Our Rabbi's Message
April 9th 2009
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelThe Crusades can best be defined by their lack of order. People joined, according to the Pope, to redeem Jerusalem from the Moslems. Had that been the only purpose, the Crusades might have met their objective, but save for the first Crusade and for a very short time, the Crusades never did bring the victory that the Popes sought. The reasons why are clear. Everyone who joined the expedition did not join with the same goal in mind. Some just wanted to plunder and some just wanted to kill and butcher Jews and/or Moslems. Some joined to save the Byzantine Empire, or to save Constantinople. Some had no idea why they were on the Crusade, but just went on with the flow of people.
While on the Crusades people had cross purposes and sometimes antagonistic purposes. As a fighting group the knights and peasants were not well integrated. And even the knights did not get along with each other. At times the kings or generals or fighting royalty fought with completely different tactics, strategies and purpose. Is it any wonder that the Crusades were such a disaster to Christian Europe and Asia?
The Crusades really mimicked a deciding event in the History of our people: The exodus from Egypt. Only there was a difference, a major difference in how the exodus proceeded. Of course there were many similarities. The people who were former slaves were also an unorganized hoard. There was a lot of division in that hoard. They are even referred to in the Torah as a 'mixed multitude' of people. In the Torah we read of many attempts by different groups to wrest power from Moses. We read of many bad people who tried to divide the people or who suggested that the people live by an ethic less pristine than the Torah.
However, because of the simple difference between the Exodus and the Crusades, the former was successful and the latter failed in at least eight attempts. The people Israel had leadership. Moses was a man with a purpose and with an idea. He refused to allow the people to stray, and if he ever saw a group straying, he dealt with them with an iron hand. Moses understood that cross purposes would only bring defeat to his people and so he did not permit those cross purposes to exist. Out of all the chaos that these former slaves brought to their march to freedom, Moses created order. It was that order, that Seder, which was the key to the emerging freedom of our people.
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