The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language (2006) by Isaac Mozeson 

The Origin of Speeches is one of those texts that cross the boundaries between disciplines and have the potential to change our understanding of ourselves, our culture, destiny and capabilities. As one reads, the discoveries about our uniquely human gift, language, unfold like a cascade of gems, vivid and lucid. It is a ground-breaking, brilliant & delightful work 

Monogenesis, the thesis that all languages share a common origin is by now well-documented. Mozeson’s study shows that it merits the designation of a science. But as historically significant, fascinating and essential for the study of culture as it is, it is rarely noted even in the science or literary pages of our major media. Monogenesis is far less newsworthy than hurricanes, perhaps because, if treated with the attention it deserves, it would generate storms throughout academia, publishing, history and even geopolitics.

It is not surprising that this groundbreaking study is not on the evening news. Its subtitle, Intelligent Design in Language is not a la mode. Things being what they are, the chances that someone has heard of the Monogenesis of language, or even the primacy of Semitic as the source of all phonetic languages is little greater than their having heard of the obelisk of Shalmaneser II, the Mernepta stele, the Amarna tablets, the Moab stone, or the thousands of l’melekh (“for the king”) seals unearthed in ancient Israel’s fortress cities.

All of the above (and there is lots more like them) are archaeological discoveries of the past two centuries that demonstrate the antiquity of Israel and the historicity of much of the Scriptures.

Thus “Edenics,” the research project from which the book emerges remains largely unknown and readers will find The Origin of Speeches to be like uncovering buried treasure, a key to discovering truths of language, history and human nature and its divinely “designed” nature. (more…)

We often are preoccupied with the challenging stresses of geopolitics and conflicts and forget to examine the historical and material records that can direct us toward lasting peace. When one considers both Torah and topography (let’s reserve archaeology for another essay), we may see how to resolve current conflicts in ways that will last.

Israel has been suffering assaults from Elam-Persia, now called “Iran” (“Aryan” in Farsi). These attacks have been brought through elite elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah (“party” or “army of Allah”) that has de facto rule of Lebanon, and artificial state named after an ancient mountain range, “the Lebanon” which is the Hebrew word for “moon.”

In previous essays we presented evidence detailing that Iran, with its ally-client, Syria, has occupied and ruled the Lebanon since Israel was pressured by America to leave the area by 1983. So now, “Lebanon is in the hands of Hezbollah. The security of Lebanon, the border and the sea are in the hands of Hezbollah” (Memri #1215).

Speaking “about the appointed time…of the End,” the prophet Habakkuk states “Hamas will inundate, Hamas-land will destroy” because you, Babylon, “pillaged the city,” that is, Jerusalem (2:3-8). Hamas means “violence” or violent plunder, “pillage” and we have discussed how Iran coordinates the violence of Hamas and Hezbollah via Damascus (Memri # 1228). When Babylon thus afflicted Judah and the Jewish people with Hamas its empire was based in Mesopotamia and included ancient Aram (similar to today’s Syria), and the Lebanon. Today again, via the Shiites and Jihadists like Muktada al Sadr, Elam-Persia and Babylon again are linked as a site of violence and source of imperialist aggression and pillage.

And their violence inundates the “Kiryah,” the nickname for the HQ of the Israeli General Staff near Tel Aviv and the word Habakkuk uses for “city” in his prophecy. Thus “the Carmel, the Bashan, and the flower of the Lebanon is devastated” (Nahum 1:4).

This context helps us to clarify a point critical to genuine peace in the region: the Lebanon is part of the Promised Land and inheritance of the nation of Israel, by etymology, by Scriptures, and, for those who prefer an empirical - ecological framework, by topography.

Many verses in Deuteronomy, the last of the five books of Moses denotes that “the Lebanon” mountain ranges and surrounding land are part of the Land promised to the Jewish people for an eternal settlement. “Hashem spoke to us saying, ‘turn and come to the Amorite mountain and all its neighbors, in the Arabah, on the mountain, and in the lowland and in the south, and at the seacoast; the land of the Canaanite and the Lebanon until the great river, the Euphrates River. See, I have given the Land before you: come and possess the Land that Hashem swore to your forefathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to give them and their children after them” (Deuteronomy 1:7-8).

After detailing the inheritance of two and a half of the tribes in the Gilead and Bashan, east and northeast of the Jordan, Moshe pleaded intensely with the Eternal One to be allowed to see this inheritance of the children of Israel, the people he had shepherded for forty years. “Let me now cross and see this good Land that is on the other side of the Jordan, this good mountain and the Lebanon” (3:24-5).

After teaching Israel its foundational prayer, “Hear O Israel, Hashem is One” and reiterating it (Deut. 6 and 11) Moshe reminds Israel that the commandments are for the Land and that its boundaries stretch “from the wilderness and the Lebanon, from the river, the Euphrates River, until the Western Sea” (11:24).

The region that now is “Hizbollah/Hamas-land” clearly is within the Promised Land. The topography of the Lebanon mountain ranges indicates that the word of G-d regarding the inheritance of Israel is reflected and grounded in the natural order and flow of the topography.

The Lebanon consists of parallel mountain ridges split by the long, north to south valley of the Litani River that drains them and turns due west to flow into the Mediterranean north of Tyre. This valley is a northern extension of the Jordan valley whose lowest point is filled by the Salt (“Dead”) Sea and that continues south into central Africa. The western ridge of the Lebanon range is an extension of the mountains that hug the western edge of the Hula valley and the Kinneret (the “Sea of Galilee”) and then split, one line curling west into the northern line of the Carmel range and the other swirling in a bend and then south into  the eastern edge of the many-folded mountains of the Shomron and Judea.

Feeding the Litani-Jordan valley from its orient slopes, the eastern range of the Lebanon, heading south, splits to form the mountains surrounding the high plateau of the Golan Heights (in the midst of which is located ancient Israel’s northeastern “city of refuge,” Golan (Deuteronomy 4:42-4) and then joins to continue south in the rugged folds of the mountains of Moab through the territories of Menashe, Gad and Reuben. This range of mountains parallels the Jordan rift valley to its east and curls into numerous lines running east rich in the history of ancient Israel. Split by several narrow valleys, principally the Yarmuk, Jabbok, and Arnon, this eastern edge of the mountains of the Promised Land hugs the Salt Sea’s east side and continues south to the Gulf of Eilat.

When one looks at a finely detailed topographical map of the Promised Land one sees the truth of the modern scientific dictum that energy behaves sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave; the mountainous, intricate and unique Land flows to reflect the powerful energies that formed and established its ecological and spiritual integrity. One sees the material logic and wisdom as well as the amplitude of the gift of Hashem G-d to His people: a land of modest size but infinite complexity and far more spacious, in its mountainous quality than any ‘flat’ map suggests.

Above all, for the purposes of this essay, which is dedicated to understanding and peace, it demonstrates how intrinsically “the Lebanon” is entwined in its essential forms with the more familiar, modern areas of Israel as well as those denoted in the Scriptures. For not only do the mountain ranges of Israel swell and extend down the east of the Jordan – Litani valley, but both of their main lines west of this valley extend south: one enters the Negev, breaks and then concludes at the Gulf of Eilat; the other curls southwest through the Sinai’s entire central and southern areas till the Gulf of Suez and the Reed (“Red”) Sea, where a smaller broken series of mountains rounds back east to Mt. Karkom in Israel’s Negev. The Sinai Peninsula, historically an unclaimed area never permanently inhabited is ecologically intrinsic to the mountains and southern deserts of the Promised Land and the long, north-south valley at its center…

Since the Jewish people’s unending return to their Land picked up irreversible force early in the eighteenth century, the Lebanon has continued, into our days, to be a site from which they are attacked and from which they are forcibly barred. This imperial and geo- political situation is anomalous from both the earthly and Scriptural – divine perspective. The earth itself bears witness, just as contemporary conflicts suggest that the days approach when “the Lebanon will be insufficient kindling” for the wrath of the aroused lion of Israel and all “the beasts” that infest it with Hamas “will be insufficient for elevation offerings” to the Holy One and Creator.

As geology and environmentalism suggest, only when we understand history and human productivity via the realities of our miraculously structured world will humans be able to recognize their rightful place in it and, as Scripture states, rule over it and tend it as the Jewish people were commanded to settle, tend and love all the land Promised to them, integral and one. 

A mark engraved by exile and victimization, one of Israel’s greatest problems is the dominance over thought, feeling and action of the social sciences, especially psychology . Psychology is a symptom of the disintegration of the west which is marked, in all fields, by the resurgence of Hellenism dressed in pseudo-empirical garb and given the status of a belief system.

Psychology is yet another replacement theology in which bought consolation displaces repentance and genuine change. It is a triumph of fear over courage…

The term “psychology” and the beginning of its modern usage occurred during the intial heyday of Romanticism (c. 1770 - 1840). The first writer in English to use the term was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a French philosophe had used it about a decade earlier, in the 1790s). The romantic premise embedded in psychology, the secular religion of the Enlightenment was that fantasy and imagination, activated by transient feelings would nourish the essential goodness of human beings until it liberated them, via love, from the confines of reason, inherited wisdom and the competition that supposedly typified civilization as opposed to primitivism.

Do you “smell a fault?”

In the Romantic era which continues to our day, the “psychological perspective‿ deforms all categories of thought, impulse and life. It’s a mental and spiritual stance oriented toward pleasure and avoidance of pain. It is in fact a return of Epicureanism (beginning late 4th century BCE), a neo-pagan turning inward of the individual away form history, national life, land / nation and identity to neurotic self-scrutiny and needs. It is near kin to the de-contextualization of Judaism and effacement of the Jewish people that bred christianity which, like Romanticism, is a doctrine of salvation through love… and devil take the hindmost!

We do not have more love today than in centuries past: far from it. What we have, as most romantic writers confessed, is terror.

In fact, the Romantic deification of feeling, fantasy and imagination, of love, love, love seduced individuals, via the utopian promises of innovation and liberation into all and any modes of reform, into free love, and thence into pain, faithlessness, resentment, alienation, conflict, fear and despair. But without a transcendent and personal G-d there was no hope of mercy and no “rational” reason or context for repentance. Into that void rushed remorse. All the above-named conditions are the subjects of Romantic art that continue to dominate both the popular culture and the politics of our day, now herded under the rubric, ‘Post-modernism,’ an era of forgetting, an era in which education and the bond to the past is snapped… An era in which the ruling cadres exhort us “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, yesterday’s gone…”

This is the lie they want people to believe and in believing, dehumanize themselves by losing their roots and thus their identity.

The late, post-modern stage of Romanticism and the West is the era of cynicism and a-historical reflexes that have helped make politics a shabby and terrifying form of popular culture. Post-modern politics recapitulate the vicious paradoxes, the seductive lie of Romanticism: an unguent surface that promises happiness, love, peace and plenty while the manipulative, highly technological and statistical methods manipulate, depersonalize, control and betray, and which idolize andempower primitive and hostile cultures. The negation of love, our politics, like the culture of which it is an omnipresent form of neurotic entertainment, engrains the loneliness in which terror breeds monsters of the id…

And thus the romance of Romanticism, the end of the west is the love of death and the conflation of love and death, the longing for the primeval mud, for the end of all the terrors bred by rejection of the past. No wonder the west is committing suicide; no wonder its artists for nearly two centuries have been obsessed with apocalypse and collapse.

The past the West has rejected is Judaism. The tragedy for the Jewish people is that the culture of psychology which reflects the West’s diseased ideology has been embedded in it. Israel will free itself from this addiction or it too will die, grown too “in love with easeful death” as shown by successive governments mad obeisance to the ‘peace processes,’ the road map to the extinction of Israel.

Having created the problem, psychologists, new prophets of modern utopianism arrived with a religion in the form of pseudo-science claiming to remediate the spiritual illnesses that their own terms of art, self-centered assumptions and endless neurotic confessions reinforced. In due course they spawned not only the vast, voracious and de-humanizing industry of social work and “social services‿ but deformed law, education and the very comprehension of human nature and the divine.

To appreciate the chasm between the Jewish approach to full life, strength and humility, contrast the ‘declaration of faith” brought with the tithes as described in Deuteronomy 26 with the self-absorbed and anxious ‘couch confessions” of godless psychology.

Psychologists, psychologism, and the era of psychology is the last gasp of the west before it expires of the terrors that psychology feeds while pretending to redress them. The routine recourse to drugs in order to suppress the terrors that psychology multiplies reveal its morbidity and failure.

The psychological approach to human life and relationships leads to loneliness, fear, alienation, self-centeredness. Cultures do not survive this. The questions psychology prompts, toward which it disposes everyone by the “mind-forged manacles” it imposes are: “how can I help myself feel good?” and “why don’t they understand me?”

This is at the expense of history, memory, manliness and simplicity. The questions of a non-psychological consciousness, a soul not bound by psycho-babble would be:

“What is our honor and how can we defend and assert it?”
“What around us is ours and how can we build and strengthen it?”
“Who are our enemies and how do we destroy them?”

The relevance of healthy consciousness to events of our day is plain.

The lethal consequences of failing to orient one’s national, familial and individual being around these questions, the failure to be Jewish is painfully visible in Israel’s decades-long spiral toward extinction. It is writ large in its failure this past week, this past thirteen years, and since June 1967 to fight and secure the victory that is in its grasp, the victory alone that will bring peace; peace which thanks to the modern epicureans of pleasure and neurosis continues to recede the more they apply their incapacitating and terrified categories of thought to the fundamental facts of life.

It is no coincidence that the enemies of the psychological culture speak repeatedly in their guiding text (the Koran) of “terrifying their enemies.” The entire meta-cultural situation reflects the logic G-d embedded in the creation, including human relationships.

Even before the war of independence, Israel already was in dependency, a thrall to psychology and socialism, twin mis-readings of human nature and twin assaults on memory, history and the soul. It follows then that Israel’s socio-economic basis emphasizes dependency in many essential facets of life; in politics this dependency is based on its abasement before England, the “world community” and, increasingly since 1968, upon America. The State of Dependency that replaces the Holy One with psycho-therapeutic clichés, decayed remnants of shallow thoughts, and with the ‘holy writ’ of the State Department, is the same State of Dependency whose teachers fail to demand that Israel eradicate its enemies within and around it.

If a Jewish hitch-hiker is kidnapped and murdered, they tell Jews not to hitch-hike, in Israel. This is not life, teaching, or honor. This is pseudo-wisdom that displaces works, and works must exceed wisdom in order for both to endure (Pirke Avot 4).

Israel is sick of the West, and no wonder. Modern western consciousness is an infantilized consciousness; needy, consuming, without pride and requiring, as its complement a totally controlling ‘mother’ figure. For the west this reflects pagan Greek theology (see Hesiod’s Theogeny) and the goddess cults of the ancient middle east. For Judaism this pattern may reflect the fears of national extinction through slavery and rape by the Greco-Romans 1500 years ago (so different than the response of the nation in Egyptian bondage), and the decision to fend off a possible extinction by changing Judaism to a matrilineal culture. But matrilineal cultures over time become matriarchal and such cultures do not survive; they are in any case the antithesis of Judaism whose very identity, education, emphasis on memory, honor and national pride and the land itself is rooted in patriarchy and teaching by fathers, not female ‘school-teachers,’ social workers and psychologists, third-rate, scolding epicureans of comfort (you’re good) and discomfort (you’re naughty).

So deeply engrained is this aspect of Israel’s sickness that feminism, an integral aspect of Romanticism and the death of the west now is considered by many to be intrinsic (rather than antithetical) to Judaism. It is fashionable, among ‘nationalist’ as well as Hellenistic Jewish women, and men, too, to assert that “women will save Israel.‿ Alas, a culture whose women have been taught, have virtually inherited contempt for men is not a culture that will survive or that will leap to assert and defend its borders. How many Jewish husbands can defend the borders of their emotional, familial, social or spiritual lives against rebellious, domineering, excitable or belittling wives? Again, these conditions describe the national condition of Israel all too well.

Modern Israel, the Israel that cannot assert or defend its boundaries responds to every problem and hurt by applying psychologists and social workers to come and make the ‘boo-boo’ better, usually by pretending to make it go away. The desire for the mommy-goddess is one reason that crises and harms continue to be invited rather than avoided. After all, the ‘goddess’ must be kept in place of primacy and honored with wealth and law. Therefore problems must remain the way of being. It cannot endure…

The social-worker approach to suffering is worse than applying leeches ni part because it comes with the veneer of ‘rationality.’ Alas it leads to the waste of much national wealth, seized by the government in taxes with the promise that it is for the “welfare‿ of the people. A more pernicious or deadly form of national suicide can hardly be found; indeed, it is the flip-side of the peace process. And in the peace process and hitkansut we see how ‘rational’ the psychologocial approach to danger and conflict is. It is a form of suicide; the warm bath and averting of the eyes; the confessions of helplessness and harmlessness; the lies of faked compassion from the Knesset or the Beltway to which Israel of the psychological era is addicted. And whenever many of the people awake from the trance and cry out for identity and assertion, to the barbiturates of media bromides are added the many forms of oppression, — the night stick, the knock on the door, administrative detention, expulsion — the police state force that everywhere, in all cultures sooner or later characterizes the psychological state, the state of dependency and terror.

Psychology is a primary expression of the demonism, predatory economics and bureaucratic tyranny of modernism, the last stage of that dynamic and suicidal hybrid, western civilization. Why suicidal? The West, as we have shown, contains both the essentials of Judaism and an unremitting hatred of Jews. The suicide, the disintegration of this ‘foot’ of clay and iron is essential to the West, it is inevitable and now it draws very near. The fact that modern Israel and Israelis embrace this modern creed and its epistemology helps explain Israel’s long-term and increasing problems and the seeming inability of the culture to heal what is so obviously self-destructive in its national-political life. The Judaism of exile that dominates modern Israel offends, blinds and dis-empowers the Jew, by force when needed. Israel’s modern self-image is based largely on a disease intrinsic to a late stage of the Jew-hating culture in which it long has been trapped, the dominion of Esau.

The time to awaken grows very short; the whirlwind of terrors sown by socialists and the cult of psychology howls around our heads and land. Where are the shofar and the banner of David?

EN