Forgetting, Uprooting and Culture Death
Our culture’s dominant institutions create fragmentation, disease, alienation, illiteracy and poverty. Family Law is to families as abortion is to birth; justice disappears beneath judicial activism in fealty to a gigantic and intrusive State, a process lubricated by the dogma of “relativism” that blends arrogance with power. The practice of medicine yields way to disease management by the insurance and pharmaceutical cartels and government. Education destroys facts, memory and memorization, degrades youth and fosters generic persons to ape lifestyle options that may be inserted into any region: like divorce and welfare it breaks people, molding them to serve the medicating State. A new world nightmare of artifice and rootlessness is largely in place, sacrificing humanity to the goat demons of power-lust (Lev. 17:7). What to do?
Those who care and try to remain informed and alert are in the position of Hamlet who realizes that “before I could make a prologue to my brains, they had begun the play” (5.2.31-1.), they being the warders conducting him to death. The corrupted wills of those who rule make reason serve their appetites and, via media and politics conjure the satyr, death, “incorpsed and demi-natured” by “witchcraft” in the beast they ride (ibid. 4.7.82-105). Serving the goat demons they are envenomed with envy of the true king they have displaced and whose memory they strain to bury, turning honorable mourning to feasting and intoxication. Down the long slide we go perhaps because our leaders cursed whom they should bless, — Israel and the teachings of Judaism.
Our computer screens often tell us that our “virtual memory” is too low. Far worse is that cultural and historical memory has long been abraded. Our ability and desire to remember has been dwindling under the ideologies that long have shaped the West. Modernism, from Machiavelli and the Renaissance, the resurgence of pagan attitudes, styles and ambitions has meant hacking away at the past, especially the Scriptural past and especially the Jewish root that uniquely stresses memory as the lynchpin of national and individual identity, charity, property and grateful wonder for a gracious transcendent Creator (cf. Deut. 26).
The rulers of the modern world tell us in myriad ways that “yesterday’s gone.” History above all must be re-written and suppressed. This means burying Judaism and the Jews whose faith and life, like that of the Creator and Eternal One centers on remembrance [1].
The root teaches an attitude of joyous obedience not to the State or a charismatic despot but to the Creator. Nothing could be more inconvenient to the Groups creating a New Age and World religion in which they will be the gods, the Alphas, with everyone else ranked below, mostly at the bottom of the pyramid.
Forgetting was central to the disturbing film 2001, a Space Odyssey. The computer Hal was cast as an anxious navigator whose concerns about the mission were resolved by removing his “memory” and command of the voyage. A similar lobotomy has been and is being performed on the West. As it proceeds Israel is being airbrushed from maps, school and College text books and lectures. The West disintegrates apace for a branch that attacks its root is a branch that will wither and die. A plan that demands that Jews disappear or convert is a dead-end that negates the Creator.
A new trend has been emerging in Academia as an ostensible alternative to political correctness: a celebration of what is called Darwinism wed to a Greek view of freedom. This occurs coast to coast, in Colleges touting the Liberal Arts and “great conversation” of the West (Judaism is absent), at major universities, journals and think tanks. There is a push to enforce evolution as dogma, negating creation and “the laws of nature’s God.” Anyone to whom this phrase has significance as bedrock of our identity and polity should take note: as Israel’s borders are collapsed so are America’s and those of other nations (Deuteronomy 32:8-9; 33:25-9). Tyranny will rule an amnesiac and rootless world.
A friend recounted a recent example of this trend. A senior academic gave a speech on the history of science emphasizing medicine and the empirical method. He began with remarks about ancient Babylon and then jumped straight to Plato and Aristotle. For him there was nothing relevant in the intervening 1600 years.
To demonstrate the ignorance in this omission some brief empirical notes will suffice.
The historicity of the Hebrews and ancient Israel is well-established by various records from numerous cultures: the Amarna tablets dating to about 1500 BCE; the stele of Mernepta recounting the battles of Rameses II c.1250 BCE with many people including Israel correlate with the period when Israel under Joshua twice conquered Goshen (northern Egypt east of the Nile); the obelisks of the Kings of ancient Ashur (“Assyria” in the Greek mis-pronunciation and geographic mis-location) list kings of Israel and Aram, like Omri and Ben Hadad (mentioned in the Scriptures) with whom they fought. The Moab stone describes the conquest of Moab by the tribe of Gad and the cities, Ateret and Dibon they rebuilt (Numbers 32:2-3) [2]. The Assyrians left a relief carving of the royal fortress city of Lakish, Sennacherib left records of his siege of Jerusalem alluding to his lack of success, and thousands of l’melekh (“for the king”) seals for storage vessels indicate the tithes and preparations for war in Israeli sites from the 8-6th centuries bce [3]. The altar built on Mt. Ebal by the Children of Israel under Joshua has been largely excavated and is visible this day [4].
These and more records demonstrate the historicity of Scriptures as well as the ancient Israelites, collectively termed “Jews” after the Assyrians conquered and dispersed most of the inhabitants of the northern kingdom leaving the kingdom of Yehuda (“Judea”).
This historicity bears on the origins of science and shows that the “enlightened” worship of the self-worshipping Greeks is evolutionary humbug and/or racism, is newspeak of a most insidious kind: that imposes itself by force because it doesn’t have or want the facts.
Leviticus, the third of the five books of Moshe demonstrates extensive knowledge of contagion and hygiene. There are extensive discussions of skin ailments and methods of treatment. For example, people with rashes, irritations or lesions must wash and wash or burn their clothing, bedding and bandages. Those who come into contact with them or their bedding also must wash and, like the sick undergo periods of quarantine. The recognition of leprosy as a contagious bacterial disease is millennia in advance of Greek-based “science” and explains the ban on inhabiting houses where the bacteria and fungi involved in its spread on surfaces and objects.
The Jews also understood the anti-bacterial qualities of hyssop. Scholarly works in medical journals demonstrate that salts and juice from the tissue of non-kosher animals are toxic to plant and cellular growth [5]. The ban on eating dead animals or those torn and left by predators honors life, a non-predatory social model, and protects health (Leviticus 17:15-16). Kosher rejects sick animals for food and those whose flesh shows they may become sick within a year.
An enlightened person, if they are honest must concede either that the Scriptures demonstrate extensive empirically-based healing and preventive medicine and/or divine inspiration.
The Torah’s correlation of sacred and every day aspects of illness that so affrights the “enlightened” progressive mind shows an insightful awareness of the interrelation of body and soul, of humanity and godliness; most disturbing to worshippers of the Greek idea is that the methods of diagnosis and treatment and the description of creation and life’s origin contained in Torah long pre-date Greek attempts to account for the origin of life without a Creator [6]. An infinite Creator Who does not apply infinite control and allows creation to be affected by free will choices is antithetical to the pagan Greek social model of slavery, imperial pride and a-historical fatalism. Yet this is the mind-set of modern academics who lead toward a high-tech feudalism.
As with medicine, Scriptural scientific wisdom includes astronomy, time and the origins of the universe. Plato and Aristotle realized that matter cannot be its own ultimate cause. But rather than concede that the Jewish model of divinity and creation explained the world better than theirs they fudged the issue. As was his wont, Plato devised an anthropomorphic metaphor for creation, “a spindle in the lap of Necessity” (envisioned as a goddess) while Aristotle posited an impersonal, purposeless “prime mover.” In 1990, a conference of physicists at Columbia University agreed that the description of creation in the opening verses of Genesis is the only ancient account that correlates with modern astronomy. Genesis tells us that there was no time before creation and Hebrew itself identifies space and time in relation to each other, as 20th century science learned to do [7]. Design by chance does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. “The consistency of nature” and its laws “is a basic tenet of biblical religion [8]. The age of the universe can be accounted for by Jewish interpretations of “a divine day” as derived from the similes in psalm 90:4, and the number of stars (“He calls them each by name; not one of them is missing,” Isaiah 40:26) approximate the permutations of the twenty-two letters of the aleph-bet [9].
Similarly, Thales, the first of the pre-Socratic philosophers is known for principles that show direct borrowing from Genesis. For example, that water preceded and supports earth, that darkness preceded light and that “soul is diffused throughout the universe.” Thales (active 582 bce) came from that part of the Promised Land now called Lebanon (Deut 11:24) shortly after the Babylonian destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 bce. His name is derived from Hebrew as are his principles. Anaximander, his contemporary, is reported to have said that “the Unlimited is the first principle of things that are” [10].
My friend told me that in touching on the history of medicine the Professor asserted a gap from Galen (c. 100 CE) to William Harvey (1590). This suppression of history would have been caught by junior high school kids thirty years ago; Maimonides (1135 – 1204) was considered the greatest physician and perhaps the preeminent scholar of the middle ages, the most sought-after physician in Spain and later retained by the Caliph as his physician and advisor for the last thirty years of his life. He is being airbrushed from history as the Children of Israel and their land is being erased from the map. It is not incidental that Maimonides definitively identified the commandments in the Books of Moshe and arranged them topically in his Mishne Torah (“Review of the Torah”), a monumental work of scholarship. But history too is being erased: “yesterday’s gone” down the “memory hole.” Eugenicist cadres negate the Torah principle that “blessing pertains to birth” [11] so naturally “the name and memory of Israel” are anathema to them as “all they take counsel to blot out Israel from nationhood” (psalm 83).
My friend said that the lecture ended with throwaway remarks about our vestigial tail and former habit of swinging from trees. This enlightened dogma urges young people to be animals, reflexive and disconnected from the past. The new group of world servers can’t abide science; their methods are telepathy, indoctrination and the purging of humans, truth and memory. Their lies will crumble just as will the war processes they foster. As the Almighty states of redemption, “in its time, I will hasten it.” The time nears when the nations scatter the Jewish people and divide their land [12]. Will “the lie become truth? Will ignorance equal strength?” [13]. Remembrance and education can prevent it.
1. Exodus 3:14-16; Leviticus 26:42 among many similar assertions. “…tell them the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is My Name forever and this is My remembrance from generation to generation.”
2. James D. Long, The Riddle of the Exodus (lightcatcherbooks.com 2006 revised); K.A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2003). Kitchen demolishes the non-scientific “documentary hypothesis” much as Schroeder (two PhDs from MIT; see note 7) and Mozeson, a linguist (the Origin of Speeches) demolish Darwinism.
3. Nadav Na’aman, Ancient Israel and its Neighbors, (Eisenbrauns 2005)
4. Deut. 27; Joshua 8. Adam Zartal is the archaeologist who excavated and identified the site. His book is in Hebrew but there is an English website that summarizes his findings http://ebal.haifa.ac.il
5. David I. Macht, Johns Hopkins Journal of Medicine, 1952
6. Hesiod’s Theogeny (c. 540 bce) is a prime example of this confusion and also displays the perverse and violent origins and nature of erotic love as worshipped by the Greeks. See Lattimore translation, 1973.
7. The word olam means both “world” and “forever.”
8. Gerald L. Schroeder, the Science of God: the Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (NY 1997), 1-71, passim, and the Hidden Face of God (NY 2001), 4-11. “The universe is tuned for life from its inception. Torah teaches that the laws of nature created by the Eternal One from “an incredibly fine substance [chila] like nothing” direct the universe “toward development and sustenance of life” (Ramban, Schroeder). “If the energy of the big bang were different by the fraction of 10×120th there would be no life anywhere in the universe.” Schroeder quotes astrophysicist Michael Turner: “the precision [of design] is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimeter in diameter on the other side.” This science recalls the “psalm of David, for the Conductor: the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament tells of His handiwork. Day following day utters speech, and night following night declares knowledge. There is no [human] speech [adequate to fully hear or repeat], and there are no words; their sound is not heard. But their precision goes forth throughout the earth, and their words [heaven and firmament] reach the end of the inhabited world” (19:1-5; emphases added).
9. “For a thousand years in Your eyes are but a bygone yesterday, and like a watch in the night” (90:4). That a night watch is four hours just begins to indicate the flexibility these similes invite. Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation (1980; Weiser 1997) 185-93 reviews the discussions that understand the development of what we call “Cro-Magnon” man from about 25,000 years ago and human beings with the faculty of speech from 6000 years ago. See Isaac Mozeson, the Origin of Speeches (lightcatcherbooks.com 2006). Depending on the interpretation of a divine day the universe can be explained as being two and a half billion years old up to fifteen billion-plus years old. Genesis indicates that the sequence of evening and morning that divided each day of creation separate periods of creation (from nothing) and formation and that years as we know then could not have existed before the fourth day when the sun and moon were created. The Greeks also borrowed most of their “alpha-bet” (after 600 bce) from the Hebrew aleph-bet which is at least 700 years older. See Richard Fagles on the dating of the Iliad and Greek writing (Iliad, R. Fagles translation, introduction Bernard Knox, 1990). See Book III. 398-540 for a striking example of the gods directing human beings like puppets much as Hesiod describes Aphrodite (a trans-gendered creature) in Theogeny.
For an extensive and brilliant discussion of creation from nothing and the primal energy that became and infused matter see the colloquium of Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (“Ramban” 1190 – 1268) on Genesis 1 The Torah with Ramban’s Commentary on Genesis I (Mesorah 2004), 1-77.
10. Thales fragments cited by and preserved in Aristotle “on the Soul,” 411 a7). The typical transposition of the Hebrew suffix indicating “God” into Greek suggests his name probably was Talya or Taliyahu. Tal (“dew”) remains a popular Hebrew name to this day. The Pre-Socratics, edited by Philip Wheelwright (Indianapolis 1960), 44-7; 54.
11. Ramban (Moshe ben Nachman, a.k.a. Nachmanides) op. cit. on Genesis 1:22-3 and 17:16
12. Isaiah 60:21-2; Joel 4:1-2 passim; 13. Quotes from George Orwell, 1984 chp. 2;7