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...