Babel

 

 As is always the case, the stories of the Bible repeat themselves in history. They resonate like echoes in history. I don't think that there is any story in the Bible that doesn't. Cain and Abel isn't just a story about two brothers with bad blood. It is telling itself today. The stories keep telling themselves over and over.

This is the Time of Babel. Now you may say, I don't notice a bunch of people suddenly speaking different languages. Well you might not be paying attention. They are, even if the language roots are the same. But what does everyone suddenly speaking different tongues signify?

Their MINDS are different. Their mentality is different. Their very souls have become different. And suddenly we have gone from one country, to everyone is their own separate territory. Some as little akin to me as a space alien would be.

The Time of Babel is a time of confusion. That is the core idea of it. And what have the last three years been, but confusion? For me, the vaccine is a piece of performance art whose technology is powered by the stolen flesh of murdered children. You do not take the product of the stolen flesh of murdered babies into yourself. For someone else perhaps, it is pragmatism and "science" and how dare you not take it. For me, the quarantines and social distancing and shutting down social meeting spaces is tyranny. For others, it is safe and pragmatic and how dare you not mask?

Which of course, is not required anymore because confusion is nothing if not inconsistent.

Tyranny in Canada. How messed up is that? CANADA! Yet they are doing the things that tyrants do: freezing bank accounts, throwing people in jail on trumped up charges, making people unpersons. That is what we have been made, unpersons. To the people at CNN and NBC, the problem is people like me. Not them, no no no. Not the elites who actually rule and have been destroying this country with their corruption and their wickedness, their absolute sickness.

And those who cancel words and "unperson" people will sooner or later throw them in camps and burn people too. And we are back to the WWII era all over again, when scapegoats were approved for the masses and then ritualistically butchered. The colossal burnt offering to science and human materialist ideology in the 1930's becomes the colossal burnt offering to science and human materialist ideology in 2030, potentially. Demon worship and madness.

We cannot even agree that men are men and women are women anymore, that your biological reality is in fact reality. We cannot agree that math is math and not colonialism. We cannot agree that children should not be taught that it is okay to cut their genitals off and become a figment of imagination. We are living in the time of Babel.

However, reality has not changed. There is One G-d and one truth of the matter, and it does not matter how many people recognize it or not. That is how you survive Babel, you hold on to the one truth, truth which has never changed.

People in cities are cut off from nature so they think it does not apply to them anymore. They are living in "Meta-verses," man-made fictitious realities, both literal in terms of Facebook's Meta and metaphorically. But the only truth of matters is not abolished thereby, and sooner or later it snaps back.

Sooner or later truth destroys fiction.

 

 

The New Religion: Right and Truth as the Will to Power

 Once upon a time, even most thieves knew the answer as to whether it was right to steal. No, it isn't and they didn't care that it wasn't right. Or at least they didn't think it was virtuous. What's the point of being a criminal if you have to be virtuous in doing it?

But now stealing can be a virtue. Or not. Entirely depending, not on the action itself, but on the PERSON WHO COMMITS IT. Are you a rich white capitalist? Stealing is wrong for you. Black man in the 'hood looting a Target? Then stealing is not simply okay but it is REDISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE. It is not the act itself that matters, but the presumed power position of the one who commits it. Black man in the 'hood is presumed to be a helpless victim of forces beyond his control.

Is murder wrong, according to the New Religion? Depends. Are you bombing Palestinians? Bad. Mother murdering the little freeloader in her womb that is trying to keep her from getting ahead in life? Good. It is not mother's fault she has a womb, this cancer on her body that is trying to keep her oppressed. She needs to keep that crap cleaned out.

Spray painting grafitti all over everything? The righteous cry of the have-nots against the haves. Even if the haves only have because they worked for it and were thrifty and avoided personal vices like drug addiction. If they worked hard and didn't have a crack habit, it is clearly because they started out higher on the power pyramid.

The New Religion is atheistic and deterministic. If you loot stores and spray paint walls, or even rape and murder, it is not because of your lack of virtue but because of your environment. You are a simple input-output system. Input privileged environment, output "good" behavior. Input underprivileged environment, output looting and vandalism.

In the New Religion, all things are right and wrong depending on the PERSON who commits those acts. And what is important about that person, that determines if their actions are right or wrong? Their position in the "power structure." White man? Everything you do is wrong, white man, because you are a white man. Black tranny? You are virtuous no matter what you do, because you are at the bottom of the power structure. Because of who you are, not what you do. This is how violent drug addict and counterfeiter George Floyd, who once held a gun to a pregnant woman's belly, is now Saint Floyd. Someone who, in terms of their behavior was the lowest scum of the Earth, is now a holy saint of the New Religion.

It is not merely morality that has undergone a change in the New Order. And make no mistake, this is the order that is going to be at least trying to run our lives in the years to come. TRUTH itself is merely a manifestation of the Will to Power. How can a man be a woman and a woman be a man? Because we say so, oppressor. The fact that there is an actual objective fact of the matter is not only irrelevant, it is in fact oppression. Facts are oppression. Men can be women and women can be men IF WE SAY SO. And they do say so. Your objective truth focus is a weapon of white cisgender supremacy.

Do you say that communism is, fairly objectively, a bad way of doing things? Crushes individual initiative, innovation and indeed freedom and individual rights? Well, you don't say that because it's true, you say that because you are currently benefiting from a higher position on the power structure. You, sir, are a White Supremacist, even if you are black or brown or red or yellow.

Again, it is not a matter of WHAT IS TRUE, it is a matter of WHO YOU ARE.

It may seem strange at first that the major corporations are not just playing along with this whole thing, but fervent boosters of it. There are two possible explanations. One is that the people who run these corporations went to liberal universities and drank the truth relativity, cultural relativity, and moral relativity Kool Aid. In other words, they are sincerely deluded. In place of White Superiority, they embraced Intellectual Superiority: the idea that if you believe in moral relativism, cultural relativism, evolution solely and only as the explanation of life, materialism and atheism, you are as a consequence SMARTER than those rubes who believe in absolute morality and G-d. You can feel better about yourself that you are not one of them. You may secretly look down on the blacks and the gays and the trannies, while assuring them that you are firmly in "ally" status. You have the luxury of bending the knee to Woke because you know you are superior. You think Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, thinks of himself as having anything whatsoever in common with a black tranny from the ghetto? No, but they have all his sympathy, and that's what matters.

The other, more sinister explanation is that they know EXACTLY what they are doing and it has everything to do with corporate power and nothing to do with social justice. Eliminating competition is the name of the game.

How do they keep some innovative upstart from overturning their business model? Tell everybody they are weak victims of the system. Weaken them. Make people passive and dependent. Damage their thinking power. Make them chattel of the corporations.

Don't want to lose your valuable chattel to pregnancy? Pro-abortion all the way baby. Don't want any competing interests for your chattel's time and energies? No families. Do not want competing deities? The corporation is your deity. Your synthetic god. No G-d. Anti-religion.

In order to OWN you, they must first make you weak. Physically weak, morally weak, and they must make your mind weak. Public school education helps. They must keep your animosities directed at something besides them, besides their real power. They don't care if they will destroy civilization, they are the only civilization that matters now.

And moral and truth relativism WILL destroy society and make life more violent, more depressing, and increase mental illnesses to epidemic levels.

Quite aside from theological concerns (that there is a G-d and He does command things,) there are two power-related perils for any society: the tyranny of one or a few men over the mass of men, and the tyranny of the individual. In other words, kings and criminals. A powerful arbitrary ruler, or a tyrannical individual who rapes and pillages and does whatever he wants to. Evil tyrannical order or evil arbitrary anarchy. King makes right or might makes right.

There is one and only one third road between those two evils. That people come together and covenant, that they will submit themselves to something higher than themselves. To a Law that no human king created and no human king or arbitrary will can change. They covenant to submit themselves, internally in their heart and externally in their behavior, to the will of G-d as expressed in G-d's Law.

This, internal and external submission to G-d's Law, empowers human beings to transcend themselves. To transcend the lusts and wills and desires that might otherwise consume and control them. In G-d's Law, in contrast to the New Religion, who you are matters not at all. All human beings are equal. What is right is what matters: if you do what is right you are justified, and if you do what is wrong you are guilty, quite aside from who you are. King or pauper, it makes no difference. As it says in the Tanakh, G-d is no respecter of persons. If you do what is right and love G-d, you have His approval and not otherwise.

This path not only helps us to transcends ourselves and our limitations, but it leads to a peaceful and prosperous society. It leads to uplift and good, not selfishness madness and destruction. It replaces the Tyranny of Man (either the State or the individual selfish agent, or the tyranny of our own selfish impulses over ourselves) with the Kingdom of G-d (in which we all adhere to and swear absolute loyalty, internally and externally, to just rules that existed long before us and which none of us can change through arbitrary will.)


The road we are on, is a road that leads to violence, illness, despair, madness and death.



"All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God:

You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.

The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock--the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.

Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed.

You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out.

The LORD will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you. They will come at you from one direction but flee from you in seven.

The LORD will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The LORD your God will bless you in the land he is giving you.

The LORD will establish you as his holy people, as he promised you on oath, if you keep the commands of the LORD your God and walk in his ways.

Then all the peoples on earth will see that you are called by the name of the LORD, and they will fear you.

The LORD will grant you abundant prosperity--in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your ground--in the land he swore to your forefathers to give you.

The LORD will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty, to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands. You will lend to many nations but will borrow from none.

The LORD will make you the head, not the tail. If you pay attention to the commands of the LORD your God that I give you this day and carefully follow them, you will always be at the top, never at the bottom.

Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.

However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:

You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.

Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.

The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.

You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.

The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him.

The LORD will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess.

The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish.

The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron.

The LORD will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.

The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.

Your carcasses will be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away.

The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured.

The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind.

At midday you will grope about like a blind man in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.

You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit.

Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them.

Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand.

A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days.

The sights you see will drive you mad.

The LORD will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.

The LORD will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your fathers. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone.

You will become a thing of horror and an object of scorn and ridicule to all the nations where the LORD will drive you.

You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it.

You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them.

You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off.

You will have sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into captivity.

Swarms of locusts will take over all your trees and the crops of your land.

The alien who lives among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower.

He will lend to you, but you will not lend to him. He will be the head, but you will be the tail.

All these curses will come upon you. They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the LORD your God and observe the commands and decrees he gave you.

They will be a sign and a wonder to you and your descendants forever.

Because you did not serve the LORD your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity,

therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the LORD sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.

The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand,

a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young.

They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined.

They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the LORD your God is giving you.

Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the LORD your God has given you.

Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children,

and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities.

The most gentle and sensitive woman among you--so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot--will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter

the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities.

If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name--the LORD your God--

the LORD will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses.

He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you.

The LORD will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed.

You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the LORD your God.

Just as it pleased the LORD to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.

Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods--gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known.

Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart.

You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.

In the morning you will say, "If only it were evening!" and in the evening, "If only it were morning!"--because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.

The LORD will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you."

~Deuteronomy 28:2-68

The Danger of Being Happy

 When times are rough, when our backs are against the wall; yes sir, we believers are wearing out the rug talking to G-d about it. If G-d's halls had floor wax on the floors, we would be rubbing those floors straight down to the marble. We would be eroding holes in the marble with our tears.

When times are good, when we are happy, maybe not so much.

This is a dangerous paradox that is woven all through the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament: G-d wants us to be happy and prosperous. He is delighted in our delight. But being happy and successful tends to make the mind wander to other things besides G-d. Being interested and involved in stuff is not itself the problem, but if this tends to make us neglect our relationship with G-d, that's where the problem lies.

This is a warning that is repeated throughout the Tanakh. Be mindful after you are happy and prosperous and G-d has blessed you, that you do not forget Him and His Laws. Especially do not imagine that it is because of any special merit in yourself that you are doing so well: you are doing well because G-d has blessed you and made you prosperous and for no other reason.

So do be happy. G-d loves a joyful heart. But don't forget where that came from.

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land
he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
to give you — a land with large, flourishing cities
you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of
good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig,
and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—
then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that
you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt,
out of the land of slavery."

~Deuteronomy 6:10-12

Clarity

 There are some things in the Bible that are quite clear. Do not murder or steal, those are pretty clear. There are other things that are not completely clear. In Judaism in contrast to Christianity, understanding all the fine print is important, and that is why Judaism has a vigorous tradition of study and debate and dialogue. The Talmud for instance is a book where rabbis of different time periods are quoted together in commentary on the Mishnah, which is itself intended to flesh out the troublesome bits of the Torah. So it is in essence a time spanning debate on a commentary on the Torah, layers upon layers. 

All in pursuit of clarity! ;) This is one reason why I tend to favor the attitude of Karaite Judaism, which is that there is no one authoritative rabbinical commentary on the Torah. You can read and seek to understand such commentaries, but only the Torah is authoritative and sometimes the Torah is hard to interpret. The interpretation of it is each person's responsibility and that responsibility cannot be deferred to rabbis.

This debate concerning what the Torah means about certain things for me comes to a head on the topic of the Sabbath. You do not work on the Sabbath.

BUT EVERYTHING IS WORK! Breathing is working. Standing up is working. Thinking burns energy, so it is also work. Living beings labor in some form continually. If my heart would stop pumping blood for the Sabbath, that would be it for me. The old rabbis had their interpretations, but those interpretations are hard to reconcile with the modern world too. It says not to light a fire: is turning on a lightbulb lighting a fire? Yes and no.

So with the Sabbath as with other puzzling things in the Torah, I go to the core meaning. What is the core meaning of the Sabbath? There is some mention of the Sabbath being connected with the seventh day of Creation, but the core meaning that rings true for me is connected to the Exodus itself. What were the Israelites in Egypt? Slaves. Well the Sabbath is a day when no one is a slave, not even slaves are to be slaves on that day according to the Torah. So the core meaning is, you don't engage in any economic activity on that day. You don't work, you don't make your employees work, you don't make other people work. You don't order delivery pizza, for instance, because that would be making the person that makes the pizza and the person who delivers it work. Anything that relates to whatever you normally do for a living, you don't do that and you don't make anyone else do it either. You do not buy or sell.

There are other deeper meanings to the Sabbath, but in terms of your conduct that is what you should not be doing. Is that the complete meaning of the Sabbath? No! But it is the external observation of it.

Another one, and one in which I disagree with the rabbis, is the passage about not boiling a kid in its mother's milk. For the sake of this one sentence, observant Jewish households have two complete sets of cooking utensils and in some cases (Jewish schools for instance) actually two completely separate kitchens! Imagine how much ink has been spilled, and how much the ironmongers have profited, off this one sentence!

For me, the sentence is clear and has more to do with the value of all life than the contamination of dishes. Don't kill a baby animal until it has weaned. Let the baby goat or sheep or cattle finish up its babyhood. Don't be so selfish with the mother's milk that you kill her offspring before it has even finished infancy. It has nothing to do with ritual contamination. Don't boil a kid in its OWN mother's milk.

Now the Christian approach to such things is to just throw the Jesus blanket over it. "Jesus, And It's All Good." Problem is, we don't do that with the Ten Commandments (or 9 of them anyway) and we don't do that with proscriptions against homosexuality and cross dressing. What defines the difference between the Law that you get to be picky about and the Law you can shrug off? Christians are involved in interpreting the Law too, or else they are forced into some sort of New Age Christianity where there is no Law and EVERYTHING is okay. So you can't not interpret the Law and interpretations involve uncertainty.

I think this is actually kind of deep. It is like we are on a stationary bicycle of holiness, where we have to keep working on getting there but we never quite get there in this life, but in the meantime we build our muscles. The effort itself is part of the Law then: we are meant to try to struggle to understand the mind of G-d, but we can't quite. Christians throw the blood of Jesus on the struggle and Jews or Rabbinical Jews anyway just refer to their rabbis for definitive interpretations. Both approaches foreclose our inquiry, they foreclose something that shouldn't be completely foreclosed in all situations. The Talmud is like photos taken of a hologram: the thing itself contains much more information than our snapshots of it. We engage in the reasoning and questioning and debate in order to conform ourselves to the hologram, not because any judgment or decision or word we will ever say is perfect.

On the one hand G-d wants a Law for us that is clear and easily interpreted and obeyed; on the other hand the world is always changing and the Torah is very old, so we have to interpret some. On the whole, the Law of G-d is very clear and is meant to be. That is my governing principle in interpreting the Torah: what is the clearest most essential core meaning? But there is a lot of stuff there and in the Tanakh as a whole, so we must always be inquiring. Not as the World would inquire, not skeptically, but knowing there is meaning there and that it is our own shortcomings that separate us from understanding that meaning better.

And then we pray that the spirit of G-d, which alone can enlighten minds and hearts, will shed its light on us.

Yom Kippur 2021

 This is a troubled year and these are troubled times. Personally I am doing fine, but many aren't. Yom Kippur is a time of personal repentance, but it is also a time of collective repentance so in addition to praying for correction for my own shortcomings I will pray that the people of G-d will seek atonement with Him and in so doing find safety, adequate sustenance and peace.

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, At-One-Ment. The holiest day in Judaism. Basically a day for seeking to bury the hatchet with G-d. The sins that separate you from G-d, you seek to make penance for. It's kind of a prefigurement of the Day of Judgment.

The Bible actually says that Yom Kippur is to be a day when you voluntarily "afflict" yourself. Generally that has been taken to mean that you fast from sundown to sundown. You like that coffee in the morning? Don't have it. Like your food? On this day you aren't eating it. Sex is also abstained from. It's a Sabbath, even though it doesn't fall on the Sabbath Day, so no work.

This will be the first year that I am attempting to do Yom Kippur right. That means I will be fasting, I won't be drinking coffee or anything but plain water. My track record with fasting isn't great, but nevertheless I am going to undertake it.

Repentance is very unfashionable these days. Atonement is unfashionable. The modern idea is that we are all peachy keen just the way we are. Self-esteem first and foremost. Unconditional self-acceptance is practically a modern commandment.

I look around the world: is this what peachy keen looks like? This is NOT what peachy keen looks like. And we will never get there in this world or even close until we conform our lives to G-d first and foremost.

Now, and I am not proud to say this, one thing I will probably not be abstaining from this Yom Kippur is tobacco. I go quite crazy when I can't smoke, and I think being crazy will make this already somber occasion unmanageable. For people with medical issues and the elderly, not going full out on Yom Kippur is acceptable. But while my condition may prohibit me from putting down the smokes, nothing prevents me from not eating so I will do that.

I was born and raised a Gentile, so there may be aspects of Yom Kippur that I may not get. Also among the Jews it is almost always a collective event, Jews gather together and suffer together and repent together. I am alone, I do not ascribe to Rabbinical Judaism exactly and even if I did, there is likely not an orthodox community within 80 miles of me. So that is also different from the typical Jewish experience of Yom Kippur.

Nevertheless, I will do it the best I can, and I hope it will be acceptable to G-d.

May your name be written in the Book of Life.

Maurycy Gottlieb - Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur

Why Wear Tzitzit?

 

 First, what ARE tzitzit? They are the fringes on the corners of a garment referred to in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. They are most often worn in the edges of a tallit or prayer shawl, but as I live in a hot humid climate I have clip-on tzitzit that clip onto my belt loops.

Why do I wear them? Well the most typical answer would be to say "because G-d said so!" There are reasons however, as there are reasons to all things that G-d commands.

The LORD said to Moses as follows: Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages: let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner. That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all the commandments of the LORD and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge. Thus you will be reminded to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God. I the Lord am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I the Lord your God.

~Numbers 15:37-41 JPS Tanakh

So the tzitzit is a visible reminder of G-d's commandments. Something that, if temptation comes your way you have a visible reminder of what the commandments are. Clearly though the tzitzit is also a visible marker of G-d's people, a sign that sets them aside as a holy people.

As far as being a visible reminder of the Commandments, I personally am barely conscious of wearing them these days so I am not sure how well that works on a conscious level. Unconsciously, you know you are wearing a sign that says "I belong to G-d" so your mind understands that certain things are incompatible with that even if you don't consciously think about the tzitzit.

Now probably most of the people who might read this blog, to the extent that I have readers, are Christian and they might ask why they would want to wear tzitzit. I cannot answer that, I can only give my answer which is that I definitely want to feel included in G-d's own and I want to do what He says. Even if you think that a lot of the legalese in the OT was wiped out in Jesus' death, well, did G-d ever command anything superfluous? Were there good reasons for the tzitzit once? Might there still be good reasons?

Also, while I don't generally get involved in matters of specifically Christian theology, for Christians what outward sign do you present that you are a member of G-d's people? A cross? Lots of people wear crosses, some for fashion and some for some sort of goth sensibility and some just to be perverse and wear a symbol of something they definitely do not believe in. Almost nobody wears a tzitzit for fashion, thank goodness. People hardly know that tzitzit are a thing. It is an outward sign of your inward membership in G-d's community.

Also if someone ever asks what those things are on your belt loops, that's an opportunity to talk about the Bible. My long hair (also biblical) is also such a sign. The commandment that applies to everyone in the Bible is not to cut the corners of your hair. Well my head has no corners. ;) I don't know how to apply that for certain, I just know how Jews historically interpreted it. We also know that some people chosen by G-d do not cut their hair at all, either as part of a temporary commitment or permanently in the case of people like Samson and the prophet Samuel. So I don't cut mine at all.

So I wear tzitzit, an outward sign of my inward membership in G-d's kingdom.

 

 

 

Renunciation

 Much as I do not ascribe to a central tenet of Christianity, that someone besides G-d was also G-d -

- at heart I am at least as much a Christian as a Jew. More so, since while I was never a bona fide (Rabbinical) Jew, I once was a bona fide Christian. Christian concepts work their way into my thinking all the time, for which I have to go back to the Tanakh sometimes and sort out how much they are justified based on it.

Renunciation of the World, in the sense that it is a concept in the writings of St. John, does not have an exact translation into the terms of the Tanakh. The best and most evocative parallel in the Tanakh is circumcision, both literal and metaphorical. In Leviticus, Jeremiah and Ezekiel it speaks of uncircumcised hearts, which is the most relevant form of uncircumcision. Your willingness to deal with the physical issue is merely a token of your willingness to deal with the spiritual issue.

What does circumcision symbolize? That you are willing to part with something near and dear (albeit useless) and endure pain, for the sake of G-d. For the sake of holiness. The visible passes away in a flash of steel and blood: the invisible is affirmed. Of course for most people that decision is taken at an age when you have no involvement in whether you are circumcised or not; but as with many things in Judaism physical circumcision is a pact the community and family makes, not just the individual. Long story short, St. John's "do not love the world" does not translate perfectly into Jewish, but there are connections.

Complicating matters further is that Judaism as it originally existed was in many ways legitimately a warlike and confrontational religion, while Christianity (originally) is not. On this topic the child is not very much like its parent. Judaism's response to evil is "sweep out the evil from among you." Capital punishment, albeit with an early form of due process, is a frequent response to evil within, whereas absolute destruction is the usual response to evil outside the community (the Canaanites.) Christianity says "turn the other cheek" and "do not resist an evil person."

Paradoxically it seems rather hard to renounce the "World" while you are making war on it. We find it much harder to synthesize godliness AND violence than perhaps Joshua and the Judges did. There is no doubt however that according to the Tanakh, people like Joshua were able to harmonize both godliness and ultraviolence somehow. Better men than you and me, perhaps.

There is some debate about the degree to which Christianity is a "world-denying" religion, or a religion which tends to think of the world as evil. I would say there is a bit of both: the physical world itself is good or at least originally good: the powers of the "World" are evil. The real neutral or originally benevolent world is a stage on which "The World" plays itself out, powers of spiritual darkness in high places. There is less debate about Judaism: Judaism seems to say eat, drink, have sex, enjoy yourself but keep the law and love G-d.

Of course, those things can come into conflict. Perhaps good food, wine, women and jollity are not bad in themselves, but love of the same can lead you astray.

I have to confess though, I am very sympathetic to St. John's more ascetic worldview. This topic arises for me because while I was out and about today in the "World" (physical and otherwise,) quotes from the New Testament came to mind repeatedly. This presents a problem in that I don't believe any man was ever G-d and so the NT, in so far as it asserts that a man was G-d, is not scripture for me. I feel myself pulled however towards John's gospel; perhaps that is a symptom of weakness rather than wisdom, but it is there nonetheless. I would like to check out of the whole ball game honestly. Stop posting confrontational content online, stop getting in debates with and trying to pwn the libs (who are genuinely lost in evil, but I'm not going to save them,) stop fighting the "World" at all. Attend to the Kingdom within.

Resign from "The World." Stop fighting it and focus on the only thing I can change. Me.


"Be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves." 
~ Matthew 10:16


Joshua, Elijah, King Josiah and many others in the Tanakh, even Moses, were not at all harmless! They didn't hesitate to kill a b*tch, more frequently than most men. In fact, Moses starts out the story of Exodus killing a dude, the Egyptian. Terminate, with extreme prejudice.

They were ass-kickers. Judaism, is an ass-kicking religion, a fact that has tended to fade from view as the Hebrews sadly got their own behinds booted on repeatedly since Biblical times.

This is not a resolvable conflict. Either the Tanakh is right, or the New Testament is. Christians all the time state that Christianity is not a pacifistic religion, but they state that on the basis of the Tanakh, which is scripture for them too. If you take what Jesus literally says as primary, ignoring the Tanakh, it absolutely is a pacifistic religion. "Don't resist an evil person," how do you reason your way out of that? Turn the other cheek. "If someone takes away your shirt, give them your coat as well."

Christianity and Judaism cannot be easily reconciled on this, and that is a real problem for me because right now I am uncharacteristically feeling more on Jesus' side. Maybe that will pass, maybe this is as I suggested previously, a moment of weakness. I am feeling fatigued from constantly being in inward and outward turmoil against the evil of this world. 

It is no coincidence however that the same Jesus who said "do not resist an evil person" also said "take up your cross." The one follows kind of logically from the other. If you do not comply with the World and do not resist the World either, you can find yourself a lamb to the slaughter. It was no coincidence they crucified the man. If you renounce and hate the World but aren't prepared to make war on it too if need be, you are a crucifixion magnet. If you renounce the World AND are prepared to kill to defend yourself doing it, at least the World's agents will think twice. The World's people are very scared of death. If they are not afraid of you, well, the minions of the World are just creaming themselves thinking of all they could do to you. That is our reality. We are cattle to them, unless we resist them.

How do you inwardly have the heart of Jesus, and outwardly have the heart of Joshua, King Josiah and Elijah? Can you be both? Saint AND warrior? Or is it only Saint OR warrior?

This is the question that haunts me today.


EDIT: And a voice came saying:
"You cannot have the perfect peace you seek on Earth. Only in Heaven."

And so on Earth we can never be altogether done with war, and other strife. However much we wish to be.