Cognitive dissonance on Passover

I suffer from it, as recounted in this June 2011 post:

Jeffrey Goldberg, Excommunicator

Jeffrey Goldberg has ignited a blog conflagration with an attack on Allison Benedikt's coming-of-age tale of her progressive disillusionment with the gung-ho Zionism she sucked up in summer camp. I found Benedikt's  narrative riveting, and Goldberg's critique smotheringly self-righteous.

Goldberg asks of Benedikt: "Does she ever try to answer for herself why Israel exists? Or is she happy to subcontract out her thinking about the most important questions facing Jews first to her camp counselors, and then to her husband?"  It's true that Benedikt's stances on the issues are barely sketched in, but that in itself suggests neither a lack of thought nor of due diligence. Her focus is on how her changing perceptions registered emotionally, not on the data points that caused them. Hers is not a policy piece; it's a chronicle about how she navigated the family mania for Israel -- and later, her husband's antipathy toward the country -- over the course of a decade and a half or so. Benedikt's response to Goldberg makes this point better than I can.

I want to focus on Goldberg's most poisonous charge -- which he saves for last. I think it reveals more about him than about Benedikt:

And then there is a whole set of other questions:  Does she ask herself whether she has a responsibility to make Israel a better, more humane, place? Does she question herself about the consequences of abandoning Israel? Does she think about the sin of the wicked son in the Passover story, and how that sin might echo in her own life? 

Abandoning Israel? Goldberg seems to have derived that idea from Benedikt's kicker at the close. Let's take a look:

A second White House Seder? Larry Summers sings Dayenu to Martin Wolf over health care reform

100-odd years ago, early in 2009, Obama and Peter Orzag were heavy on the mantra that "healthcare reform is entitlement reform"-- i.e. that "bending the cost curve"on healthcare would be the single most important step to erasing the country's structural deficit.  Here's how Peter Orzag put it in Obama's fiscal summit on Feb. 23, 2009:

Health care is the key to our fiscal future.

So to my fellow budget hawks in this room and in the rest of the country, let me be very clear: health care reform is entitlement reform.

The path of fiscal responsibility must run directly through health care.

We also must recognize that reforms to Medicare and Medicaid will only succeed in the context of slowing the spiraling growth of overall health care costs.

In an interview published in the online Financial Times today, Larry Summers, asked by Martin Wolf how other nations could have confidence that the U.S. will put its long-term fiscal house in order,  suggested that the Administration has already laid the most important cornerstone  -- again, that healthcare reform is entitlement reform, and that the cost controls in the Patient Protection Act have teeth.

Perhaps Summers was fresh from a Seder: his litany of the virtues of the Medicare Individual Payments Advisory Board (boldfaced below) swings with the repetitive glee of the Passover song  "Dayenu," which marvels at the extent of God's mercies in making the Exodus happen: