We All Have Ancestors Who Were Slaveholders, We All Have Ancestors Who Were Slaves, But We May Be The First To Have Allowed Our Spirits To Be Enslaved

Bodily bondage is a matter of circumstance; spiritual bondage is a matter of choice. The Democrats, having mastered bodily bondage, are now coming for our souls. We must never let them have them.

The Torah contains infinite wisdom about what it means to be human, but certain of its insights have always struck me as more relevant than others and chief among them is the concept of the “eved nirtza”. The literal translation of this two-word powerhouse of an idea is a strange one: a punctured slave. Since I am fluent in Hebrew, I have never had any reason to read the Bible in English, so I engaged in some cursory search for translation, which yielded the totally unsatisfying “bondsman” and the redundant “slave serf”. Google Translate offered a surprisingly better “submissive servant”. So it appears that the English language has no proper translation for this concept, which is a great shame because we are all rapidly gaining the lowest of low status of “punctured slaves”.

The idea of a punctured or mutilated slave comes from the idea of the jubilee, the fiftieth year in which all long-term obligations are erased and all slaves are set free. But what if a slave doesn’t want to be free? We can easily imagine an elderly man or woman who have spent their entire lives caring for their masters, who have never experienced the obligations of freedom, who are now being happily dismissed by an owner who uses the jubilee as an excuse to stop feeding them and caring for them in their less productive years and who is eager to be rid of them.

Or perhaps we are dealing with a young person, one who simply prefers the security of slavery to taking his chances out there in the cruel world. The Torah does not distinguish. It allows the slave to stay a slave, but forever, without the remittance of the next jubilee year and more than that, it orders that a physical mark be left upon that person by puncturing his or her nostril, making them visibly, humiliatingly enslaved forever. In doing so, the Torah draws a distinction between slavery of body and slavery of spirit, between circumstances beyond our control and free choice.

Even in the most dire circumstances, the jubilee gives slaves a choice, the choice most famously commented on by the American Revolutionary War hero General John Stark and which famously became the motto of the State of New Hampshire: live free or die. The Torah says that if the choices that are facing you are to stay enslaved and live a little longer or set foot outside of your owner’s compound and die, you should choose the latter because in doing so you are honoring the Almighty and thanking Him for giving you the precious gift of an indomitable spirit and the freedom to choose to follow it. Should you value your life above your freedom, God is, in essence, disavowing you as one of His children and He commands that your cowardliness, your feebleness of spirit, be forever carved in your very flesh.

One of the few things we can be sure of in this world is that slavery has always existed and always will. Tribal societies that have rarely if ever made contact with outside world are known to keep slaves, sometimes entire tribes of them. Slavery is still rampant in Africa and in less obvious forms on every other continent. They say that the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell comes from a slave owning family. Reach far enough and so do we all. Regardless of our racial or ethnic backgrounds, some of our ancestors were slaves, others were slave owners. It is simply human history and the human condition. Now Democrats, who belong to the party of slavery in America, want to weaponize this concept against their political opponents, believing themselves to have been immunized by their support for reparations. As journalist Salena Zeto has just recently tweeted, this is an exceptionally dumb move.

Most slave owners in America were Democrats and copious records are publicly available of their not so remote ancestors’ slave holding activities, activities that doubtlessly ran the entire sordid gambit from buying and selling at auction to financing slaving expeditions, to separating families, and much more. No amount of political pandering is going to shield them from the avalanche of revelations that are going to flood our ubiquitous social media channels with the, shall we say, less than valiant deeds of their great-great-grandpas.

This fate that is about to befall the Democrats because now as then they are greedy and hate freedom for others more than they love it for themselves is rich in irony. It is ironic because today’s Democrats are in no way better than their slave holding ancestors, in fact they are much, much worse. While their ancestors enslaved the BODIES of a portion of the population, in this case Americans of African descent, today’s Democrats wish to enslave all of us, not in body, but in spirit, though the body part is sure to follow. Simply put, today’s Democrats want to make “punctured slaves” from us all.

Do you work for a large corporation? Are you required to not only be adequate at your job, but believe in all the corporate nonsense that they are ramming down your throat? Are you required to not only attend “diversity training”, but actively participate in it if you want a good quarterly review? If you succumb, you are a punctured slave. “But my mortgage”, you say. “Exactly,” I answer. But I am guilty as well. I, as much as it pains me to admit it, am a punctured slave. There is much that I want to say in this essay that I will not say because I, like so many of us am walking the fine line between convincing myself that my retreat is strategic, that I have to live to fight another day, and simply admitting to myself that I am choosing life over freedom, the ability to say something even if of limited value, over the purity of saying nothing, of “dying”.

The Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War were not Japanese-style all or nothing extremists. When surrounded, they would let themselves be taken prisoner so they could live to fight another day. What they would never do, however, is allow their spirits to become enslaved or CHOOSE slavery over freedom. We should do the same. Nod our heads at their exultations of diversity or homosexuality or whatever perverted nonsense du jour is currently on the menu, but only if there is no other choice, only under protest, even if internal, never with enthusiasm, always with contempt, secure in our knowledge that if we do that, we will, one day, be truly free again.

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