If you are like my family, you celebrated Passover with a festive meal and Seder on Friday night.
If you are like my family, you will celebrate Easter today in church and at a festive meal afterwards.
If you do something else, enjoy your day.
On Passover, Jews recall the Biblical story of slavery in Egypt and pray that all the world will one day be free from the oppression of those who are like Pharaoh. Dayenu! (Rough translation: “That would have been enough.”) Free from Pharaoh who steals the labor of the poor and enriches the rich. Dayenu! Free from Pharaoh who spreads hatred and fear. Dayenu! Free from Pharaoh who demands tribute to himself and his family. Dayenu! Free from all forms of oppression imposed by the Pharaoh and his followers. Dayenu!
On Easter, Christians remember the death and resurrection of Jesus and his promise to bring an era of love, peace, and justice to all.
Dayenu!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for this, Diane. We also have an ethnically syncretic family. We will do a seder today since this is when we can get everyone together after the children get to dye eggs. While this is not traditional it fulfills the mitzvah of telling the story that is so important in todays world.
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Except Greek Easter Sunday is next Sunday!
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While I am not Jewish, I have celebrated Passover with my Jewish friends. Have a lovely Passover. Easter is also the celebration of the resurrection of the Savior and a hope of salvation.
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חַג שָׂמֵחַ, Diane! (Happy holiday). I don’t know about plagues and parting seas, but I do know that freedom from oppression by those who are like Pharaoh is truly a miracle.
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Not like your family, but understand the importance of marking in memory days of significance, often tied to seasonal changes as well. The magnolias are blooming.
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“The magnolias are blooming.”
Where?!!
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Th crocuses are blooming on the North Fork of Long Island, despite four Nor’easters, one after another.
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I just checked Gates Notes, Bill’s blog, and found an amazing entry. It seems Gates has had some sort of awakening of conscience and has decided to stop the Bill and Melinda Foundation from funding the Destruction of Public Education! No more money for Common Core and charters. He is going to build low tech public libraries and food banks instead. April fools.
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InService,
I looked at the Gates Blog and saw an announcement that he has dropped all support for charter schools, because they get inconsistent results, and he wants a reform that works every time.
For the same reason, he will no longer fund Common Core or teacher evaluations.
He got the Easter Spirit, and he plans to open a family health clinic in every school across the nation.
He will also lobby for a billionaires’ tax so he, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Mayor Bloomberg, Dan Loeb, Sheldon Adelson, Eli Broad, John Arnold and all their fellow billionaires will pay their fair share.
They will lobby for a minimum wage of $20 an hour.
And they are building spacious apartments for the homeless.
What an outbtreak of goodness.
They formed a group called “Billionaires No More! We Need Love!”
Their goal: to get into Heaven, which is very, very difficult for a rich man, even more difficult than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
Must be the spirit of the Holy Week. Or April 1.
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I vote for “April Fools Day”.
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Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
a medley of extemporanea,
Free market’s a thing that can never go wrong,
and I am Marie of Romania.
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Unfortunately, real slavery is still around today.
“This map shows where the world’s 30 million salves live. There are 60,000 in the U.S.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/17/this-map-shows-where-the-worlds-30-million-slaves-live-there-are-60000-in-the-u-s/
I’m not talking about wage slaves who work for poverty wages with few if any benefits and have no job protection. I’m talking about REAL slaves.
And Houston, Texas is a major gateway for slaves into the U.S. I’ve read that Houston has more illegal bordellos (using slaves) than all of Las Vegas and Nevada.
“An FBI Raid In Houston Sheds Light On Countless Human Trafficking Slaves Hidden In Plain Sight”
http://kut.org/post/fbi-raid-houston-sheds-light-countless-human-trafficking-slaves-hidden-plain-sight
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I did my annual viewing of Quo Vadis today. Eerie the similarities between Nero and our Dear Leader: fooling his followers to find scapegoats for his own inadequacies, praising his military although he was an abject coward, and destroying the lives of lower classes to realize his own grandiose dreams. But Ustinov played it much better.
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Ustinov for president!
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Peter Ustinov would make a great president … because he died on March 28, 2004. No one could buy him. No one could threaten him. No one could bully him. No one could assassinate him. The power of the presidency couldn’t corrupt him.
And imagine all the jokes and cartoons from the media and TV.
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Beautiful. My wife and I celebrated Passover with friends Friday night and Easter at Church today. The message is the same — celebrate and think and act for others less fortunate.
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We celebrated the holidays at a campground in Florida that was full of teachers, most retired. There our daughter learned to ride a bike, paddle a kayak, and wield a spotting scope to find a Purple Gallinule across the pool at St Marks National Wildlife Refuge. It was a good week. Back to school for us. There were a lot of new people in church today. I guess there were celebrating my uncle Ed’s 110th birthday.
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