This is not a podcast, this is not a book, this is not even history. As a work of scholarship, it is absolutely worthless. As a document for policy advocacy, this has negative worth. We record these writings merely as a way to document a series of speculations about the nature, meaning, and purpose of Jewish history. The 'Why' of a religion, a peoplehood, an experience, hurtled through eons of episodes so eventful, so dramatic, so filled up with the extractible juice of meaning, that the lessons to learn seem infinite and inexhaustible: both connected to the very essence itself of being and thought, and also to the lived life of nearly every experience of every day. Or, perhaps, these speculations in essence have no meaning at all.
But from a certain of view, from many certain points of view, 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 whether our outlooks are sacred or secular, I would venture at least a 50% chance that it is not simply because Judaism is somehow blessed or chosen by God, and I would venture no guess that Jews and Judaism are somehow superior to others and their faiths, nor would I ever have such chutzpah to speculate that the story of Judaism is somehow fundamentally connected to the ultimate plan and purpose of the world that a divine being has set in motion for us to realize; but rather because through a series of convenient accidents of being, Judaism has been placed at the center of the world story. Whether a divine being placed us at this center is not the purview of this podcast. But the story of the Western world is tethered to the Jews and Judaism at its umbilicals, and now, in 2020, as the Western river of history seems potentially at its mouth, flowing itself as an overdocumented tributatary into a true world history, the story of the world still seems no less tethered to the centrality of the Jewish story.
And this centrality does not need to be explained through any theory of Jewish superiority, or any theory of the superiority of the Jewish god. Though those are regrettably popular Jewish explanations. But in this explanation, at the center of the Jewish story is a series of accidents.
The first accident is a mere 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. Within this tiny junction at the center of the world, one of the many peoplehoods who inhabit it synthesize the influences of their experiences with surrounding geographical environs into the practice an intellectual, spiritual, and moral revolution. That's accident #1.
So that first accident, a geographical accident, causes a second accident, which is really a a long series of accidents which still have not ended. From its very beginnings, the people of Israel seemed to synthesize their two most important neighbors: on one side the nascent monotheism occurring in Pharaonic Egypt when, during their period of slavery, the Pharaoh Akhenaten banned all gods but Ra - the Sun god. On the other side, the anthropomorphized, human-like gods of the Mesopotamia which the Abrahamic line took with them and descended upon Canaan from their place of origin. And therefore this petrie dish, uniquely situated through geography for intellectual contagion, created a unique template for receptivity to the influences of the entire world. No place was far-flung influences more likely to reach than Israel, far-flung places were more likely to encounter influences from no place more than those influences from Israel. And as the connectivity of the known world expanded to include not just the few civilizations around Mesopotamia and Egypt but to include ever new parts of the world, so each of these newly charted parts of the world secreted their influence upon the people of Israel, and the people of Israel their influence upon it. As the millennia progressed, the world story expanded to include the whole of Europe and Africa, and the entire western half of Asia. And as common era Jewish diaspora reaches its third millenium, the world story still expands to include the Americas on one side and East Asia on the other, and yet the ancestral seat of the Jewish people is STILL poised to be the world's uniquely central meeting point, through which the tensions of world cultures play out at the point of their maximal geographic stress. That continuing series of accidents can be termed accident #2.
The third accident is the fact that these tensions of world influence operate at their ultimate point of pressure at this geographical node between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and this diversity of influence creates a revolutionary peoplehood which a series of more powerful neighbors - be they Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and/or Roman - find to be such a threat that these Hebrews and their subversive beliefs must be neutralized by any and all means, until such time as the most powerful civilization of them all, the Roman Empire, decimates the Hebrews into what their destroyers no doubt assumed would be the same basic non-existence to which Rome brought hundreds of other peoplehoods for which there is since little record or none. But the same geographic tension through diversity of intellectual influence creates yet another series of intellectual and moral revolutions. The first of which is a Rabbinic revolution which teaches almost precisely the opposite precepts the original revolution of prophetic revelation. This revolution believes that the lessons and laws of Judaism had already been received, and therefore must now be continually interpreted and re-interpreted. The religion of the Israelites, formerly tied as all worship was to the land, is revolutionized into a portable religion, specifically designed with the capability to practice in the least sympathetic places and times, and rather than center a religion upon a covenant of land, centers the religion upon the book which promises that now mostly broken covenant of land. That's accident #3.
The fourth accident is that once this religion becomes well and truly portable, the Israelites, now Jews, become not only far flung colonies occupied distantly by ancient imperialists, but fully present in the land of their ruled. A separate nation within every nation, who therefore by the closeness of their distance, become the main subject to which so many nations direct centuries of their mental space. They simultaneously live among others and yet remaining entirely separate, they directly influence the lives of every nation upon whose territory they live, and though everything their people's mentality seems completely unrelated to the mentality of the host country, the Jews within each country have the most intimate upon the history of each country, and each country has even more intimate influence on the history of Jews. That's accident #4.
(much more in the next few drafts...)
No comments:
Post a Comment