Being Jewish....
I don't like it.
It's just not a great way to live in the world... it means never being able to give more than 70% trust that gentile friends and partners have your best interests at heart, it means never being able to have more than 70% trust that the Jewish people you love won't sell out your best interests out of fear, anger, and stress, and it means never having more than 70% trust that for reasons you can't understand, the entire universe isn't actively conspiring to make your life as hard as it can be - after all, isn't that what many people still think we're doing to them?
Dear readers, the more sincere among you might read the above and take vague insult at its lack of faith in you: "How, after all we've done for you, can you doubt us?" The more cynical would read it and and say 'so what? That's just the price of living in the world? Jews are no different from everybody else."
Both are right, and that's the trouble. Perhaps we'll get to that in the root of that problem in this "sermon," perhaps not. The ultimate point is exactly that no: we're not different than everybody else; in fact, we're so similar to you that we're your reflection. We are everything you see in your bathroom hand glass, reflected back in the inverted direction - we are the 'People of the Mirror.' Being the 'invisible man' has always been the opposite of the Jewish problem; we are so visible that you see our images multiply vastly in places we've never been.
So many gentile lives are constrained from too few choices, most Jews are stuck by too many. So many gentiles worry that they'll never get what they need, Jews worry that everything they need will disappear tomorrow. So many gentiles feel the chip of humiliation, and dream that with more things: titles, privileges, pride, their humiliations will cease. Jews are history's ultimate proof that everything you think is helpful is worthless: from materials to titles to privileges to pride to ESPECIALLY MONEY. There is no such thing as a life protected from humiliation - the whole point of how to live a good life is that we endured our humiliations with faith, honor, responsibility, righteousness, kindness and community; that we show seven good faces to a world that's wanted Jews dead for 2000 years, will want us dead many times yet again; and many people who seem friendly to us now may in fact turn into the filthiest collaborators with those who'd want to annihilate us.
No Jew seems oppressed until every Jew you know disappears overnight. No amount of money protects us, no amount of prestige stops us from being blamed, no amount of power cannot be stripped at a moment's notice. It is the eternal Jewish lot to rise as high as any outsider can possibly rise in a foreign society, only to fall the very moment when things go wrong and the true insiders need meat to throw to the populace.
We are the People of the Mirror because we are the people of the middle; we are the preferred face of the underclass to the overclass, we are the preferred face of the overclass to the underclass - doctors, accountants, lawyers, landlords, teachers, community organizers... We are the converted conservatives no far right winger ever trusts, we are the subversive communists no far left winger ever trusts. Among us are Kissingers - amoral strategic masterminds who ensure circumstances that permit fifty years of right-wing rule, among us are Sanderses - moral fanatics who shake societies to the root and break open the bottles of chaos on the off-chance left-wing revolution can win. It may be a coincidence that both of them were Jewish, but the consequential nodes of historical change that come from the Jewish people are so disproportionate.
It seems over and over again that Jews are the lab rats for the future of every host country. After Egyptians enslaved the Jews, Egyptians became slaves who worked the land so that 2000 years of empires could plunder Egypt's resources: Macedonian, Ptolemaic, Sanasid, Roman, Byzantine, Calphate and Ottoman. After two-hundred years of endless Judean rebellions, Romans finally put all of Judea to the cross, only then for Italy to become the most chaotic country on earth, with 2000 years of endless squabbling intrigue. After Spain expelled its Jewish population, torturing and burning so many Jews who became Christian and plundering all the (supposed) Jewish wealth - they became a gold-encrusted country of zealots who used their plundered imperial treasure to spill hundreds of years of blood in fanatical religious wars. For 300 years, the Russian Czars imprisoned Jews in the Pale of Settlement, only to end up in the prison of the USSR from virtually the moment the Czarist Empire collapsed; and after one generation of relative freedom, Putin seems on the verge of closing that door again.
I know that this all seems like a very selective reading of history - no doubt it is, but it is very difficult for some Jews to separate themselves from this sort of jingoistic historicism; certainly it is for me, and it's even harder for antisemites. But even if it's true that a god willed it so, is that god good?
What force for good would make Jews endure what we've endured? What benevolent force would test Jews like this, as though we are just some sort of divine laboratory through which God puts yet another permutation of suffering and humiliation to test how we react before he subjects a slightly less virulent version of his latest pandemic to the general population? What is so worthwhile that anything is gained from all this? What is worthwhile to subject us to the eternal dread of not knowing whether what comes next is something awful? Is such a god worth honoring? And even if he isn't, can he really be escaped simply by not believing in him?
Atheists certainly think so, and there are certainly moments of my life when I've been one of them, but the coincidences of everything in life are just so massive; from how so many events repeat themselves in history and personal lives to the fact of life's very existence. We may not know what god is, but there is something out there which causes 'us', and whatever it is does not seem to be moral by any understanding we have of morality. Evidence to the senses tells us that there's nothing out there looking over us, but look at everything in context - the one thing we all know is there is the eternal wheel of fortune that disappoints every expectation. We have made so much progress as a species, and yet by progressing we're killing off a million other species. We have made technology that can improve the lives of every person on earth, and by developing such technology, we may blow every person on earth up. The ironies of existence are just so perfect, so elegant, so devastating. And if, as the Deuteronomist says, God has set before us life and death, blessing and curse, how is our will particularly free when there are only two (or at best four) choices?
So yes, of course Jews worry about all the things gentiles worry about too, but Jews 'worry ^squared.' That fake exponent doesn't mean we worry more, or that we worry more dramatically, it means our worries have more variables. When other demographic groups are threatened, they can pretty much guess where the basic threat comes from. There is no such guess among Jews - the threat can come from anywhere and with no warning at all. Germany and Austria were thought the most philosemitic countries in Europe, Medieval Spain thought the goldenest of Jewish periods, Renaissance Poland a place where protection of Jews was thought ironclad.
The only warning, literally the only one, is when many people believe in what they believe too strongly, Jews get killed. When Jews believe in what they believe with too much passion, Jews get themselves killed. Whatever your system of belief, if you believe it applies to every situation, you've created an impossible standard. No coherence was made out of crooked humans, and if humanity is incoherent, Jews are even less so. We should have ceased to exist when the Romans allegedly killed off 580,000 of us, then exiled and enslaved the rest. But we're still here, still alive, still thriving until that next moment we're put back into another of the endless death camps.
So if you believe in some movement too strongly, you will come to loathe so many Jews that even if you don't have a conscious antisemitic thought in your head, you will become an antisemite when you follow your thoughts to their logical endpoint. I could give a litany of examples in everything from the Trump movement to the Women's March, from Black Lives Matter to Evangelical Christianity. If you don't like ambiguity, you're trouble to Jews with a Capital Tet, and however much you depend on Jews - the very success, money, and connections you resent, there is a greater than 90% chance you will all eventually decide you have no need for us, and are better off if we were simply not there. No doubt, the logic of your particular belief looks fine to you, but the logic of every movement in every society always looked fine to them. It all has a two-dimensional patina of truth on a three-dimensional reality. Maybe the logic of your beliefs has succeeded where everyone else's has failed, but are the odds of that any greater than the fact that Jews have still survived until now?
It's absolutely true, Jews achieve disproportionately and there is absolutely no sense in pretending it isn't. It's just a thing that happens because when the knife's to your neck for 3,000 years, your culture figures out how to achieve highly in the hope that it gives us a little bit of the security we've never had, and in the process there come times when a disproportionate number of us game your system. I'm sorry, but that's the reward we get for you killing us once every hundred or so years. You're probably gonna do it again, so fuck you, what can we do but live well while we can?
To be continued on the Day...
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