Israel, forever

Today marks the 62nd anniversary of Israel's independence.

The Jews arose during hard times, amid the collisions of warring peoples. Early tribes grew, and populations formed distinct identities, as related to the lands they claimed and held. Gods were sought, bribed, and eventually attached to those lands – formal, mystical “seals” to establish coherence and to ritualize the forward movement of separate kingdoms.

The Jews arose during hard times. The factors of time, space, struggle, captivity, and freedom fed into the equation that would yield a tempered result: the nation of Israel. Rome put a temporary end to that. The Jews, deprived of their homeland, were dispersed over centuries, scattered to the four winds. In the normal course of things – the vanquished assimilate, are diluted of nationalistic energies – the fate of the Jewish nation would have been permanently settled. But Europe wasn't willing to let things be. Europe insisted on hating the vanquished, dispersed Jews. Europe wasn't finished with the Jews.

The God of those Jews had been refashioned, broken up into three Christian chunks: Job's nemesis, Jesus' manifestation, a mediating atmospheric. As papal Rome spread its monolithic culture (a Jew-despising culture) through Europe, it was axiomatic that organic principalities would protest and then revolt. Gold likes to gleam in local treasuries; gold resents being moved South. So fiefdoms recoiled and princes stiffened against Rome. A proto-capitalist culture emerged.

Thanks to Martin Luther, a general attitude of contempt for the Jews spread through Protestant time. Thanks to the greed of princes, a general attitude of envy toward the remarkable, evolution-tempered Jews spread through commercial relations.

Things came to a boil in the aftermath of WWI. A shattered Germany – its cultural hegemony refuted, its treasury depleted – gave rise to a form of bestial mysticism. This was a mysticism finding energy and inspiration from the Jew-despising sermons of Martin Luther. The Jews must be scapegoated and exterminated. All threats – social, commercial – to a pure German rebirth must be stifled. The Germans, with their cheap, occultist ideas about a blood-spirit, were too stupid to realize something important: they would be trespassing against a truly mystical world-force. The world built up the Jews through long evolutionary devotion. The slaughter of the Jews would profoundly disturb that natural, mystical devotion. It would alter the normal fabric of being. Things would be very different in the world after the Holocaust.

Nothing in particular will be said here about the Holocaust. Non-Jews who speak about it do violence to it. It was an enormity that opened up a space of great silence. The syntax and semantics of the Holocaust form an unspeakable language. All this non-Jew will say is that the catastrophe was of mythic proportions. And the mythic is a silent stratum giving rise to altered reality.

Oh!...how this writer sets himself up for the cynical response: you are romanticizing the Holocaust; you are an irresponsible emotional libertine to call the Holocaust a unique enormity; you are a giddy mystical fool to think that particular genocide has reordered the system of reality. This writer shall rebut the historically anemic and spiritually insensitive in this manner: you are a hypocrite to accuse me of mystical extravagance; you luxuriate in your own mystical forms, whether a belief in a benevolent Spirit or in a humanistic Progress; at least this writer's form of mysticism is grounded in the hard-Earth fact that the Jewish people are exemplary products of evolutionary frictions.

The nations of the world stand accused and convicted by nature itself for their behavior toward the Jews during the Holocaust. In the aftermath, nature itself would propel the survivors toward a return to justified soil, would arm their descendants in the perpetual defense of that justified soil.

The conflict today between the Israelis and the Palestinians was avoidable had the Arabs been mystically sensitive to the world reordering. The Arabs should have acquiesced peacefully to and in brotherhood toward the Jews who returned to justified soil. They chose not to do so. They not only resent the Israelis, they want them pushed into the sea. The Arabs and Iranians wish death to Israel, to the Jews. That's not going to happen.

Contending against the Jews is toying dangerously with deep, elemental – yes, mystical – forces.