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, 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 aping 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 cleansed to make our return, only yet again for our behavior to force us to leave.
Herod is the divine punishment for our people's sins. He is the murder we perpetrate visited back upon us. We cannot resurrect those Herod killed off any more than we can raise the souls our people have killed.
I hear from the auditorium's consternation that this sentiment is as controversial as I presumed it would be. Perhaps you feel as you have to the boot of gentile hands upon your necks in an entirely different way from how they're placed on ours. Perhaps we in Israel give Jews a worldwide reputation as homicidal and slaughterous. 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 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 the purpose that leads us to the crown of wisdom. The ability to interpret is the Jewish people's essence. Hashem left it up to us to locate connections between the world of God and the world of man. 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. We are the variables in God's experiments, we are the beta testers through which God observes the results of his new research. God is perfect, but perhaps His perfection is perfect because He is always evolving, rather than perfect because He is. Perhaps He is God not because He knows all but because He learns all. And because He learns, we Jews are those who learn half His truth, who dwell in God's ambiguity while the rest of mankind dwells within various places of not knowing.
So therefore, without the Jewish people, there can be no 'this world,' because how could God create a world without testing its results? Before this world, there was only the world to come, but we bring parts and essences of the next world 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 however much He knows, 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 the earth. Yet the earth is a blessing, where all good things are possible. So far as we can determine Hashem's intentions, it is that we find the good within the bad just as we are easily tempted by seeing the bad within the good.
(The text of Hillel's prepared remarks cuts off here. - RW)
No comments:
Post a Comment