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Ny times op ed11/22/2023 “Every firstborn son in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the servant girl.” Exodus 11:5. And so God, in his mercy, started killing babies. Technically this was God’s fault, as he hardened the pharaoh’s heart, but the issue of free will wouldn’t begin troubling me until my teens. Mothers nursing their babies, the rabbi explained, found their breast milk had turned to blood.īut the pharaoh, the story continues, still wouldn’t relinquish his slaves. Egyptians young and old, innocent and guilty, suffered locusts and frogs, hail and darkness, beasts running wild and water becoming blood. God, the rabbi said, struck all the Egyptians with his wrath, not just the pharaoh and his soldiers. “That’s corpse.”īut just as troubling - even more so today in light of the brutal slaughter taking place in Ukraine - were the plagues themselves. “Is this brick?” the interested couple asks. My father was something of a handyman at the time, and this seemed to me a serious violation of basic building codes, not to mention a surefire way to lose a home sale. “They put the Jewish bodies into the walls and used them as bricks.” “You mean they used slaves to build their buildings,” I asked, “and the slaves died from work?” “The Egyptians,” he told us, “used the corpses of Jewish slaves in their buildings.” To get us in the holiday spirit, he told us gruesome tales of torture and persecution. I was 8 years old, and as the holiday approached, our rabbi commanded us to open our chumashim, or Old Testaments, to the Book of Exodus. The Times Opinion/Siena College poll found that 46 percent of respondents said they felt less free to talk about politics compared to a decade ago. Two aspects of the Passover story have troubled me since I was first taught them long ago in an Orthodox yeshiva in Monsey, N.Y. He joined the paper in 1981, after which he served as the Beirut bureau chief in 1982, Jerusalem bureau chief in. In this time of war and violence, of oppression and suffering, I propose we pass over something else: Friedman became the paper’s foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist in 1995. Our forefathers, the story goes, marked their doorposts with lamb’s blood in order to spare their sons the awful fate of their enemies’. This weekend, Jews around the world will celebrate the holiday of Passover, the name of which comes from the story of God passing over the homes of our distant ancestors on his way to slaughter the firstborn sons of evil Egyptians.
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