Do I like aliteration? Yes, I do.
Anyhow, if you’re reading this you likely are a genuinely educated person so there is a good chance that you may have heard of the Pareto Principle and Price’s Law. Both are attempts to quantify unequal distributions. In the case of the former, it was originally used to describe how 20% of the population in the society under study controled 80% of the wealth. Price’s Law says that 50% of the work on any project is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work. It’s easy to see that once you get past four people in a group, a minority will be responsible for most of the work. Both of those statistical concepts are probably the basis for the better known “20/80 rule”. That’s sometimes expressed as 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but I prefer the version that says that 20% of the people do most of the productive work while the other four-fifths mostly just take up space.
The Jewish festival of Passover just concluded this past Thursday night (in the diaspora, in Israel the holiday is one day shorter). The holiday starts out with the Seder, literally an ordered celebration with a fixed liturgy surrounding a lavish festive meal that includes matzah (unleavened bread) and bitter herbs. Not only do many Jewish families, ahem, religiously follow the seder liturgy that recounts the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt, since the text of the Haggadah (literally, the telling) says that it is praiseworthy to expand on the story, many families include commentaries, interpretations, analogies, and metaphors from the broad body of classical Jewish scholars and their writings.
One of those explanations that I have heard at many of the over 120 seders that I have participated in is that according to most Torah scholars, only a minority of the Israelites suffering in slavery in Egypt were redeemed in the Exodus. A majority preferred the security of bondage and stayed behind, which explains how some of those that did leave, soon complained to Moses, yearning for the onions and fleshpots of their former prison.
While some commentaries say that only a tiny percentage of the Jews left Egypt, the figures that seems to be most commonly accepted are that just 20% left with Moses, while 80% stayed behind. Over the centuries since, there have been eras where large percentages of Jews left the religion and nationality, something we witness in our own time. It sometimes looks like just about the only Jews producing Jewish grandchildren are the orthodox and today they make up even less than 20% of the American Jewish community, though with exceptionally high birth rates in that subculture and low rates among more secular Jews, the are making up a larger and larger percentage of the overall Jewish community every year.
The Jews who this year celebrated Passover “in all its details” as the haggadah puts it, also in a way were celebrating what Pareto and Price taught. The Torah describes the Jews as Am k’shei oref, a stiff necked people, in regard to their desire to throw off the yoke of God’s commandments, but I think it also takes a bit of a stiff neck to survive as a hated minority in hostile uber kulturs for millenia, and sometimes only a minority of that minority has the conviction to persist.
Never quit ronnie .
-Nate