States of Exile

According to another opinion, the Shekhina originally did dwell here below, on earth. However, when Adam sinned, she removed herself to the first heaven. When the generation of Enosh sinned, she moved up from the first to the second heaven. The sins of the generation of the Deluge caused her to withdraw to the third heaven; those of the generation of the Tower of Babel, to the fourth. When the Egyptians sinned in the days of Abraham, she withdrew to the fifth heaven. The sins of the Sodomites impelled her to seek refuge in the seventh heaven. When the seven righteous (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Levi, Kehat, Amram, and Moses) arose, they brought her back down to earth step by step. - Raphael Patai, "The Shekhina" Addendum: the sins of the Germans have exiled the Shekhina from earth for a thousand years to match their führer's reich.

Stalin called Jews rootless cosmopolitans. I prefer the ideal of the rooted cosmopolitan : A rooted cosmopolitanism will not promise the relative peace of violence suppressed and controlled--a promise that liberal modernity has utterly failed to fulfill--for it knows that the human heart lusts more for dominion than truth, more for power than for righteousness. But against the cool, disengaged, and manipulative ethos of atomistic universalism, it can promise to meet others in the full bloom of their loves and in the full force of their loyalties. It lets men draw their swords. I have always thought that taking a man's sword seriously and meeting his convictions with a forceful vigor of one's own is the essence of cosmopolitanism: respect. Rooted cosmopolitanism has a distinguished pedigree: Herder and Hegel, for example, saw that the concreteness of our historical identities was precisely the medium in which we found and expressed our universal humanity. Later figures such as v

Anti-Semites make me feel significant.

Just so, Jews want to be called Israelites , and the tailors dressmakers . . . But when an intrinsically innocuous name is discredited, this is not due to the name but to what is named. Hence the new name will soon share the fate of the old one. - Arthur Schopenhauer Now I'll say "a Jew" and just the word Jew sounds like a dirty word and people don't know whether to laugh or not. - Lenny Bruce I dislike the word Jew. I realize it's been around too long to go out of fashion, but it's worth stating that Schopenhauer is wrong. "Jew" sounds like a slur in a way Israelite and Hebrew do not. Jew itself is simply an abbreviation of Judean, which is much less nebulous. (The idiot asks: "If Jew is a nationality, why isn't there a Jewish passport?") Judean refers to a specific country of origin, Judea or Judah, as Egyptian does to Egypt, Italian does to Italy, etc. The Zionists should have called their state Judea and reclaimed the old usage. Is

We travel like other people but return to nothing. Traveling was the cloud's way. We buried our loved ones in the clouds' darkness, among the trunks of trees; We said to our wives: Bear children from us for hundreds of years, so that we may complete this departure Toward a single hour of homeland, one span of the impossible. We travel in psalm wagons, rest in the tent of prophets, we emerge from gypsies' words. We measure space by the hoopoe's beak, or sing to repel from us the distances, wash out the moon's light. Your road is long: dream of seven women, so that you can carry this long road across your shoulders. Shake the palm trees, to know their names, to know which mother will give birth to the child of Galilee. We have a country full of words. Speak, speak so that I can rest my road against a rock. We have a country full of words. Speak, speak so that we may know what is the limit of this traveling. - Mahmoud Darwish

As a Semite, I am interested in the future of anti-Semitism. Therefore I was delighted to read an article dealing with that very theme from the blog Semitic Controversies . The author writes: The anti-Semitic movement today is at a crossroads in time, it can decide to go three different ways with its critique of jews: it can carry straight on as it has done till the present time using the same style of arguments as it did at the height of its power, it can turn to the left towards simple anti-Zionism or it can turn to the right to create a new critique of jews. You will notice that the word Jews, despite being a proper noun, is not capitalized. The faux-intellectual tone of the article is negated by this simple act of spite. Must good grammar be sacrificed at the altar of demonology? I was impressed by this portion of the article, however: Anti-Semitism has continued using these same arguments and methods to the present day, but had our anti-Semitic forefathers done this then they woul

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. – Franz Kafka, "Senses" The room Kafka refers to has been called Kodesh Hakodashim , sanctum sanctorum and Holy of Holies. Every exile carries it with him.

From the Prospect article Fear Masquerading as Tolerance by Christopher Caldwell: A central problem in welcoming people from poor countries is that Europeans have lost faith in parts of the civilisation to which migrants were drawn in the first place. ‘‘Europeans would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood,’’ wrote the French political scientist Raymond Aron in the 1970s. ‘‘Others, by their hundreds of millions, wish to enter it.’’ It is hard to follow Europe’s rules and embrace Europe’s values, as newcomers are sometimes told they must, when Europeans themselves are rewriting those rules and reassessing those values. In the aftermath of the French revolution, the Jewish reentry into history began. Zionism was the attempt by Jews as a collective to renter "the history that is written in letters of blood," while assimilationism and socialism offered the possibility of individual reentry. Europe lost much of its

It is a kind of global forgetting, a laundering of our soiled universe, washing away accumulated layers of names, memories, associations, and leaving it all unfamiliar and fresh and sweet-smelling. It is ceasing to take everything and anything for granted. It is the re-discovery of the obvious as very strange, the given as wonderful and precious, before we bend it to our purposes. It is admitting the glory that was there all along. It is actually looking at the "meanest" stone and fallen leaf, at the "nastiest" piece of garbage, at "irrelevant" things like the shape and colour of shadows and the reflection of coloured city lights in wet roads at night (which we've ceased to see because we don't drive round them). It is consciously being what we really are - Capacity for things - the Space in which each of them is allowed to arrive at its peculiar kind of perfection. It is consciously viewing everything from its Source, reuniting it with the Infini

The Germans hate the Jewish religion less than their race, less their peculiar faith than their peculiar noses. - Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem The most assimilated and preeminent Westerners of Jewish lineage still preserved in their physical physiognomy, if in nothing else, the unmistakable and eternal stamp of Israel. And this inevitable fact has again and again infuriated the pagan peoples of the world. - Ludwig Lewisohn I found the reductio ad absurdum proof of the above sentiment in a blog comment posted by an Internet beauty queen: Plenty of people object to Jewish looks/appearance, not just WNs…Jews tend to be very physically ugly. Actually, the vast majority of Jews aren’t just ugly, many are FRIGHTENINGLY UGLY, so much so that most normal and healthy people of all racial/ethnic backgrounds are immediately repulsed or even instinctively scared (women and children, mostly) of them and as such avoid contact with them. Full-blooded Jews, especially unmixed Ashkenazim, are quite

My name is Solomon Levi, the desert is my home, my mother's breast was thorny, and father I had none. The sands whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, Be hard. I dance, for the joy of surviving, on the edge of the road. - Stanley Kunitz

He shared that great post-war sense that everything was possible, and that the city was a blank slate on which we could write our dreams. Those dreams, as Webber saw it, were of non-places where we were free to be, free to do what we wanted and free to go where we wanted, regardless of where we lived, or who we were, or what town we came from. Such were the joys of modernism, and they were so appealing that today the world is filled with non-places floating above land and history. . . . . Borders will be torn down. Others will go up. Identities will disappear. Others will take their place. Languages will die. Others will arise. The non-places of today are the places of tomorrow. And until then, those of us who love the world will keep on passing through non-places to reach the places beyond. - Frank Bures, Non-Places and the End of Travel Theodor Herzl wrote that "if you will it, it is no dream." But dreams are what give us something to will for. If Zion is reduced to a sordi

An article in National Geographic details the plight of Middle Eastern Christians: But the 196,500 Palestinian and Israeli Arab Christians, who dropped from 13 percent of the population in 1894 to less than 2 percent today, occupy a uniquely oxygen-starved space between traumatized Israeli Jews and traumatized Palestinian Muslims, whose rising militancy is tied to regional Islamist movements that sometimes target Arab Christians. In the past decade, "the situation for Arab Christians has gone rapidly downhill," says Razek Siriani, a frank and lively man in his 40s who works for the Middle East Council of Churches in Aleppo, Syria. "We're completely outnumbered and surrounded by angry voices," he says. Christianity is a religion born of Judaism. Both Jesus and Paul the Apostle considered themselves Jews. Why then should Israel not open its doors to the Christians of not just the Palestinian territories, but all of the Middle East? Over the generations the prese

One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid. The Germans - once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters. Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles - I fear that was the end of German philosophy. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Am Yisrael Chai - I fear that was the end of Jewish spiritual genius. Nationalism has become the ersatz religion of a godless people. I am not opposed to nationalism, but I subscribe to what Hans Kohn called a "nationalism of inwardness." Franz Kafka internalizing the Jewish feeling of exile and universalizing it through writing is a greater nationalist than a New York settler setting fire to olive trees. Jewish nationalist excesses are justified through reference to Arab perversions. Without denying the latter, let me quote Martin Buber with my own emphas

St. Augustine distinguishes between carnal Israel, the Jews, and spiritual Israel, the Church. Christians should realize that it's possible to fuck and pray at the same time.