Mighty Cosmic Forces
We seek insight into the bundle of mighty cosmic forces called anti-Semitism.
Churches today don’t get the crowds that they once did. Even the Mormons – Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints, they’re called now - and Muslims, Buddhists and New-Agers keep getting more marginal.
That can’t possibly be all bad. Dependent as they are on certain miracles and testimonies being true, when they’re not, these faith communities have lost many supporters whom they counted on to remain “faithful” to their baloney. This may signify progress.
Sadly, as people turn from their old false religions, they usually lump “Judaism,” as they call it, together with them, and repudiate them all. “Every religion is ridiculous and unsupported.”
That’s a big mistake, intellectually, morally, cosmologically and spiritually. The universe didn’t “just happen.” Abraham and Moses and all the Jewish prophets weren’t liars – even if, after 3,000 years, they’re sometimes hard to understand.
In fact, to disbelieve in the God of Israel – let’s just call Him God, HaShem – is to irrationally deny or ignore hard data.
He, the One God Who created all things, Who sustains all things and every force, Who knows the minds of everyone and, ultimately, judges us: He still sustains every particle and atom in Creation. He’s not going anywhere just because lots of folk’s fathers subscribed "to lies." (Jeremiah 16:19)
Judaism, so called – the faith of Abraham, the Path of the Righteous Non-Jews, and the Hebrews who stood at Mt. Sinai, the movement that gave the world the Bible, and Israel, the Jewish People – is always the outlier.
Naturally, man-made legends and mistakes attach to it and tend to obscure God’s Own teachings. God's mortal worshipers Jews aren't angels, after all, but humans, and to be human is to be prone to err. But anyone who honestly, sincerely delves into this matter - ths movement, this religion, this historical phenomenon - must conclude that it definitely is not ridiculous or unsupported.
Most faith-systems – or religions, or ultimate-belief cosmologies - either start with ancient folk-mythologies, as nature religions, like Japan’s Shinto or the old popular African and Native American religions, or with one person, a Muhammed, a Buddha, Jesus, or Zoroaster, say, who attracts followers. The religion of Moses and the Hebrew prophets – and, say, the actual religion of the Christian “deity,” Jesus – is the outlier.
People used to mock the Jews for valuing the life of a new-born, or any child, as they’d value the life of its father and mother. They laughed, in ancient Rome, “It is a crime among the Jews to take the life of a child.”
People weren’t ready for much Torah back in those days. Since then, the world has been greatly improved by Torah. These are legends but historical facts.
Take, for instance, the crucial value so at issue these days in the matter of abortion, the sanctity and dignity of human life. Or, consider a seemingly completely unrelated matter: the great spiritually elevating goodness of the institution called the weekend, springing directly from Israel’s faithful adherence to a seven-day week and shabbat. Or… considering laws and values, the Hebrews’ strict insistence that God is good; on the world having a beginning, and a purpose; debtors’ rights; women’s rights; proportionate justice, equal justice; kindness to animals; ancient but ever-green principles of charity, and contracts, and inheritance; rules to civilize warfare; the institution of spring-cleaning; written, court-enforceable contracts in matters of marriage and divorce; the brotherhood of mankind; pure, seemly worship; meaning-packed words like “amen,” “jubilee,” “messiah”....
It’s an endless list. The human race is a lot better, nicer, cooperative, capable, progressive and rational than it was. It’s Torah, more than anything, that’s lifted it – not to mention the bootstrapping uplift (God using Israel, one of the human tribes, to raise all the tribes) of the people whom the Torah particularly singled out and freed from paganism. Human history is an object lesson that cleaving to Torah will turbo-charge a people.
They who follow the One God – HaShem, Who can’t be visualized nor shrunken, who works in history to set men free - are, always, outliers. Who else studies Torah – that is, holiness - in their spare time, for pleasure, instead of going off, like other peoples, drinking, hunting, carousing, or chanting numbing words?
These facts are data points, not legends.
It’s extraordinary that Israel is, by any measure, the world’s most unpopular country. That’s it’s endlessly condemned in the UN, as the Star of David is always getting burnt and Jewish memorial markers defaced. That the Jewish People are fiercely hated – hated with fierce, often lethal hatred - by hundreds of millions of adult human beings worldwide. And that scores of millions of these haters - mostly, people who don’t even know any Jews – sincerely believe that the world would be vastly improved if they could just eradicate the Jews. Even while millions of these would-be murderers claim to cherish what the Jews have always taught in the Prophets, the Psalms, the Writings and the Torah of Israel.
Oddly, parenthetically, the Qur’an praises the Torah as God’s book. The “prophet” Muhammed taught: “There is no Allah but He in Whom the people of Israel believe.” Christianity literally incorporates an only slightly altered version of the whole Jewish Scripture in its Bible, preceding its own Book of Matthew. Christians read about Jewish heroes all the time. Muslims do too, in their ancient and perennially immensely popular storybook, Isra’iliyyat, or “Of the Israelites.”
It’s weird, but hardly legendary. These are unique forces. When humanity’s highest values were religious, people hated the Jews for religion. A typical sentiment, from New Amsterdam’s famous mayor, Peter Stuyvesant, calling the Jews "such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.” When economic theories were the thing, they hated the Jews as communists - and also as capitalists! In philosophy, the Jews represented the retrograde in mankind, according to Voltaire, and David Hume, and Kant, Hegel, Spengler, and actual active Nazis, like Martin Heidegger. When "science" mattered most, people hated Israel for being racially, "scientifically" inferior, and dangerous biologically. When warlike qualities mattered, they despised the Jews for lacking any. Now that it’s human rights are everything, the Jews are nothing but violently oppressive belligerent white European colonialist imperialist avatars of racism, apartheid and intolerance.
Again, these are facts, data points, representing mighty cosmic forces, not mere legends, cute homilies nor stories.
Parenthetically, as a reminder of a very basic principle of moral and spiritual physics and, clearly, an ineluctible cosmic force: God blesses those who bless Israel and curses those who curse Israel. Genesis 12:3, 27:29; Exodus 23:22; Deuteronomy 7:9. As Scripture notes:
Whoso finds Me finds life, and shall obtain favor of HaShem. But he that sins against me wrongs his own soul: all who hate Me love death. - Proverbs 8:27-8
More data points. Consider what happens to anti-Semites. Where are the Philistines, Inquisitors, Nazi Germany, Czarist Russia's Black Hundreds, Soviet Russia, Nebuchadneztar’s Babylon, Shalamancar’s Assyria, the Cossacks, Crusaders, the blood libel pietists, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” scumbags, the Moabites, Edomites and Midianites these days?
One of our heroes, George Orwell, wrote a deep essay on anti-Semitism – we’ve posted it to our website under Articles. Trying to get at the nub of it, he speaks of its irrationality, its noxiousness, and its pervasiveness. It’s a good piece, except he – even he - rejects what Israel represents. He’s no God-fearer; Israel, to him, stands for nothing. But then, oddly, even in his own life, even though he never thinks to place it on the balance beam, his greatest works, Animal Farm and 1984, wouldn’t exist but for a rare Jewish publisher in England, Fredrick Warburg.
Still, Orwell’s sharp enough to note what others normally don’t; a most peculiar fact: “[I]t is almost impossible to mention Jews in print, either favorably or unfavorably, without getting into trouble.” c. 1944. From George Orwell: a Life in Letters (2013), p. 228.
Naturally, God gives all humankind profound reasons to believe in Him and feel grateful to Him and fear and love and worship Him. But, along with all such proofs from cosmology and spirituality, there are also these unambiguous hard facts. Data doesn't get much clearer or more convincing. Mighty cosmic forces are at work here.
“You are My witnesses, declares HaShem,'and My servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe Me and understand that I am He. Before Me was no god formed, nor will there be one after Me."
– Isaiah 43:10
By Michael Dallen
HaShem [the Lord], He is God. There is none besides Him.
- Deuteronomy 4:35
From one new moon to another, and from one shabbat to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me, pledges HaShem.
- Isaiah 66:23
