This, in the end, is the ultimate irony of the ultranationalist. In the name of defending all that is special, unique and sacred about a culture, they strip away every particularity, profane everything sacred, reduce everything to a brutal, know-nothing barbarity that is utterly indistinguishable in every detail from the fascists of every other nation or culture.
I am not Jewish - I am, in fact, an OWL (old white lady), (raised Lutheran now technically atheist) but I empathized with your concern over the burning of the books vs. burning of humanity. I felt the same way during the Iraqi war - realized that I could watch the horrors of war, as in people vs. people, with small qualms, but I turned off the TV when it came to showing the destruction of antiquities. Couldn't watch. I am also a "person of the book," as in still regretting the loss of the Library of Alexandria. Damn!
Zealots like C and deCastro and Ben-Gvir et al are leading us on the path to Masada. Which sounds glorious and heroic to some, but the en of the story is mass suicide. There are other paths; I hope it’s not too late to choose them.
It feels wrong to "like" this. So deeply shocking.
Though not observant, a sort of "post-Jew" fully aware that this won't give me a pass in a pogrom, I've felt that the Jewish soul cannot recover from this war. Israel has destroyed Judaism.
But then, that's the moral vanity of the universalist or cosmopolitan "wandering" (usually German) Jew, as confessed and decried in this dialogue I posted way back in 2007. https://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2007/07/the-jew-is-the-.html (The links in the post are dead or paywalled, but I quoted enough.) It's exactly the same quarrel that's cranked past the breaking point in your post, on the rack of this moment. And you will recognize, as I did, George Steiner's statement as "the cry of my kind."
(The weak attachment to Israel I confessed to in that post is long gone. I've never visited and I never will.)
There's a paradox, isn't there, in the fact that so many of the diaspora critics of Israel who invoke this exact vision of Judaism are themselves secular? I don't know if you identify with that label, but I certainly do, and it's been my experience that a majority of my generational peers who are most committed to Palestinian cause identify similarly.
The pro-Israeli view of this ideological tendency is almost painfully vulgar: all these people are self-hating, false Jews; they have given up their commitments to both the faith and the people, and as such are content to hurl vulgarities from the sidelines as the model minority spokespeople for antisemites. Unfortunately, after spending time in these protest movements (both online and in-person) I have to admit that there may be some truth to this view of things, but I don't this explanation tells the whole story.
Speaking for myself, I think that it's very difficult to enshrine the sort of inquisitive, humanistic Judaism that we both long for as a genuine religious commitment when contemporary Israeli society exists as such an obvious and insurmountable counter-example to the idea that our people have been bestowed any special spiritual or ethical insight about the really tough questions that come with living in a world filled other people and other peoples. God, we are told, chose our tribe for *something;* if that special favor can only empower us to prevail over and even obliterate other peoples rather than living alongside them, as so many Israelis seem to believe, then there is very little in that tradition that I can identify with or find value in. And yet this is the path that we've gone down, leaving those of us who long for something better in something of a quandary-- either these covenants were never real, or in hewing to the values of man instead of the values of God we have seriously strayed from the path set out for us.
I initially thought your fear for the Jewish soul might be over-dramatic, but in the process of writing out this comment I think I've come to understand and even sympathize with your position. It seems that a critical mass of Jews have looked at the story of Passover and concluded that "in order to never become slaves in Egypt again, we must instead become Pharaoh." The history of Judaism is certainly filled with tragic examples that those sympathetic to this view can cite from in order to justify their brutality. But if there was ever anything about our faith that made us better than our persecutors, I find it impossible to believe that those qualities can survive once we aspire to become them.
It seems that a critical mass of Jews have looked at the story of Passover and concluded that "in order to never become slaves in Egypt again, we must instead become Pharaoh."
This all strikes me as overly-dramatic, even hysterical (I'm sure you might say the same of my view, ironically.) If Meretz had merged with Labor in the past election there might not even have been a Netanyahu government and this war would have looked quite different And it's hardly "becoming Pharoah" to recognize that Israel's enemies in the neighborhood, Iran and its proxies in particular, are not looking for a friendly neighbor.
As a secular Jew it would be extremely odd indeed to leave behind any connection to the faith because you concluded "our people are not bestowed any special insight into the tought questions." Of course we're not. We're just a people who want to survive, pass our lifestyle traditions to our children, retain a connection with the past and future etc.
"It seems that a critical mass of Jews have looked at the story of Passover and concluded that "in order to never become slaves in Egypt again, we must instead become Pharaoh."
At the risk of being just another self-promoting Substacker (what else?), I wrote this https://anniegottlieb.substack.com/p/the-age-of-branded-gods I'm basically anti-tribal (which is veryJewish in its own way—there are clannish and "let me out of this ghetto!!" strains of Judaism) and not exactly "secular," but rather devoutly agnostic. I think reifying traditions—taking our own stories literally—has made us humans murderous over what amounts to one blind man holding the ear of the elephant and another feeling the tail.
I always wonder where the liberal Zionist redline is for each such individual. For me, Hebron was the real wake up call. There’s simply no system; rule, principle, that can justify such unfair treatment. To make it moral and just. “Yah sorry, you have no civil rights because Rachel’s tomb or some shit is nearby”.
For others, I’d think the sheer volume of dead kids might do it.
But then, I sadly realize, that for some, there is no redline. That we could complete a genocide and it’d be Hamas fault
Redline for what? From a realpolitik prospective, there are millions of Israelis and millions of Palestinians and neither are going away. They are eventually going to need to figure out how to incorporate this fact and exist with it. They aren't the only area with decades or centuries of ethnic/nationalist conflict.
I think the two-state solution might seem like a pipe dream but that doesn't necessarily mean it is the least realistic solution. I find it more plausible as a solution than any one-state solution that imagines a multi-ethnic, multi-religious secular democracy of Co-Existence. This is not necessarily meant to be cheery, just what I think of as the path most likely to produce less violence in the long run. Nor do I think a two-state solution is realistic likely in the near future.
I think another big issue is that this is another part the Meir Kahane/Mizrahi divide that you pointed out earlier. Ben-Gvir clearly loathes most American Jews (unwisely in my opinion). He sees us as too assimilated, too secular, too deluded (he would probably compare us to the German Jews who thought it was wrong to be alarmist about the Nazis in the 1930s especially early on and that their service to the Kaiser would save them, etc). He clearly thinks in terms that Jews must go it alone.
Yet again, I am thankful for John's honest account of the internal wrestling necessary to deal with issues like this.
It is another reminder war corrodes the morality and ethics of all involved, including the troops on your side. Stregoni's quote in an earlier comment illuminates that.
The natural state of Man is barbarism — I might add of a kind rarely seen in animals. This extends to my people because universal means universal, no exceptions and all that. And arguably capitalism by definition is an exercise in promoting barbarism as well as of the concept that one can’t win if the other doesn’t lose. (That’s the level on which Trump was the perfect person to be POTUS — the kind of savage a capitalist nation of a scale of ours should have. But that’s all a kvetch for another day…)
This, in the end, is the ultimate irony of the ultranationalist. In the name of defending all that is special, unique and sacred about a culture, they strip away every particularity, profane everything sacred, reduce everything to a brutal, know-nothing barbarity that is utterly indistinguishable in every detail from the fascists of every other nation or culture.
I am not Jewish - I am, in fact, an OWL (old white lady), (raised Lutheran now technically atheist) but I empathized with your concern over the burning of the books vs. burning of humanity. I felt the same way during the Iraqi war - realized that I could watch the horrors of war, as in people vs. people, with small qualms, but I turned off the TV when it came to showing the destruction of antiquities. Couldn't watch. I am also a "person of the book," as in still regretting the loss of the Library of Alexandria. Damn!
Zealots like C and deCastro and Ben-Gvir et al are leading us on the path to Masada. Which sounds glorious and heroic to some, but the en of the story is mass suicide. There are other paths; I hope it’s not too late to choose them.
It feels wrong to "like" this. So deeply shocking.
Though not observant, a sort of "post-Jew" fully aware that this won't give me a pass in a pogrom, I've felt that the Jewish soul cannot recover from this war. Israel has destroyed Judaism.
But then, that's the moral vanity of the universalist or cosmopolitan "wandering" (usually German) Jew, as confessed and decried in this dialogue I posted way back in 2007. https://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2007/07/the-jew-is-the-.html (The links in the post are dead or paywalled, but I quoted enough.) It's exactly the same quarrel that's cranked past the breaking point in your post, on the rack of this moment. And you will recognize, as I did, George Steiner's statement as "the cry of my kind."
(The weak attachment to Israel I confessed to in that post is long gone. I've never visited and I never will.)
There's a paradox, isn't there, in the fact that so many of the diaspora critics of Israel who invoke this exact vision of Judaism are themselves secular? I don't know if you identify with that label, but I certainly do, and it's been my experience that a majority of my generational peers who are most committed to Palestinian cause identify similarly.
The pro-Israeli view of this ideological tendency is almost painfully vulgar: all these people are self-hating, false Jews; they have given up their commitments to both the faith and the people, and as such are content to hurl vulgarities from the sidelines as the model minority spokespeople for antisemites. Unfortunately, after spending time in these protest movements (both online and in-person) I have to admit that there may be some truth to this view of things, but I don't this explanation tells the whole story.
Speaking for myself, I think that it's very difficult to enshrine the sort of inquisitive, humanistic Judaism that we both long for as a genuine religious commitment when contemporary Israeli society exists as such an obvious and insurmountable counter-example to the idea that our people have been bestowed any special spiritual or ethical insight about the really tough questions that come with living in a world filled other people and other peoples. God, we are told, chose our tribe for *something;* if that special favor can only empower us to prevail over and even obliterate other peoples rather than living alongside them, as so many Israelis seem to believe, then there is very little in that tradition that I can identify with or find value in. And yet this is the path that we've gone down, leaving those of us who long for something better in something of a quandary-- either these covenants were never real, or in hewing to the values of man instead of the values of God we have seriously strayed from the path set out for us.
I initially thought your fear for the Jewish soul might be over-dramatic, but in the process of writing out this comment I think I've come to understand and even sympathize with your position. It seems that a critical mass of Jews have looked at the story of Passover and concluded that "in order to never become slaves in Egypt again, we must instead become Pharaoh." The history of Judaism is certainly filled with tragic examples that those sympathetic to this view can cite from in order to justify their brutality. But if there was ever anything about our faith that made us better than our persecutors, I find it impossible to believe that those qualities can survive once we aspire to become them.
It seems that a critical mass of Jews have looked at the story of Passover and concluded that "in order to never become slaves in Egypt again, we must instead become Pharaoh."
This all strikes me as overly-dramatic, even hysterical (I'm sure you might say the same of my view, ironically.) If Meretz had merged with Labor in the past election there might not even have been a Netanyahu government and this war would have looked quite different And it's hardly "becoming Pharoah" to recognize that Israel's enemies in the neighborhood, Iran and its proxies in particular, are not looking for a friendly neighbor.
As a secular Jew it would be extremely odd indeed to leave behind any connection to the faith because you concluded "our people are not bestowed any special insight into the tought questions." Of course we're not. We're just a people who want to survive, pass our lifestyle traditions to our children, retain a connection with the past and future etc.
"It seems that a critical mass of Jews have looked at the story of Passover and concluded that "in order to never become slaves in Egypt again, we must instead become Pharaoh."
Citation needed.
I was quoting from OP in case wasn’t clear.
At the risk of being just another self-promoting Substacker (what else?), I wrote this https://anniegottlieb.substack.com/p/the-age-of-branded-gods I'm basically anti-tribal (which is veryJewish in its own way—there are clannish and "let me out of this ghetto!!" strains of Judaism) and not exactly "secular," but rather devoutly agnostic. I think reifying traditions—taking our own stories literally—has made us humans murderous over what amounts to one blind man holding the ear of the elephant and another feeling the tail.
"The homeland of the Jew is the text." That's only one of the things Steiner says.
While another thought I've had is: (Bibi's subtext)
"Antisemitism is eternal and undying. So we might as well try to deserve it."
I always wonder where the liberal Zionist redline is for each such individual. For me, Hebron was the real wake up call. There’s simply no system; rule, principle, that can justify such unfair treatment. To make it moral and just. “Yah sorry, you have no civil rights because Rachel’s tomb or some shit is nearby”.
For others, I’d think the sheer volume of dead kids might do it.
But then, I sadly realize, that for some, there is no redline. That we could complete a genocide and it’d be Hamas fault
Redline for what? From a realpolitik prospective, there are millions of Israelis and millions of Palestinians and neither are going away. They are eventually going to need to figure out how to incorporate this fact and exist with it. They aren't the only area with decades or centuries of ethnic/nationalist conflict.
I think the two-state solution might seem like a pipe dream but that doesn't necessarily mean it is the least realistic solution. I find it more plausible as a solution than any one-state solution that imagines a multi-ethnic, multi-religious secular democracy of Co-Existence. This is not necessarily meant to be cheery, just what I think of as the path most likely to produce less violence in the long run. Nor do I think a two-state solution is realistic likely in the near future.
We are the people of the book, and once found solidarity with other peoples of the book.
Even when their copies included sequels or prequels or, god help us, trilogies.
I think another big issue is that this is another part the Meir Kahane/Mizrahi divide that you pointed out earlier. Ben-Gvir clearly loathes most American Jews (unwisely in my opinion). He sees us as too assimilated, too secular, too deluded (he would probably compare us to the German Jews who thought it was wrong to be alarmist about the Nazis in the 1930s especially early on and that their service to the Kaiser would save them, etc). He clearly thinks in terms that Jews must go it alone.
"Chose your enemy wisely, for soon you will be just like him." -Sun Tzu
Yet again, I am thankful for John's honest account of the internal wrestling necessary to deal with issues like this.
It is another reminder war corrodes the morality and ethics of all involved, including the troops on your side. Stregoni's quote in an earlier comment illuminates that.
The natural state of Man is barbarism — I might add of a kind rarely seen in animals. This extends to my people because universal means universal, no exceptions and all that. And arguably capitalism by definition is an exercise in promoting barbarism as well as of the concept that one can’t win if the other doesn’t lose. (That’s the level on which Trump was the perfect person to be POTUS — the kind of savage a capitalist nation of a scale of ours should have. But that’s all a kvetch for another day…)