Pour Out Thy Wrath: Day 2

Usually, when Israel trouble happens, I get so angry that I have to talk myself out of mailing dogshit to people who piss me off.

This time, I'm beyond anger. I feel numb, I feel cold. I worry that if I check my feelings I'll realize I'm devastated, shattered, wrecked, utterly run over.

My reaction now is more narcissistic than selfish (the two are different). My brain seems to know that the world is ruined, but my heart hasn't caught up yet. My brain knows that no rage can save the world of everything I love. My brain recognizes it's the death of the two state solution, it's the death of liberal zionism, the death of 20th century American liberalism, the idea that one can be wholly liberal and wholly Jewish, of liberal democracy itself and who knows how much else or how many? My not quite reliable brain tells me this is the death of the idea that all the various sides of my life will ever live in accord. The conflicting parts of me feel stretched out as though on a cross and if my heart bleeds any more it will stop. I have no room for rage left because my rage is with the world itself and the god who made it.

Half-remembered lines occur to me like those in Psalm 79, excerpts of which we're supposed to chant in the Amidah three times a day (at least I think this is the passage...): "Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name... And render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord."

By biblical standards, those lines don't seem all that shocking until you realize that the Hebrew word for 'heathens' is 'goyim.' We've used the word 'goy' to make fun of gentiles for centuries, and so long as we're powerless, it's a great punchline. But this passage is literally an incitement to g*nocide at the whole world, and whether or not such incitement is offensive, that wrath is present in the heart of every Jew right now. If the progressives among us deny it, then they're as repressed as any Catholic nun.

Goyim can make all the well-wishes they want, but it's for you, not us. At this moment, Jews are literally staring down the potential that we either k*ll hundreds of thousands or be k*lled ourselves by the millions, do you really think we care whether or not you feel a moment's sympathy for our plight?

In fact, we don't want your sympathy. We want you to be terrified of us. We want you to gape in horror at what we're capable of. The State of Israel is pretty good circumstantial evidence that the world stops k*lling Jews when the price of k*lling us is as high as the price of Jews for living. When it's all over, we'll be horrified at what we've done and we'll cry convenient crocodile tears; we'll swear we were only following orders because a leader bewitched us, but we'll be alive, relieved that some other group died by the millions this time.

I know that I should let that statement sink in without qualifier, but I guess I have to add that of course, I'm not advocating for anything 1% as lethal, but if you've never felt the urge to d*mocide, you've never been part of a group on which one was perpetrated, and the temptation toward d*mocidal options is why idealism never works.

We'll get further into this at a later date, but even if I'm a liberal, I'm no idealist. I'm a liberal because if you don't spend money taking care of the poor, the poor revolt. I'm a liberal because if you don't build alliances with other countries that guide one another to better behavior, those countries make war on you. The stability of the state comes before everything else: equality, liberty, human dignity, whatever... if you don't have a stable government, the anarchy will kill you.

There are all sorts of transformative projects which assert without evidence that humans are capable of better things: libertarians promise that with enough freedom there can be greater prosperity for all, socialists promise that with enough state intervention inequality can be a thing of the past. Neoconservatives swear that a powerful military can change regimes of small countries anywhere to any kind of government, woke intersectionalists swear that by redistributing the privileges of white men oppression between demographics can end. Political coalitions require the interpolation of all these ideas into party platforms, but the moment rank-and-file liberals or conservatives start actually believing in ideals over results, the battle is lost.

I'm not a Zionist because I believe that God promised His land to the Jews. I'm a Zionist because I believe that without the land of Israel, Jews will die by the millions again.

What that actually means is for another day.