Einstein and Gaza
Albert Einstein tells you again and again in his writings how he - along with other sincere scientists, he says - keeps finding in the study of the cosmos, "behind all the discernible concatenations," intimations of "the infinitely superior spirit [emphasis added] that reveals itself,” he says, “in the little that we can comprehend of the knowable world."
“It's subtle,” he says, “intangible and inexplicable." “It evokes a deeply emotional conviction in the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe." (“The Ultimate Quotable Einstein,” Princeton, 2011, pp. 324-5).
He venerates this presence, he says. He calls it "cosmic religion," "a worship of the harmony and beauties of nature." In fact, he claims that it's already become "the common faith of many physicists." (ibid., p. 329). "I will call it the cosmic religious sense.” He says, "This is hard to make clear to those who don't experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order revealed in nature" (ibid., p. 330).
As a prophet wrote (Psalm 8:3), "When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have established...."
In truth, Einstein suffered a ridiculously pro-forma early childhood Jewish education in Germany, so he ended up believing, to the end of his life, that "the Jewish God" was anthropomorphic, as he put it. That is, he imagined that "the Jewish God" is a figment constructed in the image of man, like a man-made idol. “People make their gods in their own image.”
That kind of nutty mischaracterization of Jewish belief – an uninformed de-limiting of all that's holy - is common with Jewish atheists. So is Einstein’s other big theological mistake: accepting the idea, supposedly based on Newtonian principles, of a rigid cause-and-effect universe ruled by an implacable "blind watchmaker." The idea is that a Deity or First Cause initiated all Creation but then, in doing so, legislated Himself out of a job. That is, the Creator, having set the Universe on its course, left Himself with nothing to do and no way of subsequently affecting, changing, or influencing anything at all. Ultimately, it’s another way of saying that God abandoned the world – that, practically, speaking, “there is no God.”
Oddly, Sir Isaac Newton himself, whose teachings helped inspire that nonsense, didn't believe anything of the kind. Newton’s library and papers have been available for study since 1936. John Maynard Keynes, the great economist and polymath, purchased and perused them. In a renowned lecture, delivered by his brother just a few months after his death, he recognized in Newton a disciple of rabbinic Judaism and, particularly, Maimonides (known as Rambam to religious Jews, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon - RMBM.) ("Newton, the Man." J.M. Keynes, London, 1946).
Newton read Maimonides in Latin but taught himself Hebrew to better know and please the Deity. As for Maimonides, the great 12th Century elucidator of Torah from Sinai, didn't just teach metaphysics but also… physics!
Maimonides instructs: All reality - this and any and every other universe - depends for existence on a great Guiding Intelligence. All is not one. One Creator unifies Creation and He alone sustains its every particle, force and atom, but the Creator and His Creation are not the same. All things and beings are dependent on Him but He is not dependent on them. His essence is completely unlike them. He Who is infinite is no more divisible than a geometric point. He has neither similtude nor peer. "To whom then will you liken Me, or shall I equal?" (Isaiah 40:25). Because He sustains everything, He knows everything - with no forgetting! As for favoring and sustaining the cosmos’ ineluctable natural laws, which He Himself devised and cherishes, He retains the capacity (as the study of quantum mechanics, even in Einstein's time, began to intimate) to alter at will the course of Creation and everything within it.
The fate of matter isn't written in stone; subatomic particles can change their orbits or gain or lose a proton, for instance, for, apparently, any reason; the causation of a sunspot, hurricane or tidal wave - or, say, the appearance of a parking place - depends on invisible, indeterminate forces and, basically, "only God knows what." God's will, in other words, is everything.
Clearly, Einstein made up his mind based on wrong information. Even the Einsteins can make mistakes! People get the facts wrong all the time. Only HaShem is omniscient.
I mention this because I, too, heir of passionately devout Jews, was an atheist, and mistaken. I had more Jewish education than Einstein did, as a baby-boomer kid in America, but "God" - the word "God," a relic of German paganism, is a little misleading; as I found out later, Hebrew's much better for conveying the spiritual nature of Deity - struck me as a figment, a phony, wishful idea, and the Bible's stories about Creation, describing things that no mortal could have witnessed, childish. That the Hebrews' Scriptures are the world's only Scriptures that become more convincing the more one gets into them doesn't matter much to a Hebrew who won’t take them seriously.
Then We Had a War
Until the Six Day War - the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 - I didn't feel much affection for the Jewish people. But, watching the palpably angry, over-stuffed Arab and Communist ambassadors to the United Nations on TV, vocally enabling the aggressors in the Arab armies' biggest-ever war to crush “the Zionist entity,” I saw when they abruptly got word that Israel, amazingly, was winning. And they suddenly all became pacifists, calling for an immediate armistice! It was literally jaw-dropping, and hilarious. l remember saying, "Being hated by such disgusting clowns for being Jewish can’t possibly be all bad!”
That war sensitized me to Jewish peoplehood. But I still considered the religion - and all religion - nonsense. I could see religion was historically important so it needed to be studied, but I still went around feeling that, as I’d say occasionally, "I don't have a religious bone in my body." Until, at 19, I read a piece on revolution.
Young people in the early 70's talked about revolution all the time. "The First Revolutionary," by Dr. Wilfried Daim, a Viennese psychiatrist and Catholic writer, was the first thing that I remember reading that treated the Bible as seriously as any other work of literature. It forever blew apart the lie, for me, of religion being "the opiate of the masses" (the words of another Jewishly-ignorant Jewish atheist, Karl Marx). It showed that the Exodus, even beyond being a model and inspiration for human liberation and revolutionary freedom movements ever since, is also the story of a wildly radical revolution, an almost unimaginably liberating upset in human society.
That piece, as moving as it was, would have fallen on sterile ground if it hadn't first been prepared by the spectacle, earlier, of the evil in the Arabs' and Communists' anti-Israel crusade. My religion today - which I regard as the greatest blessing, connecting me with my Maker while I'm still able to learn and serve Him - was made possible by the Arabs' crazy Jew-hate.
Even then, I wasn't a Torah-Jew. But the Arabs kept the war going, and the "Old Testament" prophecies, as I could see from my studies, are utterly unique. One always hears from academics that they were all created by committee - that Documentary Hypothesis, Biblical Critical stuff, about the Torah's origins. But then, if you approach them seriously, on their own terms, you encounter the surprising holiness of Torah and its prophecies. By then, as a young adult, I’d served on lots of boards and committees. I finally realized that I couldn't conceive of any human committee ever coming up with anything remotely like them.
Imagine a committee ruling, “[If you, Israel, fail to follow My instructions to you in the Land that I give you] I will punish you with a non-nation; I shall provoke you with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21).
[If you, Israel, fail to rid the Land of Israel of co-claimants] "they shall be pins in your eyes and thorns in your sides and they shall vex you in the Land" (Numbers 33:55).
It was a spiritual education. Since 1967, watching generations of leaders and thought-leaders politicians pushing "land for peace," "two nations for two people," and the perennial "two-state solution [sic]" claptrap, against the explicit Torah prohibition, [You, Israel] "shall not make any covenant with [co-claimants of the Land of Israel]" nor try to divide it up (Exodus 23:32), and the dire promises, "or I shall to do to you what I had thought to do them" (Numbers 33:56), or "I will provoke [you] to anger with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21), impressed me and many others, Jews and Noachides, indelibly. (The ambiguous thundering pap of Nostradamus and all the other phony prophets, of all the world's religions and pseudo-religions that I've looked at, isn't remotely like it.) With time, and study, and great good-fortune in getting decent Torah-teachers, many of us, including me, became serious students of Torah and - we hope! - conscious servants of HaShem.
After October 7th, we've also got what looks increasingly like a study of the ongoing relationship, repeated throughout history, of Israel vis a vis much of the rest of humanity. A vast international conspiracy including Amalek, the jealous anti-Israel, and the Ishmaelite or Arab world, including Philistines and Lebanese, to "cut off" Israel "from being a nation," to erase even the memory of Israel's name! (Psalm 83). As we see from Hebrew Scripture, from history, and current affairs: the enemies of Israel – who are the enemies of all humanity – have energy and savagery, and numbers!
The Point of All This
The point I want to make here is a revelation based on my own personal spiritual trajectory. People who reject HaShem and the Torah - like Einstein did, like Karl Marx, like little moi, former young atheist - operate under false factual premises. So do the enemies of Israel, the "Palestinians" and their boosters, including all those peoples listed in Psalms 83. They've bought into the scam, the lie of Palestinianism – all about a human-constructed "vile nation that is no nation," that mysteriously can't be allowed to settle peacefully and permanently anywhere in the world except to annihilate Israel.
It's a ridiculous and more or less obviously transparent con; a giant and enormously cynical, cruel scam. Even the most well-meaning people who speak of "the two-state solution [sic]" - which, according to recent polling, at least 90% of Israel-adjacent "Palestinians" reject (they say they want one state, with no Jews) - are simply chumps for the scam, advancing the con. The whole point of it is to cripple and finally annihilate Israel by whittling it down. But the Arabs’ program is so transparent… and truth has a way of coming out - of emerging into the light.
If not for the Arabs' war against Israel, I wouldn't be here writing this today, nor - God forbid - be any kind of Torah-Jew. Amalek, the anti-Israel, the spirit of the Nazis and Hamas and Al-Qaeda and Fatah and Haman, is as evil as it gets, but Amalek, which is, after all, God's creation – a wonderous feature of the cosmos, ordained from the Beginning, even though its members need to make a completely free-will choice to enable it - serves a positive function, not just a horrid one.
Consider how Amalek must have heard story after story of how a mighty invisible God was toying with Egypt, a neighboring country, with plague after plague and fantastic manifestations of supernatural power. Even then, and even while the flower of Pharaoh's army was still rotting on the Red Sea's beaches, Amalek spied Israel rushing inland, the strongest people pushing ahead, while the weakest, the women with children, the aged and infirm - "the weaklings," Moses called them (Deuteronomy 25:18) - lagging behind (Exodus 17:8). Israel had just been wondering, idiotically, "Is HaShem with us or not?" (Exodus 17:7).
Amalek surely asked, What kind of people march through desert with no regard for their weakest members? And immediately determined: “Those people aren't that holy!" They must have thought: The gods made a mistake in choosing them. We are holier than they are. We are the chosen, and we’ll prove it!
That’s how it is with Amalek. The Nazis, for instance, saw the Jews divided over religion, and about returning to the Land of Israel, and vulnerable, and determined to destroy them, as supposed pretenders to God's favor; Hamas, similarly, saw the Jews divided, questioning themselves and their role under Heaven, over-confident in mere physical walls and fortifications, and attacked... It's a hallmark of Amalek, in all times - in every generation - to deliberately target the weakest Jews, the infants, the children, the women, in a world where armies normally attack only other armies.
It should be obvious that the only way to settle the supposedly impossibly "intractable problem" of Palestinianism is to reveal the Arab League's hoax to be the cynical, evil scam it is and to shame or force them into fixing the problem that they themselves created. If they want to be honored by civilized folk; if they want to be regarded as decent people, not murderous racists, murderers and misogynists; if they want to be regarded as sane, and capable; if they ever hope to grow their people past Jew-hate, they need to stop pumping themselves and the world full of stupid anti-Semitism, with all its Nazi trappings. And, obviously, they also need to start treating their own people decently: not as pawns, that is, with the doomed assigned destiny of furiously dashing themselves forever against the Jews - the world's only guaranteed-to-be eternal people! - but to settle them as full citizens in their own vastly underpopulated countries. To give them a shot at a decent life, having nothing to do with crushing the Jews.
It's not that hard a problem! America's Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, a major component of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, suggests itself as a model for fixing the Arabs' mess. Israel’s experience with what does and doesn’t work in settling millions of Jews in what used to be the barren Land of Israel - including all the needy refugees who came to Israel fleeing murderous hatred and persecution by the Arabs – could be valuable too. If little Israel could do that, so can the Arab League countries do it for their own.
Planet Earth could use the labor, wit, youth and talent of the “Palestinians,” turned to re-greening God’s Creation. And the world could use more truth. It’s amazing what problems caused by mistakes of fact and lies can be solved or ameliorated by the simple application of truth, and reality’s healing light.
Alas, after Hamas goes the way of Haman and Hitler's Nazis - may it happen speedily, in our time! - the envious, "holier than thou" spirit of Amalek is bound to persist on Earth until "Shiloh comes" (Genesis 49:10). That is, until Israel more fully realizes who and what it is, and stops needing the bloody goad of Amalek to bring its members devotedly to HaShem's fully conscious service.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
March, 2024
If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.
