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My life as a Jew [1]

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Date: 2023-07-07  

On seeing The Chosen again, for the first in a very long time: “Oh my God what a beautiful film. I know I saw it in my youth but I couldn’t appreciate it then as I do now...The scene of Rod Steiger as the powerful Rebbe dancing at a wedding gives me chills. (Always makes me think of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant.) Discipline applied without love is mere punishment and cruelty. And Israel, born with such hope and idealism: I wonder what the early Zionists would think of today’s far right Israel? At that time after WW2, there was so much horror in the world, so much carnage, but there was also great optimism and faith and good expectations for the future. Now the same atrocities go on, but without any hope for a better future. The experiments are failing, or have failed: the American experiment of democracy and the Israeli experiment of a national homeland. Many Hasidic Jews today support far right wing, fascist leaders both here and in Israel. Inconceivable that descendants of the survivors of the Shoah would come to see fascist voices as their strength. This is what comes of religious extremism, the very thing the Baal Shem Tov was fighting against. Why does every spirit-led movement always seem to break down into carnality and ego defenses?”

~~~

When I was in Junior High School in Houston, Texas, Congressman Mickey Leland decided to sponsor a student to visit Israel and spend time on a kibbutz. I wanted desperately to go. I interviewed with him but was not selected. Now, I no longer want to go to Israel.

Why did I want to go so desperately to Israel? Years later, in therapy, my therapist told me that Israel could be “Is Real”, that I was like Pinocchio or the Velveteen Rabbit, wanting to turn into something “real”, a little boy, or a rabbit. What I wanted was to turn into a Jew. I think it goes back to my father. He was born in Hungary between the World Wars. Unlike many of his countrymen, he was a Judeophile. As I grew up, the Jewish people were held up to me and my siblings as owning the finest human culture possible: a culture of wisdom but also cunning, resilience coupled with uncompromising commitment to knowledge; a culture of high accomplishment, the highest; a humanity both tough and gentle, profound yet joyful, full of sorrow and pain yet closest to G-d (or maybe sorrowful as a result of being close to G-d); the ultimate human beings; the people who put G-d on trial!

My father did not believe in G-d or religion. I grew up in a militantly secular home. Though there was great culture and learning, I never acquired an identity— not national, nor religious, nor cultural, nor racial. I was to be a citizen of the world, with no affiliation. I embrace this now, but as a youth I Ionged to belong somewhere, and to be anyone other than who I was. What I really wanted was to lose myself in “something bigger.” I think one of the appeals of piety and traditional living is the relief one gets from being an individual; having every decision of one’s life predetermined frees one from the necessity to think for oneself and define one’s own identity. Life in my family of origin was extremely disordered and I suffered a lot of neglect, abuse, and emotional deprivation so I was like a lost puppy seeking to be adopted. My fantasy was to be a Walton. Goodnight, John-Boy!

I learned about the Holocaust from my parents and studied the literature and history of the Holocaust almost obsessively, on and off, over all the years of my life (and at one time had amassed quite a nice collection of books on the subject, which, unfortunately, I could not hold onto.) Curiously I found the greatest identity with the children of Holocaust survivors. The way they described their parents behaving was the way my Hungarian Revolution survivor father behaved. So on top of the alcoholism, the abuse, the narcissism, the rejection, and the rage, was another layer of mystery and distance. I started to invent a myth of my father being a Jew, even though he wasn’t.

Psychologically at that time, this was the drama: an idealized Jewishness as a stand-in for my atrocious father; desperately wanting belonging, acceptance, and approval, but in myself there was only uncleanness and defilement, being shunned and unfit and rejected. I most definitely wanted membership in an exclusive club I could never be admitted to. I wanted closeness to a Jewish man as a surrogate father, but pious Jewish men do not keep company with or talk to shiksas. And there was no way, of course, for me to become part of the community. This drama in different phases played out over many years, until I tangled with a far from ideal actual Jewish man (married-- no, we didn’t have sex), and understood that Jewish men are, after all, just men. The secular ones at times took advantage of my vulnerability and low self-esteem, (there was an actual bet, in college, between two Jewish men as to who could get me into bed first), and the pious ones of course, only looked upon me as a demonic manifestation.

Later on, the whole question of “what is a Jew” became the question of, what is Isreal and can Israel even exist? I had been caught up in the idealism of early Zionism, (socialist origins and kibbutz life), but that didn’t last long. My years at UT were during the beginning of left-wing sympathy with the Palestinian cause and everyone was wearing the kaffiyeh. I was a rather politicized youth and eventually read about Israel’s use of torture and abuses of the rights of Arab citizens, and reports by the UN, and very early on became disillusioned with the nation-state project. I am anti-nationalistic, always was, and always shall be. As a Judeophile I wanted very much to believe that Israel could be a good, secular, democratic, multicultural state, but as a budding leftist I had to give up on those hopes. (Although I have to admit, Israel could have done better if it were not surrounded geographically by political, cultural, and religious enemies.) Nothing good comes out of nationalism or religious extremism. It was German nationalism and antisemitism in the first place which led to the persecutions which spurred Zionism in Europe and the drive for a Jewish State. This is the political angle. Then, there is the theological angle…

I was very naive in certain ways and did not understand or anticipate the existence of left-wing Zionism. To me, Israel was founded on Western democratic ideals with a decided socialist leaning. Jewish nationalism didn’t fit. A Judaic theocracy was the last thing I could imagine. Several years after college, I was married and living in a rural community when I started going to the library to use the computer. I joined a left-wing blogsite which shall go nameless. I wrote and published a blog entitled “I Dream of Bibi” in which I related a dream I had about Israel, about Bibi Netanyahu, and a mysterious woman who could symbolize many things. I related personal stories illustrating how I had always idealized Jewish people and how I ultimately came out of that idealization and understood finally that Israelis were not residents of an Eastern European shtetl transplanted to a Middle Eastern desert, that they could be materialistic, cruel, militant, arrogant, and racist, just like everyone else. Well, some presumably left-wing Jews on that site harassed me so terribly over that and other blogs that I gave up on writing there. I was accused of hating Jews. I was accused of fetishizing Jews. I was told that I was comfortable only with “weak” models of Jewishness and couldn’t tolerate “strong” and successful models of Jewishness. Nothing could be further from the truth. I had a different, more humanistic definition of strength and success. I had always admired the Jewish spiritual and humanist values that I found in depictions of that long ago shtetl life. But literature isn’t always reality. I can understand the attack better now, having been in the interim, burned often in the fires of the Twitter woke mob, but at the time, I was astounded and shocked. I was a “PC” virgin!

I found, like many others have, that it was impossible to form respectful, legitimate criticisms of the State of Israel without being harassed and accused of antisemitism. I also found out defenders of Israel can use any excuse to cover its sins: if you cite Torah to criticize Israel’s treatment of aliens, or the burning of olive trees by settlers, then they said, but Israel is a secular state. Then if you criticize the government for various failures on political grounds, you are attacking Jewishness and Judaism. Nobody criticizing Israel could get away with it, no matter how legitimate the criticism.

Let me back up and offer some context: I had experienced a religious conversion to Yeshua some years prior. (I had long ago given up on actual Judaic practice as soon as I learned about keeping kosher, something I rejected out of hand as being wholly unrealistic for me as a single woman outside of any connection to the Jewish community.) As a convert (from secularism to Catholicism), I was exposed to some literature written by a Jewish man who had, along with his wife, many children, and the remnants of a failed hippie commune, entered the Catholic Church. His name was Mark Drogin and his ministry was called The Remnant of Israel. He in a way became a mentor during my early conversion period. It was the first time I really started understanding that Judaism and Christianity are not two separate religions but one religion in two phases. Mark was among those who called themselves “completed” Jews, for they were Jews who had found the Messiah. Among the literature I was being exposed to was also a conversion account by a Jewish psychiatrist who escaped the Holocaust and emigrated to Canada. He was one of the first Jewish people I ever heard pointing out the folly of Jewish nationalism. He predicted, correctly, as it turns out, that a Jewish State founded on Jewish nationalism would inevitably commit the same wrongs as German nationalism under the Third Reich. In other words, Israel would be guilty of the phenomenon of the victim becoming a perpetrator, all in the name of self-defense. If we take individual psychology and extrapolate to the societal level, we see that, just as the origin of all human mental, emotional, and spiritual ills, neurosis and evil action, spring from ego defenses, so do all social wrongs perpetrated by human communities against each other come from the perceived need for self-defense (often it is the projected fear of a powerful community onto a vulnerable community, which the strong group then seeks to destroy.) Obviously, there is a legitimate ground for self-defense, both on the personal and societal level, yet this need for defense is often used to justify atrocity against not equal rivals, but against comparatively vulnerable communities, which become persecuted. Whereas as a matter of spiritual principle, only death to self, or rather, the ego false self, and the dismantling of those very defense mechanisms, enables psycho-spiritual liberation. Applying this principle on the social level is difficult. Transformation of a national consciousness is possible, but any decision to sacrifice a defense must be made willingly, no less for a nation than a person. The Jewish philosopher Simone Weil, who lived between the World Wars, believed that France’s inability to defend itself against German invasion during WW2 was not due to military weakness but to a moral failing, which had resulted from France’s brutal suppression of Algerian independence. Weil believed that it is incumbent upon all modern nations to achieve and maintain a spiritual and moral ground of honesty, integrity, and justice.

Most Hasidic Jews were originally against Zionism. As portrayed in “The Chosen” (the movie based on the novel by Chaim Potok), Hasidim fought bitterly with Zionists for control over the resources and direction of the post-war American Jewish community. The spiritual foundation of any community has to be surrender to the will of G-d (for a religious people). To many Hasidic Jews, clear instructions were given in the Tanakh, of the circumstances under which the Jewish people were allowed by G-d to reclaim the Holy Land and re-form the nation of Israel. Those instructions held that only with the arrival of the Moshiach (the Messiah) could the Jewish people gather in Israel (as a nation). Since Jews did not recognize Yeshua as their Moshiach, they were still waiting. The Bible did not cite the Holocaust or global persecution as a reason for returning to the Holy Land. But humanly and politically speaking, how could anyone deny the survivors of history’s most evil atrocity their right to live as a free and autonomous people in a homeland of their own? No humanist could deny this right. I could not deny this right, despite what the leftist Zionists accused me of.

This is where it gets really tricky, and where, whomever might still be reading this, will probably stop reading it.

And it involves a lot of theology I cannot get into here. Suffice to say, there is a metaphysical or spiritual identity and purpose for the Jewish people historically which is at odds with the natural human and political right they enjoy to form and live in and defend a Jewish State, as fraught and complex an experiment as that has inevitably proven to be. From the Christian point of view, Heinrich Heine said it best: “The People of Christ are the Christ of Peoples.” Or, according to the Kabbalic teaching of the hidden zaddikim: as the righteous and holy ones suffer for the sins of their community, so does the entire Jewish people suffer in atonement for the sins of humanity, as a holy offering to G-d, just as Yeshua suffered and died on the cross as the Passover sacrifice. The blood that was splashed on the lintels of the homes of Jewish slaves in Egypt, preserving the life of first-born sons, which is the life of the people, is the same as the blood of Yeshua which was shed to “cover” and mark believers and in a sense exempt them from the plague of spiritual death. The tradition of sacrifice starts with Melchizedek and ends with Yeshua. My point is not to convince anyone of the identity of the Messiah. I am only pointing out that there is a spiritual and metaphysical analogy between the Jewish people as a historical entity and Yeshua.

The impossibility of the modern nation state of Israel and the impossibility of defining what is a Jew (on metaphysical terms), cannot be spoken out loud or even written, in today’s world. Secular Jews will reject the metaphysical content, and Hasidim will scoff at any mention of Yeshua. Furthermore, if anyone actually ends up reading this, I will be roasted alive by the woke mob for suggesting that human suffering could ever have a higher purpose in the order of things, which they take as condoning atrocity. That is how they think. I don’t care about that, and I am going to say it anyway:

*That, a political nation-state of Israel is, for metaphysical and spiritual reasons, impossible. It is equally impossible to deny a people their right to autonomous self-government and self-determination, and a qualified self-defense.

*That, the beginning and the end of the history of salvation is with the Jews.

*That, the original Jewish Temple did become transformed into the Christian church, and in so doing, salvation was extended from the Jews, who are the elders and the first-born, to all people. In other words, Yeshua didn’t make his Jewish followers into Christians, HE MADE NON-JEWISH BELIEVERS INTO JEWS...for salvation is from the Jews. It really makes no sense that a Supreme Being would appoint a single human group to be “chosen” as vehicles of salvation, without also making provision for those outside the chosen group to partake in salvation also.

*That, the descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust who now form the Israeli government under Bibi Netanyahu (still, ten years after I had the dream), and the supporters thereof, have dishonored the memory of their sacrificed ancestors by embracing militarism, authoritarianism, aggression, violation of human rights, adopting torture, succumbing to the temptations of racial nationalism and racial superiority, in TOTAL violation of the Torah, Jewish teachings, Jewish humanism and mysticism, the history of the world’s persecution of the Jewish people, and against humanity itself. Ultimately, right-wing Israel is offending against the very G-d, Hashem, who created and anointed the Jewish people as emissaries and as the ultimate vehicle of holiness in the world. (Just as, I can add, Christian nationalists are doing.)

Although I have longed all my life for a Jewish interlocutor with whom to talk over these matters, as you can see, there is no way that is going to happen. I still have not met any Messianic Jews to talk to, either, (so far the ones I met are right wing). My life as a Jew, so to speak, metaphorically, begins and ends with Yeshua my Jewish G-d and Saviour, but He is eternal. I once discussed the Messiah with a Rabbi online and asked him, when the Messiah comes, is he, the Rabbi, going to sit and argue over who was right? (Was it Yeshua returning or Another arriving for the first time?) When the Messiah comes, or returns, will it be appropriate to argue over who was “right”? One of the Hasidic tales poses the same question: if an Angel of G-d is standing before you, are you gonna quibble? The logical outcome of these unspeakable thoughts is that this world is fixing to come to an end, or to put it more accurately, “it's the end of the world as we know it. “ And it looks to be happening in Israel, and it looks to be happening sooner rather than later.

Despite the contempt this post will undoubtedly receive, I will always cherish my life as a Jew. There are bright gold and silver and crimson (shot through with cobalt blue) threads— psychological, emotional, literary, historical, philosophical, metaphysical and spiritual, running through my entire life which render it in almost complete absorption with Judaism and the Jewish people. Some of my deepest soul friends are Ashkenazi Jewish writers who wrote at the turn of the last century in Yiddish. Even today, with the exception of far-right wing nationalists and the ultra-Orthodox, I am far more attracted to Jews, secular and pious, than I am to Christians. I believe so much in Jewish wisdom and teaching, yet I cannot embrace Jewish piety, for piety almost always seems to lead to inhumanity towards others and I don’t view inhumanity as holiness. I also don’t believe that piety is equivalent to sanctity. Religions of the world are far too comfortable with fascism. I am appalled at today’s worldwide spread of fascist movements, not just in America and Israel but in several EU nations. Israel seems determined to start WW3 and possibly usher in the Apocalypse. I am totally disillusioned with mankind and have given up all delusions of human progress. There are only spiritual solutions for me now, and I believe, for all of us, because this world is done.

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