The End of Days: Hunger and the Panther
So he lived for many years…in visible glory, honored by the world yet troubled in spirit by its perversion of the truth… To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding was impossible… Everywhere, as if by secret agreement, a positive revulsion from professional fasting was in evidence [and] it was now too late to take any counter-measures [1]
Yes, the position of the children of Israel has become untenable, too late for any counter measures to the subservience of its rulers to foreign powers and faiths, subservience masked as a quest for peace. And yes, the past is all but gone; traditions, attitudes, rules in economics and family relations are radically changed. “We live in a different world now” and spiritual matters, much less their integration with the substance of daily life, rhythms and events, the true work of Judaism and Israel is being driven from the stage, buried in the straw and the mixture dumped to make way for the panther of predatory appetite [2]. The terror as well as “the joy of life streams with such ardent passion from its jaws” and throat most people seem unable to look away from the screens of virtual reality and seductions of magic. Again, the marriage of lust and war, Aphrodite and Aries seems to triumph from Hollywood to the murdering bomber deluded by clouds of virgins: the offshoot is “panic and terror” [3].
Edom and Ishmael indirectly honor, even as they appropriate and despise the father faith until all truth, reality-based hope, divine articulation and history are forgotten. As is being done to Israel, everyone is “blotted out from nationhood” (psalm 83).
Franz Kafka’s “a hunger artist” is a multi-layered allegory about the costs of cultural decay: human obsolescence, transient passions, materialism and isolation. It also includes his complex feelings about Judaism as meant to be and as it becomes in exile: bitterly comic, grotesque and sad, ruined by a world happily ignorant of the riches it has spurned, forgotten and helped to debase.
As shown in the shoah, Israel becomes debris that was humanity, like straw litter from a cage in which a voice no longer understood demonstrated a language driven from a world of cynics and terrified amusement seekers. The sages said the translated Hebrew Scriptures are like a caged lion, its articulation and form utterly mistaken until it seems like “a hunger artist” [4]. Institutions enslave people and thoughts as all rush under the dominion of Edom toward the seemingly interminable darkness at the end of days: the panther rules. Even as slave labor we will be superfluous to them [5].
On December 20, 2007 the Israeli Minister of Housing (big government rules everything, everywhere; no one can do anything or live anywhere without its say so) announced that apartments for ten to fifteen thousand people would be built in Atarot, the northernmost section of Jerusalem. In the late 19th and first half of the twentieth century Atarot was a Jewish farming community. In 1948, the British trained, equipped and officered army of the British-created state of Transjordan seized the area and drove out all the Jews. The invaders paved a road over the wheat fields… In June 1967, after Jordan the war on Israel, the Jews counterattacked and regained all of Judea and Samaria, including Atarot.
During the subsequent forty years, a small civilian airport and industrial zone were built but few dwellings. With most of Judea and Samaria, and parts of Jerusalem about to be given, at the orders of American rulers and the other great powers, to Arabs who exist to murder Jews, and are paid and armed by the West to do so, some of the chosen people thought it might be okay to build up a part of Jerusalem left to them.
Wrong: top American officials barked over the phones and to the media and the very next day the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and shamefaced Housing Minister of the client state agreed that no housing for Jews would be build in Atarot. The 1948 seizure of all of Judaism’s holiest sites and destruction of many others, so key to the Vatican remains the basis from which the further reduction of Israel will proceed: the panther rules.
After centuries of its long exile and loss of sovereignty which seemed as if it might lift in 1922 when Kafka wrote his tale, Israel appears to the nations and often feels and thinks to itself like a hunger artist, isolated not in splendid sovereignty in “a desirable, good and spacious land” but in various kinds or ghettos or cages. Its truth is utterly misunderstood by a pagan world and often lost to itself, dwindled into a series of fetishes and celebration of weakness. Honor and national pride become miserable alienation. The forty days that Moshe dwelt, fasting with the Eternal One to receive the tablets [6] seem arbitrary, alien and trivialized, an occasion for the nations and their goddesses to appropriate the Jewish message. The gift of the commandments for living a full, productive and sanctified life, an example separated from the nations become a media moment replete with bimbos “apparently so friendly and in reality so cruel” [7]. “Why stop now” the politicians, pre-state and post – independence seem to say with their every act and word: why leave the cage now? Keep fasting: disappear!’ The Europeans have trained us to want to disappear, to blend with the crowd or to lose oneself in a pitiably small and subservient role, barely alive, detached, officially and viciously misunderstood. The noble, mighty and kindly lion, the “compassionate father” is swept out for the panther of Dionysus and predation.
Early on the evening of December 21, after Israeli officials had bowed to Washington, the enforcer for the world community and Rome, a small but notable event occurred in a very different part of the world. It involved some poignantly banal tunes on a trumpet, some incongruities and condescension that might have been scripted by Kafka.
It happened in the high-vaulted lobby of a posh health center in the outer suburbs of an old city in America’s northeast. There, amidst the posh leather sofas and chairs, before the fire cheerily leaping in the massive stone fireplace, its chimney soaring to a cathedral ceiling a tall, skinny, gray-haired man with a cracked smile set some sheet music on a metal stand and proceeded to play a few familiar seasonal tunes: “O Christmas Tree,” “Hark the Herald Angels,” “Silent Night” and others. He tried his best and kept to one chorus per song. The girls at the reception desk complimented his every effort and others left their offices to offer praise and make sure he didn’t go off the edge. The place is not meant for public performances or loud music; the fellow is a little daft and somehow had gotten permission for this eccentricity; were he healthy, he would not have been indulged.
As he played Sabbath was just beginning, the Jewish Sabbath. He’s a lost Jewish man, not exactly a hunger artist: after all he has a trumpet and a job, an indulgent audience and can play Christmas tunes even if Jews can’t live in Atarot, or Shechem, or build a room anywhere in Judea and Samaria, not even in Hebron. Their health and songs, “the glory of the land” will not be permitted by a world brutally non-accepting of Jews [8]. One can appease an alienated brother but not a foreign tyrant intoxicated with its own pretensions of divine power.
And so the past is erased, the erasure is forgotten and the lie becomes truth [9]. The world is different, self-denial is not in fashion and in most places it’s a parody of the life it was meant to ennoble: the one nation where this is not so undergoes the process of erasure that began millennia ago. It’s at the end of days, many forms of collapse draw near, and people are trained to enthrallment with the predatory terror and joy of the panther: lust, war, and rapturous worship of an eroticized nature sweep everything away; more and more people forget that it ever was or could be different.
1. Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (1922 , first published 1924) collected in Kafka: the Complete Stories (NY 1971), 272-3
2. ibid. 277
3. Eugene Narrett, WW III: the War on the Jews (Lightcatcher Books, 2007), 7-10, 34-7 on Hesiod, Theogeny, 165-210, Lattimore translation (1973)
4. Psalm 19:1-5; see G. Schroeder, The Science of God, 46-71 passim
5. Deuteronomy 28:58-68; as the nations did to the Jews, so measure for measure, the wheel comes full circle, most obviously in China, diffusely in the West. A new re-direction of creation looms to purge the lust of power that the mighty believe they wield for their own deification. NB: after this warning to Bnei Israel that the shoah was possible, the Eternal One spoke to all of them, kulkhem “standing here before me” for all time (Deut. 29:9-14). For Edom, see Ovadiah 1:3-4 and Malachi 1:2, inter alia.
6. Exodus 34:1, 28; forty days were the periods of Moshe’s fasting and reception of Torah, of the initial waters of the flood, of the reigns of David and of Solomon During Moshe’s fast, the Eternal One inscribes the tablets of Law, beginning with the articulation of the thirteen Names of mercy that humans can comprehend only in retrospect (Exodus 34:1-7) as only after the fact can we understand the redemptive purpose of suffering (c.f. Genesis 15:12-18; 45:5-13; 50:19-21; Isaiah 40-41; 65:19 inter alia). But in 1922, the assimilated Kafka saw no redemptive hope for he was doomed to live in the tents of Japheth, viz. the forty days fast is borrowed in a gospel. “Since they fail to understand themselves at all” in effecting these revisions of the Eternal One’s word nothing is left in the end but “revulsion” and animality. “They were reverting very fast” to paraphrase Wells, one of those who helped make it happen.
7. “The Hunger Artist,” 270-3, especially 271-2
8. Genesis 43:11, m’zimrat HaAretz… the produce of the Promised Land is its glorious song (c.f. psalm 87)
9. George Orwell, 1984, chapter 7