Yes, it’s time for my annually revamped Passover post

Every year for Passover, I write a post describing the general principles but with a different person standing in as Pharoah. This year, Biden again gets the Egyptian crown.

[If you’ve read this post before, skip past all the familiar parts until you get to the more specific indictment of this year’s Pharaoh.]

For roughly 3,500 years, Jews have been telling and retelling the story of Passover — which is also the story of the world’s first revolt against a totalitarian dictatorship. The story remains relevant because each generation sees dangerous tyrants abusing their people and trying to expand their reach beyond their own borders. As we stare down those monsters, the thing to remember is that those atop the tyranny pyramid care about only one thing, which is that their tyranny remains stable and protected.

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There are those who, rather than seeing the Passover ceremony as a celebration of freedom (for it commemorates the world’s first successful slave revolt), justice, and morality (Exodus led to the Ten Commandments), deride the whole ceremony as the unconscionable and immoral celebration of the Egyptian people’s genocide. The basis for this theory is the way in which God hardens Pharaoh’s heart after each plague, even as Pharaoh seems about to soften and let the Jews go. This engenders the full cycle of plagues, culminating in the death of the firstborn.

Those familiar with the Bible understand that this objection is predicated upon ignorance. The tenth plague, which saw God strike down the firstborn in every family without the Pascal lamb’s blood above their door, was not a random punishment. It was, instead, divine retribution for the Pharaoh’s own decree, in effect at Moses’s birth, that all firstborn Jewish males should be drowned in the Nile.

Dennis Prager’s superb The Rational Bible: Exodus also explains that each one of the plagues attacked one of the Egyptian’s many gods, allowing God to demonstrate that they were false idols. Of course, for those who see the Passover story as a neo-Nazi story, even that reasoning isn’t good enough.

One can bypass the whole issue by saying that the many plagues, culminating with the firstborn’s death, are nothing more than dramatic license, meant to increase the tension and danger surrounding the Jew’s escape from Egypt. If the exodus had been easy, it wouldn’t have been much of a story. Imagine if Moses had asked, “Hey, Pharaoh, can we go?” and Pharaoh had answered, “Sure.”

That narrative lacks punch and heroism. More importantly, God’s involvement is minimal or, at least, unexciting. Surely it resonates more strongly with the people reliving the narrative every year to have an escalating series of plagues, with the audience on tenterhooks as to whether those pesky Jewish slaves will actually be able to make a break for it.

However, it’s demeaning to imply that the Bible would be that superficial. There is, instead, a much more profound purpose behind the ten plagues, and that is to remind us of the tyrant’s capacity for tolerating others’ suffering, as long as his power remains in place.

What Pharaoh discovered with the first nine plagues is that life can go on, at least for the ruler, no matter the burdens he places upon his people. A blood-filled Nile River may, at first, seem appalling, but for Pharaoh, life goes on. The same is true for all but the 10th plague. As long as Pharaoh’s hold on power is undiminished, he will always reconcile himself to his people’s incremental destruction.

Sheltered in his lavish palace, Pharaoh might have a theoretical concern that a starving and frightened populace could turn on him. However, if he feels sufficiently inviolate, their suffering is irrelevant. It is only when the price becomes too high — when the plague struck Pharaoh in his own palace, killing his firstborn* — that Pharaoh is convinced, even temporarily, to alter his evil ways.

Human nature hasn’t changed in 3,500 years. Think, for example, of both the Nazis and the Japanese at the end of WWII. For the Nazis, it was apparent by December 1944 (the Battle of the Bulge) that the war was over. Hitler, however, was a megalomaniac in the pharaonic mold, and his high command, either from fear or insanity, would not gainsay him. Rather than surrendering, the Nazi high command was not only willing to see Germany overrun and its citizens killed, but it went along with Hitler’s demand to continue to divert military supplies to the Holocaust.

The war ended only when Hitler, facing personal humiliation, killed himself and the remaining high command, seeing their lives at stake, ran or committed suicide too. Hitler and his commanders were Pharaoh, sacrificing more people to their hold on power, and stopping only when the war touched them personally.

The same held true for the Japanese. Truman did not decide to drop the bomb just for the hell of it. Even impressing the Soviets was an insufficient reason for doing so. What swayed Truman was his advisers telling him (credibly, as it turned out) that the Japanese Bushido culture would not allow Japan to surrender. Instead, Truman understood that, despite an inevitable American victory, without drastic action, that victory would take another year, with millions of American casualties, including close to a million deaths and at least as many Japanese casualties (mostly Japanese civilians).

Truman had two choices: Wage war for at least another year, with millions of American and Japanese casualties and deaths, or end the war instantly, with no more American casualties and an estimated 100,000-200,000 civilian Japanese deaths (a significantly smaller number than would result from a traditional invasion). Put that way, the choice was a no-brainer.  Not only would he save the military, but he would also save tens of thousands of POWs, both military and civilian. One of the Dutch civilian POWs saved was my Mom, who was on the verge of starving to death in a Japanese concentration camp.

The Japanese high command was Pharaoh. No amount of smaller plagues could stop the command from its chosen path. Only a large plague would swiftly lead to the inevitable conclusion.

The only way to destroy an evil institution is to decapitate it. That’s what God did with the 10th plague. That’s what Truman did when he dropped atomic bombs on Japan. That’s what the Allies did when they engaged in total war against the Nazis. In each case, the only way to end a tyrant’s rampage of murder, torture, and enslavement was directly hurting the tyrant’s person.

Those who prefer the stability of tyranny to the risks of freedom are the same people who refuse to accept that, under tyranny, the innocents are always going to die, with the only question being whether they will die quickly or slowly.

That’s the problem with an evil regime. If you’re unlucky enough to live under that regime, you’re going to end as cannon fodder. Pharaoh will let you die of plagues, and the Nazi and Japanese leadership will let you be bombed and burned.

People of goodwill must sometimes understand that the generation raised under tyranny is a lost generation that cannot be saved, whether because it will die under the tyrant’s lash, in the tyrant’s war, or in a war against the tyrant. They know, too, that when slaves finally taste freedom, some fear it. The Bible recognized this problem, banning the Promised Land to those who were slaves in Egypt. They were a lost generation.

For this reason, when one sees a people groaning under tyranny, the most humane thing to do is to destroy the tyranny quickly and decisively, even if that process causes people to suffer. Most of them were always going to be lost. Our actions are for the benefit of subsequent generations and, if we are lucky, for those who survived both the tyranny and the liberation.

Protecting freedom for the greatest number of people sometimes demands proactive behavior. And there is nothing more proactive than an overwhelming response when a tyrant starts putting out feelers to see how far he can go. If Chamberlain had done that in 1938, WWII might have been avoided.**

So what about this year’s Pharaoh? There are lots of choices. Xi Jinping is a candidate. So are Putin and Zelensky, both of whom terrorize their own citizens and slaughter each other’s citizens. In Australia and New Zealand, civil liberties are dead. Actually, they’re dead all across Western Europe. Canada’s Trudeau is a soft-spoken Mao. But I’m American, so I’ll focus on the home front.

Depending on how you look at it, Biden has had the most spectacularly successful or the most spectacularly awful presidency in American history. What matters is whether you love America and Americans or not. On his watch, we’ve seen

• a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan;
• the destruction of our economy;
• the end of our energy independence;
• the internal collapse of our military;
• the threat of full-bore nuclear war with Russia;
• the imminent loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency;
• the erasure of our southern border;
• the inexorable rise of China;
• the gulag-like imprisonment and persecution of political dissidents whom the regime was able to identify on January 6;
• the new alliance of despots (China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.);
• the escalation of dangerous racial divisions in our country;
• the ascendence of transgender madness, along with its laser focus on children;
• the rise of communism and crime in America’s once great cities;
• the hideous increase in fentanyl deaths across the U.S.;
• the breakdown of the rule of law and equal treatment under the law; and, now,
• the Third-World-style political persecution of the leading candidate to oppose Biden in the upcoming presidential election.

That’s a very impressive record, with its relative value depending on whether you love America, in which case it’s a disaster of unparalleled proportions, or you hate America, in which case it’s the “fundamental transformation” Obama promised and that you desired.

From the point of view of Biden and his cronies, though, what’s important is that, to date, none of this is affecting them (if you ignore the tech titan who was just horribly murdered in San Francisco, which might worry other leftist techies living in the same city). Indeed, from their point of view, these American plagues are a massive victory.

They’re winning on climate change, so it’s irrelevant that Americans cannot afford energy and that the cost of everything is escalating. They’re destroying Trump, so what does it matter that they’re destroying the rule of law, too? They’re importing brand new voters (and cheap labor for the Chamber of Commerce), so who cares if the border and America’s high standard of living are collapsing? They have power everywhere, so the corrupt election systems across America are a benefit, not a burden. They don’t ever imagine themselves suffering from the loss of liberty they’re inflicting across America. In their minds, they’ll always have the iron fist.

The only way to stop tyranny is to fight tyranny. For liberty-loving people in America, that’s a challenge, because, for the first time in my lifetime, the tyrant is our unfettered government. Still, we have weapons — and if you’re a leftist reading this, I’m not talking about guns or bombs. I’m talking weapons in the world of ideas and individual, non-violent action.

For one thing, every last one of us needs to stop bowing down before woke culture. Even non-conservatives need to realize that there is no end to the reach of cultural totalitarians. Its practitioners must constantly strive to prove their purity, and they can do this only by attacking others.

When they call us racists, when they subject us to the appalling racist Critical Race Theory, when they use race to justify overthrowing our southern border, we need to speak out even more loudly. And we definitely must speak the truth about so-called “transgenderism,” which has become the weapon of choice to destroy our cultural norms, our families, and our children’s bodily and mental integrity.

We need to fight their ideology at every turn. We need to boycott the woke companies. We need to fund organizations that will handle lawfare for people fired because they exercised their constitutional rights.

Do anything and everything you can think of to push back against this administration. That does not mean violating the laws; it does not mean impoverishing yourself; it does not mean violence. However, it does mean speaking up constantly, withholding what money you can from complicit organizations, and backing down only when your safety is at risk.

With that, I’d like to wish all of you a Chag Sameach (Happy Passover). Whether Jewish or not, I hope that the Pesach celebration serves as an occasion for all of us to remember that, though the price may sometimes be high, both for slave and master, our goal as just and moral human beings must be freedom. So please join with me in saying, as all Jews do at this time of year, “Next Year in Jerusalem.”

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*The fact that Pharaoh survived the last of the ten plagues tells us that he was not his father’s firstborn son.

**And yes, I am aware of the argument that Chamberlain might not have been Hitler’s dupe. Thanks to England’s anti-War fervor after WWI, which led to disarmament and the drawing down of her military, Chamberlain might have believed by 1938 that England could do nothing to stop Hitler. That belief would have led him to choose appeasement as the only option. I don’t agree with this view because bullies will back down quickly if their intended victim fights even minimally, but I’ll give Chamberlain the benefit of the doubt because he was a decent and patriotic man.

IMAGE: Moses and Aaron confront Pharaoh (1537). Master of the Dinteville Allegory. As part of The Met’s Open Access program, the data is available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee.