The phrase "crushing labor" appears repeatedly in the Torah's account of the Egyptian exile and enslavement, in the text of the Haggadah, and in the symbolism of the seder observances. What is crushing labor?
Very touching. Heartbreaking in the beginning, then uplifting of the spirit.
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That is the most beautiful thing that I have ever read. It really gives us a sense of what is really important.
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Boy did I need to read this one today!
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4 starters, a witty title: indeed, we scoop, as it were, spoonfuls of His goodness and light whenever we delve in2 His Word.
But the article itself, also, is a wonderfully fresh restatement of Koheleth's message in ECCLESIASTES, i.e. "What profit hath man of all his labor wherein he laboreth under the sun?" "All things toil to weariness; man cannot utter it, the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do; and, behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind..." "So I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun was grievous unto me; for all is vanity and a striving after wind."
In the end, Koheleth realizes, "The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear G-d, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole man."
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Yes, indeedy! As Murray Bookchin points out in his sweeping historical accounts of the history of enslavement, Judaism alone of all the world's religions celebrated the revolutionary, liberatory ideal. Who were the Maccabees, after all, some Calvinists denying sensuality and waiting for the next world for their happiness? No! They were the Hammer--not indiscriminately exterminating infidels and the ritually unclean, forcing their notions of divinity down someone else's throat, but brave men who took solace & counsel from God's Word in order to throw off the cruel yoke of the oppressor and make life right here on earth as it should be. Free. Today, we live to work and work to live, a cruel & infinitely more insidious tyranny than that practiced by the Romans & Egyptians because we've come to accept without question the "laws" that science has "discovered"--laws to which we must be subject, just like all the other unthinking beasts. Imagine, nice Jewish boys like Steven Pinker saying so!
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