Dear
Spengler, I find your editorials insightful
and thought-provoking. Thank you for using a psuedonym so we
can avoid the inevitable article on how your biography
affects your writing.
In most of your writing you
put forth two notions, the Jews as an eternal
people/society and the Jews as the people most
desperately trying to get away from their heritage (G-d
of Mercy: please choose another people). Can you do a
quick compare and contrast then of the secular vs
religious cultural battle being waged in Israel today
and how this tension shapes Israeli democracy and their
response to the external Arab and European threat to
their existence? As far as I can tell only the Jews, as
a nation, can face an external threat to their existence
and still find time to fight amongst themselves. See
also the history of the destruction of the first
temple.
Thanks, Eponymous M
Dear Eponymous M, Modern
Israeli society never has been a subject of my study, but I
will offer one comment: history has not been kind to
the premises either of the Zionists or of the
anti-Zionists. Theodor Herzl's Zionism intended to normalize the
Jews, by establishing a Jewish nation-state on the model
of the European nation-states, and this on the eve of
World War I, which sounded the death-knell for the
European nation-state. Removing Europe's Jews into their
own country was to have eliminated the "root cause" of
anti-Semitism, namely a large and unassimilable Jewish
population. Anti-Zionists both of the secular
(assimilationist) and religious variety believed that
Jews either could melt into European society, or live in
Europe encysted and largely undisturbed.
All of
them were wrong. For the second time in a century, "the
Jews" are at the center of a world conflict. The Nazis
blamed Jewish Bolsheviks and bankers for the world's
problems in 1939, and today's Europeans blame Israeli
maltreatment of the Palestinians for the conflicts
between the West and the Islamic world. Sacrifice this
"shitty little country", as the French ambassador to
London remarked to the journalist Barbara Amiel, and the
problem will go away. Adolf Hitler was wrong about this, as
was the French ambassador to London.
Israel in
particular, as well as Jewish communities outside of
Israel, appear divided between secularists and those who
wish to remain true to the practice of the Jewish faith
as it evolved in the High Middle Ages, neither of which
seems particularly convincing. Where are the great
Jewish thinkers who will make sense of this to the Jews
and to the world at large? Eighty years ago, the best
Jewish minds of Europe (Franz Rosenzweig, A J Heschel,
Joseph Soloveitchik) were studying in Berlin,
confronting the ideas of Kierkegaard, Hermann Cohen,
Edmund Husserl, and later Martin Heidegger. Those were
discussions worth listening to. But where are such minds
today? Rosenzweig has become the object of a cottage
industry in academia, Soloveitchik's students quarrel
over the prophet's mantle, and Heschel has met the
saddest fate of all, namely to become a sourcebook for
sermons.
I do not know how the Israelis will
address the great divide in their country; I do not know
from what well they will draw the ideas with which to
begin a sensible debate on the topic. World War II
destroyed the intellectual centers of Jewish life of
Europe, and nothing has emerged elsewhere to replace
them.
Whatever the Israeli secularists believe,
the fact of the Jews' existence has theological content.
Rosenzweig quoted the court chaplain of Frederick the
Great of Prussia who, when asked for a proof the
existence of God, replied, "Your majesty, the Jews." The
return of the Jews to their ancient land and its ancient
capital is a faith-affirming miracle to American
Evangelicals, and a challenge to the faith of Middle
Eastern Muslims. Secular Israelis appear condemned to
suffer for the perception that it is something they do
not wish to be at all. How they sort that out is their
problem. Spengler
"Mike"
writes that I sit "over the hissing fires, stirring the
cauldron, cackling like a madman." That is accurate. But
what was your question?
Mohammad
Salimabadi compares senescent religions to
antiquated operating systems. I disagree; except in the
Terminator movies, operating systems are not
sentient and do not feel the sting of death. If one
considers the death of one's language and culture and
the extinction of one's history to be "a secular
non-metaphysical force, wrapped in the obfuscatory cloak
of metaphysics", as Mr Salimabadi says, one may dispense
with the word religion. But the truth is that whole
tribes and nations wilfully go to their deaths rather
than submit to the melting pot.
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