Thread by @GREENESJ333

Roger Froikin @rlefraim wrote, "MORE THOUGHTS FOR PESACH

A Universal Message. - Or a Message for Jews.
1)

Now I can almost hear the screaming in advance from those Jews who prefer to see Pesach as just a story about Freedom, & who want the story to have universal appeal... 2)

so they can say to their Gentile friends & the wider Gentile world, “see, we all in this together, this desire for freedom”. It sure sounds nice.

Sorry, but it’s not really true.
3)

While the story is about freedom, and while mankind has always sought freedom from oppression, from the control of others, the story of Pesach is not primarily a story about freedom with universal application. 4)

It is a story about one people, one ethnic culture, demanding & through struggle & sacrifice getting its freedom, to be a nation,... 5)

to establish its own identity as separate from the world, to see the universe in its own unique manner, to establish laws and customs of its own that express its own values.

That is not universalist. It is particularistic. 6)

The Hebrew Nation was brought out of Egypt with a “strong hand and an outstretched arm”, not the British or the French or the Germans. 7)

The Hebrew Nation was given the Law at Sinai and the Ten Statements (Ten Commandments) professed by the statement that this was for the people who were taken out of Egypt, to Freedom to be what they are supposed to be, a Holy Nation and a light to the other nations. 8)

Cant be more particularist and non-universalist than that, can you?

So, sure, I have nothing against seeing universal values in the Seder, in Pesach, as long as we remember this is something about Jews and for Jews and not something that makes everyone the same." 9)

Roger Froikin @rlefraim wrote, "MORE THOUGHTS FOR PESACH

A Universal Message. - Or a Message for Jews.
@threadreaderapp please unroll