Religion Dispatches
…ructs: “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Leviticus 19:34 is even more direct: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” 4. Ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So much for “blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9) or Jesus’ admonishment to “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the…
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…odus is not merely the story of Moses leading his people out of slavery in Egypt. “I came to see this as a journey that passes from generation to generation.” For Ganz, the story of Moses and the story of David and Goliath are not merely ancient tales of God’s champions, but the story of how we live: metaphorical maps of who we are, who we might become, and how we might get there. Ganz’s father was a rabbi, and a military chaplain during WWII; man…
Read More…hy am I doing this?’ I think of the conversation that took place in Cairo, Egypt, between an Egyptian Christian pastor who has been severely persecuted by Islam and a man named Lou Engle” (Engle is the theocracy-minded founder of The Call, a fundamentalist youth movement, who is leading a 40-day fast to pass Proposition 8.) “When Lou was in Cairo, Egypt, this pastor said to him, as a pastor that suffers at the hands of radical Islam, he said, ‘The…
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…observances. The biblical commandment to commemorate the liberation out of Egypt understood that the non-Israelite community who joined the Israelites were required to undergo circumcision before eating the paschal offering. So, clearly the Bible in Exodus understands that this is indeed an exclusive, even tribal, celebration and experience. More importantly is that the seder itself is a rabbinic institution, not a biblical one. Suggesting that th…
Read MoreThe year President Sadat was killed I lived in Cairo. That was 1981. Egypt is just across the water from the Saudi Arabian peninsula so it occurred to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and w…
Read More…not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” That’s pretty much it. Being an “alien” (the Bible’s term for a migrant) is a part of the Israelite identity. Abraham was a migrant, Joseph was a migrant (albeit unwillingly), Moses was a political refugee, Ruth was an economic refugee, virtually the entire nation was sent off into exile in Babylon, and so on and so forth. Because of all these experiences, the law b…
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…om his ugly abandonment by his brothers to his unexpected rise to power in Egypt, to the the happy if still awkward family reunion down the line. But this doesn’t mean the Muslim world doesn’t produce its own literature and media, which has progressively become more and more sophisticated in terms of the quality of storytelling and production. Until the rise of social media and indigenous film production, though, this media was mostly the written…
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…women cover their heads, how’s this?: Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and Bahrain. That’s 15 countries, including the most populous, Egypt. And while I’m not sure about The Sudan, there are of course strong restrictions around women’s dress in Saudi Arabia. That’s possibly 2 countries for the other side. (In fact, in the whole Muslim world, only two oth…
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…against Egypt and other Arab nations determined to destroy it. But in fact Egypt massed troops on Israel’s border only because the Egyptians believed (from faulty intelligence) that Israel was preparing to invade its ally, Syria. Though that wasn’t true, it is true that Israeli military leaders were urging their civilian government to fight a war sooner rather than later. The Israelis knew that the Egyptian army was far too weak to resist the Jewi…
Read More…t claimed credit. They also gave ISIS credit for attacks in Nigeria and in Egypt a few days before. Earlier in the year a group of Muslim separatists said to be associated with ISIS took over a town in Mindanao, the insurgent region of Southern Philippines, and controlled it for months in a stand-off with the Filipono army. And, of course, this past November a rented truck veered down a bicycle path in lower Manhattan, killing eight; the driver, a…
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