Deconstructing Passover

Freud claimed to have discovered the true meaning of dreams: that they are inverted, repressed, or disordered thoughts which, when correctly reorganized, will reveal a hidden meaning. Freud, a Jew, was simply restating an immemorial Jewish mode of exegesis.

To the Jews, the Torah is the collective dream of humanity. Whether understood as written by the Hand of God, by Moses at His dictation, or by one or many generations of prophetic souls, it has instructed, inspired, and unified (and divided) one thousand generations of Jews. 

Agnostics and the similarly enlightened complain that miracles do not happen, and that the character of the biblical God is both impossible, and offensive. But the Torah is not about God, it is about the mind and soul of Man. 

As it is a dream, rather than a blueprint, it can be dissected and reordered infinitely. The Sages taught that everything in the universe belongs to God, save the Torah, which belongs to Man. It is ours to use or understand as we think fit. It is the heritage, not only of the Jews, but of our spiritual descendants, the Christians, the first of whom, being Jews, took their possession, The Torah, and wrote an addendum of their own.

Currently, an Oscar recipient thought it good to proclaim he was ashamed of being a Jew. Elementary manners to one side, and irrespective of his politics, in what sense is he a Jew? If he were religious he would recognize that his slander was everywhere condemned in Jewish law and lore, as the worst of sins (leshon hara, the evil tongue), and a biblical grounds for punishment.

If he were “culturally” Jewish he would be guilty of abandonment of his brothers and sisters, and of their shared heritage. But his actions prove he is neither a Jew by religion nor by ethnic and cultural connection. 

In what sense, then, is he that Jew he is ashamed to be? His proclamation can only mean he is a Jew by blood. He is, then, ashamed to share genetics with those he understands as criminals.

This is Blood Libel — the ancient indictment of the Jews: of the anti-Dreyfusards, of the Nazis, of the Crusades, the Intifada, of the Pogroms. The Libel — that Jews are the Tool of the Devil (John 8), has been applied, historically, to all Jews (see the Shoah): the rich, the poor, the Observant, the acculturated, to anyone who may have “one drop of Jewish blood.” The greatest horror of the Oscars speech is not its indictment of the actions of a country, but in its assertion of an ineradicable “racial” taint.

The recipient, here, seems to proclaim his shame at that drop of blood. His act is not a confession of shame, however, but of pride, and a derivative plea for exemption from his taint on account of his moral heroism.

But actual heroism is moving from a place of safety to one of peril as an act of free will. Our brave affiant actually is in danger, as a Jew — for the world has, once again, discovered antisemitism as the cure-all tonic for disruption and confusion. But he is moving from one place of danger (as a Jew) to another, differing from the first only in his delusion of exemption. The murderers of Hamas and the university thugs, will not spare him, should he round the wrong corner; and his protestations of shame will, then, avail him as little as did the peace symbols on the t-shirts of the young frolickers on October 7.

The Oscars are a trade-show, and the statuette is a bit of plaster; they’ve always been a celebration of the power of nonsense. As the Universities have become, as the United Nations has been since its inception; and we note that all have proudly espoused antisemitism. It is the ineradicable delusion of the West.

Why?

We find an answer in the Torah. The rabbis said that Purim is the quintessential story of anti-semitism. Here the evil Haman wants to kill the Jews of Susa. Esther, the Queen, is Jewish but she balks at approaching the King to plead for her people. She prizes her position and fears his displeasure. Her uncle, Mordecai, counsels her that if the King turns on the Jews he’ll have to sacrifice her, too, rather than suggest that an indictment of the devil Jews is subject to emendation.

Why, however, was there an outcry against the Jews in Susa? And why is it repeated now?

The Torah’s answer is the Story of the Exodus. But it must be unpacked.

Pharaoh is concerned that his slaves, the Jews, have grown too numerous, and that, unkilled, they will supplant his rule. The infant Moses is exempted from the slaughter and raised as the Prince of Egypt. He stands up for a Jewish slave and kills the slave’s assailant. He is betrayed as the murderer, by the Jews, and flees to live in solitude.

God, in the burning bush, instructs him to return and instruct Pharaoh to let the People Go. He does so. Pharaoh demurs, and ten plagues are visited on Egypt, at the conclusion of which Pharaoh (momentarily) relents, and the Jews depart. 

As good psychoanalysts, hobbyists, or Talmudists, we can dramatically reorder the story for our current enlightenment or amusement. Suppose the story began with Egypt visited by various plagues. These need not have been of Divine origin, but merely, natural occurrences: vide: an infestation of frogs, one of lice, an eclipse of the sun, the pollution of the Nile, eruptions in the populace of boils, cattle disease; finally a plague attacking newborn males. Any of these might have been not only naturally occurring, but familiar to the Egyptians.

But what if their cycles of periodic recurrence coincided, and, overwhelmed, the populace was incapable of conceiving any individual or combined solutions — if they were, quite literally, deprived of reason? Further, what if the state of Egypt’s government was weakened by such prolonged prosperity, that neither its rulers nor their parents had been faced with this magnitude of catastrophe, and call for its powers of leadership? This people, then, rendered powerless and terrified, might search for a proximate cause, and find it, handily, among its inoffensive slaves. They might reasonably conclude that the slaves carried disease, that their habits of hygiene were outlandish, their cattle diseased, and so on.

The West, weakened by hundreds of years of prosperity, has been living off the interest accrued by previous toil. Its leaders are from classes privileged never to have toiled, sought work, served in the military, met a payroll, and so on.

Now, with the Millennium, this populace and its supposed leaders undergo a cascade of plagues: AIDS, Jihad, Covid, gender politics, teenage transsexualism, climate change, open borders and attendant crime, drugs, human trafficking, and so on. Each of the above could (and can) be dealt with by logical and concerted action, but their correction requires a resolve and understanding present neither in our leaders, nor our legislatures, and daunting to those whose willingness is indicted as inhuman, vicious, or insane.

A frenzied populace, today, as in our reconstruction of the Exodus, deprived of the mechanism of self-government (by Pharaoh, or by the Deep State), and legitimately daunted by the individual’s inability to affect widespread change absent concerted governmental effort, may cast about for an overriding cause.

The terrifying catastrophe they perceive is merely an accumulation of small, mainly mechanical concerns, a coincidence of various human errors, natural occurrences, and a civilization’s inevitable progress through maturity into decline.  

Pharaoh and his Egyptians were unfit to face the daunting confluence of troubles; and, so, panicked, and looked for the Magical Cause, which would explain to many their pusillanimity. As did the Germans after the Versailles Treaty; and as the enlightened “liberal” west does today.

The Torah is not the report of “what happened,” but of what always happens. The Torah, reconfigured, predicts human recurrence to the drug of antisemitism, since the Exodus down to October 7, and the 2024 Oscars.

The Torah is not the report of “what happened,” but of what always happens. 

The Torah, reconfigured, predicts human recurrence to the drug of antisemitism, since the Exodus down to October 7, and the 2024 Oscars.

PASSOVER 2024
by David Mamet
copyright (c) 2024 by D. Mamet