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February 27, 2002
Here's a long piece by
Here's a long piece by Hillel Halkin from February 5 that perfectly illustrates one of the central problems in grappling with the ethical considerations raised by the very real phenomenon of anti-Jewish prejudice, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. Namely: the dogmatic, irrational, and downright illogical insistence that Israel (a State, a piece of earth) is the Jewish people. Consider Mr. Halkin's equation:
“…one cannot be against Israel or Zionism, as opposed to this or that Israeli policy or Zionist position, without being anti-Semitic. Israel is the state of the Jews. Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have a state. To defame Israel is to defame the Jews. To wish it never existed, or would cease to exist, is to wish to destroy the Jews.”
As an argument, this is faulty beyond repair. There is no cogent logical connection between the statements "Israel is the state of the Jews" and "Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have a state" that supports subsequent equivalence between the defamation of Israel and that of the Jewish people. The conflation of Israel (a State, a piece of earth), with Zionism (an expansionist political doctrine that is more complex than Mr. Halkin seems to think it is) is problematic at best. Finally, not every Israeli citizen is a Jew: there are Christians, from Greek Orthodox to Arab Lutherans, and a sizable Muslim minority. Mr. Halkin admits these faults, but simply acknowledging the objections without responding to them in any substantive way does not strengthen the argument.
Mr. Halkin delves into our subconscious minds: "Can one then be anti-Semitic without knowing it? Of course one can, just as one can be unconsciously antiblack or antigay or a misogynist." This is the essense of postmodern identity politics: the denial of an individual's ability to perceive the social power relationships that form his opinions and even his personality. Mr. Halkin regards harsh judgment of Israel as a cultural neurosis. Which means, of course, that it is mentally unhealthy for us to judge Israel harshly.
Like his other personal anecdotes, Mr. Halkin's account of the CNN coverage of a single incident proves nothing. His earlier admission to having "no hard data about the rise of anti-Semitism" serves as an excuse for the repeated use of such personal observations throughout the piece in lieu of hard data. Again, admitting the objection does not constitute a response to it. His question, "Who at London dinner parties makes nasty remarks about Hindus because India has militarily occupied Muslim Kashmir for half a century?" referring to an recent incident in which an the French ambassador to Britain wanted to know why the rest of the world should go to war on behalf of Israel, misses the point. Chances are that no one in Europe or America is going to die because of an Indian occupation. That is not true in the case of the Israeli occupation. I'm also sure that Mr. Halkin merely overlooked the British invention and use of the term "wog," as applied to dark-skinned folks in general and Arabs in particular. There are many "shitty little countries" out there, and the fact that the French ambassador used those words when speaking of Israel within earshot of a reporter says more about the ambassador's lack of good sense than his anti-Semitism.
To suggest that “anti-Israeli” means “anti-Semitic” is to give the lie to the idea that Israel is a pluralistic democratic society, which is a reason often given by folks like David Horowitz to explain their unreserved support of Israel.
It can't be had both ways: either Israel is a democracy, or it is intended to be an ethnically pure state in which non-Jews are second-class citizens.
Mr. Halkin is right to point out the possibility that a double standard is applied to Israeli policies and conduct. But he should know that God did it first:
“You alone have I singled out of all the families of the earth. That is why I call you to account for all your iniquities.” (Amos 3:2)
To be chosen is to be called to account. I would suggest giving up the idea of being “Chosen.” Perhaps that would simplify relations with the rest of the world.
March 01, 2002
Good points in Bruce Thornton's
Good points in Bruce Thornton's "Bad Habits in the Middle East." The important role that ideas of God play in the Middle East, and the fundamentally different worldview produced by moral and intellectual submission to those ideas, is too often overlooked in political discussions of the Middle Eastern problem.
What Thornton misses, though, is that ideas of God are equally important when considering Israeli responses to their situation. The other "big question," as he puts it, is whether Israel is ready to fully reconcile itself with the modern tendency to view the attempted creation of ethnically pure states as ethically dubious.
March 04, 2002
A reader sends this New
A reader sends this New York Times link in with the comment, “Here's why it's so freakin' weird over there…”
Amen. That's the point I was making on Friday (below) about Thornton's piece. Look at this quote from the article, uttered by Moshe Yurovich, a 22-year old yeshiva student from the Orthodox Beit Yisrael neighborhood, in response to repeated bombings there: "When someone who loves you hits you, you don't get angry." Referring not to terrorists…but to God.
Never mind what such an attitude may indicate about Orthodox attitudes towards wife-beating. Some of these Orthodox folks believe that their God, the paternalistic and (apparently) lovingly violent God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is arranging to have them blown up in order to get them back in line. "If we behave better, the troubles will end,” says another Orthodox student.
Now, I'm all for that sentiment if by “behaving better” he means treating all people with respect and recognizing their common humanity in the sight of God. But, what he really means is "We have to study and follow the Torah, keep the Sabbath, and love one another," and by “one another” I am fairly certain he doesn't mean Gentiles, particularly Arabs.
A case in point is currently idling by the curb a block away from my office here in New York: the Chabad Lubovitch Mitzvah Tank. It's an RV that's driven around the city by Orthodox devotees of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whom they call Messiah or Moschiach. Klesmer music is piped from a little PA horn speaker on the RV's roof. The Mitvah Tank serves as a mobile outreach to members of the Jewish faith, encouraging them in the observance of the Mitzvot, or commandments of the Torah. Along the side, the Mitvah Tank reads: “Torah Education…Holy Books…Sefer Torah…Tefillin…Torah…Shabat Candles…Kashruth…Charity…Family Purity…Love Your Fellow Jew…Mezuzah.”
Not “Love Your Fellow Human Being,” or even “Love Your Fellow Man.” Love Your Fellow Jew. The rest of us, it seems, will have to make do without the Rebbe's Charity.
The Mitzvah Tank is a gasoline-powered representation of an ethnically-based eschatological worldview in which the end of history is rapidly approaching. Such a viewpoint doesn't bode well for the prospects of peace…after all, when the Messiah comes, it will all be moot, won't it?
The Islamists would force compliance with Sharia for everyone, Muslim and infidel alike. The Orthodox, it seems, only truly care about their own relationship with God, and merely suffer the existence of the rest of Gentile mankind. That's not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination, but still carries with it the unpleasant sense of a people set apart from the rest of humanity.
I can only hope that the fundamentalists among the Muslim and the Jewish peoples fail to achieve any more influence within their respective communities. They're both flip sides of the same corrupt coin, and it is the responsibility of the majority within both faiths to decry such prejudices.
March 31, 2002
Rabbi ben Isaac (1040-1105)--called
Rabbi ben Isaac (1040-1105)--called by the Hebrew acronym of Rashi--is regarded as Judaism's greatest teacher. Almost every edition of the Talmud printed since the sixteenth century contains his glosses. Studying the Torah through the lens of Rashi's commentary upon it has been the average Jewish religious education for generations. Almost one hundred commentaries have been written solely on Rashi's commentaries. His influence upon the Jewish culture is nearly without parallel (save for Maimonides).
Let us look for a moment at Rashi's commentary on Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Rashi writes,
"Strictly speaking, the Torah should have commenced with the verse, 'This month shall be to you the beginning of months' [Exodus 12:2], which is the very first commandment given to [the Jews]. Why, then, did the Torah begin with the account of the creation? In order to illustrate that God the Creator owns the whole world. So, if the peoples of the world shall say to Israel: 'You are robbers in conquering the territory of the seven Canaanite nations,' Israel can answer them: 'All of the earth belongs to God--He created it, so He can give it to whomsoever He will.'"
The Canaanites are incorrectly called the ancestors of the Arab people, but the analogy is widely used. I have referred previously to the medievalism that seems to beset the Arab people, as evidenced by both their actions and their words. How equivalent, then, is the insistence that God Himself parcels out land to a given population? How similar, then, is a claim to ownership of property that is reinforced by Divine mandate?
How very much like the Arabs' is the Jewish claim to the Holy Land.
To claim--as is so often claimed--that the Israeli position is one of democratic modernity is to ignore the subtle cultural influence of teachings such as Rashi's. Even secular Jews such as David ben Gurion held fast to the notion of Israel's ordained place as masters of the Holy Land, mandated if not by God then by the forces of history.
Look at the situation in the Middle East today, and tell me that it is right and proper. See what goes on there, and tell me that it is the will of a just and good god.
There is nothing more at play here than the final death rattle of ancient human beliefs. To believe in the Apocalyptic designs of the heir to the Jewish bull-god is to deny any notion of the value of human life. Such conviction allows for the construction of fantasies of death, wherein the blood of innocents is demanded, and the death of martyrs honored. It allows for the fervent belief in the divine justice of one's own cause, and the studied ignorance of human injustice.
In this regard there is no difference between Jew and Arab. They both struggle against the restrictive weight of thousands of years of human tribalism. Their struggle is the struggle of us all.
April 12, 2002
"Who put this stuff in
"Who put this stuff in the same part of the world, anyway? What idiot thought that this would work? Did they say, 'Ooo...hey, here's one! We take three faiths, right? And we make it so that the same place is really holy to each one, right? And then we take the pantheists, give them all kinds of trade access and a hardy national character. All within...say, five thousand miles of each other. Won't that be a scream?' Now look at this fucking mess!"
--Gabriel
Archangel of the Holy Sefiroth
Angel of Aspirations, Truth, Joy, Childbirth, Death, Vengeance, Revelation,
the Annunciation, the Resurrection, and the Apple Tree
Chief Ambassador of God to Humanity
Ruler of the Sixth Heaven
Ruling Prince of the Cherubim and of Justice
Divine Herald and Husband
Trumpeter of the Last Judgment
Governor of Eden
60 Minutes
October 2, 2006
So I was on the
So I was on the train and there was a young Hassidic fellow there
all in black and scraggle-beard with sacred loops of hair
and I thought:
You look the way you do because the Romans smashed a synagogue
--admittedly a very nice one, but a Temple to G-d nonetheless--
nearly two thousand years ago
You are dressed in black to mourn the tumbling of stone from stone
the smashing of the gilt facade
the crucifixion of thousands on the hills of Jerusalem
You wrap your scroll around your arm and head
read from a language that was old when Yeshua was young
You rock in ecstasy at the Wall while the Jerusalem postmaster
stuffs letters to G-d into the cracks between the stones
You talk to G-d in the language of the Chosen Tribes
Everyone around you talks to G-d
The hardy virus of your faith transcends the mutant sects
that have infected the world
A clear unbroken line from Brooklyn to Jerusalem
from Jerusalem to Egypt
from Egypt to times of blood sacrifice
golden calves and prostitutes of a sacred nature
The wandering in the desert...
wandering...
There he stood on the subway
a living artifact of faith thirty-five hundred years old
Thirty-five hundred years of idea mutation and alteration
had left him with poor skin
the ears and teeth of English royalty
eyes myopic behind thick-lensed glasses
reminding me somewhat of the Amish features
not in the similarity but in the commonality
A faith in a god that is in the DNA
reflected outwardly
intertwined with a resurrected language
A nation brought back from the dead
A fierce defiance in the face of a world
that tried to kill them all
And where does such a faith lead?
What kind of questions does a chosen people
ask of a god that seems to want them dead?
"We'll build more houses here
and sooner or later
we'll build the Third Temple."
April 15, 2002
More mumblings from idiots while
More mumblings from idiots while other folks who ought to be smart but somehow keep raving like imbeciles carry bravely on.
What can we do with a man like Ariel “The Tank” Sharon? When asked by Dan Rather about how his meeting with Colin Powell went, he replied: “It was a friendly meeting. I welcomed him to Jerusalem, the capitol of the Jewish people for over 3000 years, and the united and undivided capital of the state of Israel forever.”
I watched him say that, and it came out of him like a mantra, a chant, a dogmatic assertion of irrational faith that trumps all reason, brooks no compromise, permits no internal dissent. It was the weak brain-fart of an old man who can no longer think about anything other than how utterly important a miserable city in the middle of a wretched swatch of earth is. For the sake of that dirty, stinking town, birthplace of so much prejudice, hatred, and death, we must all suffer.
What can we do with a man like Yasser “Bubble-lips” Arafat? Who writes by way of encouragement to his brigades of martyrs, “The [Palestinian] nation, indeed, broke out its intifada in order to pave with its pure and clean blood the sidewalks, alleyways, and roads of the holiest of holies, the capital of the independent Palestinian state.” He too wants that pale fell city for his own, seeing its crusted stones as worthy of blood, and above all else, as a meaningful place of legend, of ethnicity, of god.
Let us drop a nuclear device on Jerusalem. There! we shall say. Now no one can have it.
July 01, 2002
"Why should I be made
"Why should I be made to feel like an outsider?"
Ah, the whine of the perpetually disenfranchised...the cry of the eternally uncomfortable. Did I not say that Mike Newdow's concern was not for his daughter? In addition to challenging the theocratically fascist Pledge of Allegiance, Mr. Newdow also plans to ask the courts to remove "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency and end prayers at presidential inaugurations. While he's at it, he'd also like to eliminate gendered pronouns from the English language. That's very progressive of him, but I don't think he'll be able to pull it off. And, to be fair, he is on to something with his objections to family law...it is a terrible morass of bad legalese and antiquated ethical theory that needs fixing.
Regarding those two little words in the Pledge: I could care less. They probably shouldn't have put them in there in '54, unless they wanted to have a good laugh and piss off the Socialists who created the Pledge in the first place. All of the political grandstanding that's been going on over the past week is more than a little disingenuous. If I believed that even half of the squawkers were the persons of genuine faith they claim to be, I'd be satisfied that there was some integrity on display. But it isn't so, and all of the public Pledging and Outraging won't make it so. It's one thing to make an appeal to the general cultural milieu; it's quite another to be photogenically outraged on behalf of God himself. God does quite well on his own, I think.
What I object to, amidst all of this nonsense, is the personal philosophy underlying Mr. Newdow's no doubt excellently argued legal challenge. Somehow, Mr. Newdow believes that he has a Constitutional right to be comfortable. Nothing objectionable must cross his path while he moves in the public sphere. He must always feel included, never excluded. How that need translates into the obliteration of any and all mentions of anything even remotely godlike from all areas of that public sphere is beyond me. But then, I didn't pass the bar without studying for it, so what do I know?
It is this belief--that we all have the right to be comfortable, that our feelings must be sheltered, that our tender psyches deserve the full protection of the Government of the United States--that is responsible for so much of what is lazy and objectionable in our modern culture. Suing McDonald's for selling hot coffee assuages not just injury, but also the sting of stupidity that comes from driving with an open cup of steaming coffee in your lap. Hence: the warning sticker industry gets a boost, as thousands of consumer products must now bear big bright labels that read DO NOT FOLD UP CRIB WITH CHILD INSIDE or DO NOT USE HAIR DRYER WHILE STANDING IN BATHTUB and so forth. All because, in addition to having accordioned your child and electrocuted yourself, you'll just plain feel bad, and we can't have that.
Diversity is uncomfortable. Ideas diametrically opposed to your own are uncomfortable to hear. And hey, guess what? Sometimes, you may believe something that 90% of the people you encounter on a day-to-day basis disagree with. If that belief happens to be that people shouldn't be run through with kabob-skewers for jaywalking, then chances are that Right and Justice are on your side, and that's a thing worth fighting for. But mere ideas? Vocabulary? Words, that bear with them no physical threat, no hint of coercion? That might make you (gasp!) uncomfortable? Or even--that dread oppression--make you feel like an outsider? Guess what? Sometimes, we're all outsiders.
Get over it.
Now then. I'm off to file suit against Mr. Newdow, who has disturbed the digestion of my lunch.
October 22, 2002
Biblical archaeology has a long and colorful history, full of intelligent people with conclusions, digging in the Near Eastern dirt for evidence to support them. The latest discovery is no exception.
An empty ossuary--essentially, a bone-box--has been discovered, bearing the Aramaic inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Actually, it wasn't discovered so much as 'revealed;' it was purchased by a still-anonymous collector from an Arab antiquities dealer some 15 years ago. The type of Aramaic, and the fact that Jerusalem-area Jews practiced ossuary burials only between 20 and 70 AD, puts the ossuary squarely in the first century AD.
The Washington Post reports that Andre Lemaire, the French scholar who has published his findings in Biblical Archaeology Review, said that it is "very probable" that the inscription refers to Jesus of Nazareth.
Later in the same article, Lemaire estimates that although the three names on the ossuary were commonplace, "only 20 Jameses in Jerusalem during that era would have had a father named Joseph and a brother named Jesus."
Um...doesn't that mean, then, that right off the bat there's a one-in-twenty shot? That's 5%. The probability goes up because of the unusual naming of the brother on the ossuary, but that still doesn't account for the possibility that this particular Jesus just owned the tomb, or conducted the burial, and didn't get nailed to a tree for our sins and so forth.
Then, the penultimate paragraph:
"Lemaire, who was raised Roman Catholic, said his faith did not affect his judgment, since he studies inscriptions only 'as a historian – that is, comparing them critically with other sources.'"
Uh-huh. I'm sure that faith had nothing to do with claiming an anonymously-owned ossuary with absolutely no provenance for the past 19 centuries as a reference to Jesus Christ. Neither did academic ambition, or any of the other myriad human foibles that enter into such investigations.
That's what's cool about hard science: it's all about replication of results. Pass that old bone-box on to others, Andre, and let them have a look.
I'm with Herschel Shanks, the editor of BAR, on this one:
"Something so startling, so earth-shattering, raises questions about its authenticity."
[Of course, Herschel Shanks did publish Lemaire's results, so I think his comment was intended to explain the skepticism, rather than express his own doubts.
D'oh! --IAW]
December 07, 2002
Sigh. Very peculiar goings-on in the head...I am not at all appreciative of my inherited neurotransmitter mechanisms, no sir. Den Beste has a long post on the role of religion in law that I disagree with for a half-dozen reasons, but I can't seem to muster up the wherewithal to respond, or even care that much, which is odd, because religion is supposed to be right up my street.
It may be because because I'm currently slogging through the first of three thousand-page volumes commenting on Leviticus, and so am up to my eyeballs in minutiae concerning the removal of the caudate lobes of livers, the proper sacrifice of kidney suet, the difference between the sacrifice of a male versus a female sheep, the mixing of oil and grain for sacrifice (which in turn may be parched, deep-fried, fried in a pan or toasted on a griddle, and there are rabbis who've commented on the differences between each), and the burning of Special Formula incense. This stuff is the nuts-and-bolts of Temple Judaism. Back in my angsty Jesus-Jumping days, the saying was that the Good Lord put Leviticus in the Bible as a cure for insomnia. On its own, the stuff is certainly soporific. Broken down in Hebrew word by word, cross-referenced with similar rites in the Ancient Near East and considered point by point, reading Leviticus becomes a long period of stupefying dullness interspersed with moments of total fascination.
So right now, the whole God/religion/culture triad is, to me, a vast muddy swamp through which I trek with inadequate footwear. Add to that an onslaught of downright bizarre dreams lately and you've got yerself the makin's of a finely toasted brain! Yazzoo!
December 30, 2004
 When I read that the head of the Indonesian Salvation Army said that the "Immediate and URGENT need at the disaster sites (Aceh and Nias Island) is for body bags, medical masks, hand gloves, hand sanitizers and disinfectants," I realized that my paltry maybe-plan for sending water purification filters off to the region was worse than useless. The last thing the relief workers need right now is a crate of 1st world technological gizmos when they're still scrambling just to equip those who are recovering and burying the bodies.
A body bag, I have discovered, costs eight dollars.
A couple of days ago I learned that a tropical cyclone killed 138,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991. Back then, not only was I less aware of the world and usually stoned, I hadn't yet been in close proximity to a terrorist attack. Today, I have a frame of reference: if I multiply that day's toll 38 times I have an inadequate sense of the scale of the present calamity, which is a small improvement over the utter incomprehension that would have been evinced by my younger self.
Despite the efforts of some construction workers who were inconvenienced by the effort of slathering on new paint every few months, a makeshift memorial still exists at Ground Zero.  It's off to one side, on the west end of the southern pedestrian walkway at the base of the stairs leading up to the truncated skyway over the West Side Highway. Everywhere else along the path, the plywood wall is covered with black paint and stern warnings. But in the one place where they didn't spray-paint that prohibition, visitors to the site have taped up artwork and photographs, and hung dozens of souvenir tokens from the scaffolding.
I wonder, now, if there are memorials to the dead of Bangladesh, and whether there will be similar memorials to the dead of the dozen nations affected by the seaquake. There probably are, and there probably will be.
Beyond their numerical scale, the main difference between the two events goes to the heart of evil: the tsunami was a natural occurrence, a twitch of the planet. September 11 was the product of intentional malice and the will to murder, an expression of the hatred that comes only from human beings. In that sense, it is "easier." We can point the finger and say, "They did this."
But, as Martin Kettle wrote on Tuesday,
A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do [... ] What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life?
From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur.
 In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the most famous consideration of these issues is found in the book of Job, the tale of that perfect and upright man from the land of Uz who feared God and eschewed evil, but was nonetheless brought low by a series of apparently senseless disasters. The lamentations of Job are some of the most powerful in the Bible, and his direct confrontation with the mighty and ultimately unknowable God of the deserts suggests that, in the end, the reasoning behind the workings of disaster and calamity belong to Him alone.
But there is evidence that, at some point, a "happy ending" was added to Job's wretched tale. Job's final response to God's roaring question, "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?"--a question which encapsulates the power and incomprehensibility of His personhood--was to repent after seeing God face-to-face.
Then, tacked onto the last chapter, are several verses wherein God gives Job everything that He had taken from him, increased twofold: fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand donkeys, seven sons, and three daughters, who were judged the most beautiful in all the land. In the end, "Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. And so he died, old and full of years."
After 42 chapters of misery and suffering, it all gets neatly wrapped up in seven happy verses.
Many modern Christian interpretations of this "blessing of Job" generally fall somewhere along the spectrum of "our trials and tribulations can be endured through a deeper understanding and awareness of God." Jewish interpretations often focus on metaphorical relationships between Job and the nation of Israel.
That's not what I see. I see a 2,600-year old written document that probably had a much longer existence as a spoken tale before that. I see a shying away from one of the hardest and most brutal truths of life, with faith offered as a salve. There is some textual evidence to support the later addition of Job's blessings by one or more authors, not the least of which is Job's sudden addressing of God as "Yahweh" rather than "Elohim." The tale is a long argument of theodicy--the reconciliation of the ideal goodness and justice of God with the punishment of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked we so often witness. But there is no real answer here, other than "God is God, and He is powerful, and His actions are beyond the ken of such flotsam as yourself."
Eventually, someone decided that was just too hopeless, too sour a note, and improved Job's lot from one of repentance before the unknowable power of the universe to repentance with resultant blessings. That change has survived the centuries, as pleasant endings often do. But no amount of repentence will restore and double the fortunes of the hundreds of thousands killed and left destitute by the movement of the earth and its oceans.
So, in the end, I find in Indonesia a mirror of September 11. Just as human evil defined the events of that Tuesday in New York, so will human goodness define the events of this past Saturday in Indonesia. The malice of those so-called martyrs will hopefully be somewhat balanced by the selflessness of those who will truly make sacrifices to bring aid and comfort to people in need.
I don't think it makes sense to excuse a god from responsibility for human evil, and then give that same god credit for human goodness. Therefore, I can only conclude that God doesn't have much to do with either quality.
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Ah, the sweet pixels of bloggish synchronicity.
The good Reverend offers his previous commentary on theodicy and the book of Job, in three bits: "My Buddy God," "God on Trial," and "God Answers."
In "My Buddy God," he offers an alternative to my conclusion:
Job does not see the hand of God in simple terms of cause and effect. Job is coming to terms with his profound loss and the heartbreaking fragility of life. To exist at all is to be vulnerable. God has made us capable of love, but we are "also susceptible to disease, accidents, violence. In this sense, it is God who gives and takes away, from whom we receive both what we yearn for and what we dread. There is a tendency to want to associate God with only what is good. If one does that, however, then when trouble comes it is easy to feel that one has fallen into a godforsaken place. At the time, when one most needs the presence of God, there is only the experience of absence. The wisdom of Job's stance is that it allows him to recognize the presence of God even in the most desolate of experiences. Job blesses God in response to that presence." (NIB)
This is an interpretation that probably wouldn't sit very well with my ex-churchmates: the idea that God is the source of good and evil is a finely shaded view that doesn't fit into the black and white Protestant evangelical worldview, where Satan is popularly viewed as the source of temptation and calamity. Nevertheless, it is certainly incorrect for me suggest that the only reasonable conclusion is that "God doesn't have much to do with" human goodness or evil.
Reverend Sensing expands on this in "God Answers:"
Job has considered only two possibilities: either God is just in ways that we like and understand, or creation is basically chaotic. God's speech reveals another choice: that there can be a vision of everything – even chaos, even evil – brought finally into God's dominion. It is a vision from outside the human plane, "and yet one which serves to give radical hope in the present." "In the beginning, God," says Genesis, and in the end, also God. The Voice [from the whirlwind] is saying, "Don't you understand that there is no one else here?" (Long).
I tend to view scripture through an anthropological, historical, and cultural lens, tracing the development of the Judaeo-Christian god as a human concept, rather than a historical and present reality. So, I don't approach Job from a position of faith, as the Reverend does, but as a seeker of a certain kind of explanatory satisfaction. I don't see in the book of Job the "radical hope in the present" that Long suggests.
That said, the idea that God (or a god, or a multitude of gods, or whatever word you choose to apply to whatever you believe Makes It All Go) is the source of good and evil seems to have a certain amount of explanatory power, and is, ironically, closer to the native theologies of the people who have been so terribly affected by the present catastrophe.
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[Andrea Harris comments.]
January 21, 2005
 William Safire praises Bush's second inaugural speech in today's NYT, calling it "among the top 5 of the 20 second-inaugurals in our history."
He writes,
In Bush's "second gathering" (Lincoln called it his "second appearing"), the Texan evoked J.F.K.'s "survival of liberty" phrase to convey his central message: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Bush repeated that internationalist human-rights idea, with a slight change, in these words: "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."
The change in emphasis was addressed to accommodationists who make "peace" and "the peace process" the No. 1 priority of foreign policy. Others of us - formerly known as hardliners, now called Wilsonian idealists - put freedom first, recalling that the U.S. has often had to go to war to gain and preserve it. Bush makes clear that it is human liberty, not peace, that takes precedence, and that it is tyrants who enslave peoples, start wars and provoke revolution. Thus, the spread of freedom is the prerequisite to world peace.
He concludes with,
Cut out of a near-final draft was the line on the side of the bell from Leviticus that rings out Bush's theme: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ... "
That verse is Leviticus 25:10, which reads in its entirety,
And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
Leviticus covers everything from the slaughtering of herd and bird sacrifices, to the preparation of grain sacrifices and the removal of mold from the walls of a house. It contains the laws that were intended to keep the people of Israel holy in the sight of their god, so that they could successfully maintain their relationship with him. These laws were said to be part of the whole ethical package received by Moses.
Leviticus 25 deals with the sabbatical year and the Jubilee year. Like the seventh day, which is to be a day of rest, every seventh year is to be a year of rest. The sowing and reaping of fields, and the pruning and picking of vines, is prohibited. During a sabbatical year, only what grows naturally is for the taking.
Every fiftieth year is a Jubilee (yovel in Hebrew) year. In addition to the normal sabbatical year observances, all tenured land reverts to its owners, and all indentured Israelites return to their homes.
In his commentary on Leviticus, Baruch Levine outlines what the Israelites meant by "liberty" in this context:
The Hebrew term deror has conventionally been rendered "freedom, liberty." More has been learned about it in recent years, however. Hebrew deror is cognate with Akkadian andurāru, which designates an edict of release issued by the Old Babylonian kings and some of their successors. This edict was often issued by a king upon ascending the throne and was a feature of a more extensive legal institution known as mesharum, a moratorium declared on debts and indenture. The Akkadian verb darāru, like Hebrew d-r-r, means "to move about freely," referring in this instance to the freedom granted those bound by servitude. In Jeremiah 34:15, we read that, as the Chaldeans approached Jerusalem, King Zedekiah ordered the people to release their indentured servants, to proclaim a deror, "release." In Isaiah 61:1, the Judeans are to be freed under terms of a deror as they are restored to their land. The biblical laws of the Jubilee year thus incorporate Near Eastern legal institutions of great antiquity.
Great antiquity, indeed: the Old Babylonian period ranges from 1728 to 1685 BC. Across more than 3700 years, the culture of the ancient Near East reaches us through the words of the 43rd President of the United States of America, delivered on the steps of our secular temple, our Capitol. Concepts directly derived from a time of blood sacrifice and theophany are now expressed in a purportedly rational age.
I don't believe that the President is aware of these things. He's not that sort of man, which is unfortunate, but not the unmitigated disaster that so many of his opponents believe it to be. In place of an acute sense of the long flows of history, the President has his faith. In the West, that faith, and faiths like it, are what connect many people to the ancient temples of Babylon, the sands and vineyards of Mesopotamia. That faith, with its attendant, multiply-translated, heavily redacted, 2,500 year old texts, can create a sense of cultural resonance that operates at an irrational level, but can nonetheless guide actions and form convictions.
This isn't always a good thing. In the extremist elements of Islam we see a bad resonance, a dissonance. The waveforms of the ancient blood sacrifice elements of pre-Islamic, nomadic faiths and early Islam have created an unholy bloodlust, whereby the power and rush of murder are mistaken for the power and rush of the approving presence of Allah.
These two sensations, the harmonious and the dissonant, can recognize one another. You don't need to be explicitly aware of the Near Eastern roots of our culture and its extreme elements to recognize the equally ancient roots of another culture and its extreme elements. You don't need to know about the Hebrew and Akkadian roots of "liberty" to sense when someone is opposed to it.
Although President Bush isn't "intelligent" in the sense that is currently the fashion among academics and the intelligentsia, he has enough perception of the great resonances of human history to recognize evil when he sees it, and to feel the pull of the long centuries that draw him to approve actions that are, more or less, in proper opposition to it.
And that is all that history requires of him.
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For more on Bush's inaugural speech, how it well it played (or didn't), and some speculation about "damage control," see Mr. Gandelman.
November 11, 2005
Anonymous Coward
Someone, apparently, thinks that I need to know what Henry Ford thought about the menace of international Jewry.
Which I already do, thanks. In addition to developing modern production techniques and applying them to autmobile manufacturing, Mr. Ford was an ardent anti - Zionist, to the point of printing up 500,000 copies of Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He bought a newspaper to further his views, and published a collection of that paper's writings as the "The International Jew, The World's Foremost Problem" in the 1920s. Other tracts followed.
You can read what the ADL has to say about all that here, and, if you're so inclined, you can read the original text of "The International Jew" for yourself here.
Anyway. If you feel the need to send me a document or direct me to a particular set of writings, have the courage of your convictions and do it in your own name.
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