In Parshat Mishpatim, the Torah builds a society of responsibility: protect the widow, guard the orphan, lend to the poor, restrain the creditor, pay damages, return what you hold as collateral before nightfall.
This is structural compassion.
And then comes the line that seemingly defines the entire architecture:
“You shall not favor the poor in his dispute.” (Exodus 23:3)
Care for the vulnerable, but do not tilt the scale for them.
The Torah draws a boundary that modern culture struggles to maintain: the difference between moral obligation and legal judgment.
Society should be generous, while the legal system must be neutral.
In the current climate, that distinction feels almost alien. Sympathy gathers momentum as institutions rush to align themselves with the seemingly weaker side in an “oppressor/oppressed” narrative. The presumption of righteousness often follows the presumption of disadvantage. It becomes an empathy swamp that drowns moral and legal clarity.
Mishpatim resists that impulse.
The courtroom is not a venue for moral correction. It is a place for weighing evidence. A judge may not rule by instinct, pressure, or empathy. Justice must be blind because fairness depends on restraint.
The Torah has forms of structural redistribution via charity and debt release, but it refuses to let generosity rewrite verdicts. Liability flows from action. If you damage, you pay. If you steal, you repay. Identity and circumstance do not determine guilt.
Call for Justice for Hamas has been counter-cultural
The Torah denies the emotional satisfaction of siding automatically with the weaker party. It insists that compassion operate through obligation, not through distorted judgment.
Mishpatim protects the vulnerable by strengthening society, while protecting justice by disciplining the court. Because when justice refuses to bend, society can remain both compassionate and fair.
Black Americans have long used a phrase that captures a structural grievance: over-policed and under-protected.
The complaint is that disproportionate scrutiny produces disproportionate outcomes. If people in one neighborhood are stopped more often, searched more often, cited more often, it will generate more arrests. Those arrests are then cited as proof that the scrutiny was justified. The cycle validates itself.
Israel occupies a similar structural position in international institutions.
At the United Nations Human Rights Council, Israel is the only country assigned a permanent, standalone agenda item — Item 7: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Every regular session includes debate under this item. No other state – not China, not Iran, not North Korea – is subject to a standing country-specific agenda item.
The numbers reinforce the asymmetry. Since its creation in 2006, the Council has adopted more condemnatory resolutions against Israel than against any other country. In multiple sessions, Israel alone has faced more resolutions than the rest of the world combined.
Volume creates narrative.
Layer onto that the density of global media in Jerusalem – more permanent foreign correspondents than in most active war zones – and the scrutiny becomes constant. Every military action is instantly internationalized. Allegations become juridical language before investigations conclude. Terms like “war crimes” and “genocide” enter discourse early and stick.
The latest war began with an attack Israel did not initiate and repeatedly stated it did not seek. It conditioned an end to fighting simply on the return of hostages and disarmament, to which Gazans repeatedly refused. While urban combat against embedded fighters produces tragic civilian loss, the reported civilian-to-combatant ratios in this conflict fell well below ranges seen in other recent urban wars. That context rarely leads headlines.
Black Americans understand how presumption operates. When systems assume danger, data accumulates accordingly. When institutions assume guilt, findings follow.
“It’s the broader narrative of who belongs and who doesn’t, which allows certain groups to tap in the police department, to use the police department or weaponized the police department in ways that are conducive to violence against Black people” – Lallen T. Johnson, Department of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University
Similarly, the United Nations decided that Jews do not belong in Jerusalem – the holiest city in Judaism – or east of the 1949 Armistice Lines / the “West Bank”, so have developed a criminal system that specifically and persistently targets Jews. The mere presence of Jews is labelled “illegal” and an affront to international law.
“Condemning all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, [presence of Jews] character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” – UN Security Council Resolution 2334
The United Nations made a law declaring Jewish presence at their holiest location to be illegal
When one minority community, whether it be racial or national, lives under permanent investigation, outcomes will look like confirmation of wrongdoing, even when standards are warped and unevenly applied.
Over-policing corrodes trust at home. Over-condemnation corrodes credibility abroad.
Justice requires symmetry. Blacks and Jews know it all too well.
In November 1943, Heinrich Himmler sent a telegram to Haj Amin al-Husseini on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
He wrote of a “shared recognition of the enemy” and “the joint fight against it.”
“The enemy” meant world Jewry.
That phrasing did real work. It turned a people into a threat. Once Jews were cast as a civilizational danger – “Jewish invaders” – their removal became a duty. Vocabulary cleared the ground and policy followed. Then came the machinery.
This is how collective persecution begins: define a group as the problem.
Eighty years later, the same grammar keeps resurfacing.
In Doha, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, used the phrase “common enemy” to describe Israel. The target was the world’s only Jewish state. The effect was to cast Jewish sovereignty itself as something humanity must oppose.
That language strips legitimacy and treats existence as offense. It moves from argument to exclusion with the implied goal of eradication.
The pattern appears in American activism as well. Speaking at a conference hosted by American Muslims for Palestine, Zahra Billoo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations urged audiences to “oppose the polite Zionists too,” grouping mainstream Jewish institutions — synagogues, federations, Hillel chapters, civil-rights groups — into the camp of adversaries, “they are your enemies.”
The construction never changes.
Nazi Himmler: Jews are the common enemy. CAIR Billoo: Zionists are the enemy. UN Albanese: Israel is the common enemy.
Different decades. Different accents. Identical structure.
Demonization targets identity. Once identity becomes the indictment, anything feels justified and the line between debate and dehumanization disappears.
After World War II, the human-rights system was built to prevent precisely this logic — the idea that an entire people could be pushed outside the moral community. Yet the vocabulary has returned, polished and respectable, spoken from podiums that claim the language of justice.
When the Nazis called Jews “the enemy,” the world should have drawn the line right there. No conferences. No nuance. No excuses. Anyone who speaks that way disqualifies themselves.
That same rule applies now.
Human-rights officials who talk like antisemitic propagandists should lose their mandates. Activists who label Jews the enemy lose the claim to civil-rights leadership positions. Institutions that tolerate this language lose credibility.
The mob put a yellow Jewish Star on Jews 80 years ago and told everyone that they are the enemy. The mob is labelling Jews as Zionists today and doing the same. We shouldn’t pause to take action, if “never again” means anything.
One fact should dominate any serious discussion of land and power in the West Bank: under Palestinian Authority law, a Palestinian who sells land to a Jew can face the death penalty.
That is not rumor or polemic. It is statute.
In areas governed by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and by Hamas in Gaza, selling land to Israeli Jews is prosecuted as treason. The charge is brought under Jordanian Penal Code No. 16 of 1960 — particularly Articles 113–118 and Article 114 on aiding the enemy — still in force in the West Bank, along with the PLO Revolutionary Penal Code of 1979. A 2014 decree by Mahmoud Abbas reaffirmed that such land sales constitute “collaboration with the enemy.” Courts have issued death sentences under these provisions.
The defining element is the identity of the buyer. A private real-estate transaction becomes a capital crime because the purchaser is Jewish and therefore legally framed as part of the “enemy.” Most countries reserve treason for espionage, armed rebellion, or wartime assistance to a hostile state. The Palestinian framework instead applies classic treason law to a civilian property sale — explicitly treating Jews, as a national collective, as the enemy for purposes of capital punishment.
Yet when the New York Times recently acknowledged this, it did so quietly, almost apologetically, inside an article whose primary concern was Israeli policy. The focus was not the law itself, but the risk that Israeli transparency might expose Palestinian Arabs to danger because the law exists.
That framing reverses cause and effect.
Israel was portrayed as aggressive and ideological, while the Palestinian Authority’s capital punishment for a racially defined transaction was treated as background context. Israeli officials were labeled “right-wing” and scrutinized by name. The PA, which enforces a law rooted in religious antisemitism, was spared comparable description. Its ideology went largely uninterrogated.
The article even suggested that sealed land records once served as a form of protection for Palestinians. That sentence alone concedes the nature of the regime. A governing authority from which citizens must be shielded because it may kill them for selling property to Jews is not a peace partner. It is a theocratic system enforcing ethnic taboos with lethal force.
If a Jewish state executed Jews for selling land to Arabs, that law would dominate media coverage. Instead, when Jews are the forbidden buyers, the death penalty becomes an inconvenience and the exposure of it becomes the problem.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “warns that the current trajectory on the ground, including this decision [to unseal the names of the owners of land making private real estate transactions easier], is eroding the prospect for the two-State solution. He reiterates that all Israeli settlements [the physical presence of Jews east of the 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel and the Kingdom of Transjordan, which specifically stated were not to be considered borders] in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and their associated regime and infrastructure, have no legal validity and are in flagrant violation of international law, including relevant United Nations resolutions.”
This is how extremist antisemitism is normalized: by treating it as an immutable local condition, while directing moral outrage at those who reveal it. When selling land to a Jew carries a death sentence, that fact is not incidental. It is the moral center of the conflict.
When Jews are murdered in synagogues in Europe, the United Nations speaks plainly. The attacks are labeled antisemitic. The violence is called terrorism. Solidarity with the Jewish community is explicit, and justice is demanded.
When Jews are murdered in synagogues in Jerusalem, that clarity vanishes.
The same act—killing Jews at prayer—suddenly requires “context.” Terrorism is softened into “violence.” Antisemitism dissolves into “tensions.” Victims are anonymized, motives left unexplored, ideology carefully avoided. Language that flows easily in Europe locks up entirely in Israel’s capital.
UN Secretary-General never calls killing of Jews in Jerusalem rooted in “antisemitism.”
This is not rhetorical drift. It is doctrine.
The UN has formally adopted the Palestinian demand that Jews should not live in Jerusalem. Through measures such as UN Security Council Resolution 2334, it asserts that Jews may not alter the city’s “demographic composition.” That position freezes Jerusalem at a moment immediately following the Jordanian army’s ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the eastern half of the city between 1948 and 1967. Jewish expulsion is accepted as a legitimate baseline. Jewish return is treated as a violation of international law.
This is not neutrality. It is the institutionalization of an antisemitic premise: that Jews, uniquely among peoples, have no right to live in their holiest city.
Once that premise is accepted, Jewish life in Jerusalem becomes conditional. Jewish neighborhoods are labeled illegal. Jewish prayer is framed as provocation. Jewish presence itself is cast as destabilizing. Violence against Jews no longer reads as antisemitism but as political reaction to an allegedly illegitimate reality.
Under those conditions, motive cannot be named. Calling synagogue murders in Jerusalem “antisemitic terrorism” would require acknowledging that Jews are being targeted for who they are, in a city where the UN has already ruled they should not be. It would expose the connection between UN doctrine and the moral evasions that follow.
So the motive is omitted.
Aftermath of Jews slaughtered in synagogue
The UN does not merely tolerate the idea of Jews being removed from Jerusalem; it has encoded it. The language is bureaucratic—demographics, international law, peace—but the result is stark: a city where Jewish existence is treated as unlawful, and Jewish murder as a political complication.
The contrast with the rest of the world makes the pattern undeniable. The UN knows exactly how to speak about antisemitism. That moral vocabulary disappears only in Judaism’s holiest city, in the Jewish State’s capital, because the United Nations has endorsed the antisemitic wishes of radical jihadists.
By any ordinary moral standard, the murder of worshippers in a house of prayer should provoke the clearest possible response: name the crime, demand justice, stand with the people and the government under attack. No hedging. No balancing. No political caveats.
The United Nations does that, except when Israeli Jews are the victims.
Read the paired statements issued by António Guterres after two attacks on places of worship: one at a mosque in Pakistan, the other at a synagogue in Jerusalem. The contrast reveals a complete moral collapse at the heart of the global body.
This matters even more because the Jerusalem statement was issued before Israel responded to October 7, 2023. Before Gaza. Before counteroffensives. Before a single Israeli military action the UN would later cite as justification for its posture.
Restraint was not urged because of Israeli action. It was urged instead of justice itself.
In Pakistan, the Secretary-General “condemns in the strongest terms” the attack on worshippers. He demands that the perpetrators be “identified and brought to justice.” He affirms the “solidarity of the United Nations with the Government and people of Pakistan” and situates the crime squarely within the global fight against terrorism and violent extremism.
That is what moral clarity looks like.
Yet in Jerusalem, when Jews are murdered outside a synagogue in 2023—on International Holocaust Remembrance Day- a whisper. The Secretary-General “strongly condemns” the attack. He offers condolences. He notes that it is abhorrent to attack a place of worship. And then he pivots—not to justice, not to accountability, not to solidarity with the state charged with protecting its citizens.
The synagogue becomes a geographic detail. The murders are folded into “the current escalation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.” There is no demand that the killers be found. No insistence on prosecution. No solidarity with the Government of Israel. No recognition that deterrence requires consequence.
This is not diplomatic caution. It is moral abdication.
This did not begin with Guterres
If this were merely the idiosyncrasy of one Secretary-General nearing the end of his ten year tenure, it might be dismissed as tone or temperament. It is not.
In 2014, after Arab terrorists entered a synagogue in Jerusalem wielding meat cleavers and hacked Jewish worshippers to death, Ban Ki-moon issued a statement that follows the exact same structure.
He “strongly condemns” the attack. He offers condolences. And then—almost immediately—he moves “beyond today’s reprehensible incident” to discuss “clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli security forces.” The massacre is submerged into “the situation.” The killers disappear into context.
There is no call to bring the perpetrators to justice. No solidarity with the Israeli government. No affirmation of Israel’s duty to eradicate the threat.
Instead, Ban Ki-moon calls for leadership on “both sides”, urges all parties to avoid “provocative rhetoric,” and frames the slaughter of Jews in a synagogue as a destabilizing dimension of the conflict—not as terrorism demanding elimination.
Different Secretary-General. Same choreography.
The explanation is not mysterious because the United Nations does not conceptualize Palestinian violence as extremism.
Extremism, in UN doctrine, is something that happens elsewhere—to states battling jihadists, insurgents, or transnational terror networks. Palestinian murder, by contrast, is treated as political expression: contextualized by grievance, softened by narrative, absorbed into a permanent dispute. It is violence to be managed, not defeated.
That is why justice is demanded in Pakistan and restraint is demanded in Jerusalem. One fits the UN’s extremism framework. The other does not.
“Restraint” here is not a plea for peace. It is a veto on justice.
When Jews are murdered, the UN permits mourning but denies agency. Condolences are extended to families, while the legitimacy of Jewish self-defense and Jewish sovereignty is quietly withheld. Sympathy is offered—but solidarity with the state is conspicuously absent.
The global body created in the shadow of the Holocaust cannot bring itself to say, plainly, that Jews murdered in synagogues deserve the same moral response as anyone else. It cannot say that Jewish sovereignty is legitimate. It cannot say that justice must follow Jewish bloodshed.
And the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs), its perennial wards, must be granted absolution.
Israel should draw the only conclusion that matters: the United Nations is not a moral compass or humanitarian organization. It is purely a political instrument.
Years ago in Australia, I rented a car and learned what every American driver eventually does overseas: instinct is not universal.
About 45 minutes into my first drive, I took a left turn too wide and drifted into the wrong lane. No crash. No damage. Just a slow, awkward mistake at a four-way stop.
An older driver exploded at me. Shouting. Cursing. A full theatrical performance of outrage.
I apologized immediately. I explained I was American and adjusting to the other side of the road. That only intensified things. Now the insults expanded — not just me, but my country and people like me. He wasn’t correcting a traffic error. He was indicting a type.
I didn’t engage. I blew him a kiss and wished him a good day. His fury was his burden, not my identity.
Then I drove away and forgot him.
I could afford to. He had no power. No platform. No mechanism to convert temper into consequence. He was just a man yelling at an intersection.
But imagine if he did.
Imagine if he persuaded Australian officials that Americans are inherently unsafe drivers. Rental cars should require warning stickers: CAUTION — AMERICAN DRIVER and charge them higher insurance premiums. Restricted roads. Special licensing. Even banning them from the road. Imagine it caught on and other countries adopted the same “precautions.”
Now the incident isn’t about a bad turn. It’s an inditement of an entire people, with irritation morphing to governance.
Apply this to western antisemitism.
The Mechanism
Western antisemitism rarely begins as doctrine. It begins as emotion: resentment, humiliation, envy. A story forms around the feeling. Jews are clannish, privileged, manipulative, alien.
From there, the sequence is almost mechanical:
Anecdote becomes stereotype. Stereotype becomes narrative. Narrative becomes moral permission. Permission becomes policy.
By the time formal discrimination appears, the ethical resistance has already been dissolved. People do not feel they are doing wrong. They feel they are being sensible.
The danger is not the man screaming at the intersection; every society has loud fools.
The danger is when the fool’s story becomes civic common sense.
Why Pride Isn’t Enough
One response to the current wave of western antisemitism is to ignore the screamers and turn inward: strengthen Jewish identity, deepen learning, fortify community. There is wisdom there. Cultural confidence is stabilizing.
But pride is psychological armor. It is not structural protection.
You can build a stronger community life. That does not prevent surrounding institutions from teaching your neighbors to see you as a problem to be managed. Parallel vitality does not neutralize hostile narratives embedded in the systems that shape public belief.
Resilience helps you endure hostility. It does not stop hostility from becoming rule.
Where the Real Battle Is: Public Schools
Street hate is episodic. Institutional formation is durable.
Public schools are the key civic storytelling monopolies. For more than a decade, nearly every American child passes through them, and is taught and tested by them. That is where moral categories are formed, historical legitimacy is assigned, and group identities are framed as native or suspect.
If students absorb a picture of Jews as recent interlopers, racial outsiders, uniquely powerful, or structurally oppressive by nature, then the Melbourne intersection has already found its legislature.
Western antisemitism does not need crude slurs. It adapts. It speaks the language of equity, power, decolonization, and social justice — while recycling ancient claims of Jewish illegitimacy and hidden control.
A new syllabus needs to be established.
Students should be taught that Judaism is the ancient Israelite civilization of the Hebrew Bible; that Jewish peoplehood originates in the land of Israel long before Christianity and Islam; that both later faiths arise in dialogue with — and departure from — that earlier tradition. That millions of Hispanics today are descendants of conversos – Jews who were forced to convert by the Inquisition hundreds of years ago, and that the majority of Jews in Israel today are descended from Muslim-majority countries that forced them to flee.
Today, the opposite is taught at the most antisemitic public schools – like those in California and Massachusetts – where Jews are cast as “oppressors,” “racists” and only care about themselves.
The public schools are setting the environment, and while I respect Bret Stephens, Jewish pride is ill equipped to address the current curriculum.
Yes, Jews should spend more time focused on their Judaism, but that will not insulate them from a hostile society. Jews and all decent Americans should take back K-12 education from the socialist-jihadi alliance that has assumed control of many school boards and unions.
An immediate effort should be to advance more charter schools and enable funding of non-public schools. Breaking the monopoly of school unions is a must to save the future.
Another remedy would be to pass a law that any school union that does not take immediate action to report, investigate and discipline (as appropriate) incidents of racism and antisemitism, will lose its right to collect dues out of paychecks and to negotiate contracts with the relevant municipality.
Public schools should also be prohibited from using materials provided by another government, such as Qatar which has been funding K-12 textbooks and trips to Qatar. This initiative is being advance under the “Transparency in Reporting of Adversarial Contributions to Education Act,” the TRACE Act.
As opposed to the COVID-19 pandemic which mostly impacted older people, the western antisemitism pandemic has consumed the youth, courtesy of a deeply broken and plagued public school system.
We cannot pretend it doesn’t matter and there’s nothing to be done. Not just for ourselves, but to save the West from the furious fools in the intersections who have gained real power.
The final season of Game of Thrones disappointed many viewers.
For years the show carried two storylines: an existential threat to humanity and a political struggle for the throne. When the ending came, the cosmic danger faded first and the camera returned to palace intrigue. Technically both plots resolved but emotionally, it felt like the story had mistaken the setup for the destination.
That structural tension comes to mind every year at Parshat Yitro.
The most dramatic moment in Jewish history — Sinai, revelation to the entire people, the Ten Commandments — arrives astonishingly early in the Torah. If receiving the law is the climax, why does it appear so soon in the Bible?
Because it isn’t the ending; it’s the beginning.
Sinai gives the people a constitution. It shapes their character, their obligations, their relationship with God and each other. But from the very first promise to Abraham, the Torah’s narrative is moving somewhere concrete — toward a land.
Walk the text and it reads like a map: journeys, wells, borders, inheritances. The story is geographic as much as spiritual. It is about building a nation in a place.
Torah and land were always meant to live together.
Torah without a homeland leaves Jewish life suspended in theory. A homeland without Torah loses its moral compass. Sinai forms the people; the land is where that formation is meant to be lived.
Over a thousand years of exile forced a different emphasis. When Jews lost soil, they carried scrolls. When borders disappeared, mitzvot became portable homeland and identity. That devotion was critical for survival.
Now history has shifted again.
For the first time since antiquity, a plurality of Jews lives in the Land of Israel, and soon it will likely be a majority. The part of the Torah that once felt distant and theoretical — sovereignty, agriculture, public responsibility, national life — is no longer abstract. It is daily reality.
Which reframes Parshat Yitro.
Sinai is not the finale of the Jewish story. It is the preparation. The training. The moment a people receives the tools it will need to build something lasting in its own land.
The Torah itself tells us this by where it ends: at the edge of the land, looking forward.
After centuries of mastering how to live as guests in other people’s history, Jews are being invited back to the main storyline: living in the land, with the Torah in hand.
The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela was an eight year travelog from circa 1165 to 1173, chronicling the pilgrimage of a Jew from Spain to the Jewish holy land.
António Guterres keeps saying the United Nations is no longer the institution it was 80 years ago. Power must be rebalanced he claims. The Security Council must reflect today’s world he urges. Post–World War II structures must evolve.
Fine. But if that claim is serious, the UN’s most glaring failure to modernize is Gaza.
The system built never to end
One UN body remains frozen in 1948: UNRWA. One vision for a state is lost to contours proposed in 1947: Palestine.
UNRWA administers a refugee regime found nowhere else:
Refugee status is inherited indefinitely
It never expires through citizenship or resettlement
It is tied to a “right of return” not to Gaza or a future Palestinian state, but to Israel itself
No other refugee population is treated this way. Bosnians were not. Syrians are not. Ukrainians are not.
Every other refugee crisis is handled by UNHCR, where refugee status is temporary and meant to end. Only Palestinians are placed in a system designed to remain permanent.
Ending inherited refugee status would not end humanitarian aid. It would end the political weaponization of refugeehood.
Why Bosnia exposes the category error
After the Balkan wars, the Dayton Accords included a right of return—but it was finite, individual, and intra-state. It applied to homes lost in the same war for the same people, and aimed to undo ethnic cleansing, not undo borders.
Gaza’s claimed “right of return” is fundamentally different: intergenerational, extra-territorial, and demographic—designed to reopen 1948 and negate another UN member state.
Guterres’ contradiction
Guterres calls for reform everywhere except where reform would actually make peace possible.
As long as the UN maintains an inherited right of return into Israel and the proposed borders which have long since past their expiry:
Maximalism is rewarded
Compromise is delegitimized
Negotiations become theater
Gaza remains permanently “temporary”
This is not neutrality; it is an institutional choice to preserve claims that prevent settlement.
Reform that applies everywhere except where it matters most is not reform. It is avoidance.
The unavoidable conclusion
Until the UN ends the one system designed never to end, Gaza will not be governed toward peace—but toward the permanence of conflict.
And no amount of rhetoric about modernization can disguise that refusal.
The Exodus is often told as a single story of liberation, but Parshat B’shalach insists on a sharper distinction. The plagues and the splitting of the sea were aimed at different audiences, and they served different purposes. Confusing them obscures the Torah’s deepest lesson about real freedom.
The plagues were for Egypt. They dismantled Pharaoh’s authority, exposed the limits of imperial power, and forced the expulsion of a people the system refused to release voluntarily. Their purpose was external and coercive. Egypt had to be broken in order to let go.
But expulsion is not freedom. Being pushed out does not mean having moved on.
That is what the splitting of the sea achieved.
The splitting of the sea was for the Jews. At that moment, the message shifted inward. The people needed to see that the world they had left could no longer be reentered. When the waters closed, the route back to slavery closed with them. The drowning of the Egyptians was not vengeance; it was finality. History sealed behind them.
This distinction explains why the Exodus alone was incomplete. Egypt released the Jews, but the Jews had not yet released Egypt. As long as return remained imaginable, fear and discomfort could always make bondage sound reasonable again. Freedom cannot take root while the past remains accessible.
Only after that closure does the Song at the Sea emerge. The song is not merely celebration; it is internalization. A people sings when it understands that a threshold has been crossed and that what lies behind is no longer an option. Memory, at that moment, stabilizes rather than seduces. The song teaches that freedom requires acceptance of permanence.
That lesson extends beyond the biblical moment. Systems and institutions can serve as tools of liberation in one era and become obstacles to maturity in another. They remain attractive precisely because they feel moral, familiar, and legitimizing long after their original purpose has passed.
The United Nations increasingly functions as a structure that keeps the road backwards open. Born from catastrophe, it was meant to prevent a return to unconstrained power and mass violence. Over time, however, it has become a place where history is managed rather than concluded.
Consider the 1947 Partition Plan which would create a Jewish State and an Arab State in the region of Palestine. It was the logical vision of the moment and Jews accepted it and built a state. The Arabs rejected it for decades and to this date, many still believe that an Arab state will be the only reality in the region. They see a past as achievable, a Muslim-majority holy land.
Worse, the United Nations itself tells Arabs that descendants of people who lived in what is now Israel will get to move back to towns and homes. The UN continues to pass laws and resolutions to this effect, making the past the direction of time, not a future of two states living in coexistence.
The splitting of the sea teaches that freedom demands the courage to let certain paths disappear. Growth requires recognizing when a framework has completed its historical role and must be left behind. Without that willingness, societies drift endlessly between liberation and dependence, mistaking motion for progress.
The plagues ended Egypt’s control while the sea ended the possibility of return. That is the difference between being released and being free. Today, the United Nations is preventing the Israelis and the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) from transitioning to the other side of the sea, moving on to freedom for all.
Every generation must choose which comforting and destructive structures it is finally prepared to leave in the past. Today, the United Nations may be the choice before us.
First One Through 