Remembering vs. Causing to Forget
I have written many essays describing how the modern and especially the postmodern world are a process and embodiment of forgetting, a compulsion at the core of the West. “The West,” a term meriting quotes because it is the paradigmatic “social construct” is obsessed with forgetting, and has arrived at programming in ‘education,’ media and diplomacy that conduces to forgetting because its claim to discrete identity is based on the lie that it is the inheritor of Israel’s promise and grace. This appropriation is the primal “identity theft” that sought and still seeks, by lies, slander, pillage, attrition and genocide to make this lie become truth, to adopt Orwell’s phrase.
The diplomacy of the Modern West gives geographic form to replacement theologies. It focuses on replacing the land of Israel with a non-people, with a State for a non-nation while reducing the areas where it will permit Jews to live and concentrating them behind “Auschwitz borders.” This long-running process they term “peace.”
How fitting that the Israeli politicians who most avidly serve the great powers have run a political campaign, an epitome of Hellenism making frequent use of the concept of shkichah, “forgetting.” It also is no accident that this party’s very name, Kadima, like the foreign masters it serves is based on a lie and perversion of an ancient Hebrew concept-word that became a modern rallying cry of Jewish restoration and rebirth: “Kadima” (from Kedem) means “forward from the origins,” from the primal roots and was adopted as the cry of officers in the Israeli armed forces: in simplest terms, “advance” or “follow me” to victory and thus back to the roots of our identity, history, role and sanctifying grandeur; kadmon, kadoum (“ancient, primeval, forebear”). The entire role of the Kadima party is hashkachah, “causing [Israel and Jews] to forget” whence they came, who they are, what they own and in what their strength rests, the earth from which they spring and are meant to sanctify in the simplest and more elaborate matters of life, the keystone of creation.
Thus, Rabbi Kook writes, the entire forces of creation were concentrated in Mt. Sinai whose “weight” was suspended over Israel to indicate that it would have to choose free will (the freedom for which we have no choice, the Rav teaches; one must choose) to exemplify for the world the only way that freedom can be meaningful and not an entryway to lawless law and lust of every kind, theft and, at last, slavery to the masters of the world who put themselves in the place of G-d; who unlike the Creator, despise, despoil and destroy life rather than encouraging life in abundance. Their “freedom” is impoverishment and desolation of seed, from ethanol to animal rights to population control and reduction.
The path to life abundant, sanctified in joy is the freedom for which the Exodus from Egypt occurred, the freedom realized on every Jubilee (50th year in the Sabbatical cycles) and in all the privileges, obligations and bounty centered on the land holding of every family of Israel in the entire Promised Land.
Politics and democracy as we often have explained are alien to the Jewish way and a snare for all peoples of the earth as a purported path to freedom. Eastern Europe was filled with “Democratic Republics” as is the world today. “Democracy” is the excuse and mantra from every mouth and screen as the world sinks, in a contrived collapse into a new age, hi tech feudal barbarism ruled by sordid buccaneers whose media tutor people in “correct opinions” till they are unable to think and only react reflexively to slogans.
Israel came into the world to establish history on the basis of zaikher, “remembrance and memory,” to remind, l’haz’kir human beings of their origins, divine soul, potential and need to choose good or evil, the model Israel established at Sinai to be embodied in its life in the Land. Against this example if simplicity are the imperial games of Nimrod, of Babel, Assyria and Egypt, proud towers with their claims to hegemony, their worship of themselves, of animals and composite beasts, their enslavement and delusion of people with forms of “bread and circuses,” a distraction machine turned into a social form and art by the mighty successor to and inheritor of all these empires, Rome – Edom, originator of welfare state depravity.
The elaborate, ambitious, imperial, amoral and cruel schemes seem to have gathered far more impetus than the simple, modest dream. The development of the West has steadily sloughed off or purged its Jewish substrate and the Greco-Roman monster dominates.
Thus the title above focuses endless material with more examples generated each day. The conflict intensifies; shkichah is within, masked by Jewish faces with gentile hearts, wild donkeys in heat for their ‘foreign lovers’ as the magnificent and vivid metaphors of Scripture told long ago. It also is within many “orthodox” who forget or downplay that Judaism is complete only in the entire land. So the war of forgetting, paganism, and animalism against humanity is the war of the world against the Jews and the Jewish idea of freedom in which love is grounded in G-d as the primary, six-word prayer of Israel attests every day (Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21), rooted in the earth and mediated through all our social relations not as a boundless, vaporous, rhapsodic inducement to group think or orgy but with limits and distinctions that give it form, meaning and realization as made clear in the first chapters of Genesis.
That is the humanity and redemption of Israel between the power lusts of the West and East. That simply, joyous glory is what the media and the powers, amplified through their fig leaf, the “UN” everyday makes hashkachah.
Since politics and “democracy” in their modern form are alien to Israel which has its own means of consensus, majority opinion, balanced by evidence and protection for the rights and integrity of every individual and family, politics are particularly grotesque there. The elections in Israel twice in three years now have given a small plurality (about 24% of the total vote; about 18% of eligible voters) to the party called Kadima that strives to serve its masters by perverting advance to and from the roots to be forgotten, l’hishakhaiach. The disintegration of the Israeli political system into a congeries of parties none of which gets more than 24% of the votes cast, and the fact that the true party of National Unity that unreservedly reveres and seeks to advance to the roots and to flourish and progress by them is but one thirtieth of the assembly, a sure sign that politics is corrupt, artificial and a service to alien gods.
But there is a spark, a segula, an intimate energy bonding humanity to its root in every facet of Israel that constantly struggles to emerge. “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will” and “the children will return to their borders.” It will be the “kingdom of priests and holy nation,” teaching by example not by imperial force.
This is the most fundamental of topics, the choice that bonds or blinds Jews and, through them, humanity to the source of our splendor. Here I simply will honor the great theme by discussing comments by Dr. Israel Eldad (1910-96) on the place of Israel among the nations as highlighted by the Trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key player in the Nazi “final solution” to the world’s problem with the Jewish people and the message of freedom they bring, in 1960.
“Hitler,” Eldad writes, “was right in using anti-Semitism as a means for gaining access to and domination over other nations” (Hitler-Germany were used by the English, and later by the English with American might in its tow). “However much the various countries in the East and in the West may have hated the Germans, they hated the Jews more. Many Frenchmen, Poles, Ukrainians and Lithuanians” [inter alia] were willing to forgive Hitler his hostility toward them provided he would once and for all rid Europe of its Jewish incubus,” Eldad writes[i]. “Without this widespread and deep-rooted hatred” of “the West” for Israel, “Hitler never would have been able to implement his scheme…” Eldad identifies a crucial point of remembrance and clear vision on those events: only the Germans perhaps could organize and push through such a shmad, but it was the desire of the nations from ancient times.
And it worked only thanks to the active collaboration of other nations and the indifference or tacit consent of other largely “hostile institutions such as the Vatican and Western democracies” who turned their back on the clear and present plight of European Jewry at the Evian Conference in 1938 and who, led by England and America undercut all efforts to rescue or ransom Jews from Europe during the holocaust” [ii]; “and Communism” too, Eldad adds for Russian hatred of Jews was only somewhat muted during the shoah even though half a million Jews fought in the Russian army. Indeed all the West, and Kedar too, incited from Berlin by Amin el Husseini, a British creation conspired to exterminate the Jewish people, “to blot them out from nationhood” and create a smog that would utterly deform, disguise or hide the nature of the Creator and godliness from mankind.
The rescue efforts that occurred were done, led or prompted by individuals, simple people in Poland, France, Italy or famous diplomats like Raoul Wallenberg whose work in Hungary shamed the powers into belatedly activity to save a remnant of Hungarian Jews, nearly all of whom, 800,000 could have been saved[iii].
Writing in 1970-1, when despite its oligarchy of subcontractors eager to give away the parts of its heartland and heritage it had regained in ‘67, Israel still ruled from Suez to the Jordan, although the Temple Mount had been alienated within two days of its recapture, after eighteen-plus centuries of yearning, Eldad, who had seen it all in the 1940s, may have had too hopeful a view of the significance of the Eichmann trial; perhaps. “That moment [of the trial] in Jerusalem was unique,” he writes, “because for the first time the Jewish people were the arbiters and judges of the persecutors.” While one should remember the victories of the Maccabees, and of Gideon, Yiftach, Saul and David over Amalek and many other hostile nations there was a unique aspect to the trial and execution of Eichmann who served the climax, for now of the West’s guilty hatred of the Jews. Testimonies of survivors were broadcast to the world though it hardly could or wished to consider a thousandth part of the horrors visited by the Germans and their enablers from Chamberlain, to Ivan, to Lord Moyne and the State Department to anonymous murderers and guards at the camps. For Eldad, “the decisive historical aspect was…that the reborn State of Israel in the land of the Jews, in Jerusalem, the city of Solomon and David was finally sitting in trial against a living personification of anti-Semitism, the embodiment of the will of many powerful nations, churches, parties and philosophies” including the enlightenment “to put an end to the Jewish people.”
Eldad examines the German word losung (“solution”) for a revealing reflection on the place of Israel among the nations, particularly in Europe whose dark heart is German. Throughout the ages, he writes, the Jews strove for Erlosung, “salvation” and Europe accused them of Auflosung “a process of dissolution of the European blood and spirit” for trying to live full lives outside the ghetto. “Therefore,” you decided, “we shall carry out an Endlosung a final solution”[iv] and finish the work of Hadrian, Constantine, Ambrose, Chrysostum, Augustine, Anselm, Benedict, the pillage, pyres and expulsions from England, France, Spain and German duchies, Voltaire, Blavatsky et al.
Thus he concludes the chapter, “the trial of Eichmann, the symbolic representation of this Endlosung by the Jewish nation in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel was a resounding historic answer to anti-Semitism…Jewish Jerusalem thus served notice on Berlin, the Vatican and the Kremlin: ‘the State of Israel is sitting in judgment upon the man who symbolizes your age-old hatred for our people.’” But now this moment of justice is being undone by the masters and agents of shkichah and “all the foundations of the earth collapse” in injustice and the lies that sustain it.
That was in 1960 as described in 1971; despite the justice and importance of the trial, and its practical inability to bring back a single murdered Jew or to create sentiment to expand Israel’s borders to their true extent, not a single State in the world today recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel because it was the capital of the kingdom of Israel and Judah and because the powers of the world want Israel’s segula for their own dark imperial purposes. For four years since the victory of 1967 that, as Eldad knew could have been won in 1948 or ’44,[v] and since 1920 the great powers led first by England and then America had worked relentless to abort the rebirth of Israel; had worked to plunge the world into a night of shkichah and hashkachah (“oblivion”) with their own imperial idea of elite-led “freedom,” the breaking of all the sovereign eggs of the world to make a more easily managed global omelet without features or the essence of life, discrimination, the anathema of postmodern “relativism” and Orwellian “equity,” all the better to manage their human inventory. It is this oblivion which the big lie of the “peace process” and Road Map to the ethnic cleansing of Jews and colonization of the Temple Mount is devoted; to the sponsorship and celebration of a political party with no platform but the deracination of the Jewish people in Israel and their expulsion from their holiest sites and original heartland, site of so much building, struggle and history.
The world powers are as relentless as they are mad; they are drunk and not with wine but with the cup of stupefaction that is power lust and the suicidal rapture of shkichah. Under their thumb we have no tomorrow because they have long since made our history and thus our present into a lie, into a virtual dazzle, a charade, a tower of lies built on lies, on identity theft and denial. Against this great darkness, impoverishment, and the tyranny of the new Malthusians the Jewish people must summon their segulah to hold fast in the storm, a last beacon for men of good will to rally round. As the good and loyal Kent says, “almost nothing sees miracles but misery.” The Jewish people have lived that truth and as in King Lear amid horrible betrayal, homicidal malice, greed, and envy they endure, like Edgar (Etgar = “challenge”) though often reduced to the status of a seemingly mad beggar by poverty “brought near to beast,” a hunger artist with the great mission of nobility, redemption and restoration that gathers import in the gathering darkness of these times[vi]. They have simple truth, a simple dream, not an elaborate imperial scheme; lies will dissolve; the force and fraud of Edom and Ishmael directly relate the frailty of the lies. When the mad party is done, Kadima will regain its beautiful and wise significance and remembrance, settlement and abundance will sing from the hills in simplest things, rejoicing hearts now knotted in confusion and fear. Israel lives in the hope, HaTikva and promise of this providence; life has purpose: the readiness is all[vii].