Monday, April 21, 2008

Guess Who's Coming to the Seder

For centuries, Jews have gathered around the Seder table to celebrate Pesach (Passover), the deliverance from slavery to freedom. This family holiday is marked not only by the ubiquitous matza, but mainly by the reading of the Hagada, the recounting of the events that led to the freedom of the ancient Israelites. Everyone participates in the reading and especially the singing, which is what makes the Seder such a joyful experience.
As we ask "Ma Nishtana Ha'Layla Ha'Ze" - What's Different This Night from all other nights?, an answer (which is not in the Hagada) is that this Passover in 5768 (2008 AD) falls in an election year in the USA. All three candidates wanted to participate in the political Passover. The Torah mentions "four sons": the wise one, the wicked one, the naive one and the one who doesn't know how to ask. In their trying to appeal to the Jewish vote, you decide who is who:

Barak Obama noted that the Passover Seder ceremony encourages children to ask questions. He interpreted that as meaning that American policy should emphasize dialogue. He previously has said that if he were elected president, he would talk with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is a Holocaust denier and dreams of "wiping Israel off the map". However, he has rejected the idea of sitting down for discussions with Hamas, which is funded by Iran. I guess his thinking is why talk to the dogs when I can talk directly to their masters?
Obama is clearly naive. He is he also wicked when he tries to appear as a friend of Israel (despite his public support for the Palestinian cause and his refusal to condemn Carter's useless trip to the Middle East) or of the Jews (when his friends, Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakan are racists and anti-Semites)?

Hillary Clinton used the Hagada to make a call "to stand up to oppression, tyranny and discrimination." She also paid a surprise visit to a Jewish federation-sponsored Philadelphia Orchestra concert celebrating Israel's 60th birthday. She made no political comments, but her appearance was part of a last-ditch effort to garner more votes in Tuesday's state primaries. Hillary is not naive and does know how to ask but she is as wicked as they come because her perfidy and dishonesty know no limits. She couldn't care less about Israel, as she proved it when she stood by Suha Arafat which was spewing vicious statements about Israelis poisoning Palestinian children. She does care about Jews, American Jews to be precise, because there are, unfortunately, many foolish enough to donate money to her and because Jews are still overwhelmingly blind to continue following the Democratic Party despite its increasingly leftist and anti-Israeli stance (although the number of Republican Jews has more than doubled since Bush became President in 2000).

Republican candidate John McCain appears to be the most Zionist of the three candidates who commented on the Passover Seder and the reading of the traditional Hagada, according to The New York Times op-ed writer William Kristol. McCain, who was a prisoner of war during the war in Vietnam, was the only one of the three candidates who linked the story of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt with attacks on Jews. He commented that three IDF soldiers who were kidnapped two years ago "will celebrate [Passover] once again, in captivity.”

The older, the wiser....Hag Sameach! (Happy Holiday!)

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