Ignoring Genocide is the Horrific Deeply Human Response to Evil

 

Part of the challenge in defending Israel in its war against Hamas is that there are two charges that Israel confronts and our opponents casually switch between the two, Motte and Bailey style. The first is that Israeli policy is problematic and that Israel has done things it should not have during the Gaza War. In truth, I agree that Israel is guilty on this front. There may be readers who take a less charitable view of Israel, but, at the end of the day, we are going to be arguing along a spectrum. The second charge, based in the previously discussed chimerical anti-Zionism, sees any wrongdoing on Israel's part as merely a manifestation of the cosmic evil that Israel embodies. From this perspective, Israel, simply by existing, is already as guilty as the Nazis.  

Defending Israel against the first kind of charge, even when Israel might factually be innocent, is likely to be ineffective. The reason for this is that, if our opponent is a chimerical anti-Zionist, they are not really arguing based on the particular bad thing they are accusing Israel of at the moment. Instead, Israel is guilty of the particular charge because the speaker has already made Israel the ultimate villain in a make-believe morality play. 

One thinks of the example of Holocaust denial. One might be tempted into getting into a technical discussion about the practicality of Zyklon B to mass murder people or whether crematoria could be used to dispose of the bodies, but, for the Holocaust denier, that was never the real issue. The Holocaust denier starts with the assumption of the grand Jewish plot and that Jews really have the power and inclination to fake something like the Holocaust for their own nefarious purposes. We see something similar with Candace Owens. She is not interested in an honest discussions of the technical issues surrounding Charlie Kirk's murder. That is simply a stage for her to present her story that Israel is the grand mastermind of global evil. In both cases, a response needs to be centered around turning the tables on the conspiracy charge to make the case that it is the people claiming a Jewish/Israeli conspiracy who are the ones plotting to commit mass murder.      

In regards to the charge of Israel committing genocide, a few things should be noted. One, convicting Israel requires a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the term, far outside its common usage. Two, those who charge Israel with genocide would never wish to apply the same standards to Arab and Islamic history. Three, the genocide charge was popularized even before Israel invaded Gaza on October 27th, 2023. This suggests that the charge of genocide has nothing to do with anything Israel may have done. Instead, those who charge Israel with genocide see Israel as this grand evil, whose very existence is an act of genocide. As such, the mass murder of Israelis, such as on October 7th, becomes a "defense" against genocide.   

Even when we are dealing with honest critics of Israel (and there are good reasons to be critical of Israel's actions), their information is likely to be tainted by chimerical anti-Zionists. We are not going to be able to make any progress, even with such people, unless they can be convinced to accept that, yes, chimerical anti-Zionism, much like chimerical anti-Semitism, exists and, as such, there really is a "vast anti-Israel conspiracy." This means that news hostile to Israel needs to be treated with skepticism and that, furthermore, Israel needs to be granted a great deal of license to fight the manifestations of this conspiracy. 

Take the example of schools in Gaza. It is hard for a regular person to fathom the idea that Hamas would build tunnels underneath schools with the intention that Israel will have to bomb them, allowing Hamas collaborators in the mainstream press to accuse Israel of bombing schools. What kind of psychopath would try to get their own kids killed? Furthermore, you have the idea that schools run by a perfectly "respectable" international organization like UNRWA are really Hamas training institutes. This means that high-ranking elements within the United Nations are actively part of a conspiracy to help Hamas destroy Israel, in essence to carry out another Holocaust. I admit that all of this sounds far-fetched, the kind of nonsense that regime propagandists would say to try to silence those exposing their human rights crimes. That being said, once you accept that chimerical anti-Zionism, as an extension of chimerical anti-Semitism, exists, then, all of a sudden, this becomes quite plausible.   

For those of you who are new to this concept that Israel really is the target of a vast international conspiracy founded on the fact that large parts of the world honestly operate on a Protocols of the Elders of Zion-based narrative that Jews, and by extension Israel, are the primary source of what is wrong with the world, consider the number of condemnations issued by the UN against Israel compared to the number issued against rogue regimes like North Korea. Either you must believe that Israel, which for all of its very real faults is still a functional liberal democracy, is a worse abuser of human rights than North Korea or accept that there is something fundamentally rotten about the UN and how it approaches human rights. 

Considering the challenge of defending Israel without recognizing that it is under attack by an ideological conspiracy, it becomes important to focus on the chimerical issue over responding to particular factual charges. For example, it is useless to respond to the charge of Israel committing genocide unless we have first considered why there is a mass movement accusing Israel of such. Take this tweet from John Cusack, where he claims that "to be obsessed with stopping a genocide is a deeply human, moral response to evil." 

Contrary to John Cusack, it is not deeply human to be obsessed with stopping a genocide. I wish it were, but the facts are otherwise. If Israel were guilty of genocide, it would stand as the genocide with the greatest protest opposition and that itself would require an explanation. 

Consider the example of the Holocaust. Even though the Allies were fighting Nazi Germany, there was little interest in stopping the Holocaust. Nazi atrocities received little attention even when the information was available. When they were reported, the Jewish element tended to be ignored. The fact that we were at war with the Nazis actually made it more difficult to publicize the Holocaust because people were inclined to dismiss such claims simply as wartime propaganda. Keep in mind that, during World War I, German atrocities in Belgium were widely reported and turned out to be bogus. 

Even in the immediate aftermath of the war, when Nazi crimes were exposed to the world, there was little interest, outside of Jewish circles, in the Holocaust. It took years for the Nazis to be seen in Western eyes as ultimate manifestations of evil. In essence, we did not yet have the Nazis of Godwin's Law that we take for granted today, where, if you are stuck trying to find a word to denounce someone, you simply call them a Nazi. 

This change was not because of the Holocaust, but because both the right and the left found it useful to use the Nazis as shorthand for evil. If you were a mid-twentieth-century conservative, Nazis became the ultimate evil that America fought against. This meant that, contrary to what the left claimed, the United States and its military power were fundamentally good for the world. If you were on the left, Nazism was the extreme manifestation of right-wing evil. In essence, conservatives were all really secret Nazis trying to lead us down the path of Germany. Rather than this vilification of the Nazis being caused by the Holocaust, it was the other way around. 

Once the Nazis became society's shorthand for evil, suddenly the Holocaust became something that everyone could take an interest in. The right could embrace Israel as the Jews picking themselves up by their bootstraps and fighting for traditional liberal Western values. The left could embrace Jews as the victims of European Christianity. As such, for decades, the Holocaust "benefited" Jews and made them popular, not because of anything related to the Jews themselves but because they were useful good guys in the stories that both the right and left wished to tell. 

To be clear, the Holocaust was real and its basic facts were well known. It was simply that, before about the 1970s, non-Jews did not particularly care. Even today, there is little concern with the crimes of Imperial Japan such as the Rape of Nanking. It is not that the facts are unknown or in dispute; it is simply a matter of there being no reason for people to want to actively think about them. Japanese crimes do not easily fit into anyone's narrative. If you are on the right, you have the inconvenient fact that we kept Emperor Hirohito on his throne. If you are on the left, you have the inconvenient fact that the Japanese were not white European imperialists; on the contrary, they acted in the name of "freeing Asia" from European imperialism. 

Alternatively, consider the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, something that happened when John Cusack was already a famous actor, who, for some reason, did not use his celebrity to bring attention to what was happening. The massacre of the Tutsis happened in the face of modern media and was well publicized even as the public was largely indifferent. To care about Rwanda, you needed to simultaneously care about people in the middle of Africa and about people who were victims of someone other than whites.  

Imagine a truly evil dictator of a country that most Americans would not be able to find on a map. In the spirit of being truly evil, they decide to invade their neighbor, another country that most Americans would not be able to find on a map and wipe out an ethnic group that most people have never heard of. To do this right, our dictator has hatched their plan with the help of their top experts in international law (these are lawyers, so we can already assume that they are evil) to make sure that mass murdering these people will check off every possible box to count as a genocide. The massacre begins; the worst barbaric atrocities imaginable are filmed and broadcast to the world. Could you manufacture the kind of protest movement that Israel has faced? 

It seems obvious to me that any attempt to convince tens of thousands of college students around the world to put their lives on hold and join a protest movement to shut down campuses to force politicians to take action would fail.

   

It would not be because people would be unaware or not be horrified by these atrocities. It would simply be a matter of them lacking a motive to actively care; they would lack any larger narrative to make any of this relevant. The dictator is not a useful stand-in for Western Imperialism and the minority group being slaughtered is not a manifestation of the revolutionary spirit against oppression. It would take decades and a massive infrastructure to change this. It is unlikely that the backlash against the dictator would happen in time to stop an actual genocide and the motives for trying to demonize them are unlikely to even have much to do with saving the minority group. 

I encourage readers, whatever their religion or ethnicity, to honestly read about what is going on with the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. You are likely going to find good reasons to be critical of Netanyahu or of any Prime Minister that might replace him. Israel is in a difficult situation, particularly as it attempts to operate as a liberal democracy committed to human rights. Those who care about the survival of liberal democracies under military threat need to study the Israeli example, both what it has done right and its mistakes. 

None of this has anything to do with the vast majority of Israel's most committed critics. Their opposition to Israel is rooted in an imaginary narrative in which Israel assumes the role of ultimate evil whose dark villainy serves to show the critic in a heroic light. John Cusack did not speak out in the same strident fashion against the Hutus as he does against Israel, because there was no organized movement encouraging him to do so. Furthermore, he would have risked being seen as a white imperialist promoting racist stereotypes. By contrast, denouncing Israel serves to place Cusack within a global leftist movement that opposes the American world order that grew out of World War II and defeated the Soviet Union. Israel was a creation of the West and its moral defense has relied on the fact that it stands on the front lines of protecting and promoting Western values. Defeat Israel morally and you have the basis for a wider attack on the legitimacy of American political hegemony. From this perspective, Israel already assumes supreme guilt. The particular facts of Israeli crimes are only incidental.        

Chimerical Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

 

Part of being a student of Jewish History is an awareness of Gavin Langmuir's distinction between a realistic and a chimerical anti-Semitism. Take the example of medieval Christendom.  In 1096, Jews in the Rhineland were murdered by roving bands of Crusaders. (It is important to keep in mind that not all Crusaders supported killing Jews and many Christians, such as the Bishop of Speyer, actively protected Jews.) Those Jews who were murdered were killed for "crimes" that they were most certainly guilty of. Imagine if those Jews were put on trial:

"Jew, do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?

"No. I believe that he was a mamzar and his mother was a zonah."

Not to approve of the mass murder of Jews, but it did not happen because Christians misunderstood something about the nature of Judaism. The Crusaders were looking to kill unbelievers and they were correct in assuming that Jews were unbelievers.  

The big question at the heart of the study of medieval Christian anti-Semitism is: how do you explain what happened in the twelfth century? For some reason, and there is a vast literature with a wide variety of theories as to why this happened, Christians somehow came to believe that Jews actively served Satan. Their ancestors during the first century crucified Jesus precisely because they knew that he was the Son of God and that contemporary Jews gathered to reenact the crucifixion by torturing innocent Christian children to death. In essence, twelfth-century Christendom went insane. 

Considering that medieval Christianity was no longer thinking rationally regarding Jews, it must be understood that, regardless of whether medieval Jews were particularly saintly, medieval Christian chimerical anti-Semitism had nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Christianity. Christians might have come to believe that Jews were greedy because of Jewish moneylenders. Christians coming to believe that Jews served the Devil required something internal to Christianity. To be clear, what precisely that internal issue was is an open question, but insanity is, by its nature, something internal to the human mind. 

In modern times, we have the example of Nazi Germany. It would have been one thing if the Nazis had simply believed that Jews were greedy capitalists or revolutionary communists. Early in the Nazi period, we have Hitler ignoring the pleas of leading German scientists not to expel Jews from the universities, as this would damage German science. Hitler believed that the Jewish threat was of such a nature that he knowingly sabotaged German scientific development. Considering the role of Jews in the Manhattan Project and Nazi dismissal of Relativity as a "Jewish physics," Nazi anti-Semitism quite literally caused them to lose the race for the atomic bomb and ultimately the War. 

The Nazis started World War II and used it as a cover to carry out the Holocaust because they believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; in essence, that there was a vast Jewish conspiracy, stretching from Wall Street to the Kremlin, that threatened to take over the world. The Holocaust was not only one of the greatest acts of human evil; it was also profoundly foolish. What was the logic of diverting trains, in the middle of a war, to murder useful slave laborers? In essence, people like Eichmann, who carried out the Final Solution during the final two years of the War, when Germany was losing, did so knowing full well that they were likely costing Germany the War. They were "humanitarians," willing to sacrifice their own country in order to save the world from the Jews.     

Considering the irrational nature of Nazi anti-Semitism, it should be understood that, whatever its origins, it never was really about the Jews. There were many things one can fault early twentieth-century Jews for. Nothing that Jews did could ever explain why the Nazis would do something so destructive to themselves as the Holocaust. The Nazis believed that Jews were an existential threat to the world for reasons that could only have come from an internal discourse within German thought that had nothing to do with Jews.  

Chimerical anti-Semitism becomes important for understanding modern anti-Zionism. Whether or not anti-Zionism actually is anti-Semitism, it lends itself to the sort of chimerical thinking that is the hallmark of anti-Semitism. Let me be clear. There are good reasons for Arabs and Muslims to object to the State of Israel and even be willing to use armed force to eliminate it. This is different than believing that the State of Israel is at the center of some kind of grand conspiracy to rule the world.   

Consider the example of October 7th. I can understand why Hamas would attack IDF bases along the Gaza border, but why shoot people at the Nova Music festival? Hamas' leadership had to have known that their actions would lead to the bombing of Gaza. What did they do to protect and feed Gaza's citizens? One has to conclude that Hamas made the calculation to not only murder Israeli citizens but to sacrifice Gaza's civilians as well. In essence, like the Nazis, they were willing that their own country should be destroyed if it might strike a blow against the Jewish conspiracy. 

As for the anti-Israel protesters, I can understand why people would speak out and question the death and destruction in Gaza. The fact that this opposition exceeds that against only ongoing conflict, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggests that this is not really about whether Israel's response has been excessive, but a narrative in which Israel is not merely a small country on the other side of the world that engages in morally problematic behavior, but some sort of grand cosmic villain.

Like Hamas, opponents of Israel's war in Gaza care nothing about Gazan civilians. If you believed that Israel was actually carrying out a genocide, your first response would be to try to get as many Palestinians as possible out of Gaza. One thinks of the example of Jewish relief organizations trying to get Jews out of Nazi-controlled Europe only to run up against the fact that no country wanted to take in large numbers of Jewish refugees. Alternatively, consider the millions of Ukrainian refugees who are currently residing within the European Union. Why have the Arabs not done something similar for the people of Gaza?  

The lack of interest in getting Palestinians out of Gaza becomes particularly farcical when you consider that Israel did not launch its attack on Gaza until about three weeks after October 7th. Already at this point, Palestinian activists were accusing Israel of genocide, but not using this window to evacuate civilians. It would have been a simple thing for Egypt to allow Palestinians into the Sinai Desert, where the international community could have set up refugee camps for them. This did not happen because Palestinian activists care even less about Palestinian lives than Israel does. Israel has some incentive to limit Palestinian deaths to avoid international pressure. For "supporters" of Palestine, dead Palestinian civilians are simply a sacrifice to awaken the world to the evils of Zionism. For them, Zionism's evil lies in the metaphysical fact that it is a settler-colonialist apartheid entity that causes Palestinian alienation; it has nothing to do with how Israel physically treats Palestinians. 

This is not a defense of Israeli government policy, against which there can be numerous legitimate objections. That being said, it should be recognized that the opposition to Israel has nothing to do with anything Israel might have done, however morally dubious. This fixation on Israel, as opposed to numerous other countries with lousy human rights records, must be the result of something other than Israel. 

Recognizing this distinction between regular prejudice and chimerical hate allows us to better understand anti-Semitism and to navigate the Israeli-Arab conflict. There is a common misunderstanding of prejudice where prejudice itself leads to genocidal violence. You can believe that Jews are greedy and manipulative and still be a perfectly friendly neighbor. This is distinct from having a narrative where a group becomes the conveyor of cosmic evil that must be resisted at all costs. If you are willing to sacrifice your own people to save the world from the Jews, of course you are also going to be willing to wipe out the Jews for trying to destroy the world.   

While chimerical anti-Semites may wish to kill Jews, they have almost as little regard for the lives of their own people. For all the talk of the Nazis or Hamas about Jews oppressing Germans or Palestinians, they both were willing to destroy their own people as well. The reason for this is that it was never about what Jews might have actually physically done to Germans or Palestinians. Instead, the real Jewish crime is something existential against the moral order. As such, the Jews need to be defeated no matter how many non-Jews die in the process. On the contrary, the death of non-Jews will make for an even more glorious reborn world, as this sacrifice will show a greater rejection of the Jewish metaphysical evil.  

As for confronting chimerical anti-Zionism, there is nothing you can do to mitigate it. Whatever concessions Israel should or should not make to the Palestinians, I will leave to the Israeli government and ultimately its voting public. That being said, let us be clear that nothing Israel does can ever affect those opponents who are chimerical anti-Zionists, as their turn toward chimerical anti-Zionism never had anything to do with Israel. Instead, it is the product of issues within the Arab-Islamic or leftist/rightest psyche and will only be resolved there. 

As terrifying as chimerical anti-Zionists may be, it also offers us a kind of moral clarity. Unlike conventional prejudice, chimerical opponents honestly want to kill us at all costs to themselves and can never be negotiated with. As such, we should have no qualms with trying to get them first. As to the fear that we might kill innocent people and create more chimerical anti-Zionists, we can be confident that this will not be the case. Bombing people might create anti-Zionists who dislike us and even wish to fight back. It will never create chimerical anti-Zionists who believe that Israel is the ultimate evil to be wiped out no matter the cost.  

From the River to the Sea and the Horrific Doctrine

 

I was in a public library when I found a home-printed-looking pro-Palestinian magazine titled Where is Home. 

It is a collection of mostly poems, artwork, and a few short essays. As a regular listener of Haviv Rettig Gur, the primary thing that stuck out to me was that this was not a serious exploration of a complicated geopolitical issue involving real people on both sides. Instead, it was a cartoon morality play. For the creators of this magazine, Palestine seems to have little to do with a physical place. It is treated as a kind of psychomachy, a war of the soul, that manifests the world's decision whether to embrace love or hate.

I was particularly interested in the introductory essay, which begins:

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE FREE

Do you see the words "murder" or "death sentence" being remotely implied in this phrase above? We don't either, yet some people will gasp, call you antisemitic, and believe it is an outcry to kill Jewish people.

   

For the zine's intended audience, chanting "from the River to the Sea" as part of a like-minded crowd is something that makes them good people standing up against injustice. It has nothing to do with trying to solve problems in the Middle East by reaching out to the opposition through negotiation and compromise to avoid getting millions of people killed.

From the perspective of anyone not absolutely committed to the Palestinian cause, the sort of people you actually negotiate with in the non-cartoon universe, the claim that the River to the Sea chant could never have anything to do with murder is laughable. Are the authors, Madi Parsley and Ivan Salinas, unaware of the concept of euphemistic language? Advocates of mass murder rarely call for it openly. Real mass murderers talk in code. This code signals marching orders to those actually carrying out the crime, such as operating a gas chamber. In addition, the code serves to protect the wider population of enablers, allowing them to collaborate in the crime while pretending they have no idea what is really happening. For example, the ordinary German who supported sending Jews "to the East" for "resettlement" must have known at some level that this meant murder, but the phrasing allowed them to pretend otherwise.

Imagine a pro-Israel person saying, "From the River to the Sea, Eretz Yisroel Shall Be Free." I assume the authors would agree that there would be valid reasons to suspect this was a dog whistle to commit mass murder, even though the statement says just as much about murder as the Palestinian slogan. We can assume that, in this "redeemed" Eretz Yisroel, there would be no place for Palestinians. Who else are we making the land free from? Furthermore, if lots of Palestinians happen to die in a way that is deemed "completely their fault" during the "sacred" task of bringing about the cosmic good of Eretz Yisroel, a cause that transcends the flawed politics and borders of a limited State of Israel, who should complain? A few million dead people are a small price to pay for the redemption of the world, particularly if they were the evil ones who were standing in the way of salvation in the first place.

In truth, as I have argued previously, it must be taken for granted that every doctrine is a kill order. If you claim that your beliefs do not make you complicit in mass murder, you are either lying or you have not seriously thought your beliefs through. To use a math analogy, we understand the nature of a quadratic equation, in part, by finding the roots, those points on the x-axis where y = 0. So too, we only truly understand an ideology when we can find those points where it advocates murder. To be clear, there are going to be quadratic equations where the discriminant involves the square root of a negative number, leaving us no real roots where y = 0. Similarly, in politics, there are Tolstoyian pacifists who will refuse violence even at the cost of allowing the entire world to fall to evil. For example, Tolstoy advocated refusing to convict murderers, allowing them back on the streets to kill again because the legal system itself is a form of violence. While such pacifism allows the believer to personally avoid committing violence, the real-world implications of this position are so monstrous as to defy the imagination.

Imagine if we were to hand Parsley and Salinas a button that they could press to free Palestine from the River to the Sea. It would also "magically" "resettle" all Israelis in the "East." These Israelis would never be heard from again, but their fate would not be the fault of the Palestinians, who we all know are wonderful people only caring about fighting for freedom and justice. Alternatively, they can refuse to press the button. This will crush all Palestinian resistance, leaving the River to the Sea in Israeli hands forever. Perhaps I am wrong, but I have a hard time imagining our authors not pressing the button. For them, Palestine is not about actual Palestinians and their claim to a piece of land along the Mediterranean coast. Instead, Palestine is nothing less than the redemption of the world from cosmic evil. Who would be willing to accept global damnation for the sake of a few million Zionists?

What I have said about Parsley and Salinas applies equally to me. I am not a pacifist. If I had to choose between letting Israel fall victim to an October 7th-style Holocaust and killing every Palestinian, I know what I would choose. Because I know that I would sacrifice their people to save mine, I can empathize with Palestinians who make the same decision, letting my people die to save their own. That being said, if I were given a button that would make Palestine free from the River to the Sea, but in which the lives and property of Israelis would be protected, I would press that button rather than see the bloodshed of Israelis and Palestinians continue. I do not see Israel as the redemption of the world, nor do I see the Palestinians, even Hamas, as cosmic evil. As such, while I may be willing to kill millions of Palestinians to save Jewish lives, I am not about to sacrifice Palestinians, let alone Jews, merely for the cause of Eretz Yisroel. Could supporters of Palestine make the inverse choice, letting Israel win in a way that does not seriously materially harm Palestinians? How could they allow the "evil" of Zionism to persist even at the expense of the Palestinians?

 

A Thank You to Biola University for Discriminating Against Me

 

This coming school year, I am leaving the public school where I taught for the past two years to join the faculty at a Jewish private school in the Los Angeles area. Because I still need to finish clearing my teaching credential, I have been researching local university programs. As part of that search, I reached out to Biola University. I spoke to some administrators, and initially, things looked positive. However, when I started filling out the application, I discovered a mandatory section on "Christian Commitment."

While I knew that Biola was a Christian school, this rigid insistence on personal Christian belief surprised me. I previously attended Azusa Pacific University, another Christian institution, and there was never any expectation that students had to be professing Christians. It is true that professors occasionally brought up Christian content, and a few assignments required looking things up in the New Testament. As readers of this blog know, I have absolutely no problem with that. My professors appreciated me because, even when I disagreed with them, I respected their beliefs and took them seriously; I am still in contact with several of them today.

I inquired with a Biola administrator to see if some kind of exception could be made for my situation. Considering how easy it would be to lie on an online application and that many applicants likely do precisely that, if I were running an admissions department, I would want to recruit unbelievers who respected Christianity enough not to lie about their lack of faith, perhaps finding a back door to let them in. It is not as if I grew up in a church and later rejected it; as a child, I never set foot in a church and, with the exception of Father Schmutz stories and polemics against Christian biblical exegesis, received no instruction in Christian doctrine. While our exchange was entirely positive, the administrator stood his ground: affirming Christian doctrine was not something he could compromise on.

While it is annoying that I will have to apply to a different school, I am honestly grateful to Biola for discriminating against me. I believe in freedom of discrimination as an essential component of free speech. If Biola were an Aryan Christian school and wished to turn away black applicants, I would support their legal right to do so. The fact that I have now been discriminated against as a non-Christian demonstrates that when I say private discrimination should be legal (however despicable it may be in practice), I am genuinely standing on principle.

Furthermore, as a Jew, I am grateful to Biola for forcing me to actively live out my rejection of Christian doctrines like the Trinity. I easily could have checked a box claiming I believed in it. Much like the early Christians who were ordered to offer a pinch of incense on an altar to Caesar, I could have told myself that no one takes an online admission form seriously. I chose not to do that because, even if no one at Biola cared enough to look at my statement, I take my faith seriously. I am a Jew who believes that God is One, with no parts, and that He is entirely divine, with no human aspect. Whether I believe this deeply enough to die for it is something I hope to never find out. At the very least, I am willing to be inconvenienced for it. In this, I stand with the generations of Jews throughout the early modern period who were barred from higher education because European universities, with the rare exception of Padua’s medical school, required students to formally profess a belief in Christian doctrine.

By giving him the chance to turn me down, I would like to think I did that Biola administrator a favor, as a Christian, too. He had every excuse to bend the rules for my sake, but he refused. Perhaps that is simply because he is a soulless, Pharisaic, legalistic bureaucrat. But maybe he is an actual Christian who cares that there should still be at least one place left in this country outside of a church where it actually matters if someone believes in the Trinity. I allowed him to put his principles into practice. Because of me, Biola really does stand for something. 

 

The Moral Implications of Magic: Lord Voldemort (Part III)

(Part II)

When I first read The Order of the Phoenix upon its release in 2003, it was my least favorite book in the series. As I argued at the time in the YU Commentator, the plot felt stagnant. I spent far too much time with nothing happening instead of delivering the all-out wizarding war fans had anticipated for three years.

In retrospect, however, the book is vital for setting up the final arc of the series. It reframes the Ministry of Magic as an institution ranging from hopelessly incompetent to, in the person of Dolores Umbridge, outright evil. The Ministry fails to stand up to Voldemort because, at its core, it is morally compromised by the exact same ideology Voldemort espouses: magic as power. Because the bulk of the Ministry already agrees with Voldemort in principle, they have no ideological reason to fight him. Instead, they can simply negotiate a surrender while ironing out a few pragmatic details.

Fudge’s Political Bind

Cornelius Fudge’s refusal to accept Voldemort’s return goes far beyond simple skepticism of Harry’s word. Fudge needs to believe Voldemort is gone. To acknowledge the truth would utterly undermine the political arrangement that keeps him in office.

The Death Eaters are merely the tip of an iceberg; they represent a massive segment of the wizarding population that harbors a deep hatred for Muggles and Muggle-borns. As long as Voldemort was out of the picture, this anti-Muggle faction could be kept in check because its philosophy was implicitly tolerated by the Ministry. This status quo perfectly suited Fudge, the ultimate compromise candidate: anti-Muggle-born at heart, but never overtly or maliciously so.

Voldemort’s return shatters this fragile peace. It means the radical Death Eater faction will actively try to overthrow the Ministry, forcing pro-Muggle groups like the Order of the Phoenix to resist. This places moderate anti-Muggles like Fudge in a bind. His solution is a quiet compromise: the Death Eaters temporarily halt their coup and, in exchange, they are granted operational freedom and the unspoken promise that the Ministry will slowly be remade in their image. The Death Eaters have no reason to wage an open war when patience guarantees they will eventually win from within.

Like most political compromises, this arrangement is built on a massive lie. Fudge agrees to pretend that Voldemort hasn’t returned and that no Death Eater conspiracy exists. By logical extension, Harry must be labeled a liar, and the only "conspiracy" becomes one hatched by Dumbledore to overthrow the Ministry. This narrative conveniently allows the Ministry to ignore the real threat while actively targeting the Order.

The fact that so many wizards blame Muggle-borns for the ills of wizarding society is the logical conclusion of the wizarding world's self-imposed isolation. Muggle-borns inherently threaten the separation between the two worlds because they have a foot in both. A Muggle-born child receiving a Hogwarts letter does not automatically sever ties with their Muggle parents or discard their Muggle upbringing.

This anti-Muggle philosophy treats magic strictly as a tool of dominance rather than evidence of a higher moral order. If magic is merely power, then Muggles are inherently inferior beings who lack it. Conversely, if magic is tied to a higher moral authority, then wizards and Muggles are equals under the same moral law. Rather than a badge of superiority, magic becomes a heavy moral burden; wizards are simply those who have been given the knowledge of this law, and they will be judged by it.

A Negotiated Surrender

As long as Voldemort remained in the shadows, "moderate" anti-Muggle wizards were perfectly content to let him eliminate the "wrong" kinds of wizards, provided he didn't directly threaten Ministry authority. From this perspective, the Death Eaters imprisoned after Voldemort’s first fall were punished not for their bigoted beliefs, which many in the Ministry shared, but for rebelling against the Ministry. Death Eaters who were not hostile to the Ministry, like Lucius Malfoy, therefore walked free.

The eventual mass breakout from Azkaban can be read as part of the Ministry’s negotiated surrender. By initially allowing "moderate" Death Eaters to operate quietly, the Ministry invited them to call its bluff. The breakout signaled to Voldemort that the Ministry had no intention of fighting; it would capitulate, so long as it could dictate the timing and terms.

Why risk destruction when you have no principles left to defend? The Ministry's willingness to imprison innocent wizards on flimsy evidence while letting known Death Eaters walk was a pure display of authoritarianism. It proved the Ministry was no longer a legal institution governed by the rule of law, but a raw power hierarchy where politicians rewarded friends and punished enemies.

Ultimately, Fudge and Voldemort both worshipped power. Their only disagreement was stylistic: Voldemort believed in magical power wielded by a supreme individual, while Fudge believed in bureaucratic power wielded by a mediocrity like himself, a man with no real talent beyond navigating a system.

The Power of the Bureaucratic Lie

Bureaucratic climbing is the average man's version of magical power. Because the social skills required to navigate a bureaucracy are so subjective, anyone can convince themselves they could succeed if given the right opportunity. This fantasy is reinforced by the success of the talentless. The average wizard can support Fudge precisely because he is so clearly undeserving of the public trust; seeing him in power allows every ordinary wizard to believe that they, too, could become Minister.

The defining characteristic of bureaucratic power, and its ultimate disconnect from morality, is the lie. Because bureaucracy is the power of words over reality, a truly powerful bureaucrat does not bind themselves to facts. In fact, lying becomes the ultimate demonstration of authority. The more flagrant the lie, the more powerful the bureaucrat who successfully enforces it. People accept the lie, knowing it is false, simply because they dare not defy the system. This creates a self-sustaining cycle: the bureaucrat gains power as more people submit to the lie, and people submit to the lie because they see everyone else doing the same.

If Fudge represents the pleasant, bumbling face of the Ministry, Dolores Umbridge reveals its terrifying reality. Umbridge shares Fudge's exact bureaucratic philosophy, where climbing the hierarchy is an end in itself, and she uses lies in the exact same way to wield power. When she forces Harry to carve "I must not tell lies" into his own flesh, the actual truth is irrelevant. She is asserting absolute dominance: she has the power to mutilate him, and not even Dumbledore can stop her.

The only thing separating Fudge from Umbridge is his reluctance to get his hands dirty. Umbridge has no such qualms, going so far as to send Dementors after Harry from the very beginning. Because of her willingness to personally commit atrocities, Umbridge could never achieve supreme power on her own; she relies on Fudge's status to shield her, just as Fudge relies on her ruthlessness to maintain his position while never losing his plausible deniability.

It leaves us with an uncomfortable question: Who is worse? The moral psychopath incapable of understanding that their actions are evil, or the perfectly sane politician who would never personally murder anyone, but happily stays complicit so long as they can pretend they aren't responsible?

(To be continued ...) 

What Is the Point of Teaching?

 

As a teacher, imagine that you could wave a magic wand and do one of five things in your classroom:

1) Turn your failing students into D students.

2) Turn your D students into C students.

3) Turn your C students into B students.

4) Turn your B students into A students.

5) Inspire your A students to become life long learners. 

Just to be clear, for the purposes of this thought experiment, we are going to assume that these letter grades represent real standards and not the sort of grade inflation that dominates modern education. 

At a gut level, my choice is to try to inspire the A students. It is not that I believe that the other choices are unimportant or that I ignore most of the class. That being said, what puts a smile on my face in the morning when I walk into my empty classroom is the possibility that something I present is going to get into a kids head so that they find themselves thinking about it at home. 

When I prepare a lesson, my first question is why is this topic interesting. If I can figure out how to make the material interesting to me, there is a chance that I might make it interesting to someone else. When I teach, I am loud and passionate. In this sense, I am very much the product of the Haredi yeshiva system. You can think of me as a somewhat secularized rebbe.  

This attitude has its downsides. Consider the problem of skills training. Under the surface of every topic lie certain discreet skills. For example, reading requires phonics decoding and vocabulary. A good student can usually learn how to decode words and develop an advanced vocabulary passively by being exposed to books. That being said, most students need to be explicitly taught phonics and vocabulary even though they are not the interesting part of reading. Part of the appeal of Whole Language methods of teaching is that this approach allows teachers to actually sit down with students and read with them. The hard truth is that this approach does not meet the needs of most students who need to be explicitly drilled in the individual skills that make up affective reading.   

When I teach literature, what I want to do is present a book that fascinates me and make the case that they should share my fascination. The book does not have to be complicated. I have been blessed with a childlike mind and remain interested in children's things. For example, this past year, I taught A Wrinkle in Time. I loved having students bounce a ball in class and recite the multiplication table. Then, playing the role of It, the villain in the novel, I announced to the students that there is only one right answer to multiplication problems and we need to make sure that everyone answers in the right way. There is only one right way to bounce a ball and we need to torture kids to make sure that they bounce the ball properly. My way is the only way to live. I know what is best because I am a giant brain who is totally rational. As long as everyone is not like me, society will not be perfect and people will not be truly happy. We better get rid of all the people who are selfishly ruining society and making everyone else miserable by not simply complying. 

The reality was that, even though A Wrinkle in Time is listed as being for fifth graders, most of my students struggled with the vocabulary. I recognized that my students needed explicit instruction in vocabulary and was willing to do so, but my heart was never in it. This was always merely a chore that, like a kid going to school, I had to get through in order to be allowed to get back to the teaching I wanted to do. My antics in the classroom were certainly memorable and helped some students. That being said, I was not always what most of my students needed.

The year has passed and hopefully my students and I both learned something. It is summer now and I have the opportunity to think of how I can do a better job next year.  

     

The Moral Implications of Magic: Lord Voldemort (Part II)

 (Part I)

While Harry grows up under the Dursleys, Voldemort lives as a bodiless spirit in the forests of Albania. Then, not long before Harry gets his Hogwarts letter, Voldemort meets Professor Quirrell and convinces him to help steal the Philosopher's Stone. It is a pity that the book does not deal much with the relationship between Quirrell and Voldemort. We only see them interacting at the end when Voldemort has already become the dominant partner in the relationship, with Quirrell agreeing to be possessed by Voldemort and to drink unicorn blood. One imagines Quirrell as someone with low self-esteem, beaten down by a sense that no one respects him. When he first meets Voldemort, he sees Voldemort as a source of dark knowledge that he could use to gain power for himself and get back at everyone who ever looked down upon him. Clearly, Voldemort, lacking a body, needs Quirrell more than Quirrell needs Voldemort. Yet, somehow, Voldemort manages to turn the tables on Quirrell, making Quirrell the dependent one. One imagines Quirrell, afraid of being caught after his failure to rob Gringotts, becoming increasingly desperate and willing to do anything Voldemort says. This would have been particularly interesting to see because Voldemort is supposed to be a master manipulator on par with his power in the dark arts. 

Voldemort's attempt to steal the Philosopher's Stone is thwarted by Dumbledore's use of the Mirror of Erised, which makes it that the stone can only be found by someone who merely wants to find it but not use it. This is the perfect trap for Voldemort. It is Voldemort's own philosophy of power that prevents him from solving the Mirror of Erised and gaining the stone. By contrast, Harry can get the stone precisely because he does not subscribe to Voldemort's philosophy. Like being protected by his mother's sacrifice, this is another power that Voldemort knows not. 

The Philosopher's Stone ends with Voldemort back at square one, having lost Quirrell and still lacking a body. The Chamber of Secrets deals with Tom Riddle's diary, which he turned into a Horcrux. This memory of the young Voldemort is able to manipulate Ginny Weasley to the point that he is able to possess her and eventually force her to go to the Chamber of Secrets to serve as bait to lure Harry into a trap. Riddle, though, because he only understands conventional power, fails to appreciate what he is up against and that he is really walking into another of Dumbledore's traps.  

He assumes that just because Lucius Malfoy has removed Dumbledore from Hogwarts, Dumbledore has been defeated and can no longer help Harry. When Fawkes arrives with the Sorting Hat, Riddle simply doubles down on dismissing Dumbledore: "This is what Dumbledore sends his defender! A songbird and an old hat! Do you feel brave, Harry Potter? Do you feel safe now?" (pg. 316)  

Beyond killing Harry, Riddle is curious about Harry. How is it that he survived Riddle's future self? Even though Harry explains to Riddle that it was his mother's sacrifice that saved him, Riddle fails to appreciate the true significance of that sacrifice and what makes Harry special. 

So your mother died to save you. Yes, that's a powerful countercharm. I can see now ... there is nothing special about you, after all. I wondered, you see. There are strange likenesses between us, after all. Even you must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles. Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself. We even look something alike ... but after all, it was merely a lucky chance that saved you from me. (pg. 317)

Riddle needs to dismiss the thought that Harry might be special, but he clearly fears that it is true. He therefore turns to Slytherin's basilisk to kill Harry. He needs to show that it is he, with his power of Slytherin, that is special and not Harry. 

What Riddle fails to see is that Lily sacrificing herself was not merely a countercharm, but something that transcended magic, making Harry special in ways that have nothing to do with his ability to cast spells. This deeper spiritual blindness is mirrored by Riddle's practical blindness. He does not see that a phoenix like Fawkes can blind the basilisk, his tears can heal Harry, and that the Sorting Hat can call forth the Sword of Gryffindor to kill the basilisk. These objects, the practical manifestations of Harry's Gryffindor bravery and loyalty to Dumbledore, are enough to defeat Riddle, proving once again how special Harry really is. 

Just as Voldemort's attempt to kill baby Harry not only failed, but created the danger that Voldemort was trying to avoid, so too does Riddle's attempt to kill Harry here create the weapon to ultimately defeat the Horcruxes. Harry is able to use a basilisk fang to destroy the diary. By sending the basilisk against the Sword of Gryffindor, Riddle allows the sword to absorb the snake's poison, giving it the ability to destroy Horcruxes in the future.      

Voldemort next appears in The Goblet of Fire when Peter Pettigrew and Barty Crouch Jr. join him. Like Quirrell, these are people who turned to Voldemort out of an imagined sense of their own inferiority and not being appreciated by those they looked up to. Pettigrew felt that James, Lupin, and Sirius merely tolerated him, and Barty felt unloved by his father. With the Philosopher's Stone destroyed, Voldemort now wishes to use Harry's blood to refashion his old body. Still thinking of Lily's sacrifice in conventional terms, Voldemort calculates that using Harry's blood will allow him to touch Harry. What he does not consider is the possibility that there may be unforeseen consequences in further connecting himself to Harry. This is because Voldemort does not connect Lily's sacrifice to a higher moral order in the universe. As such, he fails to realize that he cannot simply manipulate it for his own ends as if it were simply a morally neutral form of technology. 

Upon capturing Harry and using his blood, it is not enough for Voldemort to kill Harry the boy. Voldemort needs to fight Harry in front of his Death Eaters to destroy the notion that Harry was ever anything special. Even after all these years, Voldemort is caught by this petty jealousy where he needs to feel uniquely special and is threatened by the possibility that Harry might be more special than him. Voldemort fails to properly evaluate Harry as a dueling opponent. Harry's power lies not in his ability to cast spells to counter the Unforgivable Curses, but in his willingness to resist Voldemort even under hopeless circumstances and his connection to Voldemort that Voldemort himself accidentally created. 

Because of the connection between Harry and Voldemort, manifested in Harry's scar, Harry was chosen by the brother wand to Voldemort's. This leads to the Priori Incantatum effect when the spells from the two wands connect. Voldemort's wand starts producing ghosts of the people he has killed, allowing Harry to escape. Voldemort's willingness to kill people to further his drive for power creates the obstacles to hinder that same drive for power. Furthermore, Voldemort has unwittingly strengthened Harry's wand, giving it the power to perform spells on its own. Voldemort believes that, now that he has been resurrected, his victory is inevitable, but the stage is merely being set for his eventual defeat. 

(To be continued ...)   

      

The Moral Implications of Magic: Lord Voldemort (Part I)

 

Contains spoilers for the Harry Potter series. 

In the previous post, I wrote about why magic is so closely intertwined with the struggle of good versus evil. If magic is real, you can either turn to evil and see magic as a form of power disconnected to any moral questions, or you can turn to good and recognize that, behind the magic, lies a higher moral authority. I would like to further examine this idea through the lens of Lord Voldemort, the villain of the Harry Potter series. 

Voldemort's philosophy is stated by Professor Quirrell at the end of Philosopher's Stone:

I met [Voldemort] when I traveled around the world. A foolish young man I was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it. (pg. 291)

Voldemort consistently interprets events in the series from the perspective of power while ignoring the moral authority behind that power. Every opportunity to reconsider what he is doing simply confirms to him that he is right and there really is no moral law beyond power.  

As Tom Riddle, Voldemort first learns about magic when Dumbledore invites him to attend Hogwarts. For Voldemort, his ability to perform magic is the proof that he is special and not merely the orphan Tom Riddle. He, therefore, wants to be the most special wizard of all. Tom Riddle, named after his Muggle father, could never be special. Instead Riddle fashions the name of Lord Voldemort and even then wants the name to be so feared that wizards would not even call him by any name, but simply "You Know Who." There is no sense that he has been given a special gift that he never deserved and therefore has obligations to those not so generously gifted.  

Because Voldemort needs to be uniquely special, he is incapable of love. To love someone means to believe that they are special. This would take away from Voldemort's own sense of being special. By contrast, Voldemort embraces having underlings. The more Deatheaters he has to venerate him, the more special he becomes. It helps that most of the death eaters are members of the wizarding pureblood aristocracy. If even the wizarding elites bow before Voldemort, that shows his greatness.  

To maintain control over his Deatheaters, Voldemort needs to direct their hatred against, giving them purpose. Since the wizarding pure bloods tend to hate Muggle-borns, people  not born into elite wizarding families, they becomes Voldemort's target. Muggle-borns are people who, on the surface, are just like Voldemort, growing up as Muggles. He refuses to accept the idea that anyone could be given the gift of magic as that would mean that magic does not really make you special. Instead he sees his magic as coming from Salazar Slytherin and seeks out Slytherin's basilisk underneath Hogwarts castle, using his ability as a parselmouth. If he is Slytherin's heir than he deserves his power and has the right to use it against others. Voldemort hopes that being the heir of Slytherin with the power to refashion Hogwarts according to Slytherin's design, with no Muggle-borns, would establish him as a wizard on par with the founders of Hogwarts, forcing everyone to acknowledge his greatness.  

Voldemort is stopped, though, by Dumbledore, a wizard who combines incredible power with a mysterious lack of interest in its pursuit. Because Dumbledore honestly does not want power, he is immune to the young Voldemort's flattery and manipulation. From the beginning, Dumbledore sees Voldemort for what he is, someone with power uncoupled from morality. Long before Voldemort's nose falls away, Dumbledore sees Voldemort not as a young god, but as a monster. Voldemort refuses to even consider why someone like Dumbledore might turn away from power, being content to remain a schoolteacher, or how it could be that Dumbledore could still become so powerful despite rejecting dark magic. Instead, he insists that Dumbledore is a weak fool who allows his sentiments about love to hold him back from the unbridled pursuit of power. 

The problem of a life devoted to becoming the most powerful wizard who ever lived is that, no matter how strong a spell caster you become, there is still death. Instead of accepting death and living his life preparing for a final judgment, Voldemort's solution is to pursue Horcruxes. He splits his soul into different parts and puts the pieces into physical objects. In the Horcrux spell, Voldemort sees a form of magic so powerful as to conquer death. What he misses is the fact that the existence of Horcruxes demonstrate that the soul also exists and that it has a value so beyond conventional magic that one should not be willing to damage it for any amount of power. 

Since Voldemort does not believe in the power of love, he is unprepared for how Regulus Black would turn against him when he decides to leave Kreacher to die as part of setting up the chamber to house the locket Horcrux. This is important because Regulus' defiance against Voldemort is going to prefigure the defiance of Severus Snape and ultimately that of Lily Potter. Why should Regulus care about a mere house-elf like Kreacher? Why should Regulus be willing to sacrifice his life when Voldemort could give him a life of riches and power? Since Voldemort believes in nothing but power, he can never seriously consider such questions.  

If there is anything that should have alerted Voldemort to a higher power it is the existence of prophecy. Snape informs him of Trelawney's prophecy about a child who will come to challenge him. Instead of accepting the limits of his magic, Voldemort attempts to kill baby Harry and falls into the prophecy's trap. In order to satisfy Snape's request to spare Lily, he asks her to step aside and allow him to kill Harry. This allows Lily to sacrifice herself for Harry. Voldemort's Avada Kedavra curse backfires and his body is destroyed. Whatever power lies behind the prophecy is powerful enough to defeat Voldemort with only an unarmed mother and a baby. What Voldemort, though, sees is that his Horcruxes have proven to be more powerful than even death. As such, despite the setback, Voldemort thinks that his pursuit of power has been proven correct. All he needs now to do is wait for his opportunity to get his body back and he will seize control over the wizarding world and kill Harry Potter. From Voldemort's perspective, Harry is not really special at all but the fortunate beneficiary of chance. By killing Harry, everyone will see that it was Voldemort who was always the special one and fear him as the greatest dark lord ever.     

(To be continued ...)

The Moral Implications of Magic: Why Fantasy Needs Good and Evil

 

Essential to the genre of fantasy is the battle between good and evil. This does not mean that fantasy is simplistic in its morality. As Lewis noted in his review of Lord of the Rings, the characters, even Gollum, cannot be reduced to being either wholly good or evil even as good and evil are real forces that people must choose between. The challenge lies precisely in the fact that the characters are mixtures of these forces and the fight is less about defeating Sauron and his orcs, but the evil within.   

Tolkien's surprisingly nuanced understanding of evil is rooted in Tolkien's Augustinian worldview where evil is not an independent power, but a corruption of the good. There are two implications of this. One, the Devil was created good by God only to fall. Two, the Devil is fundamentally uncreative. He can take those things created good by God and corrupt them. Similarly, Sauron was created good before being seduced by Morgoth. Even Sauron's ability to create the rings of power was rooted in that element of good within him. Otherwise, he never would have been able to deceive the elves, who, contrary to the Rings of Power show, could never be accused of being fools.  

This fact that Sauron is fallen good rather than purely evil, creates the fundamental threat of Lord of the Rings. Worse than Sauron taking over Middle Earth is the possibility that someone (whether Frodo, Aragorn, Boromir or even Gandalf) will take up the ring to fight Sauron and become dark lords themselves. If Sauron was simply evil and not fallen, we would never take this threat seriously. To reinforce this danger, we have the character of Saruman the White, who was good for millennia only to fall in the years leading up to the story. If Saruman, Gandalf's superior on the White Council, could fall than even Gandalf is not safe from the ring's corruption. Ultimately, it is not Sauron who is the primary villain, but the ring and, by extension, the very people who are tempted to use it.   

Evil's importance to fantasy is inseparably tied to magic. To accept the existence of magic means to see it through one of two conflicting perspectives. To be evil means to see magic as power that some people can wield to place themselves above others, not just physically, but also morally. To be good means to see that magic indicates the existence of a higher power who created magic and to whom even the magic user must submit to. In the best of fantasy, while the dark lord may be out there to serve as the catalyst for the plot, the real struggle will be within the hero. Characters will fall or be redeemed based on what magic ends up meaning to them.

An example of the evil perspective can be seen in Glaucon's argument about the Ring of Gyges in Plato's Republic. In Glaucon's telling, morality is something that weak people invent. Anyone with power, say a magic ring that could turn them invisible, would quickly cast off all moral restraints and commit adultery and even murder. In the real world it is easy to see how political power can render people empathetically tone deaf. It is not hard to imagine a world with even greater power divides, such as between those with magic and those without, leading to magic users seeing non-magic users as animals to be killed for sport. 

This view can also be seen in the character of Uncle Andrew in Lewis' Magician's Nephew. Andrew tricks Polly into teleporting into another world and then blackmails Digory into going after her to rescue her. In his defense, he declares:

I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subject to do it on. Bless my soul, you'll be telling me next that I ought to have asked the guinea-pigs' permission before I used them! (pg. 23)

Digory has the same facts as his uncle, but sees the moral truth beyond them. He, therefore, responds:

I didn't' believe in Magic till to-day. I see now it's real. Well if it is, I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you're simply  a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories. Well, I've never read a story in which people of that sort weren't paid out in the end, and I bet you will be. And serve you right. (pg. 24) 

The existence of magic baptizes Digory's imagination so that he can no longer accept materialism, but, unlike his uncle, what he sees is not power that he can use to place himself over others. Instead, he comes to know a moral order that is as real as any physical object.  

While Uncle Andrew is a dilatant magician, playing around with things that he does not understand, Digory soon find himself dealing with the far more dangerous Queen Jadis, who destroyed her entire world. She feels no guilt about this. but declares:. "I was the queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will." (pg. 61) 

To be clear, Jadis, at this point, lacks the malice to be truly irredeemably evil. Instead, she comes across as more of a spoiled child. One imagines that she could still be saved if she could only have some sense smacked into her. The point of no return for Jadis is when she eats the apple and attempts to convince Digory to do the same. She is motivated by the desire to gain an even greater level of power for herself, mainly immortality. Digory is tempted by his desire to save his dying mother. What holds Digory back is that, by this point, he has come to know not just an abstract moral law, but the person of Aslan, who has commanded him to not eat the apple. Digory chooses to remain a normal boy, who will grow old and die but still have a relationship with Aslan. Jadis, seeing only power, chooses to become the White Witch. She may be immortal and destined to rule Narnia for a hundred years, making it forever winter and never Christmas, but she is forever beyond redemption.  

Pulling Off the Boots of an Angel: Some Thoughts on A Wrinkle in Time

 

For this coming semester, I am planning on teaching A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle to my fifth graders. To prepare, I have been doing a close rereading of the book and am continuously struck by how deeply biblical L'Engle was in her thinking. Like C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, L'Engle takes what is outwardly a science fiction story about traveling through outer space to other planets premised around an unapologetically non-materialist worldview. Instead of a cold and empty space, we are presented with the heavens filled with intelligences that defy human comprehension. Our primary "aliens," Mrs Whatsit, Who, and Which are angels out of the Book of Ezekiel. They are not beings that anyone would ever think to put on a Christmas tree. To behold them would mean to flee in terror or bow down in worship.   

We are first introduced to Mrs Whatsit, not in her winged-centaur form but as an old lady who walks into the Murry residence in the middle of the night while there is a storm raging outside. She asks for caviar, Meg makes her a tuna salad. Whatsit then has Mrs. Murry pull off her boots. This angelic visit is modeled after the story of Abraham hosting strangers, who turn out to be angels. Abraham serves them food as well as their feet, allowing their feet to be washed as they rest under a tree (Genesis 18:4). There is also the parallel to Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the last supper. 

I watched the Disney adaptation and found the film to be a fabulous example of people either not understanding the source material or intentionally wishing to reject the values that the story stood for. One can gain a fuller appreciation of the book's religious thought by noticing the subtle things that the film changed to the impoverishment of the story.

       

Take the example of Mrs Whatsit's visit. Instead of an ugly old tramp walking into the Murry home, we have the beautiful Reese Witherspoon. There is no sense of disgust or reason to feel threatened by this Mrs. Whatsit. She does not wear anything so foul as a pair of soaking wet boots. She is not so rude as to ask anyone to take them off and cause a mess. She does not ask for food. She simply comes into the house, is charmingly eccentric, drops the important plot point that she knows what a tesseract is, and then leaves.  

While the basic plot is maintained, we are stripped of what made the book meaningful. Not only are robbed of the angelic centaur transformation later in the story, here we are not allowed to have the angel being human complete with having to walk around in boots with sopping wet soaks. This matters because, from the very beginning, the moral heart of the story is undermined. Without the opportunity to serve a tramp tuna fish while her mother takes off her boots, we do not see the Meg's ability to love as something that transcends reason. This is the very superpower that Mrs Whatsit is going to be relying on to save Meg's father and defeat the cold utilitarian logic of It. No wet boots, no love that transcends reason, no faith in what cannot yet be understood, so no reason why Charles Wallace should prefer his family to being possessed by a giant brain. We are simply left with send the children to be captured by the dark one so that they can defeat him through "I love you."        

Returning to Voyaging Into Jewish History

 

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a post titled Voyaging Into Jewish History. I contrasted the traditional view of Jewish History with that of Zionism. In the traditional view, Jews were powerless in the face of the historical forces opposing them. As such, the most that Jews could hope to accomplish was to survive whatever disasters befell them, presumably through divine aid brought about through the scrupulous observance of Jewish Law. Zionism rejected this view as it forced Jews to play a passive role in politics. Instead, Zionism strove to protect Jews by making them an active political force with a state and an army that could stand against those who wished to harm them. 

I wrote that post about a month before October 7th, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdering over a thousand Israelis, and taking some 250 hostages. It is important to understand that, just as the Holocaust changed the nature of this debate about Jewish survival, October 7th has once again changed the nature of that conversation. As such, I wished to revisit my earlier post to explore this shift, recognizing that, even nearly two years into this conflict, the implications of October 7th are still in the process of being worked out. 

In a sense, October 7th made the Zionist attempt to solve Jewish History untenable much in the same way that the Holocaust made the traditional view untenable. The traditional view was premised on the notion that anti-Semites were individuals who might temporarily gain power in a particular place, killing large numbers of Jews and forcing the survivors to flee to a safer place. It was never prepared for a major power like Nazi Germany, which did not simply dislike Jews, but made the annihilation of world Jewry central to its own identity. Against such pathological anti-Semitism on a mass societal scale, the only plausible option was for Jews to have a state which would allow Jews to fight to protect themselves and offer sanctuary to any Jew around the world threatened by anti-Semitism. Ultimately, though, Zionism did not solve the problem of Jewish History and we saw that on October 7th when, for just a few hours, thousands of Jews found themselves in the power of Hamas fighters just as, during the Holocaust, European Jews were under the power of the Nazis. Even now, nearly two years later, hostages remain in Hamas captivity and live under conditions that closely parallel that of concentration camps.     

It is useful here to consider the examples of the two Netanyahus, Benzion and Benjamin. Benzion Netanyahu was a medieval historian who specialized in fifteenth-century Spain. At the heart of his work was the failure of the traditional model, as exemplified by Isaac Abarbanel, to fend off the expulsion of 1492. Highly placed Jews like Abarbanel were supposed to be able to use their connections at court to make sure that Jews were protected, making Jewish political sovereignty irrelevant. Abarbanel, though, failed not only to stop the expulsion but even to foresee its coming, which could have saved many Jews. From Benzion Netanyahu's perspective, the belief in the influence of court Jews like Abarbanel embodied the illusion of any hope for Jewish safety outside a sovereign State of Israel. Writing about 15th century Spain was Benzion Netanyahu's way of commenting about the failure 20th century European Jewry to save itself from the Holocaust. Whether in Spain or in Germany, Jewish attempts to assimilate only created more anti-Semitism. Jewish leaders, confident in their ability to bribe and negotiate, were helpless to stop the destruction of their communities and blind even to its coming.   

Considering this, it is rather ironic that it was Benzion Netanyahu's son, Benjamin Netanyahu who was prime minister for the debacle of October 7th. Furthermore, today, much of Netanyahu's appeal relies on the assumption that he can influence President Donald Trump to help Israel. Whether this is true or not, it should be recognized that history has come around in a sort of circle and Benjamin Netanyahu now plays the role of Isaac Abarbanel, the court Jew, that his father so despised. 

That being said, even if Zionism has failed to solve Jewish History, this makes the State of Israel all the more important for Jewish survival. If traditional Jewish statelessness failed to protect Jews against Nazi Germany, I fail to see how anything but a State of Israel can protect Jews worldwide against the ideological forces arrayed against them. These involve Iran and its proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, Sunni Islamists, such as Hamas, and a wide variety of Western leftist revolutionaries, who took to the streets to protest on behalf of Hamas as the October 7th attacks were still going on. It should be understood that these groups do not simply hate Jews, but see the Jews as the primary enemy that must be destroyed (with the exception of those Jews willing to offer them moral cover) in order for their glorious new world to come to being. As such, these enemies cannot be bribed or negotiated with. Their goal is a second Holocaust and nothing can stop them but the full military and political might that only Israel can provide. 

In a sense, October 7th marked the return to Jewish History. Despite the existence of the State of Israel, Jews are once again vulnerable to being murdered in mass. Around the world, pathological anti-Semitism, as opposed to mere prejudice, is now acceptable, particularly on the Left. Once again, we Jews are left standing against opponents who are stronger than us and our goal is to somehow survive. This involves using whatever physical resources available to the best of our ability, whether that is the IDF or AIPAC. Ultimately, though, we have to accept that Jewish survival is a miracle and that being Jewish means being willing to risk one's life in order to participate in the miraculous story that is Jewish History.          

The Declaration of Independence With Calvin

 

 

In honor of July 4th, here is an assignment I gave my students when I was teaching about the Declaration of Independence. In general, I find Calvin to be a useful tool for teaching rhetoric because he makes arguments designed to appeal to children and even the inner child in all of us. Part of the process of becoming an adult is being able to articulate why Calvin is wrong. Part of becoming an adult who has not lost their soul is to disagree with Calvin and still love him anyway.  

How does Calvin understand the right to pursue happiness? Do you agree with his argument? Explain your position.

 

 

 

What does Calvin mean by “Patriotic Prerogative?” What do you think really motivates Calvin?

 

 

 

 

Who is Calvin accusing of being an “Monarchist?” What does he mean by this?

 

 

Life Update

 

I would like to apologize for not posting since the end of July. It has been a wild year that has kept me busy. At the beginning of August, I was hired to teach in a public school that is north of Los Angeles, more than an hour's drive from where I live. This school does not have a lot of resources but is blessed with some excellent teachers and administrators, people who honestly care about the students and are committed to giving those students the best education that they can with those resources. These are the sort of people from whom a new teacher can learn a lot. Over this past year, I have grown fond of the place, the staff and even some of students that I get to work with every day.

Between my teaching load and my driving, I have not had much in the way of spare time. In addition, the school administration picked up something that I have grudgingly come to admit over the past few years, mainly that I find myself having more fun working with younger kids. The great advantage of working with younger kids is that even (and often especially) the troublesome kids are adorable. As such, the school offered to put me in a lower grade if I got myself a multi-subject credential in addition to the single-subject credential that I currently possess. To do this I have needed to pass the multi-subject CSET and the RICA exams as well as two online classes.  

At present, I am working on lesson plans for the coming year. I hope to be able to get a few posts over the summer, including some on education.