Billions of the world's people do not know the meaning of the important festival of freedom and liberty known as Passover – a festival of spring, recognizing an event that has blessed the world for well over 3,300 years.
This year, the festival, which always falls on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nissan, will begin on the evening of April 22 of the standard calendar.
The biblical story behind Passover tells of the Exodus and of the salvation of the Jewish people after centuries of slavery under the Egyptian pharaohs and the subsequent creation and deliverance of an entire nation.
Such a seminal event in humanity's history became the foundation for true freedom and liberty for mankind many centuries before democracy was first enunciated by Greek philosophers who lived in a polytheistic society wholly unlike monotheistic Jewish society.
Many people know in varying degrees the Passover story and the birth of the Jewish people and of their undying faith in the One and Only God, invisible and indivisible.
Judaism has given the world monotheism in its purest and most undiluted nature.
The Unity of God is what Jews have defended against all who attempted to suggest a plurality – even to suffering martyrdom as they uttered with their dying breath the towering prayer, the Shema, which is the centerpiece of Jewish religious thought and is best understood by those knowing Hebrew grammar as contained in the following:
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One" (Deut. 6:4);
"The Lord, He is God, in heaven above and upon the earth beneath; there is none else" (Deut. 4:39);
"Besides me, there is no God. Turn to me and you are saved in all ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is none else" (Isaiah 45:22).
The longsuffering Jews under Egyptian bondage were led to freedom by the Jewish prophet Moses, who brought them to their own very special and promised land, the land of Israel.
Moses spoke with God in Sinai and brought a wondrous divine gift to the Jewish people – and through them to all humanity – the Decalogue:
the Ten Commandments, the basis of today's Judeo-Christian civilization and jurisprudence.
These ten brief commandments – a mere 120 Hebrew words – are written on the walls of synagogues and in many Bible-based churches, as well as in secular sites.
As in all Jewish practice, Moses was never deified.
He was shown in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as a man – nothing else.
Indeed, in order not to deify him or exalt him over others, he is shown in the Holy Bible with human failings and his burial place remains unknown.
He sought the mountain top and beheld the Promised Land of Israel, yet was never to enter.
Unlike in so many other nations, Moses's sons and descendants did not set up a dynasty, and in fact are not mentioned in scripture after his death (except for a possible coded reference to a grandson in Judges 18:30).
In fact, in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) Moses is described merely as "the humblest and meekest of all human beings," for in Judaism, only God is divine and beside Him there is none other.
Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) is the first of the Jewish holidays and festivals, coinciding with the coming of spring in the Jewish people's ancestral, biblical, and native land – the land given by God in an everlasting covenant to the Jewish people.
It is the land extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – a mere 40 miles in width known for millennia by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria.
Sadly, a mostly hostile world prefers to deny this biblical and Jewish patrimony by renaming it the West Bank, the name given to it by the Jordanian Muslim Arab invaders who drove out its Jewish inhabitants and illegally occupied the territory for a mere 19 years from 1948 until it was liberated by Israel during its defensive June 1967 Six Day War.
Indeed, part of the covenanted land also includes Gilead (the biblical and ancestral possession of the tribes of Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben), which is east of the river Jordan in the present day British-created Arab state of Jordan.
But in the very heartland of the Jewish ancestral homeland stretching from the river to the sea, Arabs who call themselves Palestinians occupy territory with the sole intention of coming against the Jewish homeland and destroying it.
In doing so, they challenge the very promises of God in scripture (God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob):
"Unto thy seed have I given this land...I will give to thee and to thy seed after thee all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession" (Genesis 17:8);
"And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land.... " (Genesis 12:7);
"The land which I gave unto Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee...." (Genesis 35:12);
"I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them...unto a good land and large, a land flowing with milk and honey...." (Genesis 3:8);
"Be strong and courageous, for it is you who will cause this people to inherit the land that I have sworn to their fathers to give them" (Joshua 1:6).
The Passover festival precedes two other harvest festivals based upon the agricultural cycles of ancient and modern Israel.
Next comes Shavuot – Pentecost – which records and commemorates the giving to Moses of the Ten Commandments, followed by Succot, which is known as Tabernacles.
Mankind was, and is, blessed through the Passover, for it is a veritable gift to those who accept its divine message and perform the ritual meal – the Seder – recording the Exodus story.
But there is an evil in men's hearts, and it is a profound evil, for those who hate and envy this Jewish gift to humanity and its message of freedom, liberty, and foundational democracy.
They have chosen since time immemorial to destroy all it stands for and to persecute those – the Jews – who received it from God and who have shared it with all humanity.
Let me recount what Mary Antin wrote in 1911 about the horrors inflicted upon the Jews in Russia as they celebrated the festival of liberty in the Exodus story during the festive Seder meal.
Ms. Antin wrote of what routinely took place at Passover – often coinciding with Easter – and of how Russian neighbors reminded the Jews that for them it was another Egypt:
"... in Russian cities and even more in country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered, the peasants would hear lies about the Jews, fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill their Jewish neighbors.
"They attacked them with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom.
"Jews who escaped the pogroms came with wounds on them and horrible, horrible, stories of little babies torn limb from limb before their mother's eyes. Only to hear these things made one sob and sob and choke with pain.
"People who saw such things never smiled any more, no matter how long they lived and sometimes their hair turned white in a day and others went insane."
In the Passover story, which is enshrined in the Haggadah – the book retelling the events of the Exodus and of the order of the Seder meal – there is a profound and millennial old passage:
"Not one man alone has risen up against us to destroy us, but in every generation there have risen up against us those who sought to destroy us; but the Holy One, blessed be He, delivers us from their hands."
And so it was and still is.
As if to remind us of the generational evil that is perpetrated against Jewish men, women, children—even babies—think on that terrible day, October 7, 2023.
Muslim Arabs who call themselves Palestinians stormed into southern Israel from Hamas-occupied Gaza.
They broke into Jewish towns, villages, and farms and slaughtered 1,200 victims in scenes of utter Islamist depravity reminiscent of the horrors committed by the German Nazis and so many of their European supporters during the Holocaust.
Yet even the Nazis were shamed enough by their degeneracy that they tried to hide evidence of what they had done.
Not so the decadent Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
Oh no, they joyously filmed their inhuman acts of genocidal and bestial horror with glee to show their celebrating families in Gaza.
This is just one recent example in a long and dismal string of savage atrocities perpetrated by the local Muslim Arabs – those who today call themselves Palestinians – against Jews as the latter sought to live peaceful lives and redeem the land.
By the way, there has never existed in all of recorded history a sovereign, independent Arab state called Palestine.
Mary Antin spoke about unspeakable horrors inflicted on Jewish families in Russia, atrocities which have been repeated time after time throughout Europe and the Islamic world for millennia.
Those relentless persecutions, pogroms, and the shattering genocide perpetrated against the Jews in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany – in which a third of the world's Jewish population was exterminated – were done when the Jews were still living in the long night of statelessness after Rome had destroyed Jewish Judea in 135 AD.
Yet today, since the modern miracle in 1948 of Israel's rebirth and reconstitution as a sovereign, independent nation – restored again to its native, ancestral, and biblical homeland – successive Israeli governments since that of Yitzhak Rabin, despite all the overwhelming and empirical evidence of implacable Arab and Muslim refusal to ever accept it as a Jewish state, continue to plead for peace.
It is offered again and again by them to the Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, and has again and again been rejected by them.
The simple reason is that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians do not want to live peacefully in their own state next to Israel.
They simply do not want Israel to exist. Period.
It would be hard to exist in such a delusional Two-State Solution, yet world figures still malignly influenced by Barack Hussein Obama, and led by Biden, Blinken, ad nauseam, demand that Israeli leaders make suicidal offers of "land for peace."
They try to pressure Israel to make endless concessions to the Palestinian Arabs who never, ever make any concessions to the Jewish state in return.
Instead, the Muslim Arabs indoctrinate their children from pre-school age with relentless and utterly evil hate toward Israel and the Jewish people, so yet another generation of Arabs grow up with genocide in their hearts toward the Jewish state.
As the biblical Jewish prophet Jeremiah once said: "Peace, peace; when there is no peace" (Jeremiah 6:14).
So, Israel's repeated attempts to seek peace may seem to many observers as an aberration, an illogical and deeply naïve act in the face of so much evidence of antipathy and hatred toward the Jewish state by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
After all, what nation would accept such Arab and Muslim barbarity – and withstand so many Palestinian crimes against its civilian Jewish population – and still hope for peace?
What nation would continue, despite the rain of thousands of missiles launched from Hamas-occupied Gaza upon Israeli women and children, to hold out the hand of peace to a people who display such cruelty and commit such crimes against humanity?
What nation, after seeing the Hamas horrors inflicted upon the Jewish residents in the Jewish villages and towns on October 7, 2023, would still harbor such hopes of a peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel?
What people would still entertain the insanity of dividing up their tiny land under the fatal rubric of a "Two-State-Solution?"
Perhaps only a state whose people have embraced the Passover message for millennia and the biblical passage in Leviticus19:18 – "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"– would remain convinced of the benefits to all, even to an Arab people who have poisoned and morally crippled themselves with abhorrent and loathsome anti-Jewish hatred.
But, nevertheless, to give away one inch of the land is a profound rejection of the covenant made between Almighty God and His people.
It is also a strategy of national suicide.
So, we will soon approach the Passover festival, which brings light and blessings to all humanity, but which also brings the maniacal threats of genocide against the Jewish people by those who would unleash indescribable terror and who, like the evil president of Iran, the mullahs, and the Ayatollah, spew hideous ravings and shameless libels against the ever-suffering Jews.
There are millions of American Christians who support Israel and want to fight for her in the media and in the political realm against grievous pressure from the Obama-influenced Biden administration.
Christian Zionists display immense and heartfelt love for the restored Jewish state and are a beacon of spiritual sanity in an increasingly sinful world gone mad.
So, these timely thoughts and questions must be urgently considered before, during, and after the time of Passover, for that festival is surely humanity's moral barometer.
And it would not be amiss to remind the increasingly godless United Nations and European Union of Passover's gift to the Jewish people and through them to the entire world:
The promised and undivided land.
© Victor Sharpe
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