RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rehearse the story of liberty gained and be humble—honor what has gone before.

I associate conservatism with optimism and its synonyms—hopefulness, sanguinity, positivity and confidence. American Jews are often associated with a gutted liberalism, but that is a caricature. A more intimate understanding of the Jewish experience connects it to an optimistic conservatism that could help secure America’s future.

I’m particularly reminded of that connection as Jews celebrate the eight days of Passover beginning Friday at sundown. Passover is the festival of freedom when Jews commemorate and re-experience the biblical story of their passage from slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt to freedom, first in the desert, then in the Land of Israel.
Emphasizing the importance of decentralized authority and individual responsibility, the escape from Egypt is celebrated not in the synagogue but in the home, among family and invited guests who join for the ceremony of the Seder, which means order. Following a ritual text called the Haggada, families retell the story as recounted in the Book of Exodus, and eat the unleavened bread that the Children of Israel took with them when they fled in the middle of the night.

When I took over from my mother the organization of Passover for our family what I felt most keenly was the paradox—the incongruity of it all. The cleaning and cooking preparations for Passover are so demanding that in the weeks leading up to it, obsessive-compulsive personalities come into their own. I could not get beyond these questions: If we were breaking for freedom, why these weeks of preparation? If we were recalling harsh conditions, which was it—the dry matzo and bitter herbs, or the chicken soup with matzo balls and the best meal of the year?

And that is how the association of conservatism with hopefulness began for me, and how it is further reinforced every year. Freedom was not decamping to Hawaii to become a surfer, not experimenting with drugs or with sexual conquests—not getting away from, but readying oneself for, the enjoyment of freedom. The Passover ritual of re-experiencing the Exodus helped me figure out the constituent elements of freedom that were crafted over many centuries:

First, a people is not defined by its experience of slavery, but neither does self-liberation happen once and for all. The temptation of slavery is always there, the part of us that wants to return to a stage of dependency, to the relative security of having the overseers regulating life. Those who do not reinforce the responsibilities of freedom will be returned to the house of bondage.

Second, the Passover ritual calls for humility—not to reduce our self-confidence, but rather to harness our capacities to the larger civic purpose of a free society. Friedrich Nietzsche was concerned that the Judeo-Christian tradition squelched the greatness of the emergent individual. The constitutional civilization that Passover celebrates is wary of the hubris of individuals who think themselves too good to “merely” reinforce what others have achieved before us.

One other item of Passover consolidated my conservative hope for change—the section about the relation of optimism to evil. It’s one that makes liberals queasy. “Pour Out Thy Wrath!” is a collection of verses from Psalms and Lamentations that calls on God to punish not the Jews who obey his laws but—for a change!—the evildoers who want to destroy them.

Needless to say, this section about confronting the enemy was the first part of the Passover Haggada that was eliminated by self-styled Jewish progressives, by the Bernie Sanders constituency of the Jewish people. That constituency gets very angry—but it pours out its wrath on its own people instead of on its destroyers. And let’s acknowledge that when you have no incentive for aggression, it is hard even to voice aggression.CONTINUE AT SITE

Under the heel of suffocating tyranny, we became a nation of survivors who will not give up our faith, our religion and our right to live.

When the sun sets and the first stars appear on Friday evening, more than 6 million Jews in Israel will gather around their Passover Seder tables.

Sitting at beautifully set tables in cities, villages, kibbutzim and outposts, we will tell the story of our Exodus from Egypt. We will describe how persecuted, oppressed, exhausted slaves decided that they were a nation, woke up at midnight, and began the longest journey in the history of mankind, a journey that is still ongoing and will never end. The children of slaves turned overnight into the children of kings, ready and willing to pay the price of freedom.

It has been thousands of years since the Exodus. The call to “Let my people go” moved hearts and nurtured the yearning for freedom. Freedom fighters adopted the songs of the liberated slaves, adding a new dimension to human dignity, equality and basic humanity.

For 2,000 years, the Jews wandered around the world without resting. Tyrants and villains made every effort to wipe the Jews out of existence. No other nation could have survived the pressure, the horrors, the destruction and the genocide.

Under the heel of suffocating tyranny, we became a nation of survivors who will never give up our faith, our religion and our right to live. The Jewish ability to survive finds its source in the same feeling of freedom that has beat in the heart of every Jew since the Exodus. It is impossible to defeat the children of kings, whose spirit rises up even if their bodies are downtrodden. The Jews spoke of the Exodus each day, and their prayers expressed hope to return to Jerusalem, the eternal city.

Top universities in Britain are threatening to break ties with the country’s National Union of Students (NUS) following its recent election of a new controversial president accused of making antisemitic, anti-Israel and terror-sympathizing comments, the UK’s Daily Mail reported.

Students at Cambridge and Oxford announced on Thursday that they would be holding referendums on whether to split from the NUS following the election of Malia Bouattia, the report said. In 2014, while speaking at a “pro-resistance” event celebrating “Gaza and the Palestinian revolution,” Bouattia asserted that it is “problematic” to consider that “Palestine will be free” only by means of “non-violent protest.” In 2011, while attending the University of Birmingham, she called the school “a Zionist outpost” with the “largest [Jewish Society] in the country.” Bouattia has also previously attacked what she called “Zionist-led media outlets,” the report said, and more recently, voted against a NUS motion condemning ISIS because it would be “blatant Islamophobia.”

Prior to her election, Bouattia’s candidacy caused an uproar across many universities in Britain. Fifty-seven Jewish student leaders penned an open letter to the would-be president, asking her to clarify her positions. In response, Bouattia claimed she was not an antisemite, rather an anti-Zionist. “I want to be clear that for me to take issue with Zionist politics, is not me taking issue with being Jewish,” she wrote.

NUS members have now launched a campaign to disaffiliate from the student organization, the Daily Mail reported, following Bouattia’s election. Students from the universities of Durham, York, Westminster, Birmingham, Edinburgh, King’s College of London and the London School of Economics have offered their support for the disassociation campaign. On social media, Facebook pages are encouraging students to cancel their memberships with NUS.

Last December, President Obama and his environmental-activist political appointees traveled to Paris to persuade other nations to sign up for his radical climate-change agenda. This administration doesn’t care that many Americans believe climate change is exaggerated, that the scientific justification used for his regulations are flimsy, or that the models he uses to predict climate-change impacts are often biased. Instead, the administration recently launched investigations to intimidate anyone who disagrees with them.

If climate change is the real threat the Obama administration says it is, and the science is as “settled” as we are told by the liberal national media, why does the administration need to use tactics often reserved for the mafia to try to protect its own interests? What is the administration afraid of?

A few days ago, the president signed the United Nation’s Paris climate-change agreement, knowingly entering America into a contract that puts us at an economic disadvantage. Hardworking American taxpayers don’t want their government to work against their economic interests. And the president’s promises will do little to impact climate change.

The former head of the Department of Energy’s Fossil Energy Office, Charles McConnell, testified before the House Science Committee that the Clean Power Plan, the cornerstone of the president’s climate agenda, will reduce sea-level rise by the thickness of three sheets of paper. The same regulation would also reduce global temperatures by a measly 0.03 degrees Celsius, yet the plan, if implemented, would cost billions of dollars annually. That is all pain and no gain.

Today, Earth Day, President Obama will attach America’s name to the Paris Climate Agreement. Greatly affected, according to gushing accounts in the press, will be the president’s “legacy.” Unaffected, according to math, will be the threat of climate change. And left holding the bill, as seems to happen with each new acquisition for the Obama presidential library, will be the American people.

The agreement’s uselessness stems from its negotiating structure. Each country submitted a pledge of climate action, each pledge was accepted without question, and the sum of those pledges became the deal. Doe-eyed diplomats at the United Nations envisioned this process creating an “upward spiral of ambition,” as they phrased it during the 2014 Bonn Climate Conference. But the major developing countries, whose rapidly rising greenhouse-gas emissions are the driving force behind fears of climate change, care more about economic growth for their impoverished populations. So, as I wrote at National Review Online in December, they submitted pledges to continue with business as usual.

China pledged that its emissions would peak “around 2030,” precisely when the U.S. government’s national laboratory had already estimated the peak would occur. India’s pledge amounted to a slowdown from its current rate of progress. Pakistan said simply that it would “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible,” which offers nothing beyond a definition of the word “peak.”

Unsurprisingly, the sum of many pledges to do nothing is: nothing. When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compiled the pledges and compared them with its own preexisting projection, it found a temperature reduction by 2100 of only 0.2°C. When the analysts compared the pledges with the projection created by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2000, they found no improvement at all.