Fighting for Peace in Gaza

As a follow-up to the previous post, I hope it is obvious to my readers that there is a profound distinction between pursuing justice/revenge and self-defense. Israel’s actions in Gaza are defensible to the extent that they make it less likely that an attack like October 7 will ever happen again. If it were not possible to eliminate Hamas as a military force (distinct from a political ideology) or at least degrade them as a fighting force so that it would take them years to rebuild then fighting this war would be immoral. Obviously, one cannot justify killing Palestinian civilians simply in retaliation for Hamas’ actions. (As opposed to accepting their deaths as tragic collateral damage brought about by Hamas’ decision to use their own people as human shields.) But even the death of Hamas leaders by themselves could not be justified if it were simply a matter of giving them what they deserve.

If Yahya Sinwar would release the hostages and decide to live in peace with Israel, then Israel should accept a ceasefire with Hamas. Granted, I have a hard time imagining what Sinwar could say at this point that could convince me that he was serious about peace. He may deserve death many times over but that is not our job. I do not care about giving members of Hamas what they deserve. All that matters is protecting the lives of the people living in Israel.

The Oslo Accords made sense in theory. If Yassir Arafat was willing to live in peace with Israel, then the right thing to do was to give him control over the West Bank and Gaza. It was not that Arafat suddenly became a good person whose terrorism should be forgiven. In truth, Israel was relying on his lack of virtue, to be willing to sell out his principles in exchange for political power and respectability. It turned out in the end that Arafat had no intention of pursuing peace and Israel paid the price for trusting him. Similarly, I supported Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 on the logic that, even if it would not lead to peace, it would place Israeli soldiers out of immediate harm’s way as well as grant Israel the moral credibility on the international stage to respond to Palestinian terrorism.

My fundamental mistake regarding the peace process was that I assumed that there was a significant element of the opposition to Israel, at least in the West, that was rational and moral and could, therefore, be satisfied with good faith efforts on the part of Israel to compromise and demonstrate that it took what its critics said to heart. Furthermore, I assumed that the threat of alienating the “decent” opponents of Israel would keep the radicals in line. For example, one would have imagined that Hamas would tell its fighters not to murder children because if pictures of dead Israeli babies showed up on TV that would undermine support for the Palestinian cause among American college students. I was wrong in these assumptions. As such, more than feeling betrayed by the Palestinians for turning down every chance they had for a State of their own, I feel betrayed by the Western Left and no longer trust them to make any pretense of living up to their own stated values when it comes to Israel.

Under the present circumstances, the foundation of my approach to Israel is that I do not see how there can be any concessions on the part of Israel that would not lead directly to dead Israelis and likely even dead Jews around the world. As such, there are no concessions that Israel can make in good faith. Even the concessions that Israel offers the United States, such as allowing aid to Gaza that will go straight to Hamas, should be seen as making a Faustian bargain of sacrificing Israeli lives in exchange for weapons and a veto at the United Nations. Perhaps, it is necessary but certainly not something that I can ever be comfortable with.         

Avenging Noam: Why Oppression Does Not Create Terrorists

 

It is commonly argued that oppression leads to violence. This argument can take the form of outright apologetics for terrorism. It is “understandable” that Hamas launched the attacks of October 7th as they are responding to 75 years of oppression. There is a more subtle version of this argument that grants that what Hamas did was wrong but suggests that Israel’s response is only going to create more terrorists. Every Palestinian killed in Gaza is going to cause their relatives to become terrorists. This argument seems contrary to practical experience. Everyone is oppressed to some degree. Most people do not turn to violence unless pushed by some propaganda effort.

My middle name comes from my half-second cousin, Noam Yehuda. (His grandmother, Sarah Wachtfogel, was my grandmother’s older half-sister from their father’s first marriage.) Noam was killed in Lebanon the year before I was born. As I understand it, he was hit by the shrapnel of an exploding tank caused by a Syrian missile. Presumably, the Syrian soldier who fired that missile is still alive somewhere. How would I respond if given his name and address? Would I seek “justice” for Noam and kill this Syrian? One thinks of the scene in the show Gotham where the young Bruce Wayne confronts his parents' killer.

 

I was not raised to kill people. For that matter, I was not raised to pursue justice, but rather peace. As such, I would introduce myself to the soldier and explain how we are connected through this person Noam. I would assure him that I mean him no harm, recognizing that he was a soldier who did his duty just as Noam was a soldier doing his duty. Perhaps I would invite him to join me at Noam’s grave to pray. Is this what Noam’s killer deserves? I am not trying to achieve justice. The best way to honor Noam is to bring peace and that means shaking hands with murderers (assuming that they are not using the peace treaty as cover to plan more attacks) and letting them live their lives without getting the justice they deserve. Noam's killer needs to make his own peace with God. It is not my job to hasten that appointment or to help him atone through his death.  

If I were to shoot this man and claim that I was avenging Noam, perhaps you might believe me that I was pursuing justice, however misguided my actions might be. If I were to torture the man before proceeding to murder his family and then shoot up a Syrian kindergarten, it would be obvious that, whatever my claims for striking back against oppression, I was doing this because I was a murderous psychopath using idealistic rhetoric as a moral fig leaf. What if I were aided in my killing spree by several thousand American Orthodox Jews? If such an atrocity were possible, it would show that the American Orthodox educational system was not just raising kids with a giant oppression complex but was brainwashing kids and raising a generation of killers.

Note that this is a distinct issue from whether such actions could be justified. Even if defensible, such an atrocity could only be carried out by moral monsters. Decent people the world over would, therefore, be justified in protecting themselves against this menace and would not have to worry about creating more "Jewish terrorists." The terrorists are being created no matter what anyone does. All that is left is to eliminate those terrorists in the short run. In the long run, it will be necessary to go after the larger system that manufactures these terrorists. This would mean taking out political leaders who arm and finance these “justice warriors” as well as the “educators,” who gave them the idea that they had any business pursuing justice through violence. 

One can believe that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is unjust and that Palestinians have the right to violently resist. But, even if Israel was the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany, that would not explain what happened on October 7th. The Hamas fighters would not have raped women and murdered babies, even if those women and babies deserved to be raped and murdered, unless they were raised within a system that actively encouraged them to do so. We have no reason to assume that the Hamas propaganda machine would suddenly stop even if Israel agreed to a ceasefire or even surrendered. As such, Israel has no reason to worry about creating more terrorists. Those terrorists are being created no matter what Israel does so Israel can do nothing but try to kill as many terrorists as possible and prepare to do the same to the next generation.          

The Paradox of a Bohemian Community: A Conservative Deconstruction of Rent

 

Among my favorite musicals is Rent. I confess that I feel guilty about some of the more problematic aspects of the musical. It is not as if I actually approve of the life choices made by any of the characters. In my defense, I would like to make the case for seeing the musical from a conservative perspective as an exploration of the intellectual trap of attempting to live outside of any communal standard. 

The characters in Rent are fundamentally narcissists in the sense that they choose to live for themselves over the interests of any community. To be clear, there is a spectrum among the characters with Maureen clearly being the most narcissistic with Mark and Angel being the least. In this, they follow the dictates of 19th-century Romanticism, the main philosophy in the Western tradition that attempts to justify placing the desires of the individual over the moral standards of the community. 

Ultimately, living for oneself is an unworkable idea so the characters attempt to create their own counter community This can be compared to Milton’s demons trying to create their own counter to Heaven, a project doomed by its own inherent contradictions. If submission to God is the necessary component to build heaven, then any community founded on the rejection of God will, by definition, turn into Hell.

The characters attempt to protect the homeless tent city from being torn down by their former friend Benny. The homeless (unless they are following some version of apostolic poverty) are an example of what can be seen, from an Aristotelian perspective, as a non-community. They may live in physical proximity to each other but they lack a set of binding values that allow them to work together for some greater good. Later, the characters try to form a community with each other. This attempt to build a community is fundamentally doomed as the "greater good" that binds the characters together is their commitment to living according to their Bohemian personal standards. 

One can see the logic of Bohemia as leading to one of two intellectual dead ends. The first can be seen in the landlord Benny.

           

On the surface, Benny is a traitor to the Bohemian values of the other characters. He once was like them, but then he exchanged sexual liberation and socialist living for marriage and now works as a capitalist for his father-in-law, destroying the homeless community in order to build the more lucrative Cyber Café. It should be noted that Benny still sees himself as the altruist and he has a highly plausible argument that, in the long run, Roger and Mark have a better chance of pursuing their Bohemian dreams under his "neoliberal" regime. The fact that we have good reason to question Benny’s sincerity both in terms of his marriage and his altruism does not mean that the other characters are right. On the contrary, it is Benny, with his neoliberalism, who is the ultimate Bohemian, living for himself without any care what other people think of him while pretending to have higher ideals. His hypocrisy is the contradiction within Bohemia itself.

The second and truly literal dead end for Bohemia is manifested in AIDS, which physically affects both Roger and Angel. AIDS represents death in its inevitability as well as its fundamental unfairness. With AIDS, some people might die in a matter of months while others may go on for years. Obviously, all people face death. AIDS just forces the characters to face the likelihood of dying young without the hope of pushing death to some far-off old age.

   

Roger hopes to write one song before he dies that will redeem him from being nothing more than a singer who threw away his gifts to heroin addiction and was responsible for his girlfriend's suicide.

 

Conventional people face the problem of death by making themselves part of a community. By being faithful to a spouse and raising one’s children together with them, one ensures that, even after you die, you will have meant something to someone remaining. This family should be embedded within some larger community with a story that plays out over millennia. Finally, this community and its purpose should be based on something supernatural that transcends time itself. (One thinks of the Last Battle where all the good things of Narnia are taken to Aslan's country to continue to exist forever even after Narnia is destroyed.) Even Romanticism could never truly escape this need for community. Even the genius artist who violates community standards in pursuit of their art can only succeed by embodying the essence of some people. Roger has no people to write for who will appreciate his art, leaving him facing death with nothing but regret and guilt for his girlfriend’s suicide.

The musical’s solution is for the stripper Mimi to fall in love with him, coming into his apartment to ask him to “light her candle."

   

With some reluctance, Roger falls for Mimi and this allows him to join with the other characters to resist Benny. This gives us an unconventional community populated by people who, except for Mark, are some combination of gay, drug addict, or HIV positive. The big question of the musical then becomes can love allow such an unconventional community to survive.

In the end, the true challenge does not come from Benny, but from the group's own internal dynamics. Angel's death causes the group to break apart as Joanne stops being willing to put up with Maureen's flirting with other people and Roger comes to suspect Mimi of sleeping with Benny, causing her to relapse into addiction. 

It is here that the musical finds itself trapped between allowing its scenario to play out to its logical conclusion or giving the characters a happy ending. Logically, the community should fall apart as the characters' beliefs do not allow for the formation of a community. As such, the musical should end as a tragedy. This, though, would not affirm the beliefs and lifestyle choices that the musical is attempting to advocate. In the end, the needs of propaganda outweigh the demands of truthfulness. A happy ending is salvaged with Roger returning to Mimi after she overdoses and she is saved, deus ex machina style, from a drug overdose. 

It is interesting to note that the musical has an artistic problem to match its intellectual weakness in that it effectively lacks a second act. The songs that are worthwhile are almost all in the first act. If only musical shorts were a thing then Rent could have been presented up until La Vie Boheme with the gang giving Benny the proverbial middle finger. One imagines Jonathan Larson of blessed memory being forced to add material simply to get to a respectable runtime and hoping that audiences would be so impressed with the first half that they would forgive him for giving them a garbage second act.   

    

Public Judaism: Chabad's Outreach Playbook

 

In the previous post, I discussed Charles Taylor's argument that the Protestant notion of privacy led to the rise of modern secularism. Here, I would like to use the example of Chabad as a model of how Taylor's version of secularism can be countered. Once one understands the extent to which modern secularism relies on the privatization of religion, Chabad’s style of outreach begins to make a lot of sense. In essence, the primary goal of Chabad’s outreach is to get Jews to do publicly Jewish things. By taking Judaism out of people's heads, into their homes, and out into the public sphere, it becomes possible to reverse the presumed slide into secularism where every generation is less religious than the last.

Chabad's strategy of bringing Judaism into the public sphere starts with the very idea of sending out shluchim in the first place to cities one would not normally associate with traditional Jewish observance. Back in the 1950s, the Lubavitcher rebbe actually had a difficult time getting his followers to become shluchim. You want me to leave the New York area, a place where I might have a fighting chance at keeping my kids religious to go where? It should be noted that an essential part of Chabad’s success has been that they have been able to keep the children of their shiluchim religious. In turn, these kids have grown up and have gone on to become shluchim themselves. At this point, Chabad has multiple generations of shluchim, making it a family business. None of this was obvious back in the 1950s and it is certainly foolhardy to believe that people are automatically going to be able to do successful outreach simply because they are thrown out into the secular world. I suspect that a large part of Chabad’s success with their own children comes from the fact that, since the parents are doing outreach, they are more likely to apply what they are doing to their own children without falling into the traps of believing that their kids are automatically going to be religious or that it is a lost battle so there is no point in trying. 

In keeping with the principle of "the medium is the message," the bulk of Chabad's message is quite effectively articulated by the mere fact of having someone with a hat, jacket, and a beard setting up shop in a place outside of New York or Jerusalem. By showing up dressed in their distinctive outfit, the Chabad rabbi is demonstrating that they do not accept the premise that Judaism is merely a set of practices relevant only to the privacy of one's home. In fact, they are going on the offensive and believe that a place with little previous association with Judaism can be claimed as a Jewish space. 

This can be effective as it takes away people's excuse to not be openly Jewish. One cannot argue that people over here do not openly do Jewish things. There is a friendly Chabad rabbi here who is doing Jewish things and he is now challenging you to not just claim to be Jewish but actually put that Judaism into practice. This usually involves simple actions that take only a few minutes like men wearing tiffilin and women lighting Shabbat candles. These street corner tiffilin and candle stands have their counterparts in Chabad's efforts to create major candle-lighting spectacles for Chanukah challenging the notion that a public space must be a secular space. What seems like a minor gesture can have large consequences. Human beings are fundamentally influenced by their lived reality; what you do controls what you think. 

It should be noted that, unlike most Orthodox outreach organizations, Chabad's model of outreach is not built around getting people to become Orthodox. Instead, Chabad focuses on small victories while they play a long game by establishing permanent Chabad house synagogues. These welcome all Jews even those who drive on Shabbat. Chabad rabbis are going to spend decades embedded in a community building personal relationships as opposed to looking for a more prestigious and more lucrative pulpit. If Chabad rabbis were looking for respect, in the traditional rabbinic sense, they would not be serving as shluchim in the places that they do. 

By establishing communities premised on Orthodox observance even if most of the people there are not observant, it becomes possible to reverse the expected trend of secular modernity and create a situation where kids are more religious than their parents. By taking their kids to Chabad programs, parents send the message to their kids that it is not just that they are Jewish but that they are part of a Jewish community and, regardless of what they personally do or do not observe, they are striving to become more actively Jewish. Children raised in such an environment are less likely to assume that the march to secularism is inevitable and, therefore, may choose to not follow that script.      

This interpretation of Chabad's outreach is effectively summarized in a far more entertaining fashion than I could ever offer in Benny Friedman's music video Ivri Anochi. 

The story that plays out in the video is someone being blatantly Jewish causing other people to shift their behaviors in subtle ways that add up to make the neighborhood a more Jewish place. 

Protestantism, Privacy, and the Rise of Secularism

Charles Tayor’s Secular Age is one of those rare books that are nearly a thousand pages but demand close reading. At the center of his narrative regarding the rise of secularism is the rise of privacy. Ironically, as with much of the origins of European secularism, privacy was a creation of Protestantism. In contrast to the Catholic model where one was saved by being part of the visible community of the Church and physically entering the local church to confess one’s sins and receive communion, Protestantism held up the individual reading their Bible and discovering that they are sinners who can only be saved through Jesus.

As a matter of practical application, a church service came to mean something different for Protestants. The Eucharist became incidental. Instead, one came to church to reinforce the lessons that proper Bible reading should have provided. One sang hymns that explained the basic message of sin and salvation and listened to a sermon provided by a minister to explain the Bible. This provided our Christian with the proper tools and frame of mind to go home, read the Bible, and be saved.

This focus on the private individual had unintended consequences. If we require this personal acceptance of Jesus as the only source of salvation, what is the use of religious coercion? For that matter, why bother having the state involved with religion at all. If people are not going to be saved as a community, what is even the use of public displays of religion that might provide a sense of a community bonded by faith. Ultimately, once we make the individual alone with their private thoughts deciding what to believe the central player in the narrative of salvation, we are on a straight path to Kant's Enlightenment where each individual is answerable only to their own reason for what they believe.

The ultimate danger of privacy is that it allows for the process of secularization to unfold without people realizing what is happening. One simply decides to take a more private approach to religion, first taking religion out of the public sphere into one’s home and then into one’s head. This is easy to do because all of this can be justified on religious grounds. One can honestly believe that they are not abandoning their faith but, on the contrary, are deepening their faith and becoming more spiritual.

This claim is quite plausible for the individual. The problem comes when we insert children into the equation. Religious belief is going to be of little use if it is not passed down to the next generation. Any break in the chain and it becomes difficult for the faith to be recovered. What happens to a kid raised in a society in which the public sphere is free of religion. At best, religion becomes a quirky hobby that their parents engage in that the younger generation is free to abandon when they grow up and become their “own people.” The parents might believe that they are raising their kids in a religious home and will not realize until it is too late that their faith was something in their heads and not something they ever bothered to seriously share with their children.

Protestantism is particularly vulnerable to this as it fundamentally rejects works and, therefore, cannot demand adherence to ritual practice. All too easily a Protestant can lead a completely secular life except for the hour a week they spend in church and, since that can never be made mandatory, even that can easily be dropped.

Orthodox Jewish religious practices obviously offer their own challenges as they create more head-on conflicts with secular society that children will become conscious of at an earlier time. Judaism does not let me watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat McDonalds; I, therefore, hate Judaism. That being said, the children lost in this fashion will likely be lost anyway. What ritual offers though is precisely the ability to make the conflict clearer and avoid slipping away without realizing, at an early stage, what is happening. The Christian freshman who stops going to church can pretend that they simply are looking for one that fits them. The Orthodox Jewish freshman who starts eating the regular cafeteria food knows that they have crossed a red line.

The process of secularization gains even greater power through people seeing it as inevitable. If parents do not really expect their children to follow them in their faith it becomes all too easy for parents to Pontius Pilate themselves of any blame. If no one’s kids are religious, then I cannot be blamed if my kids are not either. I can do my private religious thing without having to do something out of my comfort zone like actually trying to engage my kids.

Keep in mind that very few people have ever lost their religion because of a book they read. Losing one’s faith to a book would require actually reading a book as well as coming to that book without any preconceptions as to what the book contained. The number of people throughout history who have read through the Origin of Species after innocently pulling it off a shelf has to be somewhere around zero. People who have read Darwin have presumably done so because something caused them to pick up his work. Furthermore, judging by membership, ideological secularists remain a minority even as most people today are assuredly secular. Most secular people never lost their faith. Instead, they, or their immediate ancestors, were raised in homes that were de facto secular without their parents realizing it. As such, they became adults who took secularism as a given and never even needed to go through the trauma of abandoning a faith.  

I am From Palestine

In the previous post, I spoke about how Paulo Freire uses his made-up problem of banking education as a deceitful Motte and Bailey argument in favor of turning education into ideological indoctrination. In the following video, we see a similar use of Freire’s tactic on behalf of Palestinian propaganda. 

The basic story we have here is about a little Palestinian girl named Samidah who goes to school and is faced with the fact that the class map only shows Israel so she does not know which country to mark as her country of origin. When Samidah tries to explain the problem to her teacher, she simply responds that Samidah must be from Israel. When she goes home, her father explains to her that they really are from this wonderful place called Palestine and that one day they will return. Samidah imagines herself in this special place called Palestine, buying food in a marketplace, and seeing the sunset over the Golden Dome. The next day, the girl goes back to class with additional Palestinian gear than just the necklace she wore at the beginning and unfurls a map that has Palestine instead of Israel.

What struck me about this video was that I have been in many American public school classrooms, and I have never seen them use a map that did not differentiate the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. Furthermore, I have a hard time imagining a teacher so ignorant as to not know the difference between Israel and Palestine. This is not Azerbaijan versus Armenia.

Why would the filmmakers make a film about a made-up problem? The purpose is to distract us from the solution. Contrary to appearances, the film's solution is not that we should acknowledge Palestinian identity and even that they have a legitimate claim to part of the land. When the girl goes back to class, she does not bring a map that shows the West Bank and Gaza and explain how these places are not part of Israel. Instead, her map eliminates Israel and replaces it with Palestine.

This raises the question of what the girl and by extension the filmmakers imagine is supposed to happen to all the Jews in Israel when it is replaced by Palestine. It is interesting to note that the imagination montage does not include any obviously Jewish people. One gets the impression that they have mysteriously disappeared. As with most Palestinian activism, its real purpose is not that Palestinians should be able to live in peace, dignity, or even independently but that the State of Israel should be eliminated. Ever since October 7^th, there should be no illusions that this means anything but mass murder.

What if this movie was about a cute blond-haired German girl who imagined living happily on her Lebensraum farm in Ukraine with other Germans, whose ancestors had been “unjustly” forced to flee their homes after World War II? It would be obvious that this was Nazi propaganda and that the film, even though it never says so explicitly, is calling for millions of Ukrainians to be murdered. Ukrainians presently living on the land are not going to simply leave to rectify a historical injustice and will have to be killed. As such, there is no moral difference between such a film and one that explicitly glorifies mass murder beyond the fact that the latter has the virtue of being intellectually honest.    

Paulo Freire's Bank of Motte and Bailey

There is a type of Motte and Bailey argument where you offer a strawman version of the opposition that no serious person believes. Having presented a problem that does not really exist or at least has been greatly exaggerated, you then offer a solution that sounds innocent, mainly not to do the thing that no one is really doing anyway, but really is quite radical. Then, in true Motte and Bailey fashion, when called out as to what is really being argued for, you then retreat into the claim that you are only opposing the thing that no one actually supports anyway.

Paulo Freire is a good example of this. It is clear to me that the education teachers who had me read his work did not really understand him. In all fairness, Freire is not an easy author to understand. Reading a work like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, most readers are only going to come away grasping his opposition to the banking model of education where the teacher is seen as depositing knowledge into the heads of students who are rendered passive figures in this process.

To be clear, I am not saying that Freire is wrong on this issue. On the contrary, the problem with Freire’s position is that he is saying something that just about anyone who has ever taught has agreed with. While it should be acknowledged that teachers presumably have knowledge about material that students do not and that the job of a teacher is to convey some of that knowledge, no one seriously believes that this is all that goes into teaching. There is still the issue of how you convey that information and also the building of a personal relationship with students combined with incentives to offer the circumstances where students are likely to want to learn. This is all the more so in modern education where information is so readily and cheaply available. Every teacher needs to constantly ask themselves the question: what am I giving students that they cannot easily get through Google and YouTube?

Competent teaching is going to be a combination of giving over information as part of the formal hard education and the creation of systems to offer informal soft education. Reasonable people are going to fall along a spectrum. Different students will benefit from different teachers depending on their personalities and a variety of other factors.  

If all Freire was saying was that teachers should not try to simply stuff facts into their students’ heads, his work could be considered trite but innocuous. The problem is that Freire has a deeper agenda hidden in his rather dense prose. For Freire, the true purpose of a teacher is not to teach people practical skills like reading, enabling them to get jobs and function within a capitalist economy. In truth, teachers are not really supposed to teach anything. As Marxist revolutionaries, the teacher is supposed to go among the people and arouse their innate revolutionary spirit. That being said, what teachers are supposed to discover is that the students already possess the revolutionary spirit in contrast to the teacher who is tainted simply by the fact that they went through the capitalist education system. As such, there is a dialectic/contradiction in Freire’s work in which it would seem that the teacher is not even supposed to be teaching the students Marxism, but rather is supposed to be learning from the students, undermining the dichotomy of teachers and students.  

As I mentioned previously, I do not believe that even most education teachers, let alone teachers in training, understand Freire. I assume that a Straussian model is at work. A handful of activists have pushed Freire into the curriculum precisely because they understand his esoteric agenda. Most education professors agree to teach him because they only understand the exoteric mask. The teachers in training end up being corrupted by Freire but it is not because they understand even much of the exoteric material. This would require that they bother to do the assigned reading. They understand enough to recognize that knowledge of their field is not that important so they do not have to read much beyond the textbook. Thus Freire becomes a license for teachers to do what they were already inclined to do mainly to remain ignorant of what they are supposed to be teaching while imagining that they are somehow teaching higher critical thinking skills that transcend their field. 

What one should take away from this is that if you see someone raising a problem that does not really exist or is greatly exaggerated, pay close attention to their solution. You can count on the fact that they have no intention of solving the problem; why would someone bother to solve a non-existent problem? The solution is not going to really be not to do what no decent person is doing anyway but something fundamentally indefensible in the light of clear language.  

Orual's Blindness: Understanding the End of Till We Have Faces

 

Years ago, I did a series of posts on C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, but I never really felt happy with how I explained the ending. Essentially, I tried to keep with the idea that Orual is right and the gods acknowledge this fact by offering her salvation even though she is their enemy. I would like to take another pass at explaining the ending and make the case that the ending is worthy of the rest of the book. 

Till We Have Faces, is, I would argue, Lewis' greatest book. What is so impressive about this work is Lewis' ability to create a spiritual anti-hero in the form of Orual. As I have previously argued, part of the difficulty of writing good religious fiction is that it requires one to be able to seriously imagine going "off the derech" and abandoning the faith. Most religious people remain so precisely because they cannot see themselves as following a different path and they want to read fiction that confirms their belief that there is not another plausible option for them. As with Milton's Satan (See Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost), Lewis' point in making Orual intellectually attractive (in contrast to her physical ugliness) is to challenge us. What does it say about us if we find ourselves liking Orual and inclined to give her a pass for the terrible thing that she does, mainly forcing Psyche to violate Cupid's commandment and destroying her happiness?  

Admittedly, the problem with Till We Have Faces is the ending. It is easy to understand the majority of the novel, which is Orual's argument against the gods, mainly that they should either leave us alone or reveal themselves; they should not play games with us, leading us to wonder about them. The gods' answer to Orual is not so clear. It seems that Orual's question of why the gods hide themselves is better than the answer that we cannot see them until we have faces. 

Let us begin with Lewis' most important change from the original story that Orual is unable to see Cupid's palace and therefore does not believe Psyche when she claims that she is now married to a god. On the surface, this makes Orual more sympathetic as her motive becomes a perfectly legitimate skepticism as opposed to jealousy. This fact, though, covers Orual's tragic flaw that she is blind. The fact that Orual is blind to spiritual things like Cupid's palace, raises the question of what other spiritual things is Orual blind to. 

There is Orual's treatment of the Fox and Bardia where Orual does not treat them nearly as well as she imagines. As we shall see, this is important but not simply as a matter of arguing that Orual is not such a nice person. The big thing that is in front of Orual (and us the reader) the entire time was that Psyche is a goddess and had been so even before she was taken by Cupid. (This is meant to parallel the ministry of Jesus where the apostles spend years with Jesus without ever understanding who he was and what he was actually here on Earth to accomplish.) Once we accept that Psyche is a goddess taking on human form then the entire story changes and Orual's argument against the gods collapses. 

By becoming human, Psyche choses to suffer in order to elevate the humans around her with her divinity. Psyche's suffering is caused not by a jealous Venus but by humans like Orual, who never appreciate or love her like another god can. What Orual thinks as the gods' demand that Psyche be sacrificed is the gods coming to save Psyche from the torment of having to live with humans. Even here, Psyche's redemption from her life as a human is incomplete. She is unable to look upon Cupid's face because she is still holding on to a human aspect of herself, mainly her love for Orual. It should be understood that Cupid's commandment to not look at his face was never a trap but simply an acknowledgment, as the gods know the future, that Psyche would sacrifice herself for Orual by looking at Cupid's face simply because Orual demanded that she do it.  

Orual, because of her misguided love, fails to leave things as they are and pursues Psyche but she is unable to even see the palace, the lower truth that Psyche is now married to a god, let alone the higher truth that Psyche had always been a goddess even when Orual changed her diapers. Unable to convince Orual of the truth, Psyche undergoes the ultimate sacrifice of giving up the bliss of her unity with Cupid. The only way for Orual to be saved is for Psyche to suffer for her sake and for Orual to come to see that suffering. Only then will Orual be able to see Psyche for who she really is and become unified with that divinity by having Psyche forgive her. 

It should have been enough for Orual to see that the palace was real after Pysche looked at Cupid's face and know that her unbelief cost Psyche everything. The problem is that convincing Orual that the gods are real simply causes her to blame the gods for Psyche's misfortune. What sort of god hands out random commandments with extreme consequences for failing to keep them? If the gods are the ones in the wrong then Orual was right in opposing them even if she was mistaken in not believing in them. In fact, Orual's unbelief is one more thing that can be blamed on the gods. She would have believed in them if they had only shown themselves to her. As such, curing Orual of her spiritual blindness is going to be a process taking many years.   

It is important to realize the source of Orual's blindness. How is it that she could be the person who knows Psyche best and still not realize that she is a goddess? Orual's problem is that she has been intellectually seduced by the Fox. Whether or not the Fox actually believes the gods literally exist, for him, the gods are theoretical abstractions with no relevance to human existence. What makes the Fox's unbelief so plausible is that he is, by human standards, a virtuous person. If the Fox can be virtuous simply because of his Stoic principles and not because he fears that the gods will send him to Hell then he does not need the gods and can simply ignore them. Furthermore, since Orual lacks the framework of a simple faith where of course the gods exist and she needs to get right with them, Orual naturally comes to try to turn the tables on the gods where she judges them to decide if they are worthy of her belief. (See Lewis' "God in the Dock" essay.) Orual's right to judge the gods becomes all the more plausible once she becomes, by human standards, a good queen, who rightfully and fairly stands in judgment over others. 

Here is where Orual's treatment of Bardia and the Fox becomes crucial. The fact that Orual makes them important people at her court does not really improve their lives. This gives Orual reason to question whether she really is, with all of her godlessness, so virtuous. Furthermore, the fact that her problem in treating Bardia and the Fox is that she clings to them out of a selfish human love for them, raises the question of whether she was wrong to cling to Psyche. Once Orual's belief in her own virtue is challenged, her case against the gods becomes vulnerable. The gods are virtuous in ways that we cannot ever be. One needs to believe in the gods in order to be judged by them because even to be condemned by the gods is better than living in the knowledge that, with all of your flaws, you are the closest thing to true virtue in the universe. (Think of the horror of living in a Lovecraftian universe even if you assumed that Cthluhu was not going to rise up during your lifetime.)     

In the end, the only way for Orual to come to know the truth about Psyche is through this roundabout way where she would cause Psyche to lose Cupid, become queen, fail Bardia and the Fox, write a book against the gods, and demand that they stand trial. It is only then that Psyche is revealed for who she was all along. Orual is able to see how she had wronged Psyche and, despite all that, Psyche loved her so much as to sacrifice everything to allow her to see. The gods had never been hiding from Orual. It was she who had been covering her eyes not to see them all along until they finally backed her into a corner where she could no longer refuse to see them. 

From this perspective, Orual, even though she finds redemption in the end, is the villain of the story. For me though, seeing her as a villain only makes for more interesting as a character. She may be an appealing villain but that simply raises the question of what it says about us that we can find such a villain attractive even to think of her as the hero. Are we freethinking individuals with the courage to stand for our principles even against the gods or are we trying to hide from a world in which the gods are real because we do not want to face the consequences.   

 

Voyaging Into Jewish History

 

Previously, I explored Haredi education through an Abie Rotenberg song. I would like to continue to use Abie Rotenberg to better understand Jewish thought. The song "Journey at Sea" from the album Journeys Five stands as a useful introduction to a traditional view of Jewish History. To be clear, by history here, what I mean is not so much the particular facts about the past but the narrative framework in which we place those facts. Admittedly, part of the song's charm is that it never explicitly says anything about Judaism. If I had heard this song on a Celtic album I would have simply thought that this was a solid song. What follows is my interpretation. You have the ship of Judaism crewed by the faithful and led by wise captain rabbis. It sails on the Sea of Galus (exile). The goal is at some point to reach the port of messianic redemption, but that is of little day-to-day relevance when compared to living as a religious Jew. The challenge of sailing on the Sea of Galus is that inevitably you are going to run into storms that threaten to destroy Judaism either through physical violence or through assimilation. 

It should be noted that the captain and the crew are fundamentally passive figures as events play themselves out. They have absorbed enough of Jewish History to recognize that storms are on the horizon and take measures, presumably the strengthening of Jewish practice, to give themselves a chance of getting through the storm with the ship intact. That being said, no one on the ship ever tries to stop storms from happening. Such actions are presumed to be beyond their power and, therefore foolhardy to pursue. All that is left is to recognize that they have limited power and seek to act only within their means. 

This view of Jewish History has not been limited to Orthodox writers. For example, Heinrich Graetz's Jewish History is famously an exercise in a lachrymose narrative in which Jews suffer and think. There is a reason why Rabbi Berel Wein was able to so easily take Graetz and give him a more religious spin. Graetz's basic narrative remained a fundamentally traditional one in which Judaism managed to survive outside threats even as, for Graetz, Judaism meant something slightly different from Orthodox writers, mainly nothing involving Kabbalah or Hasidism.    

An essential point to understand about political Zionism (whether secular or religious) is that it rejected our traditional model of Jewish History. One thinks of the example of Benzion Netanyahu's biography of Isaac Abarbanel. Netanyahu could never forgive Abarbanel for having been caught by surprise by 1492 and for having no real solution to the problem of expulsion beyond apocalypticism. If Jews had a state of their own, then Jews would not have had to ask themselves the question of what are they to do if they were faced with expulsion or pogroms as Jews living in a Jewish State would not be under the power of gentiles. Similarly, at a spiritual level, Jews would not have had to worry about making themselves acceptable to gentiles and refashioning Judaism to suit gentile tastes. Instead, Jews could have focused on the development of a genuinely Jewish culture. From this perspective, traditional Jewish History, with its emphasis on bracing to be hit in the hope of being able to stand back up again, was a colossal mistake that needed to be fixed.     

It should be appreciated that the State of Israel was founded in 1948 at a time when the traditional model of Jewish History seemed to have reached a dead end. This was in the wake of the Holocaust when a modern state like Germany decided to invest its full efforts in murdering all Jews under its control. Furthermore, neither the United States and certainly not the Soviet Union could stand as plausible candidates for flourishing Jewish life, particularly when being Jewish now meant facing the possibility of something like the Holocaust. Under such circumstances, it seemed unlikely that Judaism could survive without a Jewish State that would physically protect Jews and offer them a space to be productive citizens without abandoning their Jewish identity. In judging the State of Israel over the past seventy-five years, it is a fair question to consider to what extent it has offered a legitimate alternative to traditional Jewish History.

In understanding the traditional narrative of Jewish History, it is useful to also pay attention to the song's chorus: "It's our life a journey at sea, a voyage of fate and destiny." What has allowed Jews to even try to survive as Jews has been a belief that there really was no other way of life available to them. To be a religious Jew has meant believing that God has a literal plan for history that requires Jewish survival so he will not allow the Jewish people to disappear. If you are a Jew, you will always be a Jew and God, often acting through gentiles, will never allow you to escape your Judaism no matter how hard you try. Even for those Jews who formally reject such theology, the basic model of seeing the world can be hard to shake.   

 

Time Traveling Missionaries or Why Christianity Needs Depravity

Imagine if a Jew and a Christian took off in the TARDIS to the year 2023 BCE to preach their faiths. As there is no such thing as Judaism or Christianity at this time, our Jew and Christian would have an identical pitch to any person they met. There is one God, who created the world. You need to get rid of all of your idols and worship just him. In addition, you should commit yourself to an ethical way of life, which you can learn more about by finding the appropriate pre-Abrahamic sage who is alive in this generation. 

Admittedly, our Jew and Christian would have to acknowledge that their pitch has a limitation that has no solution at this time. For the Christian, the problem is that our 2023 BCE person is not yet in a position to accept Jesus as their savior as Jesus has not yet come to Earth to die for their sins. At best, our person can hope for some sort of pre-faith in Jesus so that Jesus will take him out of Hell when he descends there after the Crucifixion. For the Jew, the problem is far more minor. However sincerely our person comes to believe in the one true God intellectually, it is going to be very difficult to pass this belief system onto their children. This is going to trap us into a situation where individual ethical monotheists are going to have to constantly reinvent the wheel all by themselves, figuring out that God exists and that their parents were wrong to worship idols. An example of this is the midrashic Abram, coming to believe in God and then smashing the idols that his father, Terah, sold in his store. That being said, preaching ethical monotheism is still a worthwhile endeavor as all the good monotheists you create will be right with God.  

Step forward in time to 23 BCE and the basic pitch remains the same even as there is now a solution to the Jew's problem but not the Christian's. Obviously, as there are now Jews, Jews need to believe in the Jewish God and practice Judaism. Our non-Jewish person still needs to get rid of their idols and worship what one we might now call the Jewish God, but who has always been the God of the entire world. That being said, there is a way to radically increase the odds for our non-Jewish ethical monotheist that their children will also be ethical monotheists. Our person can convert to Judaism and take on the full array of Jewish practices such as observing the Sabbath, kosher, and circumcision. Even if they do not convert to Judaism, there is still a benefit to becoming a God-Fearer, a non-Jewish supporter of the ideals that Jews are supposed to stand for. The fact that their children will now know that Judaism exists and have interacted with Jews will increase the odds that they will become ethical monotheists as well. Obviously, our non-Jewish monotheist does not have to actually convert to Judaism as there were people who were perfectly fine when there was no Judaism to convert to. 

Our Christian is in a bit of a bind as he agrees with the Jew in 2023 and 23 BCE. It is only when we come home to 2023 CE that there is meaningful disagreement. The Christian has agreed with the Jew all along but believes that the Jew's picture of reality is incomplete in that it leaves out Jesus. The burden of proof is on the Christian here to make the case that Jesus adds something that Judaism cannot account for otherwise Christianity becomes an added complexity that can be rejected on the grounds of Occam's Razor.  

The Christian response to this needs to be depravity. Specifically that humans are not capable of getting right with God without Jesus. This is presumably because Original Sin has tainted the human will so that we can never properly fulfill God's commandments or that it has even tainted human reason so that we could never form proper beliefs about God on our own. If humans could never choose to follow God when taught about him or even when given commandments to be passed down to one's children and made to serve as the basis for a people, then perhaps what is needed is for God to come down in human form and die to fix whatever is keeping people from God.   

In Romans 4, Paul attempts to use the example of Abraham against Judaism, arguing that Abraham had faith even before works. Obviously, Abraham was righteous in God's eyes before he was circumcised. In truth, Abraham is a far bigger problem for Christians as they have to explain how Abraham could have faith nearly two thousand years before Jesus. What did Abraham have faith in besides for the one God who created the world? The fact that Abraham was righteous before his circumcision is not a problem for Judaism as Judaism does not believe that one needs to be Jewish. Abraham did not need to be circumcised and was free to eat pork to his heart's content much like it was ok for Judah to sleep with someone he thought was a prostitute. Judaism with its commandments is not an end in itself; it exists as a means to pass on the belief in ethical monotheism to one's children by being part of the sanctified body of Israel. 

Ground Rules for a Discourse With Me

 

In an earlier post, I explored why I felt I had an easier time reading conservative Christians than woke leftists. The practical implication of this is that I recognize that I struggle to engage people on the left. I am open to the possibility that this is a failure on my part that I need to rectify. Readers should feel free to offer book recommendations or to attempt to engage me in dialogue. For a fruitful conversation to happen, I suspect that there are going to need to be ground rules. 

1. People on the mainstream right today are not responsible for racism: 

We can still acknowledge that there are real problems today facing various minority communities and, recognizing the historical sources of these problems as well as a need for Americans to come together, there may be a need for government solutions; this may even include direct reparation payments. That being said, the very act of reaching out to conservatives to help in solving the problem means that you are not blaming them for racism. This would apply even if we are mainly asking conservatives to write a check. Even asking conservatives for money is distinct from trying to punish conservatives by making them pay. With punishment, there is no dialogue, just a demand and a threat of what might happen if that demand is not met. 

2. There will be no tearing down of present-day systems: 

We may acknowledge that the political and social systems we have inherited contain deeply problematic elements that need to be reformed. Furthermore, an important aspect of how we teach history should be an open and honest exploration of the skeletons in our collective closet. That being said, it should be acknowledged that any attempt to completely tear these systems down is likely to bring about extreme bloodshed and what is likely to arise will be more authoritarian than anything we have today. It may still be possible to argue that those people unfairly victimized by the system should be compensated in order that they do not harm the rest of society by turning toward revolution.  

3. As a general principle, capitalism/free markets should be acknowledged as superior to government action on both moral and practical grounds: 

There can still be room for government action under specific circumstances such as providing public goods or compensating people for past iniquities. That being said, there is going to be no unwritten constitution where the government is deemed as "people coming together" and markets as mere greed. Government must be acknowledged as a literal act of physical violence, leaving us with the question only of how much can we minimize its use without causing the collapse of civilization.   

4. There must be red lines on the left:

Historically, as Jordan Peterson has argued, the mainstream right has understood that there were lines, mainly Nazism/racism, that should not be crossed. This has not been the case with the left. Consider the example of Che Guevera. It is not socially acceptable, within polite society, to wear a Himmler t-shirt; how is it ok to wear a Che Guevara shirt? Underlying such social rules is a double standard regarding Communism. Communists get a pass for their ideals and are not held responsible for the millions of deaths they have caused. The fact that Nazis also were idealists gets ignored. We can talk about where to draw these lines to the left, just as we can talk about where the right needs to draw its lines, but such lines must still exist.    

For a meaningful dialogue to happen, I need to believe that you are not planning to kill me. As such, I need to feel confident that you are not going to demand something that I must refuse even at the risk of my life. The reality is that there are going to be people (such as Nazis and Communists) that I am unlikely to be able to live with and having me live in the same country as them is likely to lead to Hobbesian Civil War. I do wish to be able to live with others, even those I disagree with, and to do so I am willing to make compromises but compromise needs to be a two-way street.   

Critical Anti-Semitism Theory: The 33 Project

 

Growing up with one foot in the Haredi world, I was surrounded by a particular narrative about Jews and gentiles. The non-Jews around us might appear, at first glance, to be decent people but, in reality, they are all vicious anti-Semites ready to murder us at the first opportunity. "Esau hates Jacob" was a historical metaphysical fact much the same as the notion that Jacob and Esau were twins. To be clear, it is not as if we ever had a hate non-Jews class that demanded that we recite some catechism about the diabolical nature of gentiles. What we had was something subtler and more pernicious. We were surrounded by songs and stories that took this assumption as a fact. You can never argue with a story because stories do not make arguments to be responded to. Things are even trickier when we are not even dealing with things that are not even said but merely assumed. For example, Father Schmutz is a scumbag by virtue of his name in much the same way as the Malfoys in Harry Potter are literally people of bad faith.  

This negative view of the outside world was an essential part of keeping us within the fold. If we were going to be hated no matter what then assimilation could never be an option. We were fed a diet of stories where assimilated Jews were rounded up by the Nazis while attempting to deny that they were Jews. The fact that Jews have managed to survive living among such dangerous enemies was an argument for the Truth of Judaism; it could only have been through divine providence. We have a deal with God, going back to the Bible; follow his commandments or he will allow the nations of the world to murder us as they are naturally predisposed to do. Therefore, our only chance of survival was by being as religious as we could while reaching out to irreligious Jews to make sure they learned to carry their weight and not get us all killed.

It is worth noting that this narrative flipped the script on anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was not caused because Jews made themselves stand out with their strange clothes and customs. Being like gentiles and even intermarrying with them would not cause them to like us. On the contrary, it was the secular Jews, who caused anti-Semitism. While gentiles cannot help themselves but hate Jews, it is the secular Jews who truly rouse them into a murderous rage as such Jews violate the natural order of things.    

My academic training in history has served to tone down and add some nuance to how I view non-Jews. This is particularly the case for how I relate to Christianity. At the time time, it has also made me more dangerous as I can better monologue on the particular details of crimes against the Jews if I so choose. Alternatively, this can all be used for some ridiculous fun. In this cause, a new weapon in my arsenal is critical race theory with its assumption of structural racism and privilege. This allows for the condemnation of Western Civilization as a whole as being fundamentally racist as opposed to merely containing racist elements to be purged. At a practical level, critical race theory allows us to convict individuals of racism even without being consciously motivated by any hostility toward people of color. Merely not actively trying to tear down established culture makes you complicit in racism. As Kendi argues, it is not enough to not be racist, you have to be an anti-racist.

In order to help my readers become anti anti-Semites, I should write a history of anti-Semitism that uses the logic of CRT against Christianity, Islam, modern secularism, and ultimately the contemporary left. We could call it the 33 Project. The essential points of the book would be as follows. 

Anti-Semitism is the foundation of both Christianity and Islam and by extension all of Western Civilization. The true foundation of Christianity may be the year 33 C.E. but it is not the Cross but the accusation of deicide where Jews were supposed to have forced Pilate to crucify Jesus, claiming that his blood would be on their hands and that of their children. In truth, it has been Christians who have been the crucifiers of Jews. The Jews are the Christian Other, who are to be implicated and ultimately even murdered for Christian vices in order to allow Christians to claim to be virtuous. 

At a fundamental level, Christianity is an act of cultural appropriation. The vast majority of Christians today have no ethnic connection to Judaism and yet they have no objection to taking Jewish scriptures as well as the narrative of choseness reinterpreting it not only to make themselves God's chosen but to cast Jews as the ultimate other, the people who God rejected. 

In a similar fashion, Islam was founded not only upon Mohammed's mass murder of Jewish tribes in Arabia but also his appropriation of Jewish choseness, replacing Isaac with Ishmael as the chosen son of Abraham. Today Muslims have the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. Here we are going beyond cultural appropriation to outright cultural eradication. The idea here is to eliminate Jewish history by denying the existence of the two Temples. 

What this means is that anyone raised within a Christian or Muslim environment is, by definition, an anti-Semite. Christians and Muslims simply cannot help themselves, it is who they are. In fact, anti-Semitism is so infectious that anyone who believes there is anything valuable about Western civilization becomes tainted with anti-Semitism. Considering the ubiquity of Western Civilization today, even seeming non-Christians and Muslims (such as Indians, Chinese, and the Japanese) should assumed to be anti-Semites as well. 

As a Christian or a Muslim (and therefore an anti-Semite), you have an obligation to educate yourself about the history of anti-Semitism. This does not simply mean that you should acknowledge the existence of the Almohads or the Inquisition but that you should actively declare that all Christians and Muslims are inherently guilty of structural anti-Semitism by the mere fact that they are Christians or Muslims. (Obviously, when pressed, I will pretend, using Motte and Bailey tactics, that all that I am trying to do is teach about the Almohads and the Inquisition and I will accuse my opponents of trying to cover up these historical facts.)  

Even people who try to help Jews are really anti-Semites. Such anti-Semites believe that it is possible for Jews to improve themselves by reading anti-Semitic works like Aristotle and Kant or even the Old Testament. This implies that Jews are not perfect and that any seeming imperfections are not the fault of non-Jews. As we know from the doctrine of converging interests, whenever non-Jews look like they are helping Jews, it is only to better serve their own interests. For example, non-Jews might wish to pretend to not be anti-Semites and therefore avoid having to reckon with the anti-Semitism inherent within themselves and their civilization.  

Secular people might wish to congratulate themselves on not being anti-Semites on the assumption that they have distanced themselves from the anti-Semitism of their ancestors but this is not so. As we can see from Shakespeare and Dickens, Western literature is inherently anti-Semitic. If you have ever read Shakespeare or Dickens you become an anti-Semite much as you would from watching a passion play. It does not help if you try to censor any offending material. Doing that simply proves that you know that they are anti-Semitic but simply want to cover it up. This makes you not only an anti-Semite but a dishonest one at that.  

Obviously, Christians and Muslims who do not abandon their faiths are guilty of anti-Semitism. That being said, if you abandon your religion, you are still an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is so ingrained in Christianity and Islam that not even apostasy will be able to cure Christians and Muslims of its taint. In truth, a true gentile anti-anti-Semite would recognize that they can never be cured of anti-Semitism and would not desire that his Jewish allies should have to demean themselves by pretending he is not an anti-Semite. (It is psychological violence enough that Jews should even have to be in the same room as an anti-Semite so gentile anti-anti-Semites should do their best not to spend any time with Jews.)

Since Jewish victimhood is the foundation of Western Civilization, only Jews can ever be victims of bigotry. Anti-Semites (a category that includes all non-Jews) can never be victims. If they appear to be victims, it is merely their anti-Semitism coming back to harm them. In a world in which anti-Semitism did not exist, there would be no oppression. Because of this, any discussion of oppression, say, for example, the Trail of Tears, outside of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitic. Obviously, the reason why the Cherokee were forced off their land was because they failed to make an intersectional alliance with Jews to fight against the anti-Semitic United States government. Clearly, the reason anti-Semites would wish to cover up this anti-Semitic facet of Native American history is that, as anti-Semities, they wish to pretend that anti-Semitism is not the foundation of all oppression. 

Because Jews (assuming that they are not anti-Semites) are inherently victims, it is not possible for them to ever be oppressors. This applies even when Jews do things like use the N-word. When Jews use that word they are simply reacting to being oppressed and are bravely standing up to anti-Semitism. Anyone who objects to Jews using the N-word is really an anti-Semite as they are implying that there can be a type of oppression besides anti-Semitism and are trying to rob Jews of their moral high ground as inherent victims.  

It should be noted that most Jews are anti-Semites. This is hardly surprising considering that Jews have lived for more than a thousand years within the structural anti-Semitism of the West and have imbibed its hatred for Jews. When we think of Jewish anti-Semites, it is not enough to point out Jewish Voices for Peace or If Not Now. Any Jew who refuses to recognize that Western Civilization is inherently anti-Semitic and believes that it is possible to interact productively with Western Culture without becoming tainted with anti-Semitism is an anti-Semite. Even for Jews, it is not enough to refrain from active anti-Semitism. One must be an anti anti-Semite by working to tear down all structures of non anti anti-Semitism. 

As one of the world's only true anti anti-Semites, it is a lonely task. I bear the weight of so much oppression and it is the fault of all you anti-Semites. Maybe corporations can hire me to offer seminars to help cure their workers of anti-Semitism (or at least to make them feel really guilty about it). This will include classes on why you are an anti-Semite for thinking that I am a greedy Jew taking money from anti-Semites in exchange for moral cover or why you are an anti-Semite if you found this piece funny. (Since anti-Semites have no sense of humor, if you did not laugh at this piece, you are also an anti-Semite.) 

Am I to Blame for Killing Your Lord (or for Racism)?

 

As a principled classical liberal, I believe in the importance of reading things that one disagrees with the goal of being able to pass an Ideological Turing Test. This means being able to talk about a position in such a way that people will not be able to tell the difference between your description and the words of genuine supporters. I do read plenty of things that I disagree with. That being said, recently I find that a large percentage of that reading is being taken up by contemporary Christian conservatives like David F. Wells, and Voddie Bauchman. This is to say nothing of my great love for classical Christian writers like C. S. Lewis, who I have been reading since my Yeshiva University days, and G. K. Chesterton, and John Bunyan. All of these are writers that I can listen to for hours at a time with great pleasure. By contrast, I have a difficult time with Woke writers such as Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi to the point that I cannot listen to them for more than a few minutes without getting annoyed. The reason for this, I suspect, has much to do with my annoyance, as a teenager, with Rabbi Avigdor Miller; I take their criticism personally.

By contrast, I do not take Christianity as a personal threat to me. As I once explained to my students, I am privileged to be able to read the New Testament in a post-Vatican II world where the Catholic Church has denounced anti-Semitism and specifically the charge that the Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus. This means that I can read the New Testament, and by extension the wider corpus of Christian literature, without getting hung up on whether someone is blaming me for killing their Lord even to the point of wanting me dead. I am well aware of the historical reality of Jews shuddering in fear on Easter Sunday from drunken peasants who had just been told by their priest that the Jews murdered Jesus. This only highlights the fact that this is not the world in which I live. On the contrary, as far as I can tell, conservative Christians are far more likely on Easter to contemplate how fortunate they are that the Jewish people gave them their Savior and that it is a wonderful thing that the Jews have returned to the land of Israel just like in the days of Jesus. 

I am particularly grateful to the Protestant tradition with its emphasis on total depravity. From this perspective, the Jews, as a group, can never bear particular responsibility for crucifying Jesus. All human beings are equally depraved in their sinfulness. This means that Jews cannot be worse than anyone else. Furthermore, since Jesus died for the sins of the entire world, the sins of both Jews and Gentiles equally serve as nails in the Cross. 

Conservative Christians may wish that I convert to their religion and even believe that I will be condemned to Hell for all eternity for not accepting Jesus. That being said, I do not believe that they take my failure to convert personally. It is not as if I am, in some sense, torturing Jesus with my Jewish practices, beyond all the other eight billion sinners on the planet, showing that, if I had lived in the first century, I would have been crying out for Jesus' crucifixion just as loudly as my ancestors. 

When I read Woke literature, the essential point that I cannot ignore is precisely that I am being personally held responsible for American racism (or sexism, homophobia, or economic inequality). It does not matter that I do not feel any ill will towards black people, particularly as this group includes members of my family. Nor does it matter that none of my ancestors lived in the United States before the 20th century so none of them were owners of African-American slaves. The mere fact that I hold ideas they deem racist (mainly anything they strongly disagree with), makes me racist even if I never had any racist intent. The mere fact that I have white skin means that I have, in some sense, benefited from racism. By not getting on board with their plan to end racism, I fail to be an "anti-racist" and this, according to Kendi, makes me a racist.

The claim that I am responsible for racism has much in common with the traditional Christian anti-Semitic charge of deicide. My ancestors were never threatened by Christians out of a belief that my ancestors personally crucified Jesus. The assumption was that my ancestors, by remaining Jews, showed that they would have crucified him. As such, it was like they crucified him. As long as there were people, like Jews, exposed to Christian teachings but who stubbornly still rejected it, Jesus, in some sense, would continue to suffer on the Cross. From this perspective, the only solution would be to eliminate Jews either through conversion or through violence. 

Similarly, from the Woke perspective, I am guilty of racism simply because I am white. This is possible because, as with the Christian notion of sin, racism is assumed to be systemic. It is not about what you do but about who you are. In Christianity, this notion of sin is countered by the doctrine of total depravity. Since all humans are equally guilty of sin, no person can set themselves over anyone else in judgment and demand that they atone. No one can claim that they have committed the sin of lust in their hearts fewer times than me and are therefore less guilty of fornication. By contrast, for Wokeness, being marginalized means that you can lecture others about their privilege. For example, a black person can lecture me about my racism on the assumption that the mere fact that they are black means that they are less guilty of racism. It should be noted that, from the Woke perspective, it is impossible for a black person to ever be guilty of racism against whites, no matter how hateful their words are, while white people are guilty of racism simply by being white. The black person, it is assumed, does not wield power, while the white person, by virtue of their skin color, does. 

Something that I find fascinating about DiAngelo is that she specifically targets Jews as one of her main examples of whites trying to deny their complacency with racism. The white Jew tries to claim that they cannot really be guilty of racism because, as a Jew, they have also experienced oppression. This is parallel to the traditional Christian anti-Semitic argument that Jews bear a unique kind of guilt for the death of Jesus because Jews claim that they are saved through their works in following the Law and do not need Jesus. Just as Jews present a challenge to Christianity by opening up the possibility that some people might not really be tainted by Original Sin and therefore do not need Jesus, the white Jew challenges people like DiAngelo with the possibility that skin color might not be the best prism for understanding oppression. As such, white Jews bear a special guilt for racism. Since the Woke definition of racism is built around power. 

I can read conservative Christian writers, whose theology is premised around the doctrine of total depravity (distinct from Christian white nationalists) because I do not have to worry that they want me dead or that someone might "misunderstand" their words and try to kill me. When it comes to Woke writers, I have a difficult time interpreting them as anything other than dog-whistling calls to kill me as a white person who refuses to own up to the fact that I am responsible for most of the evil in the world today. For example, there is the wide support for the Palestinian cause and the willingness to tie it to American civil rights movements. If members of Black Lives Matter openly proclaim that their cause is simply another side of the Palestinian "fight for justice," I have no objection to taking them at their word and concluding that they are a terrorist organization committed to violence. Let us assume that, at the very least, they consider the murder of millions of Jews in Israel as an acceptable price for making Palestine free from sea to sea. I should also assume that they support something similar here in the United States where whites pay their "reparations" by accepting that it is only just and right that they should be robbed and even murdered. The fact that whites include Jewish whites and even Holocaust survivors will not cause them to pause. On the contrary, white Jews are particularly guilty of racism in that they have served to bring "Zionism" to American shores. 

From this perspective, no reasonable dialogue is possible. This certainly makes it harder to justify reading their books. It is not as if I am going to be sitting down with the Woke to show them that I have taken their concerns to heart and it might be possible to reach a compromise. If Wokeness is simply a plot to offer intellectual cover for mass murder then the only reason to read Woke literature is to convince the non-Woke of this fact and to warn the Woke that we know that their claims regarding social justice are a sham and are not going to submit to their moral blackmail.