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Jewish World Review
April 1, 2004
/ 11 Nissan, 5764
Tenth Plague Revisited
By
Jonathan Tobin
The Angel of Death that mercilessly passes among the homes of Israel's contemporary foes needs no signposts
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
For good or for ill, all parents have the chance to inculcate their children
in their own beliefs. Though none of us can be certain what ideas they will
wind up accepting as adults, one inalienable right of every father and mother is
to start getting inside their kid's head as soon as possible.
Proving this thesis is the fact that although my daughter Moriah is not yet
3, my wife and I are doing our best to teach her to recite at least the first
line of the Four Questions for Passover.
We were encouraged in this quest by her own spontaneous recitation of the
Sh'ma while playing with the small figures who live in her dollhouse.
Since she regularly joins us in singing the prayer that she has heard every
night of her young life before bed, she assumed that the same routine applied
to her dolls. When they are put to bed (something that can happen quite a lot
when the dollhouse has got her attention), she sings them the Sh'ma before
kissing them and assuring them that they will get to "go see the party tomorrow."
Hearing her small voice chant the prayer is not only a profoundly moving
experience, it also serves as incitement to further educational efforts, though
there's no way of knowing how long she'll continue to humor us. So the refrain
of Mah nishtanah … continues to ring out in our home, and we hope for the best.
A VOYAGE INTO HISTORY
These precious moments are the stuff every parent cherishes. Yet even on this
simple level, the beginning of Moriah's Jewish education with these lines
from the Hagaddah must also be recognized as the first step in her own voyage
into Jewish history. Because to ask the question about why that night is
different from all others is to initiate her, albeit on an elementary level, into the
constant struggle for life and liberty of the Jewish people that the seder
represents.
At the core of this voyage is a desire to preserve her and all Jewish
children from the suffering that befell the Children of Israel in Egypt, and in so
many other stops along the way in our people's long journey. As much as we enjoy
Passover and make it a joyous festival, this celebration of our freedom is
also a tacit acknowledgement that a darker side to life lurks in the shadows.
It will be some time before she understands the meaning of the line: "For not
only one enemy has risen against us; in every generation men rise against us
to destroy us, but the Holy One saves us from their hand." But that day of
understanding will come, and then, like all other parents, we will be faced with
the dilemma of how to explain to her about evil and suffering that's not
simply the stuff of Disney villains.
And not far from our minds is the fact that other children, who are not so
fortunate as ours, are learning about the consequences of evil firsthand.
While we sit down at our family seder, other kids, some the same age as
Moriah, will come to their tables still dressed in the bandages that cover grievous
wounds caused by terrorist bombs and bullets.
Still other Jewish children will look around their tables and seek in vain
the faces of beloved parents and relatives who are no longer there, thanks to
the mindless hatred of terrorists sent forth by present-day Islamic Pharaohs.
These creatures with hardened hearts from Hamas and Fatah send Palestinians
forth to kill and be killed in an endless war, whose purpose seems no different
from that of the Egyptians of the Exodus saga.
Even worse is the knowledge that, as we hopefully sing of our gratitude for
all that G-d has done for our ancestors and for us, other youngsters will be
learning different lessons.
What, for example, was young Hussam Abdu, age 16 (or 14, according to the boy
himself), taught? Abdu was the teenager from Nablus who was stopped last week
at an Israeli checkpoint near his hometown. When challenged by soldiers who
thought his bulky sweater looked suspicious, he lost his nerve and revealed a
bomb.
I cannot imagine what sort of education or faith can lead an adult to strap
20 pounds of explosives to a child, and then point him in the direction of the
nearest Jew with instructions to press the button.
Abdu was not the first example of this barbarous sacrifice of a child for a
cause; earlier last month, another even younger Palestinian child — an
11-year-old boy — was similarly given a few shekels and then wrapped in a
suicide-bomber's kit. Arab armies and adult terrorists have failed to break the will of
the Jews of Israel to survive. So now, these cowards send forth their children
to explode themselves.
HUMAN SACRIFICE REVIVED
The story of the Exodus lists the 10th and last plague visited upon the
obdurate slavemasters as the slaying of the first-born sons of Egypt. The Jewish
slaves were instructed to mark their homes with the blood of a lamb and so be
spared.
But today, the Angel of Death that mercilessly passes among the homes of
Israel's contemporary foes needs no signposts. The Palestinians have chosen to
deliver their children into the hands of the Angel themselves.
This is a modern-day revival of the ancient Near Eastern practice of human
sacrifice, which monotheistic religions were supposed to have rejected.
Ironically, just as Jews around the world try to foster feelings of identification
with the past through their seders, Israel's opponents have taken their own trip
back into the time machine, and conjured up a vision of the horrors that
preceded what we call modern civilization.
Those who struggle for a peace settlement to this bloody war are loathe to
confront the ugliness of such tactics. We are all more comfortable with the
language of moral relativism, which allows us to rationalize even the most
barbaric of crimes.
Incidents such as the exploitation of Hussam Abdu and other Palestinian kids
like him are routinely swept aside by the makers of world opinion. For the
moral pygmies of the United Nations, it is Israel's willingness to use force to
strike down the leaders of terrorist organizations — such as Hamas founder
Sheik Ahmed Yassin — that is the crime, not the sacrifice of children in the name
of Palestinian nationalism.
In the face of such depravity and hypocrisy, all we can do is to embrace our
own children and hold fast to the message of Pesach, which promises us that as
long as faith exists, evil will not be allowed to triumph indefinitely. And
to that hopeful prayer, let us all say: Amen.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
Let him know what you think by clicking here. In June, Mr. Tobin won first places honors in the American
Jewish Press Association's Louis Rapaport Award for Excellence in Commentary as
well as the Philadelphia Press Association's Media Award for top weekly
columnist. Both competitions were for articles written in the year 2002.
Jonathan Tobin Archives
© 2004, Jonathan Tobin
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