Passover wandering
Like 70% of American Jews, I spent last night at a Seder, celebrating the story of liberation from pharaoh. Here are some of the thoughts that were on my mind.
Three years ago I wrote with enthusiasm about the Passover of Arab liberation. Two years ago Syria seemed already in the midst of ten plagues and ruled by a pharaoh who wouldn’t let his people go. Last year I thought things in the Middle East better than expected.
This year I’ve got to confess things are a mess, not only in the Middle East but also in Ukraine.
The war in Syria rages on. Israel/Palestine peace negotiations are stalled. Both sides are pursuing unilateral options. Egypt is restoring military autocracy. Libya is chaotic. Parts of Iraq are worse. The only whisper of good news is from Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia, where something like more or less democratic transitions are progressing, and Iran, where the Islamic Republic is pressing anxiously for a nuclear deal, albeit one that still seems far off.
In Ukraine, Russia is using surrogates and forces that don’t bother wearing insignia to take over eastern and southern cities where Russian speakers predominate. It looks as if military invasion won’t be necessary. Kiev has been reduced to asking for UN peacekeeping troops. NATO can do nothing. Strategic patience, and refusal to recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and any other parts of Ukraine it might absorb, seems the best of a rotten bunch of options.
This is discouraging, but no one ever promised continuous progress. Even the Israelites wandered in the desert. Everyone forgets the part about getting stuck in one lousy oasis for 38 of those years. Freedom is not a one-time thing. It requires constant effort. There are setbacks. And there are breakthroughs.
Americans face their own liberation challenges. While the past year has seen giant strides in acceptance of gay marriage, there have been setbacks to the right to vote. Money is now speech and corporations are people, according to the Supreme Court. I’ll believe that when a corporation gets sent to prison and banks start accepting what I say as a deposit. The right to bear arms continues to expand, but not my right to be safe from those who do, except by arming myself. In Kansas City Sunday a white supremacist and anti-Semite allegedly shot and killed three people at Jewish facilities, all Christians.
The plain fact is that liberation, as Moses discovered, is hard. It requires persistence. There are no guarantees of success. The only directions history takes are the ones that people compel it to take. Some of those people are genuinely good. Others are evil. Sometimes they are both, as son Adam’s piece on LBJ this week suggests. There may be a right side and a wrong side of history, but it seems difficult for many people to tell the difference.
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There is a certain drunkenness and shallowness in the world. One thing is certain, those who look hard for a place in the history will not have it as those who are looking hard to solve the problems of the world. Waste of energy anyway. Many things will require additional cycles and energy in order to accomplish the same achievements lost in the past few years.
The Jewish Question in East Ukraine
Notices with the following have been posted next to the synagogue in Donetsk by the “Main Headquarters” of the newly self-proclaimed People’s Government, as reported (with photographs) by Gordon http://gordonua.com/news/separatism/V-Donecke-separatisty-raskleili-antisemitskie-listovki-evrei-za-50-dolzhny-proyti-registraciyu-18609.html – the translation is mine.
[Logo of the Independent Donetsk Republic, General Headquarters]
________________________________________________________
RESPECTED CITIZENS
OF JEWISH NATIONALITY
Inasmuch as leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine have supported the Banderite junta in Kiev and have shown a hostile disposition toward the Orthodox Donetsk Republic and its citizens, the Main Headquarters of the National Donetsk Peoples Republic have ordered the following:
All citizens of Jewish nationality over the age of 16 resident on the territory of the the sovereign Donetsk Republic are required to present themselves for registration by May 3, 2014 to the Acting Commissar for Nationality Issues at Donetsk Regional Administration Building, Room 514. The cost of registration is 50 dollars USA.
You must have with you 50 dollars USA for payment of registration, passports indicating religion, documents for family members, as well as legal documents for all real property and vehicles owned by you.
Those failing to register will be deprived of citizenship and forcibly expelled beyond the borders of the Republic and their property confiscated.
[Round seal of the Donetsk National Republic]
Your national Governor, Denis Pushilin
Unlike interpreters, translators usually have a chance for second-thoughts. The nausea was getting to be a bit much, so I sent this off without dealing with putting the second paragraph into some kind of infinitive construction that sounded ok in English (somebody’s attempting to write in offialese without bothering to get it right.) Literally, the paragraph is “To have with oneself 50 dollars USA for payment of registration, passports indicating religion, documents for family members, as well as legal documents for all real property and vehicles owned by you.”
The translators of Mein Kampf into English were later accused of making Hitler sound more rational than he was by cleaning up the language, a caution to us all. It’s not a problem patent translators usually have to worry about, fortunately.