Hoisted from the Archives from 2004: Mark Kleiman: Avodim Hayyinu l���pharoh b���Mitzrayim

Mark Kleiman: Avodim Hayyinu l���pharoh b���Mitzrayim: "So the Bush Administration is supporting the anti-gay marriage FMA.... And the right-wing media are loudly cheering for Gibson���s Passion, with its blatantly anti-Semitic retelling of the Crucifixion wrapped in a pornography-of-violence package. I wonder whether, now that their own oxen are being gored to right-wing applause, conservative Jews and conservative gays will reflect on the extent to which 'conservatism' as a political practice in American (as opposed to the conservative strand in political thought represented by Burke, Hayek, and Oakeshott) turns out to embody a willingness���and sometimes a gloating eagerness���to stomp on the out-groups...

...The willingness of Jews to stand up for vulnerable non-Jews, which I had always attributed to centuries of being the out-group, turns out on closer examination to be��quite deeply rooted in the religion. Last week in the faculty Torah study group at UCLA���which has been fighting its way through Deuteronomy at the rate of about����four verses a week for the past decade���we were examining Deut. 24:17-18:

Thou shalt not pervert the justice due to the stranger, or to the fatherless; nor take the widow���s raiment to pledge.
But thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee thence; therefore I command thee to do this thing.

A quick check with a concordance showed that the formula: ���Do X, because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord redeemed you��� occurs five times in Deuteronomy, in each case following a commandment about dealing fairly with the vulnerable.... That, then, is the deeper meaning of the first phrase in the answer to the Four Questions at the Passover Seder: ���Avodim hayyinu���������We were slaves.��� It seems, if you think about it, a rather remarkable assertion to put at the very center of a celebratory feast. What other group, instead of boasting about being nobly born, makes a fuss about being descended from slaves, and then personalizes it so as to say that everyone present was a slave until redeemed? But linked to the commandments in Deuteronomy, that phrase comes to mean: ���We were slaves��� and therefore must never, never, ever act like slaveowners. That makes sense of the empirical link between Judaism and liberalism.

No, there���s no reason to think that the ���liberal��� viewpoint on any given policy issue is superior to the ���conservative��� one. With respect to crime, which is my own study, I���d have to say that the liberal tendency over the past half-century has mostly pointed toward the wrong answers, though the conservative tendency hasn���t noticeably pointed to the right ones. Nor is it the case that all claims made on behalf of vulnerable groups are justifiable��claims, or even that satisfying those claims will in fact be good for the groups in question. But I���d still rather start with a political philosophy consistent with ���avodim hayyinu��� than with one rooted in the impulse to defend the power and wealth of the wealthy and the powerful, and to demonstrate���as, for example, Rush Limbaugh, Honorary Member of the House Republican Class of 1994, does so amusingly to his millions of listeners���that despised groups are really despicable...

#shouldread #hoisted #moralresponsibility