Mount of Olives from Jerusalem, photo (c) Ben Adlin
Yonah Fredman has posted here before and comments under the nom-de-blog wondering jew. He lived in Israel for 4 years 8 months and 16 days and has been back in the states for about half a year. After a virtual discussion following Weiss’s post “Contextualizing the Holocaust”, Weiss invited him to comment on the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
I had two grandmothers. Both lost their mothers in World War Two. One grandmother also lost the rest of her family- father, brother, sisters, nephews and nieces. It’s worse to lose your family than to have your limb amputated, even though it’s less obvious to outsiders.
“If you put your tongue to my heart it would poison you,” one survivor said in Claude Lanzman’s “Shoah”.
Zionism is like a booby prize for the Shoah. “My grandmother went to Auschwitz and all I got was this shitty little country.”
I cannot dismiss Jerusalem as insubstantial. Too much time spent contemplating the Mount of Olives from the walls of the Old City for me to act aloof and disinterested. That piece of the planet sends me. But oy, the meshugene murderous politics! What a curse!
“This long time curse hurts
but what’s worse
is this pain in here/ I can’t stay in here
ain’t it clear
that I just don’t fit.
I believe it’s time for us to quit…”
But quitting as an individual cannot be multiplied by five million. My need to breathe freer air is not a prescription for the conflict. I wasn’t born there and face it- it’s not designed for a spoiled old American like me, who’s not spoiling for a fight.
Will I be young enough to spoil for a fight when Hamas and/or Fatah finally advocate one man one vote. I don’t know.
I do know that I love many people who live there and I care what happens to them.
The Torah and the prayerbook, the Tanach, the Midrash and the wise parts of the Talmud should not be tossed on the ash heap. Neither should they be overestimated. I’m not an atheist. To me religion is like art, an integral part of our humanity. Still, some art is not so pleasant to be around.
The litigious Jew pushing his menorah into the public square and pushing the tree out is not my response. The dissident Jew who listens to “Feliz Navidad” with one ear and rebels against the bombardment of the mass media majority rules seasonal onslaught is a better description. It may seem perverse, but the split mind is the stance that fits me. Maybe a nonsocial individual can afford such a split, whereas more social people cannot. I think this just happens to be the halfway point between the way I was raised and some unknown ideal that I will probably never find. If I cannot be myself, at least don’t drag me into the public sphere to act like something I am not. This is the essence of my stance.
No religion is perfect. No belief system is flawless. Mortal vulnerable life plus the brain chip known as the God chip or the awe chip have produced many systems of belief. My rational mind versus my awe chip wrestle, scratch and elbow each other, depending on the day, the week and the season.
I still participate in most of the Jewish holidays and in an occasional Friday night Shabbos/Shabbat/Sabbath meal. On occasion I read Psalms and Isaiah in Hebrew aided by English translation. I feel closer to my nieces and nephews in Israel because I do. And also closer to my grandmother’s family murdered in the forest outside of Brest Litovsk.
“No religion is perfect. No belief system is flawless.”
Indeed. Whereas politicians, revolutionaries, and others try to come up with systems to help people live together more beneficially (than, e.g., under Israeli-Zionism or USSR-Communism or USA-Capitalism or USA-Oligarchy), and although social engineering is never going to work perfectly or even very well, at least the attempt is CONTEMPORANEOUS whereas all the old-time religions were crafted (also, generally, by social engineers, politicians, etc.) AGES AGO when conditions bore very little resemblance to today’s conditions.
There are a lot more people now on earth, to name a predominating difference, and we live artificially (e.g., by transforming oil into food via factory-farming using pesticides and fertilizer produced from oil), and mankind is largely interdependent rather than locally self-sufficient, unlike during Biblical times right up to 1900 or so.
Weapons and communications are far different now than they were when Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc., were reduced to canon.
The newly-minted “religion” of Zionism (possibly intended to replace Judaism as a religion, and pretty much doing so in the USA) has meanwhile morphed (among spies, warriors, and other non-governmental zealots inside Israel) into a Judaism-inspired justification for terrorism — rather as Islam seems to have morphed into terrorism in al-Qa’eda’s hands.
Whereas it is impossible to trust to new modes of governance, it is at least possible to tinker with these modes. But old-time religion is too fixed and too out-of-date for relevance today if taken literally. And if religious leaders are to be free to pick and to choose and to interpret (i.e., here the word “yes” means “no”) — as the religious leaders in all contemporary religions seem to do, without democratic participation — religions become merely arbitrary systems of quasi governance with traditionally-inspired obedience use to keep “the people” “in line” by leaders who do not fear to re-interpret their religions in ways that would not have been recognized 100, 200, 500 years ago.
Nice sound to this, WJ, but you didn’t tell me what your God chip says about Jerusalem. ;-)
This is a disturbing text! Hard to withhold sympathy. Jerusalem clearly arouses both positive emotion and great pain. But MRW is right in that we don’t hear what you think about J’lem theologically or politically. Tell us more.
“If I cannot be myself, at least don’t drag me into the public sphere to act like something I am not. This is the essence of my stance…My rational mind versus my awe chip wrestle, scratch and elbow each other, depending on the day, the week and the season”
Perhaps an aspect of the self’s duality? If you have to put on a public persona that makes you feel uncomfortable or anxiety, then you aren’t being yourself. In some cases there is a chance it is caused by repressed experience in the past. Maybe it’s just not you. Maybe most everybody feels this in different ways and puts on false public personas. Or maybe it’s hopeless and they really have fallen into a borg-like hive mind state of materialist commercialism.
Spiritualism is important to us, religion is a spiritual outlet. These days it seems people of varying religious faiths lack the spiritual element. They don’t get it. Especially the extremists. They really don’t get it. IMO, the leftover dogmatic elements, the contradicting passages (due to mistranslation, misinterpretation, vandalism, or all of the above) can and are really interpreted in a dangerous way for these people. The wisdom and the spiritualism gets lost.
We are definitely ‘wired’ for religion/spiritualism. I’ve never been religious and it took 30 years to figure out the importance of spiritualism so now I’ve been meditating quite a bit more and it works. You get to know yourself. Perhaps even slay some old demons and get your duality to act as one. Work out inner problems first and maybe we’ll be able to better handle the public sphere. The US is passing some pretty scary laws, but in a lot of cases Israel already operates that way. A corporation-driven Orwellian ‘democracy.’ Anybody who sees through the BS is a terrorist sympathizer… or a terrorist. What the PTB don’t realize is you can’t destroy what I’ll call the Freudian id. The anxiety over being something against our nature will eventually lead to rebellion.
>> No religion is perfect.
Religions are human-devised belief systems. It’s no surprise that they’re not perfect.
>> No belief system is flawless.
But the modern humanistic ones that stress equality, compassion, respect and freedom (among other things) are a damned sight better than centuries- or millennia-old systems rooted in tribalism, racial/ethnic/religious supremacism and inequality (among other things). Retain and work to refine the former; discard the latter.