This is not a book of history, this is not even really a podcast. This is just a series of speculations about the nature, the meaning, and the purpose of Jewish history. The 'Why' of a religion, a peoplehood, and an experience hurtled through the eons so eventful, so dramatic, so filled up with the extractible juice of meaning, that the lessons you can learn from it seem as though they might be infinite and inexhaustible: both connected to the very essence itself of meaning and thought, and also connected to the lived life of nearly every experience we deal with every day. World history, or certainly Western history, IS Jewish history, and you cannot begin to understand the world until you begin to understand the one people who have lived all that history's main events. And I would venture a more than 50% chance that it is not because Judaism is somehow blessed or chosen by God, and certainly that Jews and Judaism are somehow superior to others and their faiths, or that the story of Judaism is somehow fundamentally connected to the ultimate plan and purpose of the world that a divine being has set out for us, but rather because through a series of convenient accidents of being, Judaism has been placed at the center of the world story. The story of the Western world is tethered to the Jewish people, and now, in 2020, as the Western world seems definitively to incorporate itself finally in the firmament of the whole world, the story of the world seems no less tethered to the centrality of the Jewish story.
At the center of the Jewish story is an accident of geography. Israel and/or Palestine will forever be poised at the easternmost point of the Mediterranean sea, the single most easily designated meeting point between Europe, Africa, and Asia. What makes Judaism unique and special is not its exclusivity but its inclusivity, the unique geographical receptivity to the influences of the entire world. And as the world story expands to include the Americas on one side and East Asia on the other, the ancestral seat of the Jewish people is STILL poised to be the world's uniquely central meeting point.
There is no such thing even so as a convenient meeting place between cultures, and even in the age of pandemic, there is no replacement for person-to-person interaction. Person-to-person interaction between people of disparate places obviously takes enormous amounts of travel, and once exhausting travel is undergone, then comes the further exhaustion of potential for infinite misunderstandings. In the age of global travel, it's obviously easier to have that exchange, but it is never easy. And with that exchange and expand of influence comes the inevitable people and movements who say that these exchanges are never worthwhile, and those who are not convinced either way always flit back and forth between beliefs in inclusivity and exclusivity and being torn and confused and thinking there's a meeting point between the two or a way to combine the two or limitations that can be placed on how to meet - depending on some confluence what their generations and demographics particularly tend to believe, their personal experiences, the tendencies of their times of life, and which side has the most effective agitprop, they spend their lives changing allegiances between the belief of including others and belief in excluding them, and in doing so, always changing the balance of power between nations and demographics, always thwarting the best intentions and designs of people who see the world as an unchanging series of moral laws.
To those who believe the world is simple enough to be moral, there is no question, the world would be a better place if it were able to conform to any series of moral strictures at all, it almost doesn't matter which, and if the people of the world simply decided en masse to follow that particular system of beliefs. the entire world population would be so much happier, simpler, easier to get long with; life would be easier to get through and far more fulfilling - probably every person within the world. But the one thing the world clearly is is no such simple place. The nature of humans, perhaps the nature of existence itself, is that people do not have the ability to live simple lives and follow directives without working out those meanings for themselves, meanings that clash with each other terribly and irrevocably. Because the meaning of the world is something perceived through the mind, and therefore we can only see in the direction of which we're pointed. No one can perceive that whole twelve tribes of meaning, but we can see and record the meanings which others than us perceived, and attempt understanding at how people came to their conclusions.
The point of this podcast is not polemic - au contraire dear listener. What this writer believes is, to the best of his ability, immaterial to the mission at hand. He has beliefs and prejudiced orientations as all people do, and no doubt as time goes on he will fess up to his particular series of so that listeners can draw their own conclusions for how to judge his judgements from the differences between my beliefs and yours. But the point is not what I or you believe, the point is to understand why we believe what we believe, and much more importantly, why everybody else but you and me believes what they believe: Why Jews through the ages believe what they believe, why the gentiles around them with no horse in our race believe what they believe, and of course, why antisemites through history believe what they believe. That is our asymptotic mission, to get as close as we can to understanding the essence of things, while still realizing that there is a no end more of essence to understand.
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