And what is the status of my Freedom and yours and ours? Where are the new Revolutionaries?
Passover (or Pesach) is about finally taking more than enough abuse and leaving an abusive relationship, an abusive system. You have to see that it's abusive first, that plagues are not Love. If you don't see this, Passover is but another Fairy Tale for your dusty King James[!!!!] Bible.
I am not a Christian or Jew or Muslim, but revere the essential spirit behind these religions and other paths that have crossed my Path for their deep, spiritual lessons they teach. I have made it a point since my college days to observe all of these Holy Days in some measure - Lent, Ramadan, Passover, The Solstices. Our best teachers employ metaphors to make their lessons more powerful and better digested, and these Holy Days are powerful focal points from which to take steps forward. The symbols behind Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are no less - even while its supposed adherents happily enslave themselves in superstition rather than lessons of prophets, wise men and women [yes, there had always to be women!]. Being a "Westerner" and more impacted by the Christians, I see them a lot like Baldwin did: pretenders, lacking moral authority by their crimes; or Maya Angelou, which said her Christianity was more like a Holy Grail that daily, hourly, had to be fought for, always elusive, first requiring a boundless passion, because you were always coming up short. Like being a revolutionary, conscious a successful revolution begins a process.
Jesus, who was born and died a Jew, was also revolutionary. Undoubtedly, if you see beyond the sectarianism and religious partisanship, he was essentially trying to extend the mission of the Jews leaving Egypt and continue the Revolution. Our sects and religious parties - no better than our political parties - draw strict boundaries between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. How idiotic. How short-sighted. How ... calculated! Also, Egypt was and is in AFRICA. The Jews were escaping the terrors of Ramses II, but they were in Africa. Egypt in some historical twist ceased to be in Africa, the cradle of civilization, the site of the oldest Jewish synagogue [Ethiopia]. What does the breaking of these continuums of philosophy and geography do to break the bonds that tie us and form a cohesive and coherent moral story?
What is Pharoah teaching you today?
So, on this Passover: how's your state of Freedom? Broken? What old, worn-out, diseased ideas are you chained to? Where is your Liberation? How many injustices and profanities will you swallow before you gather what you can and move on?
Tonight, I will sit at my boveda with my Eggun [ancestors] and read the Passover story from Exodus. I will do so conscious of a strong, historical thread linking that old Mother continent, Africa, with Judaism, Christianity, Islam; our common class struggle; and our spiritual prisons, our economic prisons, whose bars need tearing down. Conscious that it was not at the first abuse we stood up but after 210 years of slavery. This seems strange in hindsight, but don't we all know co-conspirators? Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, wrote about these Jews in the camps and what they did to survive and what they had to become, as bad as their captors, and equally weak-in-spirit.
How often do we turn against our comrades, empowering the wicked, degenerate Values of our oppressors and cowarding from the human values?
CHANGE BEGINS WITH ME is a reality. We can all be a Moses, a Jesus, a Mohammed, a Sojourner Truth, an Emma Goldman, a Fidel, a Mao, a Bolivar, a Boukman. When the knife hits the bone and you scream "Enough!" depends on your constitution and what you are ready to give up. Fidel admonished us many years ago that the duty of a revolutionary is to make a Revolution, not to sit on your porch waiting for the corpse of Imperialism to be brought passed.
I guess you must at some point see the civilization around you as being fundamentally wicked. My co-workers/co-conspirators who would take milk from a baby because some government rules allow it is a daily, profound reminder we just might do better under the Taliban than suffer another hour of such nonsense. That many of my co-workers/co-conspirators digest this whole and seem to gain a sense of power speaks to lack of moral and ethical authority the West and Christianity have.
For, Christianity no more exists than Judaism or Islam. The distinction between them is rather like the distinction between Mexico, the USA, and Canada: political boundaries in what Nature created as one cohesive land-mass. Together, these teachings speak to a powerful revolution of human society. Separate, we are prisoners in ghettos, under the boot of an overlord, wage-slaves, tyrannized. Ramses II's troops may have drowned in that sea, but the pharoah lives on and on and continues to amass new troops.
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