by such a worldview—whether the “right-wing” or the “left-wing” version, the religious or the atheistic—celebrating the murder of innocent Israeli civilians, including children, women, and the elderly, is an expression of the partial fulfillment of a moral vision. As a teenager in Egypt, I recall nearly all the adults around me expressing such feelings when following the news of suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada. Egypt’s most prominent religious authorities declared the perpetrators to be martyrs and saints. In a way, it was not unlike the valorization and even canonization of those who destroyed livelihoods, burned property, and targeted police officers during the protests in America in the summer of 2020. I do not mean to inject American domestic politics where they do not belong, or to suggest a perfect moral equivalence, but there is a reason that leaders of Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran themselves insist that they are engaged in the same struggle against racism.

Almost every Arab Muslim knows that what I’m describing is not a personal opinion but objective reality. We may try to belittle these facts, or dismiss them as the delusional daydreams of uneducated know-nothings under the influence of religious and populist fanatics. But we should not deny that they are true.

My fear is that the impulse to dismiss and belittle is the byproduct not of sincere belief but of a deep sense of helplessness. After many recent conversations with the rising generation of young, intelligent, Westernized, and highly educated Arab professionals and diplomats, I have witnessed a strong urge not to confront this reality. Even among those who genuinely accept the legitimacy of Israel in a way their parents would have never been capable of, I almost always hear them describe the deaths of innocent Israelis as somehow being their own fault, or at least the fault of the Israeli government for not unilaterally making peace and ending the conflict. There is nothing more depressing than the surrender of the young to a problem they see as too big to solve.

Those of us who belong to the cosmopolitan professional class of Arabs, who jump from country to country and from one lifestyle to another, benefiting from foreign cultures that live on the moral currency of liberalism and tolerance, are in many cases secretly ashamed. We see the antisemitism, the bloodlust, the insanity, and we cringe—but we hope it goes away. It’s easier for us to look forward to a hypothetical future where things are otherwise. It’s easier to ingratiate ourselves to the new social world where we want to belong, rather than grapple with the failures of the one we’ve left behind. We dismiss, we belitte, we explain away, we say, “What about Shireen Abu Akleh?”—and we go on pretending.

To the Arabs of my own generation, I say we need a truly different approach. I’m not asking you to love Israel or Zionism, or to hang a poster of hipster Herzl in your bedroom. If you are critical of Israel and think there should be a Palestine, continue to do so. All I ask is for you to be authentically courageous, to admit that the murder we all witnessed in the last few days is an accurate representation and logical consequence of a catastrophic moral system, the one we all know intimately. This is a moment for collective introspection. It’s time to confront the darker corners of our ideological heritage, and question the ideas and beliefs we may have uncritically absorbed. Only by doing so can we hope to contribute to a more constructive and humane world for ourselves.

It was a belated awakening. For many American Jews, Oct. 7 uncovered the deep rot in the elite institutions they had invested in for decades, psychically and financially. A recent poll found that 73% of Jewish students experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents since the beginning of this academic school year, a 22-fold increase over the year before. Jewish students have been punched, spat upon, assaulted with sticks, shouted at, and corralled by students in kaffiyehs. But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the DEI regime has fostered the flourishing of campus antisemitism under the Palestinian banner. Having established Jews as members of the “oppressor” class and defined “justice” as the dismantling of this class, the officially sanctioned ideology has given license to the Palestinian vanguard to demand fulfillment of the progressive promise, “by any means necessary,” while turning Jewish students into piñatas. In New York City public colleges, a kippa-wearing, red-headed leprechaun named Ilya Bratman—former U.S. Army tankist, applied linguist, long-distance runner, and immigrant from the former Soviet Union—has witnessed up close the socialization of young Americans into this toxic worldview. A teacher of English composition at Baruch and John Jay colleges who holds a Ph.D. in education from the Jewish Theological Seminary, he also serves as executive director of Hillel at eight CUNY and SUNY colleges.

…

After the students use cookie cutters to shape chocolate chip cookie dough into Stars of David, Bratman grabbed a microphone and stepped forward. “Last week, everybody was already seated in my 8:00 a.m. class, and a student comes in and she says to me, “Wow, I can’t believe you bombed that hospital last night and killed all those people.”

…

Bratman’s reaction, as a teacher, was to affirm the importance of sound reasoning and argumentation—and, of course, language. “I told her, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you forgot completely everything I taught you about the accusative voice and the proper use of the pronoun ‘you,’ because you just said that ‘I’ did this,” he recounted. “‘I’ bombed the hospital. What hospital? Where? Who?’”

…

Bratman believes strongly in America and the American dream. Teaching American students in New York City has brought him face-to-face with an entirely different worldview—one that appears to be particularly common among students from officially sanctioned “minority” backgrounds. The students don’t appreciate what a gift they’ve been given to live in America. Instead, they are lost in a zero-sum game of calculating relative oppressions. This fixation stops them from learning, Bratman believes, in part because it assures them that they will fail. In his composition classes, he explained, he tries to get his students to create and support an argument. One week, he asked them to write about space exploration. Should we go to space? Or should we not? One girl argued in favor of space travel because “white people will move to space, maybe to Mars, or wherever,” creating a gap, or an opening into which the “indigenous brown and black people can move up in the class structure and fill that gap left behind by the white people who will move to Mars.” “There’s a lot to unpack there, isn’t there?” Bratman responded. “First of all, the belief in this structure where white people are on top, everybody else on the bottom, and the only way to move up is if the white people leave.” Another girl wrote that no, we should not have space travel because then the white people would colonize the Martian people, as they always do, and ruin the Martians’ lives.

…

The narrative of victimhood has become welded to these young people’s identity, leading to an increased detachment from, and a sense of grievance toward, America—the irony of course being that they and their parents chose to immigrate here. One girl in the class told him: “I am here in this country against my will.” Bratman asked her: “Who’s holding you? Tell me, please. I’m frightened for you,” showcasing his high-energy, high-drama style. “Everybody’s laughing, and I asked her, ‘Where are you from?’ And she says, ‘Haiti.’ OK. ‘And where were you born?’ And she says, ‘Brooklyn.’” “So you’re actually from Brooklyn. Your parents are from Haiti,” he repeated. “Who’s holding you back? Do you really want to go to Haiti today? You should actually go and see what life is like in a noncapitalist, depressed country that is in a desperate economic struggle. Or go to Gaza to a totalitarian, autocratic, hateful, homophobic nation. Or go to North Korea, go to Iran, go to all the places as a young woman, and see what life is really like.”

…

Bratman told me he had a student at John Jay whom he will never forget, a student struggling mightily at school. “I had many conversations with him,” Bratman said. “I’d say, ‘come, come on, keep going, keep going.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m thinking of dropping out.’” “And I’m like, no, no, get through this class. I got you. I got you. And I carried him through this course. And on the last day he came to see me, and he said, ‘I dropped out of all the classes except for yours. Everybody in my family, including my mother and my grandparents—I don’t know my father—my uncles and everybody said, ‘What are you doing? Why are you going to college? You can get a job now for $20 an hour, and when you graduate, you’re gonna get a job for $20 an hour. What’s the purpose?’” Bratman seemed genuinely sad—not angry or offended, just sad—about what he heard next. “No one ever believed in me,” the student said. “I can’t believe that the first and only person who’s ever believed in me is a white Jew.”

Do you have any "must-read" literary magazines/book publishers/blogs, etc.?

I think the best literary coverage in magazines these days is in Compact and Tablet, because whoever's putting up the money and whatever their agenda has evidently and wisely decided to keep the cultural coverage much more free of overt politics than other venues. I'm not only talking about "wokeness" here but also the nonsense we find in the "anti-woke" venues, like, just to give an example, this tacky "Zombie Reagan" complaint in Quillette that English departments are dying because they teach, and I quote, "Foucault, Judith Butler, Kant, and Gloria Anzaldúa," yes, I repeat, Kant. Whereas Compact gives Gasda free rein to take it to the Oxfordians (not least Yarvin), and let the tech-adjacent neoreactionary politics fall where they may, just as Tablet lets Blake Smith chart the uncharted middle course in subtle essay after subtle essay on queer theory and politics, the very subtlety itself guaranteed to offend activists of all camps. Not to mention that both venues publish interesting free agents like Valerie Stivers and Naomi Tanakia. In the same vein, Unherd is good for political and cultural commentary—pretty unpredictable, if convergent upon what we might call the new center. The Mars Review of Books also seems interesting, but it's too soon to tell. There's still good material in the usual places like LRB, NYRB, The Nation and Harper's—Will Self almost (almost!) persuading me to read a book I've privately been calling Adenoid, for example—but it's been more mixed since the commanding heights crudely tried to requisition the whole of humane culture in reaction to Trump. (Full disclosure: I've written for Tablet a time or two myself.)

In our agitated and ever-shifting media environment, one would have to cover Twitter accounts, Substack and other newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels too, across the cultural and political spectrum, so I have both too much and not enough to recommend. I've always thought Katherine Dee had her finger on the pulse of the culture, so her work in various venues is a longstanding recommendation. The renegade and provocateur Justin Murphy is always interesting if often silly or willfully offensive. The aforementioned Matt Gasda's Substack "Writer's Diary" is always compelling. Lately I've been admiring Emmalea Russo's tour of the Divide Comedy with reference to cinema and astrology and modernism and theory and what have you, also on Substack. The collected 1990s-era YouTube lectures on great books and intellectual history by Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff are also recommendations of long standing, and Sugrue and Staloff also now produce new material, if more casual. My favorite podcasts specifically for literature and the arts are Manifesto! and Art of Darkness.

Favorite book publishers? Not exactly. The go-to answer is NYRB Classics; they publish a lot of stuff that interests me, including things I didn't know would interest me until they published it, especially their nonfiction catalogue, whether Simon Leys's collected essays or Simone Weil on the Iliad or Gillian Rose's incomparable Love's Work, and their attention to major world fiction neglected by other publishers (Platonov, Jünger, Salih). But as I believe Ann Manov once Tweeted, some of those midcentury novels might have been deservedly forgotten; hate me if you must, but I never did finish Stoner. They should reprint the whole of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, though who knows what the copyright situation is there. Another publisher recommendation: you'll rarely go wrong reading a classic in the Norton Critical Edition.

Listening to the Tablet Magazine recorded Zoom call about the current war in Israel and oof, I knew Tablet employed some kooks but I’m pretty sure at least one of these guys said Iran and the US were conspiring together against Israel which is…not something I have ever heard before

Can you imagine Obama joining them on the court?

He’d be terrible because he’s too lazy. This is in the book. It goes back to him being Hawaiian. At one point, he says, “I’m fundamentally lazy and it’s because I’m from Hawaii.” That’s close to the actual quote. via https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama

I have a really complicated relationship with Gertrude Stein. I’m mystified that she always seems to get a pass for her support of fascism in ww2, so when I went to read an article that goes into her wartime years in support of fascists (Franco and Vichy France specifically) I wanted a Jewish perspective and this article from tablet didn’t disappoint.

A great quote from a separate article:

“Stein was a narcissistic woman. She wasn’t a very nice woman, but no, not anti-Semitic.”

The general vibe I get is that she felt like she had transcended her Jewishness by being a genius and so I don’t know if she really identified or felt that connection to her people anymore. Unfortunately, she was very good at controlling the narrative so I don’t really know how much her words can see to be reliable. She’s kind of like Hemingway in that regard, inasmuch as they weren’t very reliable narrators of their own stories.

I guess in conclusion, I want to slightly compensate for my own autism by saying that it’s entirely possible that Gertrude Stein is just a prominent member of the leopards eating peoples faces party. She wouldn’t be the first and she isn’t the last. 

And just to state the obvious that since I am a gay Muslim, I am very aware that I, by converting to a religion with such an abysmal view of gay rights. might have inadvertently also joined the leopards eating peoples faces party. I mean, I’m no fool, and would I want to support Muslims adding more Islamic values to American government? Hell no. I like my civil rights. Thank you very much. Would I be happy as an out gay man in most Muslim countries? No. Absolutely not. So I guess I’m fascinated by this question because I feel a kinship with her. It’s entirely possible that we are both members of the leopards eating people’s faces party. 

new favourite ship just dropped: Noah's Ark actually circular

Jfc how did I manage to not realize Tablet Magazine is a totally ridiculous, right-wing, shit -smeared square of single-ply TP until they straight up published an antisemitic anti-trans conspiracy theory in their "News" section?!

Sucks, because their podcasts *aren't* all like that and some of them did have good, thoughtful Jewish content. Still not worth supporting that publication.

This is legitimately one of the most insane headlines I think I have ever read. It perfectly encapsulates the extent to which Tablet Magazine seems to have gone off the deep end in the wake of October 7th, pursuing bizarre grievances seemingly totally disconnected from reality.

The DWR Quote of the Day - Bari Weiss on We Should End DEI

  Read the entire article on Tablet Magazine.   “But “DEI” is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power. And the movement that is gathering all this power does not like America or liberalism. It does not believe that America is a good country—at least no better than China or Iran. It calls itself progressive, but it does not believe in progress; it is explicitly…

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The Roots of Jewish Herbalism from Tablet Magazine

Guided by the Haggadah, or Passover text—one of the most popular Jewish books ever written—Seder participants are led along in a series of prayers, texts, and activities. We talk and talk and talk about the miracle of liberation; we parse the details of its unfolding, enumerating the many miracles involved; we go over whether we are supposed to commemorate the blessing of freedom only in this life or also in the next one; we assert in words and song the gratitude we feel for being the lucky descendants of those who escaped from slavery.

One thing we do not generally discuss, however, are the Jews who didn’t leave

…

Wait—what? The Jews went out of Egypt how? What does “chamushim” mean? It is generally translated as “armed,” but nearly all commentaries note that its definition is, in fact, uncertain.

Into this breach arrives the legendary medieval Torah commentator Rashi, with a startling assertion. After acknowledging the “armed” option, Rashi offers, with casual sangfroid, another idea: That “chamushim” relates to the Hebrew word for five, and the text should be understood to be saying that only one-fifth of the Jewish people chose to leave Egypt.

What happened to those who stayed? Nothing good. “There were among Israel of that generation wicked individuals who did not wish to depart Egypt and they died during the three days of gloom,” Rashi continues.

Rashi’s contemporary, Ibn Ezra, was positively outraged by this interpretation, calling it “a sick evil.” But Shemot Rabbah finds Rashi’s explanation perfectly reasonable, and even adds to it: “There were sinners among the Jews who had Egyptian patrons, and they had wealth and honor there, [so] they didn’t want to leave.” In other words, they liked the good life in Egypt.

This, of course, flies in the face of what is commonly understood to be the definition of slavery. Jews who stayed behind were not inexplicably choosing a life of torture; they simply did not want to give up on the comforts of the life they knew. In the later words of Rav Yehuda Henkin, they were “disinclined to trade flesh-pots for freedom.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about these Jews lately.

I think about them when people refuse to accept that beloved blue-chip organizations—the ACLU, the ADL, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International—no longer fight for their own founding values.

…

I think of them when I see people’s language change on a dime, and in lockstep: systemic racism, gaslighting, victim-blaming, platforming, deplatforming. And when I see people with previously solid moral compasses lose their footing in the face of this or that hysteria du jour—suddenly incapable of saying clearly “this is wrong” (or “this isn’t wrong”), regardless of how emotionally it is positioned by a collectivist swarm.

I think about these people, about the moral imagination needed to take risks, to leave old worlds and build new ones; about the confidence required to believe that it is you who makes a given institution or cause or idea legitimate and special, and not the other way around; about the bravery and faith needed to withstand the loneliness of the desert of outsiderness before getting to the Israel of a new life. I think about all of this, and suddenly Rashi’s insight becomes less mysterious.

In 2017, I was one of the few among my friends who didn’t attend the Women’s March. I recognized the legitimacy and even urgency of the cause, but I had concerns about the movement and its leaders. When I asked questions or noted inconsistencies, clear answers were never forthcoming. Instead, my impulse to examine and weigh evidence was suddenly considered suspect. I was sneered at, if not openly attacked: Was I against empowering women? Against the elevation of women of color? In favor of rape?

Once the answers were finally uncovered—showing the march to have been mired in financial mismanagement, to say nothing of the antisemitism espoused by its founders—some of the same people who questioned my allegiance to my own sex, or my politics, or whatever else they suspected, confessed to being shocked that they were putting money in Louis Farrakhan’s pockets while funding an organization that badly damaged the cause they meant to support.

…

When Tablet defended the Satmar community’s response to draconian COVID policies, including their insistence on sending their children to school or their commonsense inquiry into why one would close playgrounds—forcing people to stay indoors, often in close quarters, during an airborne pandemic—our writers were called medieval science-deniers. When people asked questions about mask mandates and vaccine passports, they were smeared as anti-vaxxers and right-wingers—even when they were obviously nothing of the sort.

In an age of uncertainty, it feels good to cast the habit of questioning aside and embrace the idea that the cautious weighing of evidence is unnecessary. Your side walks in light. The other side dwells in darkness. And indeed, there is nothing wrong with fighting racism, wherever you find it. Fighting for equal rights for people of any gender, orientation, or sexual preference is good. Promoting public policies that bring safety and security, and clear air and clean water, and needed medicine and economic opportunity to more people is a noble aim. Protecting the environment is also good. There is nothing wrong with opposing Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

What is wrong, as I now see it, is that none of this activism results in making anyone’s lives better. The Women’s March collapsed under the weight of the very sorts of problems raised by its few early skeptics. Time’s Up has been mired in one scandal after another. Barely a year and a half after garnering an Emmy, a $5 million book deal, and an army of “Cuomosexual” fans online, the former governor of New York left office in disgrace. According to New York Magazine’s Sean Campbell, Black Lives Matter spent $6 million on a mansion for its leaders. The word “science” was used to shame those who wouldn’t fall in line and boost the profit margins of large pharmaceutical companies that had been, barely minutes before, justly infamous for lying to the public and profiteering off of illnesses that they often did little to heal—and even, as in the case of America’s recent opioid epidemic, caused.

The public campaigns that utilize these virtuous slogans on social media are political tools, wielded by people who are interested in corralling the public toward a variety of unrelated ends—including their own self-enrichment. If you’re wondering whether or not your favored cause is a radical effort to help those who are genuinely in need or powerless, there’s an easy way to find out:

…

Ask yourself why BlackRock—a corporation making it impossible for middle-class Americans to own homes—is draping itself in the language of social justice. Ask yourself why, in fact, so many corporations now all support the same roster of causes. Ask yourself how all channels of discourse in America suddenly flow in the same direction, making local and institutional and communal distinctions that were once defining seem vanishingly trivial. Why do all universities have the same politics and curricula and trigger warnings and quotas? Why must all hospitals and schools have them too? At what point does one accept that all of these causes and crises are related, that the closeness of their relationship to each other is quite strange?

A new and decadent power center has been built, made up of the federal government and a constellation of corporations and nonprofits that operate as connected wings of the same sprawling complex. The people who control the key platforms and networks are aggregating power to themselves at the expense of everyone else. These people and the institutions they dominate are not interested in social justice, or any other kind of justice, except to the extent that they can be used as shields. They festoon their corporate headquarters with slogans about women’s rights, Black rights, and trans rights while hoovering up millions of jobs and billions of dollars that once belonged to small- and medium-sized American businesses and shipping it all to China. Through their networks of foundations and NGOs, they have emptied out America’s free press and turned most of it into a quasi-governmental political propaganda apparatus that is remarkably empty of meaningful information about how power works in America and why the quality of so many people’s lives keeps getting worse.

Different people have different words for this new monolithic reality, but everyone who isn’t either naive or craven knows that it exists. I envision it as a pyramid—one that contains the sum total of every slogan and brand name and source of prestige, acting and speaking in unison. To live in its shadow, to take one’s moral or political or social cues from the pyramid’s overseers, is not simply an act of idol worship; it’s a form of servitude.

…

Because if there is the pyramid, there is also a space emerging outside of it—a space increasingly populated by people who want to take back their right to question, who want to experiment and quarrel and even get things wrong sometimes but to do so according to their own consciences, and who are willing to sacrifice comfort and prestige for that freedom. The people who dwell here are not part of any political faction or ideological school—or rather, they are from all of them. Indeed, the operative distinction in the near term in American politics will not be between left and right, but between insider and outsider; between those incapable of leaving their fleshpots and those who would willingly face uncertainty and risk for the chance at a better world. Between the majority that stays and is swallowed up by history, and the minority that leaves and makes the future.

Whoever you are, if you are sitting around a Seder table this weekend, your ancestors were among those who opted not to serve the people who built the pyramids. They were people who chose to pursue the spark of the divine that makes us human, even if it meant being pursued by Pharaoh’s chariots and then enduring 40 years of uncertainty wandering in the desert. If it’s no surprise that most Jews preferred to stay in Egypt, this Passover let us celebrate the ones who left—by following their example.

Heady Analysis. Worth the read.