Pesach – we know the story all too well. We just told it as we reclined for the four cups and delighted in the taste of the crispy matzah. The Hagaddah contains, perhaps, the earliest account of the unfortunate and very familiar historic saga of the tyranny and oppression of our people. The cradle of anti-Semitic hatred was Egypt.
But is that really so? Is it only the tale of the Jews? The Torah’s tenets are universal and the Bible’s truths are not reserved and cannot be claimed to represent a one-dimensional agenda. Its eternal message transcends time, space, race, ethnicity and gender. The story of the Jews is in fact the journey of all people in their quest for freedom and pursuit of liberty.
Hope for self-determination is in the heart of every man and woman and the ambition for independence is at the core of every revolution. Independence is won with pain and sacrifice. The wounds of freedom and the scars of liberty have left an indelible mark on many a nation. But was it not the aching spirit and broken body that paved the road in the mighty waters of our struggles? Was it not the pangs of hunger and the suffering of children that gave us strength to trail blaze towards triumph and victory?
Mankind has broken through the chains of tyranny because man was born to be free! Freedom cannot be weakened. To paraphrase Mark Twain, freedom “ … saw them all, beat them all, and is now what she always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of her parts, no slowing of her energies, and no dulling of her alert …” No dictator, no philosophy and no political agenda can tame the spontaneous energy of freedom or alter its dynamic. Freedom is harnessed within us. Freedom is ours and claim it we shall!
But the fight for freedom is not over. The battle for world enlightenment, co-existence and tolerance is far from won. We are surrounded by totalitarian regimes who have cast an evil spell on freedom and who will stop at nothing to destroy it. These are heartless men hypnotized by a radical and fundamentalist rationale in which they believe and which anchors their deepest expressions of faith and conviction.
Hatred and discrimination are not always impulsive, they often result from a philosophy that glorifies, sanctifies, rationalizes and sits well with the moral compass of its followers. In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the famous psychological drama set in 11th century Scotland and England, both Macbeth, the murderer, and the three infamous witches – who prophesy of Macbeth assuming the kingship of Scotland after his assassination of the king and throwing of the country into an upheaval – express one of the major themes reiterated throughout the play: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
What does this mean? If it is “fair” how is it “foul” and if it is “foul” how is it “fair”? The answer is quite revealing. By making a seemingly contradictory statement, Shakespeare is taking us on a journey into the distorted mind. Indeed the choice is ever present between fair and foul and certainly they are worlds apart, but it is the perception of the truth that eventually misleads the criminal. If what is bad is perceived as good and what is wrong is perceived as right, then a perversion has taken place, the bending of light in a sinful angle, the creation of a distortion.
In her diary, Anne Frank wrote words that provided hope for a humanity faced with suffering. The resilience of soul that led a young girl to express such words following two years of hiding in a small, crowded attic, stripped of every human right, decreed on her by senseless evil, ushered in a new era of optimism and reconciliation after a world war that claimed the lives of tens of millions of innocent and pure victims: