Fathers & Sons: Pesach, Continuity, and Redemption
by Prof. Eugene Narrett - copyright 2006
“That which we have heard to be true and our fathers told us, we shall not withhold from their sons — recounting unto the final generation the praises of Hashem, His might and His wonders that He has wrought. He established a Testimony in Jacob and a Torah in Israel which He commanded our fathers to make known to their sons, so that the last generation may know, — sons yet to be born — they will mature and tell their own sons…” [Psalm 78:3-6]
The essence of Pesach is reading and discussing the Haggada, the story celebrating the redemption of the Jewish people from Egypt, to receive the Torah and “be a free people in our land.” Rambam established the halacha that “in every single generation, one must show himself as if he had personally left Egypt” (Hilchot Chametz u’Matza 7:6). As translator and prisoner of Zion Daniel Pinner comments, “the reading of the Haggada, and the explanations thereof, must be a living and dynamic experience,” thoughts, beliefs, and actions must be unified just as Judaism is a unified way of life, of understanding and being.
Of course, if fathers and sons are separated this essential rejuvenation and unification of the entire people and its purpose is impaired; & cannot truly occur. Such separation violates the continuity of the generations, the chinuch (education), the mixture of joy, remembrance and identity that makes a Jew. A Jewish child must be able to look up into his father’s eyes every night; especially on the nights of telling the Haggada… Because the Hebrew root of chinuch, education is “grace,” a wise and beautiful insight, than the grace of Pesach, re-connecting the bond of the Creator and His people through their generations is rooted in this connection of fathers teaching their sons.
Everyone living in America (indeed, in all the Anglophone nations) and in Israel in our days knows that ‘father-optional’ families have been the standard for thirty years. ‘Disposable dads,’ expelled from their homes by the “no-fault” divorce industry and its self-serving, stone-hearted judges, lawyers, and feminist ‘advocates’ are creating nations in a free fall toward disaster, nation in which it is routine for children to be deprived, usually without cause, by whim and hearsay, of the love, guidance, teaching and security of a father’s daily presence.[1]
As Israel will not survive the Supremacist, activist - Pharaonic court, State Department flunkies in the Knesset or the anti-Jewish agenda of the media and other modernist groups, neither will Israel nor any nation survive the anti-father agenda at the suicidal core of western civilization [2]. How can it, when the assault on fathers is essential to western civilization’s Greek myths and violent, perverse theogeny that have been hacking for over two millennia at the Jewish roots onto which they were audaciously grafted.
How much worse then, how suicidal (like other trends in Israel and among Jews in recent decades) that this ethnic cleansing of fathers is routine in the nation whose identity, continuity, concept of sovereignty and memory depends on the connectedness of fathers and sons, fathers and their children.
A father cannot “show” his sons and daughters what it is like to leave Egypt when he is not there; he cannot show them because the STATE shows the children the opposite when it expels a father from his home and makes him a ‘visitor’ in his children’s lives, usually because the wife has chosen the ‘father-optional’ plan so celebrated in mass culture, and not only in mass culture… The STATE and its legal elites, and too many women show their children that their father is a nuisance, an irrelevance, an alternate weekend baby-sitter, not a teacher, not a living presence and source of authority and object of respect… Yes, it is common.
Suddenly innocent and loving fathers are expelled from their homes. How many expelled fathers thought of this in the terrible days last summer when the criminal expulsion of Jews, sinat chinam and without cause or excuse was an example of what millions of fathers have suffered for three decades to almost universal silence and with the media, to the extent that they notice at all, cheering on the deadly process and vilifying its victims.
The very last prophet of the Jewish people warned that “a day, burning like an oven” would come when the hearts of fathers and children had been separated from each other and thus from Hashem, when grace had been driven from Israel. They must be re-united to turn the entire nation to Hashem in Jewish renewal. “Or else Eliyahu will smite the land with destruction!” And what does Israel face these past 35 years that it has turned from its roots, turned from the primacy of the father-child bond and from everything it requires and represents? It faces DESTRUCTION, suicide, uprooting, the Hellenistic, antifamily cultural paradigm of perversions and madness….
This Pesach, Jews can consider how deeply we are in bondage by considering how many fathers and children are forcibly, needlessly and illegally separated from each other, another irreplaceable year. They can consider the ways this fact is ignored, trivialized or misrepresented; consider yet another way the nation is being destroyed so irrationally; they can and should consider what the Haggada says about fathers in families and the life, pride, joy, education, grace and freedom of the nation, and about rebirth.
Then and only then we will have from Hashem, “a sun of righteousness with healing in its wings.” Soon, it is needed very soon.
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1 see Dr. Sanford Braver, “Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths; the Surprising Truths about Fathers, Children and Divorce” (Tarcher - Putnam, Penguin, 1998). This text is the most comprehensive extant survey of divorce.
2 See Hesiod’s Theogeny [”the generations of the gods”] and my writings on their place in western civilization, e.g. “Why the West Wars on the Jews: Origins I, Love” or “Western Civilization’s problems with Memory, History and Survival.”