States of Exile

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not. - Protagoras For so long as the scale did not exist, there was no seeing from countenance to countenance, and the primal kings perished, and their species had no existence, and the earth vanished. - Zohar , II Every truth has more than one means of expression.

The following excerpts from the journal article 1890s Zionism reconsidered: Joseph Marco Baruch attest to the sublimity of this Hebraic D'Annunzio, who sadly killed himself in 1899: Baruch was a Turkish-born Frenchman, whose Zionist conception was independent from, yet nourished by, Central and East European Zionist trends. Geographically, his activism was not limited in scope and was well received in a variety of European and Mediterranean contexts. Conceptually, his social vision juxtaposed political action and an affirmative Jewish identity that called for a distinctly Jewish/Hebraic society positioned among a panoply of other nations. This contrasted with a Herzlian "liberal utopia" largely devoid of Jewish content. . . . Of passionate character, Baruch was given to singing songs about "Carmel" (presumably the mountain) and composing poetry in French. But he was also prone to more belligerent behavior, frequently engaging in both verbal and physical confron

Frequently people fall in the street and lie there dead. Whereupon all the shop people open their doors laden with wares, then the chatter begins: "Good morning,--it's a dull day--I'm selling any amount of kerchiefs--ah yes, the war." I rush into the house . . . I finally knock on the janitor's window: "Good morning," I say, "I understand a dead man was carried in here just now. Would you be kind of enough to let me see him?" . . . "Out with you!" he shouts. "This riffraff is getting in the habit of snooping about here every day. There's no dead man here. Maybe next door." I raise my hat and go. - Franz Kafka, "Description of a Struggle" Kafka was a Gnostic and a Jew. Integral to both is the command to remember. Only anamnesis can save us from the constant, contextless present of modernity. There is a certain nobility to being a man among the ruins; there is no nobility to being a man among the ruins who forget

Whoever would aspire to transform Germany into a middle-class democracy in the Western-Roman sense and spirit would wish to take away from her all that is best and complex, to take away the problematic character that really makes up her nationality; he would make her dull, shallow, stupid, an un-German, and he would therefore be an antinationalist who insisted that Germany become a nation in a foreign sense and spirit. - Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man The above applies equally to Israel, both state and nation. The most prevalent form of modern Jewish nationalism, middle-class liberal Zionism, is really antinationalism. Is the final goal of Zionism for Israel to be "a nation like all other nations"? Which nations then, Belgium? Slovakia? America? Shall we be satisfied with McDonald's in Hebrew, Israel in the E.U.? I don't claim to have all the answers, but it is precisely the "problematic character" of Jewish existence that grants greatness to

Your country is pain, is pain, An April of sorrow in your soul, Your country is the cross, the cross, It holds, it holds you, too, in its soul. Your country is the promised land, You set foot as master, it slides from beneath you, Your country has no words, has a sad gaze. Its love dies in your obsession. Your country is the food of the starving, It slips from your hands and sates you not, Dream and anguish and exhausted hope, Its eyes in the dark search for themselves. Your country is an open grave, a grave, All your life you followed in good faith, In a teardrop it drowns your tragic fate, In a teardrop it births your freedom. Your little country, so tiny, That immortal divinity - that tear. - Fatos Arapi

For one sees that the wise die, that the foolish and ignorant both perish, leaving their wealth to others. Their grave is their eternal home, the dwelling-place for all generations of those once famous on earth. Man does not abide in honour; he is like the beasts that perish. -Psalm 49 Zionism is the movement to restore the Jewish people to their temporal home. Necro-Zionism is the movement to restore the human race to their eternal home. Our goal is the ingathering of the exiles from Adam on down. We preach katabasis, not aliyah. We build uniting pyres, not dividing walls. Settlers are welcome. Am Sheol Chai!

The interventionist God died in Auschwitz. The most charitable reading of Jewish theology in the light of Jewish history is that God laid down the law at Sinai and, as it were, retired. The attitude Samuel Beckett characterized as "waiting for Godot" is no longer tolerable. If the Jews of Europe had placed their faith in human potentiality instead of divine intervention, more might have resisted the Nazi death march. Dostoevsky was the first to articulate that if God is dead, everything is permitted. God is the necessary postulate to prevent the war of all against all. If the interventionist God is irretrievably dead, we must seek Him in other forms. The kabbalah tells of a God in exile who has left sparks of the divine hidden within the shards of the material world. The role of Israel is to liberate the hidden sparks and repair the shattered vessel. Leo Strauss said "it is surely nobler to be victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wal

Little orphans in the snow With nowhere to call a home Start their singing, singing Waiting through the summertime To thaw your hearts in wintertime That's why they're singing, singing Waiting for a sign To turn blood into wine The sweet taste in your mouth Turned bitter in its glass Israel, in Israel Israel, in Israel Shattered fragments of the past Meet in veins on the stained glass Like the lifeline in your palm Red and green reflects the scene Of a long forgotten dream There were princes and there were kings Now hidden in disguise Cheap wrappings of lies Keep your heart alive With a song from inside Even though we're all alone We are never on our own When we're singing, singing There's a man who's looking in And he smiles a toothless grin Because he's singing, singing See some people shine with glee But their song is jealousy Their hate is clanging, maddening In Israel Will they sing Happy Noel? Israel, in Israel Israel, in Israel In Israel Will they sin

"Israel" lived twice, once in the patriarchs and matriarchs, a second time in the life of the heirs as the descendants relived those earlier lives. The stories of the family were carefully reread to provide a picture of the meaning of the latterday events of the descendants of that same family. - Jacob Neusner, "'Israel': Judaism and Its Social Metaphors" When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remarkable to wonder, if there are Jews here, why are there not Hittites here? - Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle Living again through one's seed is the Jewish promise of immortality, in contrast to the Christian promise of resurrection of the body. The eternity of Israel is in the past, not the future: the word reinterpreted in an endless hermeneutical spiral. The Jewish promise of immortality - through genealogy and tra

Yesterday was Victoria Day in Canada, a vestige of our monarchical past. Canada's head of state is still the Queen, represented in Canada by the largely ceremonial Governor-General, while the Prime Minister manages the daily affairs of government. Canada is not a republic but a constitutional monarchy. The Canadian model of governance has relevance for a theo-political understanding of Judaism. Kings and queens represent a check to untrammelled democratic power. Hitler was elected to office and commanded the undivided loyalty of the German nation. Mussolini, on the other hand, was hemmed in by the monarchy of Victor Emmanuel III. Even the Duce had to answer to someone. Israel is a monarchy, and a constitutional monarchy at that. Unlike the other Middle Eastern peoples, who tended to apotheosize their royalty as divine (think of the pharaohs), the Hebrews recognized the kingship of God above human rulership. Thus there always existed a greater entity (even if, paradoxically, that en

The journal article Anarcho-Nationalism: Anarchist Attitudes towards Jewish Nationalism and Zionism provides a fascinating overview of this mostly forgotten theo-political alternative of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Some background: Many Jewish radicals, socialists as well as anarchists, initially subscribed to the universalist ideas common to radical thought, ideas that [Moses] Hess himself used to advocate before his nationalist conversion in Rome and Jerusalem . In The Holy History of Mankind (1837), Hess maintained that Jews have a future in the modern world only as individuals, and that a solution to the Jewish problem would only emerge via a process of assimilation and integration into the universal socialist revolutionary movement. But while it took Hess a relatively short time to sober up to the reality, whereby national affinities were deeper and stronger than class solidarity, most Jewish radicals continued to believe for a long time that the social revolutio

For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. - 1 Timothy 2:5 As a monotheist I believe there is one God. As a pluralist I don't believe Christ is the one mediator between God and man. Unlike Dante, I don't condemn unbaptized babies and virtous pagans to the first circle of Hell. Besides the man Christ Jesus, mediators between God and men include Plato, the Vedas, Akhenaten, the Torah, Zarathustra and music at its most sublime.

In an article from the New Republic on Slavoj Zizek, Adam Kirsch hurls a j'accuse! at Slovenia's "deadly jester" for his views on Judaism: Invoking Freud's Moses and Monotheism , Zizek asserts that Judaism harbors a "'stubborn attachment' ... to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement." Thanks to this Jewish stubbornness, he continues, "the Jews did not give up the ghost; they survived all their ordeals precisely because they refused to give up the ghost." This vision of Judaism as an undead religion, surviving zombie-like long past the date of its "natural" death, is taken over from Hegel, who writes in the Phenomenology of Mind about the "fatal unholy void" of this "most reprobate and abandoned" religion. This philosophical anti-Judaism, which appears in many modern thinkers, including Kant, is a descendant of the Christian anti-Judaism

When you truly feel equal love for all beings, when your heart has expanded so much that it embraces the whole of creation, you will certainly not feel like giving up this or that. You will simply drop off from secular life as a ripe fruit drops from the branch of a tree. You will feel that the whole world is your home. - Ramana Maharshi Jesus was the Jewish Maharshi ("great seer"). He transcended the particular to feel equal love for all beings, dropping off from secular life as a ripe fruit drops from the branch of a tree. Individual Jews can achieve redemption from galut as surely as individual Hindus can achieve liberation from samsara . Jesus was part of the prophetic tradition, perhaps its culmination - but he was not the messiah. The messiah is not just an enlightened being who feels the whole world is his home; the messiah, in the Jewish tradition, makes the whole world home for everyone. Converting the whole world to Christianity cannot make the world Christ-like,

An interesting, because representative article from PopMatters on Middle Eastern Americans provides grist for my own thoughts on Jewish identity. The author writes: To truly be an American and to be accepted in America is to do certain things, “perform” in a certain way in order to be considered as part of the white, Eurocentric majority. These include speaking English, following some form of Christianity or Judaism and of course, looking or acting “white”. I have previously toyed with the question: are Jews white? Leftist Jews would rather identify with "racialized" minorities, but the fact remains that only white supremacists share their conception of Jews as a distinct, non-white race. Muslims see Jews as white interlopers; the black homeless man who cursed my family as "white motherfuckers" in San Francisco certainly sees Jews as white. That is not to say that Jews are Anglo-Saxon, or have always been considered white; simply that as far as social reality goes

Zionism is not synonymous with Jewish nationalism. The Zionist revolution that meant to uproot diaspora culture is more accurately termed Hebrew nationalism. Like all revolutions, the Zionist revolution was forced to compromise with the (Jewish) establishment to achieve its goals; thus the current identity crisis of the state of Israel. Israel's secular socialist and nationalist pioneers would look in horror on the millennialist settlers who have a strangehold on contemporary Israeli politics. Radical Zionism meant to create a new Jew, not provide a home for the old one. Yet history had other plans, as Israel emerged after the Second World War as the de facto home for all Jews. And yet I've always been intrigued by the lost alternative to Hebrew nationalism: Yiddishism, or Ashkenazi nationalism. Here are some excerpts from a book review that deals with the topic: Yiddishism can be defined as a romantic nationalist ideology in which Yiddish reflects the Jewish spirit--a concep

Octavio Paz articulates many of my own sentiments - especially as they relate to the universal and the particular, the we and the other. To wit, the interview published under the title Iniquitous Symmetries in which his reflections on Latin America have import that go beyond it: Latin America belongs to the West both by virtue of its languages - Spanish and Portuguese - and by virtue of its civilization. Our political and economic institutions are also Western. But within this "Westernness" the Other, the Others lie hidden: Indians, pre-Columbian cultures or those brought from Africa by blacks, the peculiarity of our Hispano-Arabic heritage, the particularity of our history. All this makes of us a different, unique, eccentric world: we are and are not the West. Jews are similar to Latin Americans in this regard, except our particularity is our Semitic origins and history of exile. That makes us different, unique and eccentric compared with other Western peoples, but we are n

In his essay Nietzsche and the Marginal Jews , Jacob Golomb provides a term for the modern Jew in exile: Grenzjuden . Golomb refers to a cultural and intellectual trend among early-twentieth century German Jews: These individuals tragically lacked an identity: they rejected any affinity with the Jewish community but were nonetheless unwelcome among their non-Jewish contemporaries. Jakob Wassermann describes them from within as: "religiously and socially speaking floating in the air. They no longer had the old faith; they refused to accept the new one, that is to say, Christianity . . . the physical ghetto has become a mental and moral one." There is an incipient identity in the "tragic lack" of identity. Through disillusionment with the "community of truth" there can come a greater affinity for that truth: the truth of exile. I don't reject any affinity with the Jewish community, nor am I unwelcome among my non-Jewish contemporaries. The situation has

In the essay Seeing and Using: Art and Craftmanship , Octavio Paz writes: Technology is international; its constructions, methods and products are the same everywhere. By suppressing national and regional particularities and peculiarities, it impoverishes the world. By spreading all over the globe, technology has become the most powerful agent yet of historical entropy. Clearly by technology Paz means more than just the physical products of mass production. He is referring to an idea: the idea that greater efficiency, greater functionality and greater uniformity are signs of universal progress. Faith in technological progress is not exclusive to any one ideology. Marxists and neoconservatives share the belief that the "end of history" (what Paz calls historical entropy) is the final result of technological progress. The "international Jew" tends to be associated with the adverse effects of technology and is scapegoated as its embodiment. But the Jew who maintains hi

I define myself as a six-thousand-year-old European. - Irving Layton The name Kafka is both Hebrew, from Jakov-Jacob , and Czech. Kavka , spelled with v, is the Czech word for black bird. . . . The Jews' gratitude to the Emperor was enormous and their loyalty to Habsburg intense. Kafka's first name offers a good example. His parents named him Franz, token of their affection for Franz Josef. - Walter H. Sokel, "Kafka as a Jew" Of course "Semite" refers to the speaker of a language group and was turned into a racial epithet by a German pedant. That being said, "Semite" in the broader sense has its use. Middle Eastern nationalities that share certain linguistic, cultural and yes, racial affinities can be categorized as Semitic. These include Arabs and Hebrews, but also other nationalities that were either assimilated or decimated in the wake of the Islamic wars of expansion: Assyrians, Arameans, Chaldeans, Phoenicians (arguably still around in Lebanon