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.