April 8, 2020
RAMBLEOVER PASSOVER
The food at the Passover Seder is always a sublime experience thanks to the culinary genius of my partner Emma, demonstrated conclusively over the years. But I cannot stomach the traditional contents of the Haggadah, the book which elaborates on the biblical myth of an escape from slavery in Egypt and fills in the time before and after eating with rituals, songs, rabbinical commentary and praise of the fictitious and vicious god named Jehovah. In recent years, my main pleasure, beyond the meal, has been delivering a "sermon" expressing my views about this indigestible mix and trying to instill some genuine meaning into the proceedings.
Last year I cooked up the suggestion that it could become a holiday for the general celebration of human freedom.
This year, the year of the plague 2020, I think I may have something even more appropriate, grounded in the portion of the myth describing how it took ten plagues to get Pharaoh to consent to letting the Hebrew slaves leave Egypt.
Since we are presently undergoing a worldwide plague, there is a reason to look for analogies. And, believe it or not, it led me to the conclusion that, in this scenario, we are the Egyptians, not the Children of Israel!
I wondered which of the characters in the myth most resembles myself. I realized that the character who has the most comfortable life, the most servants or slaves, shall we say, who eats the finest food, and has the greatest distaste for mixing with rabble, is likely to be closest to me. So it turns out that Pharaoh is my equivalent in this myth. And not just my equivalent, probably the equivalent of most of the people who are celebrating the Passover Seder.
We are fairly close to the top of the social pyramid. Hot and cold water is delivered to our houses for drinking, bathing and flushing away our wastes. Our rooms are lighted and adjusted to the seasons by networks of electrical power. Communication, News/Entertainment and music of great variety is available to us 24/7. And we have a host of slaves who cater to all our needs and satisfy all our desires. Slaves to deliver the food and the 10,000 other things we order on line. Slaves to clean our houses and maintain the grounds (if any). Slaves in other countries, employed in making all the sundry objects we consume and discard or store forever. Slaves fighting wars for us in obscure places about which we know nothing and couldn't care less.
So what lesson or lessons could this holiday teach people like us in our time, that is to say, the ruling class of the "most advanced" civilization?
Here it is: The only thing that will penetrate our consciousness and possibly improve our behavior is a barrage of plagues and the prospect of imminent death. The details of how to improve are the proper subject of the next phase in the development of human knowledge.
The sequence of plagues experienced by Egypt can have contemporary analogies. For example, the waters of Egypt turning to blood can stand for our selfish and insane pollution of the waters of the planet Earth. The various animal and insect plagues, (frogs, lice, wild beast rampage, cattle epidemic, locust) can represent the results of our tampering with the biosphere, on many levels. Boils - take your pick of any less-than-fatal human disease caused by environmental tampering. Thunder, hail and darkness symbolize reaction to, and consequences of, our interference with climate and reckless addiction to electricity and power generation in general. Overall, even a series of nine "lesser" plagues may not be enough to get our attention or get us to start thinking and working on readjusting our relationships with the universe.
That requires going to the tenth level, namely, the prospect of execution (which Dr. Johnson said "concentrates the mind wonderfully.") Finally, in the instructive Passover myth, death of the firstborn is the ultimate "riposte" to our attempt to penetrate and control the uncontrollable, transformational and mutational powers of nature and the universe on the sub-atomic and genetic level. A mysterious killer, emerging from the border between the living and non-living, wreaks havoc in the population of Homo sapiens, the intelligent ape which has grandiose ideas about knowing everything, controlling everything and ruling the universe. When I say "riposte," I do not mean that some godlike consciousness is reacting to our behavior or that we are one of the direct causes of the start or continuation of the most recent plague (although that remains a possibility). I mean that the forces affecting life are so far beyond our comprehension and control that we will always be faced with unexpected, life-threatening demonstrations of the power and inventiveness of nature.
All this suggests, at the very least, the need for an increase in human modesty and a focus on achieving a greater harmony with things we cannot know or control before we try to dominate them. When this is over, we must resist the temptation to conclude it was not as bad as the last one and to use that as proof of human progress. This may sound anticlimactic and vague but it is worth meditating on. I feel that simplification and restraint may be called for on the part of the human race in the next phase of its unpredictable development. I hope to return to this subject in the future.
Good luck!
END
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