This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
On the beach, almost sunrise. Meditation time. Letting the words flow.
After his cartoon bomb UN appearance, Netanyahu himself appears as a cartoon-like figure. The target is too easy.
Though what’s too easy doesn’t disappear. The issue is highlighted. Now what?
The silliness of the cartoon bomb is obvious. How many understood its seriousness?
I remember visiting Syria in the 1990s. Quite a place that was – and is. What initially tipped me off to the vagaries of the dictatorship there was a huge multi-story banner hanging from an apartment building. It celebrated Syria’s victory in the 1967 war. It blew me away. Another cartoon.
But the bloodshed in Syria today is realer than real. It isn’t a cartoon.
When individuals become caricatures of themselves it’s sad. Hopefully we recognize the situation, step back and begin again. This is true of communities, religions and nations. The deepest cultural, political and religious impulses become perverted. What is the way back?
This is what Jews have come to. Time to join the nations. Now the most conscientious of us are witnesses at the end of Jewish history – as we have known and inherited it.
Joining the nations, who are we? My response: Not much. At times, I imagine Israel as a Miami-Dade County look-alike. With a nuclear arsenal. I see Israel’s Prime Minister as the Mayor, Knesset members as County Commissioners.
Such imaginings don’t demean Israel. It places Israel in the right context. So Israel doesn’t get as large in our head as it is in Netanyahu’s head. However, if you’ve noticed, it already has.
Nonetheless, to bypass Israel, as many Jewish academics do now -because it’s convenient -or as many young Jews do -because they’re fed up with the whole thing -or to simply condemn Israel to hell -because at times it deserves to be – ignores what Israel means to Jews and Palestinians. Likewise it diminishes what Israel/Palestine could mean to the world.
If Israel is small with a large ego, Jerusalem is similar. Like Israel, the reality of Jerusalem doesn’t live up to expectations. How could it? Jerusalem is a smallish city with old artifacts and religions that claim the city as their own. But if you look closely, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are local religions that claim Jerusalem as a local capital. Through history, though, they’ve had a global impact.
The impact of Judaism, Christianity and Islam has been for good and ill. On balance any sane analyst would prefer they’d stayed local. When local goes global bad things are bound to happen. It may be size rather ideals. Or size begins to obscure ideals. Then there is the “faith conquering the world thing” which means religion needs an empire patron.
If you take away their outsized influence and large flocks and look at them from the outside, the monotheistic religions are more like a dressed up Middle Eastern Mormonism gone global. Freedom of religion, for sure, but the national and global aspirations of religion have to be checked at the door.
Yet as we skewer the world religions, let’s not forget modernity. This is also a local religion gone global. For good and ill. On balance any sane analyst would prefer modernity had stayed local. If you think Mormonism is a hoot – or Judaism, Christianity and Islam – step outside of modernity and look inside its tinted windows. You will see more horror than you expected.
Small isn’t always beautiful. Small isn’t always unimportant. Israel could have meant something when it was created. It could mean something different now.
Israel is a settler colonial state. But not only. If every colonial state was condemned there wouldn’t be many that survive. The survivors would probably do what was done against them. If they haven’t already done so in their history and even if they have.
This doesn’t mean we accept injustice or the war against Iran or whomever Israel deems in need of being worked over. Israel doesn’t deserve a free pass just because others might do the same.
Then there’s the prophetic. Yet another local item gone global. But unlike religion or its modern variant, modernity, the prophetic isn’t interested in dominating or becoming empire. The prophetic accompanies the local in its global journey as its critical shadow. It’s there to inform power that it has become a caricature of itself.
On the “local” Jewish prophetic level, it’s instructive that the academics and young Jews who bypass Israel likewise bypass the prophetic. In our time, Israel and the prophetic are bound together.
Jews who aren’t engaged on the Israel front are deflecting their own indigenous. They’re going global without attention to the local.
The prophetic isn’t going to straighten out history. History isn’t a series of straight lines. The prophetic doesn’t choose the history it operates within. Just as the prophetic can’t straighten out history, the prophetic can’t be straightened out.
History is a series of patterns and anomalies. So is the prophetic. History and the prophetic meet in between.
History wins. The powerful aren’t obstructed by the prophetic. This doesn’t mean that the prophetic is consumed. The meaning of the prophetic is in its continual appearing.
Even if the prophetic isn’t winning, power knows it can be disrupted and over turned at any moment. The prophetic reminds the powerful and the powerless that power isn’t everything, especially when it seems to be.
The pretense of power is endless. Do those who seek to diminish Israel have less deceit? Simply to condemn Israeli power isn’t an allowance that can be spent on anything you want. Without being called to task yourself.
Netanyahu is such a hoot he doesn’t even know he is. Still, he’s not the only world leader who is. Look around.
Still, I believe that Israel is a special case. That Jewish is a special case. That the prophetic is a special case.
Even if you argue against Israel and Jewish as special, it’s hard to deny the prophetic.
Why the prophetic? Simply put: Without the prophetic there is no meaning in the world. The prophet embodies the possibility of meaning in the world.
Sure, maybe things aren’t so good without the prophetic. But remember, without a song, the day would have no end, the road would never bend, and a couple of other not-so-awesome things, too, but they happen to corn plants. Besides, a man is born, but he ain’t got a friend, without a song!
So with a song in our stouthearted, not to mention plenty of stout, we go forward, shoulder to shoulder and bolder and bolder, and to hell with Burgandy!
independent of nationality, religion, ethnicity, special as well as prophetic is the equality of all the living and yet to be born.
I read somewhere that the “problem” that Bach’s compositions try to “solve” is the problem of reconciling harmonic scales with the chromatic scale. (Never mind if you don’t know what this means. It is enough that they are quite different, conflicting.)
The “problem” that Judaism tries to solve, it would seem, is the conflict between the morality of a people strictly within that people (the morality of Jews among Jews), on the one hand, and the morality of one people within the world (the morality of Jews in the wider world).
What does “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you” mean? Are the “others” merely “other Jews” or are they “other people generally, even if not Jews”? Or to ask it another way, was Hillel speaking truly to the non-Jews when he indicated that Judaism preaches consideration by Jews for non-Jews, or was he lying (or mistaken)?
In the diaspora, Jews learned the rule: be separate if you must but don’t offend your neighbors. In Israel, Jews have made bold to reverse the lesson: be separate and do nothing that does not offend your neighbors.
Not what one might call “reconciling”.
Perhaps “the prophetic” is a reminder to spend more effort in the attempt to reconcile these things and less on infuriating the neighbors.