As a consultant, this situation comes up more than occasionally, and assessing the relative weight of the prophets versus the guardians can be a rough guide to the future. When organizations are confronted with challenges or the need for change, the reactions that are provoked are often very similar. Some people respond like (or turn into) prophets; others become guardians. I think this genuinely reflects people’s responses to (potential) disruptions in either their internal or external working environments, no less in the world of arts and culture than in any other area–and sometimes more so, because the motivations for change in a non-profit are very different from those in a for-profit.

Understanding that people may respond this way can help leaders navigate through the necessary interpersonal and practical decision-making processes. Guardians can be helped to understand that not all change is bad–and that most organizations change over time, even if they don’t recognize it as such. Prophets can be encouraged to frame their views in ways that connect past and future; they can be helped to turn their vision of an inevitable future into a process that feels controlled and controllable.

At the same time, the world is rarely so black-and-white; few of us are ever 100% of anything, let alone 100% “prophet” or 100% “guardian.” We may embrace change or fear it, and sometimes we do both in equal measure. That is the most difficult place to be, because it can so easily lead to stagnation. But for most businesses and organizations it may also be the best hope–if both those leading and those being led can understand that they are in this dynamic together. This is the point when the good ideas and opportunities can be separated from the bad, using the critical judgments of those leaning in one direction or the other. It does not necessarily mean absolute consensus, but it can mean general agreement that helps an organization’s leaders to lead.

The worst situation? Whether an organization is mostly guardians or mostly prophets, the real threats come from the barbarians: those who function that way internally, or those who are outside the organization and viewed as such. The internal barbarians are the ones who may run roughshod over both the good and the bad ideas, forcing “change” but not evolution. They form alliances that fight for the status quo, but only for the status quo that applies to them. If you perceive barbarians externally, well, your problem is likely also internal. Those people are your audiences–your customers–so if you view them as barbarians, then you need to ask yourself whether you are doing enough to help these folks understand your mission and your goals.

Are there legitimate barbarians outside your gate? Probably a few. But they may be clamoring for a past they vaguely recall, or for a future they cannot articulate. Your goal is to embrace and convert them. An organization that cannot adapt to embrace its customers–and instead views them as a threat–is doomed to fail. No embrace of the future or protection of the sacred past will change that.

Until I was stopped dead in my tracks quite early on by a question about what they can do “to achieve world-class excellence.” Hmmm. (1) Nothing. (2) Should “world-class excellence” even be the goal? What on earth does that mean?

It seems as though this term–”world-class,” or sometimes offered as “world class” without the hyphen–is on the rise (again), particularly in the non-profit world. In the last couple of weeks, it has come up in materials for more organizations than I care to count, all attempting to use it as the ne plus ultra of modifiers to signal “We are awesome!” All of them miss that mark.

There are three core problems with using the term “world-class.” First, if we take it at face value, then most organizations / cities / restaurants / experiences just are not that. That’s not snobbishness; rather, that’s clearly the point: to identify one’s group with the (very few) things in this world that are absolutely outstanding and exceptional. Objectively speaking most things do not rise to that level, and most cities and institutions will not become (rapidly, anyway, or based on the wording in a website or a press release) the must-see destination of the year or the century.

Does that suggest “world-class” is just an expression of an aspiration? Perhaps. But why is that the thing to which one wants to aspire? The second problem with the term is that because it’s what so many people say, it fails the test of how to sell or market something. Don Draper never would have stood for it, you can be sure of that; I can just imagine the “Mad Men” episode in which it might come up. He’d have thought it lazy, not to mention a threat to his business: if you can say the same thing about so many different things, with no meaningfully expressed point of differentiation, then why bother saying anything at all?

As a term, “world-class” offers nothing in the way of insight to the person one is trying to seduce: the average visitor is unlikely to decide to come based on whether you have (or have not) described yourself that way, and journalists probably don’t even see the phrase any more because it’s in such common use. If you want to sell your project or engage someone in thinking about your organization or community, find a description that is organic–something that reflects who and what you really are and where you’re actually headed. People–consumers and journalists alike–are more influenced by descriptions that feel genuine and that engage their imaginations, not by generic terms that can be used by anyone.

And that’s the third problem with the term “world-class,” the problem so deftly addressed in “The Incredibles“: if absolutely everyone is special, then no one is. Or rather, then the word “special” loses most of its meaning and value. It should be ok–more than ok, really; it should be acceptable, comfortable–to be “special” within the community that a particular organization is most concerned with engaging. It’s desirable to want to express that, to tell the world that your project or entity is worthy of support and is contributing value to its community. But that does not make it “world-class” by default.

Especially in the world of culture, it’s easy to find wonderful and charming projects that excel within a particular niche–such as a museum with a very specific kind of collection, or a small performing arts group with a focus on music from a specific period or style. Organizations that adopt the “world-class” mantle actually lose their specialness by embracing terminology that no one finds compelling and that, at the same time, wipes out the descriptive qualities that might help them appeal to both their core audiences and new ones, too. Being “world-class” is harder than simply saying it, and also less meaningful–to the worldly, anyway–than it may appear.

I was reminded of this “anniversary” recently when I read a short post on Seth Godin‘s blog, about a business relationship gone awry. This item was so short it’s easy to recount with a single quote: “When pressed, though, she couldn’t actually recall what the problem had been, or how much financial or project damage had been done. All she remembered was that she didn’t like him.”

Yes, well, that could apply to many situations—and probably many of us have been there.

***

There are all sorts of ways to describe what I do as a communications consultant to cultural institutions. My colleagues and I help clients evaluate and set goals; we develop strategies to meet their goals; and we work with them to develop messages and create platforms for them to speak about or otherwise demonstrate what they do, whether that is through written materials, public programs and events, or tools like social media. (There are other parts of the job, too; harder to describe, and I often put them under the umbrella of “consigliere-psychologist.”)

But when it comes right down to it, once you push past the business jargon around “communications,” the thing that we help clients do is simple: tell their stories. The audiences for these stories may be external—journalists, or potential visitors—or internal, to help one part of the organization understand the needs of another. Ultimately, that’s what communication is all about: getting your story across as best you can, and hoping someone else finds it compelling. It’s definitely the part of my job that is easiest to explain or witness externally.

And you’re thinking: well, that’s fine, but how does that relate to this thing about relationships and getting kicked off an account?

Simple: relationships are also about stories. Whether business or personal, they are the things that we tell ourselves (and others) about how we feel about particular people or groups. In Godin’s example, the woman was essentially replaying for herself a particular narrative—a very broad one, without much detail, that always led to the same conclusion. Once these stories are written, they are difficult to re-write.

Fifteen years ago, I knew something had gone wrong in my relationship with this client, I just didn’t know what. I found out five years later when, under different circumstances, I met someone from my former client who had the details: I had shown up to a meeting carrying a backpack. To them, that said something about me that had nothing to do with qualifications, and created a narrative they couldn’t get over.

It’s easy to laugh now—especially since these days backpacks are de rigeur for many New York business men. But it’s why I think Godin’s post epitomizes the challenges and, more importantly, the opportunities of (business) relationships. When relationships are good, projects are often even more successful: the internal narrative we build for ourselves subconsciously will be better, and the work that we do and the client does will also be better. You get engaged, committed; you want the best for your clients, not just because that’s what they pay for but because you have invested in the relationship with them. Success (and sometimes failure) nurtures these relationships, but good relationships are about more than just success.

It’s also increasingly clear that these different levels of understanding are reached slowly, and often through indirect means. There are lots of news stories about social media tools being (mis)used and causing problems in the workplace, but they can be just as beneficial in helping people learn about and understand each other. These tools help people write their own public narratives, and they may be funny or boring, shocking or banal—but you learn something either way.

Commitment counts, of course. So do simple things like understanding each other’s working processes and goals. In my business, it helps to be smart, a nimble thinker, and to have a good understanding of human psychology. But the longer I work in this field, the more I find that it is often the internalized stories we have about our relationships that are as critical as the working processes or the external outcomes. Those stories are what drive emotional responses around whether we trust people or feel they understand our goals. And that is hard to beat.

This was an extremely unusual scene.

The reading itself is not unusual. My daughter loves books and has from an early age; she’s the kind of kid who is quite likely to grow up to be a voracious reader. She has two shelves of books in her room, and another shelf of her own in the living room, and while she’s too young to articulate it this way, I think she takes pride in the books’ presence and what they offer: the opportunity to grab one and read it, no matter how familiar, and enjoy it all the same. I love books too, both the reading of them and the collecting of them, and have for as long as I can remember. I grew up surrounded by books, inherited libraries from people, and knew they were the one thing my father would always buy upon request. Books were and are essential to me. (The shift to the ebook is vexing, and very much a separate subject. But beyond the philosophical issues they raise is a simple, practical one: it feels not quite as authentic to catalog them when their very presence is so ethereal.)

So what was unusual about this scene? I realized that while I read constantly, I couldn’t remember the last time my daughter actually saw me reading a book, an actual book–and that saddened me quite a bit.

I am fairly sure she knows that I read books; our house is filled with them, and there’s a whole shelf and stack next to my side of the bed. She’s a smart girl, and my guess is that without ever thinking about it, she assumes I read those books just as she reads hers.

Yet that assumption isn’t the same thing is the literal, in-front-of-your-eyes knowledge of seeing your parents reading. It just can’t be. In an all-digital, iEverything age, the shared experiences of families takes a different form, and this whole thing gave me one more reason to feel slightly sad about its seeming inescapability. When I was young, I saw my parents reading all the time. Sure, they did other things too, but on a summer weekend afternoon, my dad was often inseparable from a book, or from one issue out of a stack of New Yorkers or New York Review of Books that he was trying to catch up on. I understood implicitly that this was an activity central to his life. I want my daughter to be able to say the same about me. Likewise, I want her to know the shared joy that comes from reading together–reading separate things, together, in the same place, whether it’s on a beach in summer or around a fireplace in winter, or just on a random evening at home.

With all these digital devices, her experience is different–as is mine, of course. I read, often, but holding my phone or my iPad I could just as easily be playing a game; there’s no book spine to give it away. Likewise, I spend time with these devices writing (as I am now, drafting on my iPad, editing on my laptop), and while she can discover these blogs when she’s older and look back with some understanding of what I might have been doing while typing away … I could just as easily have been sending a text message or an email or something else equally fleeting.

In theory, the fix for this should be easy: read more–more books, especially–around my daughter. This will likely be just as important for my younger son, who likes books but who could probably do with more evident modeling of the Life of a Reader. Talking more about books would help, too, to make evident the connection between their physical presence and our digestion of them. I love being a writer, and that’s an identity I would be happy to have my daughter understand–but as a writer, few things are as important as good readers. And as a reader, I want her to have the best shot I can provide at staying engaged with books for the rest of her life.

We settled on one that seemed the strongest: to try to explore the impact of the Akedah, the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham, on Isaac’s psyche and life. What interested me about this idea is that there seems to be so little written about it: both the text and most of the subsequent commentary focus on Abraham, which seems rather unjust given that he’s not the one who nearly lost his life. It’s a terrible and terrifying story–and that might be precisely what makes it good for Rosh Hashanah, day 2.

The complete text of my dvar Torah can be downloaded/opened here as a PDF. Writing this was a great, and challenging, experience. For anyone who is ever offered the chance, I encourage you to accept the offer: it is not only a great honor, but a great opportunity to engage with and think about Judaism (or whatever religion) through a new, different, and very personal lens. That cannot help but enhance its meaning.

On the other hand, Ethan’s post has the benefit of suggesting that people should do this sort of thing—and I can say, from the perspective of a recruiter for my firm, that an amazing number of people seem not to Google themselves, or to have any awareness at all of how the internet represents them.

But Ethan gets to a more interesting question when he writes about understanding Google’s page ranking algorithms, and his desire to wind up on top just by being himself. No “SEO” or “search engine optimization” techniques—which is good, because much of this is pay-for-link spam, a curse of the web. He wants to be the number one Ethan Lewis on Google just by virtue of being, well, the number one Ethan Lewis. That seems to me to be a reasonable ambition.

Still, I think boosting Ethan Lewis to number one might, by necessity, require a few small and entirely natural (i.e., not SEO-type) changes. We know that search engines look at incoming and outgoing links, and about the ranking for pages on both sides. The system is mutually reinforcing, which is why link spam works (until the algorithms are tweaked to eliminate it… until it pops up again…). So one idea might be for Ethan to pull his Icarus P. Anybody blog into his http://www.ethanlewis.org/ domain name, perhaps with a subfolder or sub-domain. (I highly recommend WordPress for this. Blogger stopped supporting FTP publishing, and I made the switch very easily.) While I appreciate the origins of the blog’s name, it does kind of work against natural identification with Ethan himself. And, anyway, the name wouldn’t have to change—just the web address.

There’s also the Google Profiles tool, which lets people set up specific profiles within Google itself. Now that doesn’t guarantee visibility, and Ethan has a profile of sorts through Blogger—but the Blogger profile probably doesn’t get a whole lot of visibility, whereas Google’s maneuvers into the people/profile business might help. Getting a LinkedIn profile is another useful approach.

Of course, Ethan also wrote: “Another thing that affects my ego-surfing is that I want to be the top result on Google when searching for “Ethan Lewis”, but I don’t want to do any work to get there.” So the above suggestions might sound like work. I suppose there’s some truth to that.

And then you just have to ask: will my writing this post for my friend Ethan Lewis, with links to his website and his blog, help boost his ranking? Maybe. But he didn’t pay me to do it.

****
Update: I posted this entry, and then I sat down to read the paper. Yes, the actual newspaper. The New York Times‘ business section has a story today–another in its great “Haggler” series, by David Segal–about Google search results and a number of “lead generation” companies that have figured out how to scam the results, specifically in the locksmith business. “Picking the Lock of Google’s Search” is worth reading, especially in light of the above. And meanwhile, in what is presumably an oversight on the part of the Times’ web editors, there’s no link to Ballard Lock & Key, the subject of their story, so I’m including one here. Small consolation, no doubt.

I’m sitting at home, working on my computer–a late-2008 edition MacBook Pro, all appropriately up-to-date on its software, etc.–when the cursor starts going haywire. My hands are not on the trackpad, yet it’s jumping all over, it’s right-clicking, it’s opening windows and files; it’s possessed. Every attempt I make to control it is like Ouija Board combat, it just doesn’t want to do what I want it to do.

I closed the lid and let the machine sit. Ten minutes later, I try again. It works, briefly, and then is possessed again.

I forcibly quit all open programs and turn off the machine. Time for bed.

June 10th, Friday

On the iPad, I search for a range of related terms like “possessed MacBook trackpad,” and get lots of results with a range of inconclusive answers. One suggests resetting the “PRAM,” wherein you unplug the computer, take out the battery, and then press the power button to clear all electrical charges. Another suggests the problem is caused by swollen batteries. I open up the machine, reset the “PRAM,” and in the process check my battery. Doesn’t seem swollen.

I reboot, and I get about 15 minutes of time before … the Possessed Trackpad takes over. Mere seconds after that, it has shrunk the icons of the items on my desktop to miniscule items of something like 8×8 pixels, while also opening 20+ PDFs in a folder.

I reboot, switch batteries. I get another 15 minutes in, but not more. I manage to get TimeMachine connected and get a back-up process going–and then effectively lock the cursor out by switching on the screen saver.

The back-up completes, I turn off the computer, and I go to work. Over the weekend, I hardly touch it.

June 12th, Sunday

It’s still not working. I check my AppleCare status–good through November!–and make a date for Thursday with the Genius Bar folks.

I try running the computer with no battery. I have no evidence that the battery is the issue, but I wonder whether it’s too hot and affecting the trackpad. This technique works for the standard 15 minutes, before the Deus in Machina takes over again.

June 13-15, Monday – Wednesday

I give a lot of thought to cloud computing, which sounds fairly attractive right about now. The idea of being only moderately dependent on a single computer is alluring at times like this. (I’m writing this on a 10″ Sony Vaio running Ubuntu Linux. I try to run a Microsoft-free home.) I have my iPhone and my iPad, plus the Vaio, and aside from my files all locked up on the Mac, things aren’t so bad. Normally, I don’t like the “cloud” idea, because internet access can be so unreliable (not to mention slow); I don’t want every interaction with my files to be dependent on an external connection of some kind, a point echoed by David Pogue in his review of the new Google Chromebook.

I also give a lot of thought to how dependent I am on all this tech shit. How miserable it makes me when it’s not working. How obscenely addicted we are to something that’s been with us less than a half-century, yet feels as integral as food. Granted, I *work* on a computer; my job would be harder without one. Granted, I got my first computer in 1981, when I was 10, and I have been working with computers for the majority of my life.

But still. It sucks when they’re broken and sucks to realize how much it seems to matter.

June 16, Thursday

The good folks at the Genius Bar are kind and comforting. A trackpad issue, clearly; it can be replaced, free of charge and in under an hour. We’ll call you.

They call me. Actually, it seems like the display isn’t working properly either; with your permission, we’d like to replace it. Free of charge, and it’ll take another hour. Ok, sure, great. Thanks!

They call me. Actually … well, we’re sorry. We’re sorry it’s escalated like this. We’d like to send it out to our diagnostic repair shop, off-site. There seems to be an additional problem, maybe an electrical issue, can’t tell–but they can sort it out, and any part that needs replacing will be replaced. Free of charge. It takes five days, starting today. Did you back up recently, because if they replace the harddrive… (Yes, I backed everything up.)

And there we are. The MacBook Pro is in the shop, in the care of AppleCare. I remain impressed with the quality of service Apple provides, and feel good about the likelihood my computer will be fixed. Not to mention that I’m still left with more computing power than most people.

And yet feel naked without my “core” machine. Services like Evernote and GoogleDocs help keep me going–yay, “cloud”–while not entirely diminishing my sense that all is not right with the universe. There’s been a disturbance in the Force. I just want my damn computer to work.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE, 29 June 2011

Apple called me on June 25th to tell me my computer was ready, a few days later than originally estimated, but it’s hard to complain in this situation. I picked up my MacBook Pro on Sunday, June 26th, and they walked me through the servicing as I booted up the computer. It had been given a new TrackPad and display, as mentioned previously–and also a new motherboard, new hard drive, and a new cover. (I’m not sure why it needed a new cover, but perhaps the original was damaged in the process of repair…) The motherboard alone costs north of $500, and all told it was probably $1,000 in new parts and who knows how much more in labor. In theory, Apple is sending me an itemized invoice–but all costs were covered by AppleCare. I usually pass on extended warranty programs, but I definitely got my $350 of value out of this one.

This story would not be complete without the tale of renewal that goes with it. Once the machine was booted up, the third screen asked me if I wanted to restore my computer from a TimeMachine backup. I closed it up right at that spot, and went home. At home, I connected the external hard drive that is my TimeMachine backup, and hit the option for restore.

I have had to do this once before, and it is always a nerve-wracking few seconds: everything depends on whether the backup itself has worked. But it had, like a charm–and 90 minutes later, my computer had been returned to it’s original state, with all my files and all my settings intact. (First thing I did after that? Update it with all the files that had been in holding since the repair process started … And then I ran another backup.)

Back when I had a Dell, I had one of the worst computer repair experiences ever. The man who came to fix my computer (after making me sit at home all day) spoke virtually no English, and didn’t have the right part. When he came back the second time, he had the part, but because of his language deficiency wasn’t in a position to tell me what was wrong with the computer when it still didn’t work. In the International Herald Tribune recently there was an article about design and functional items, and how good design can help users with even complicated tasks. I think Apple products sometimes need more descriptive support than people think, at least for some users. But the author is dead on in describing the ease of use issue as central to Apple’s strengths. This experience just proves it, on a few fronts, from service and repair to restoration. Apple products may not be infallible, but few are. What matters, though, is how the systems manage the fallibility, and whether it’s designed to protect and help the user.

Thanks to the folks at Brave New Code for their WPTouch “plugin” that makes all this work so easily.

While you’re at it, and regardless of which device you’re using to browse, go check out my latest posts on the other side.

First I discovered Barry Eisler’s first short story “The Lost Coast,” featuring Daniel Larison, a wayward special ops agent from his most recent novel, “Inside Out.” Eisler has become even more famous recently for walking away from a big, traditional publishing deal in order to pursue the world of self-publishing aggressively. “The Lost Coast” was a good read, and Eisler clearly has a talent for story telling that works just as well in a short format.

Larison, on the run from his former bosses, is skulking around the quieter bits of California, keeping his own company as much as possible. In “Inside Out,” Eisler cast Larison is gay, an element one might not have imagined or predicted–but also one that he makes seem as natural and normal for a special ops agent as … well, as it probably is in real life. Here this is the twist on which the plot turns, and the story again marries Eisler’s traditional strengths of combat strategy and martial arts with his liberal politics. However, where “Inside Out” got preachy, “Lost Coast” just knuckles down, literally and figuratively. A couple bits were more gruesome than expected, but this story was so gripping that I wound up installing the Kindle app on my iPhone just so I could keep reading.

That led me to “Paris is a Bitch,” Eisler’s next short story, which picks up the tale of the half-Japanese / half-American assassin John Rain and his Mossad-agent girlfriend Delilah. Rain is the focus of an extended (and terrific) series by Eisler, and it is one of the author’s singular skills that he has made Rain a sympathetic figure: one cannot help but cheer him on, despite his deadly assignments. Here we find John Rain employing his traditionally well-tuned antennae to resist an attack, and deploying his own martial arts and combat strategies right on time. We also gain insight on aspects of Rain’s emotional side that Eisler has been slowly teasing out over the last couple of books. If slightly less visceral than “The Lost Coast,” it is nonetheless entertaining and a must-read for Rain fans.

Both ebooks include chapters from Eisler’s new novel-in-process, “The Detachment,” which will bring Rain and Larison together with a few other characters and, already from the first three chapters, it’s clear it will be a killer thriller, all puns intended. My only regret is about the ebook format: as digital short stories, I don’t have them available to put on my shelf next to the other Eisler novels. If that sounds like a small complaint in this context well, yes, it is. But as a collector of books, I like having more than a mere virtual possession of the things I read. Perhaps some day Eisler will release an actual book of his short stories.

***

Print isn’t the issue with the longer book I read on my iPad, Lee Goldberg’s entertaining story “The Man With The Iron On Badge.” For any fan of John D. MacDonald’s series of novels with Travis McGee, or any devout followers of 70s-era detective TV shows, this story (also available in print) is a must. But I will say that one character that came to mind repeatedly (though unreferenced by Goldberg) was Lawrence Block’s delightful Chip Harrison. Goldberg seems to be channeling a similar kind of late-adolescent delight in watching his detective-obsessed Harvey Mapes become a man. No matter what format you choose, this story is fun.

In 2011, the Exodus story takes on a whole new meaning, as we have cause to celebrate not only the historical freedom of the Israelites. but the modern freedom of Egyptians after Mubarak. To carry the analogy forward, one might say that the Egyptians (and Tunisians, too) are currently wandering the in the desert, trying to figure out how to restore order amidst their new-found freedom, much as the ancient Israelites did. We will surely see “Golden Calf” manifestations, in the form of putative leaders and potential governments, before these great nations find their surest footing forward.

Yet 2011 also feels like a moment for reflection, if not outright sadness: as we clean our homes, plan our Seders, and prepare to celebrate Jewish freedom, one cannot help but observe that many Jews have enslaved themselves all over again. In Israel, the Jewish state is (rather ironically) enslaved by its own oppression of Palestinians: it cannot figure out how to achieve true freedom, nor cannot it bear to free the Palestinians whom it has kept ensnared for more than 40 years. (Longer than the Israelites were wandering in the desert.) Nor, sadly, has official Israel been able to embrace freedom for neighboring Egypt. Israel instead preferred the sacred safety offered by the oppressive Mubarak to finding a way to extend an olive branch of hope to those who, like Jews themselves, yearned to be free.

American Jews are no more free. We too are sadly enslaved by a super-structure of Jewish officialdom that works diligently to maintain $3 billion a year in military aid to Israel from the United States, and, wherever possible, to guarantee that the so-called “peace process” won’t demand too much of Israel. Every piece of bad news is embraced by this super-structure as an opportunity to assert its dominance and reinforce the rightness of its perspective.

But: in insistently asserting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires a nuanced approach; in choosing to believe that Israeli freedom can only be maintained at the expense of Palestinian and Egyptian oppression (and the oppression of other Arabs); in consciously choosing to de-universalize the Jewish message of freedom that has been a bedrock of Western thought … we lose something of ourselves. We lose the clarity of the message: Let my people go. And by “my people,” we mean any peoples oppressed anywhere.

All should not be lost. Here are a selection of short statements—all less than 140 characters, designed for easy circulation on Twitter and text message. Join me in making a statement this season, that freedom from oppression is not a right reserved for the few, and should not come at the expense of the lives of other people. Here we go:

• 5000 years of oppression of Jews doesn’t justify Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
• Ancient Egyptian oppression of Israelites doesn’t justify modern Israeli support for an oppressive Egyptian government
• “Let my people go!” Wherever they be, remember the bitterness of slavery and support freedom.
• “The works of my hands are drowning in the sea, and you wish to sing praises?!?” (Talmud Tractate Megillah 10b) http://bit.ly/fQOBIB
• “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah 6:8
• Freedom comes in many forms: freedom of movement & action, of thought, of expression. Celebrate each, hope for all.
• “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” courageous words in 1776 to which we should all aspire.
• For Ai WeiWei, & every other person like him, held against their will for the “crime” of independent thought, we must demand freedom.

We cannot sustain our own humanity by choosing to degrade someone else’s. That is not a Passover-specific message, but it is a very Jewish one, and it’s time we started trying to live up to that ideal. When we proclaim, at the end of the Seder, “Next year in Jerusalem!” we must ask ourselves: at what price?