To my esteemed colleagues and our honored donors,
It is so wonderful to be back in my mother's home country. I have always felt, though the warmth of the Babylonians I've known, through your commitment to Israel, to your commitment to keeping the Jewish people alive, as though Babylon is nearly as much home to me as Judea. The Babylonian dream guarantees freedom of worship for however many or few gods. How much more secure is that than Judea, where even worship of one god is under threat forever?
When I first met Herod, he was ruthless, flawed, Machiavellian, forever testing what he could get away with, but he was human and could strive half-mightily to be a better king and do what's right. He is now the prince of darkness. The Romans have their Pluto, Jews have our Herod.
However evil Herod seems, he's much moreso than that. He is the darkness forever present in Jewish History, the Amalek that it's arguable has always been within us. We claim Herod is not one of us, and yet if he isn't, has not the rise of someone like Herod always been inevitable?
From the moment we arrived in Israel, there were people already present. People we have conquered again and again for a thousand years and killed off by the tens of thousands over and over. Our people are continually dispersed, yet these people always remain, fight against us upon our return, continually lose, only for us to overmatch them and kill them again the way we ourselves were killed by others. This is as much part of God's plan as our return. We will be thrown out of Israel until such time as we learn to stop ourselves from apeing the slaughter perpetuated upon us.
Because through it all the Kingdom of Judea is a place of unaccountable light. God promised us the Land of Israel, and in His own way, He kept his promise in full. The world is full of unaccountable darkness and unaccountable light, and the maintenance of both is Hashem's will: unknowable, unaccountable to all. But there is something in the holiness of this land that provokes the dark within us all, and makes us unworthy to stay in this holiest of places. We leave and we suffer until such time as our sins are sufficiently cleansed to make our return, only for our behavior to force us to leave again.
Herod is the divine punishment for our people's sins. He is the murder we've perpetrated visited back upon us. We cannot resurrect those Herod killed off any more than we can bring raise the souls of those our people have killed.
I had half expected the hall to boo me out of the synagogue by now, but perhaps you feel as we don't have to the boot of gentile hands upon your necks as we in Israel give Jews the reputation abroad as murderous and slaughterful. The eyes of the world are forever looking to Israel, judging us as harshly as the Holy One does, condemning us in their minds as more animal than man.
What sort of God would allow His people such an impossible situation? What sort of God would willingly place His own nation in such peril? Why would He do it? What does He gain from our uncertainty?
We cannot know the divine will, but we can interpret, we can guess, we can plan accordingly, and perhaps this guessing game is our purpose. Perhaps the ability to interpret, to locate connections between world of God to the world of man, is the Jewish people's essence. We are God's middlemen, his portfolio traders, his lawyers and doctors and engineers, the white collar workers who tend the world's accounts and make the deals and. We are the beta testers, we are the variables in God's experiments. We are those who learn half the truth, who dwell in God's ambiguity while the rest of mankind dwells securely in various places within the abyss of not knowing.
Without the Jewish people, there is no 'this world.' There is only the world to come, but we bring parts and partials of the world to come down to earth. We establish the new within the old and the old within the new. We sometimes bring the alpha, we sometimes bring the omega, but only God knows the divine alphabet from Aleph to Taf.
If all this sounds very hermetic, not to worry. There are moments in your lives when such mystical jumble will seem as clear as a sunny day and others when they seem even more obscure than they do currently. This is the essence of God's kingdom, where nothing makes sense and it all seems like a load of shit. Forgive my language but you know it as truly as I do: an Israel where Herod is king makes no sense and leads us into the desire to curse all the earth. Yet the earth is a blessing, where all good things are possible. So far as we can determine God's will, it is that we find the good within the bad just as we are easily tempted by seeing the bad within the good.
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