Tag: Oct 7

Z-Zero

David PorushLeave a comment

The “Used-to-be-Jews”

I play poker with the same group of guys every week, mostly Jews. One is a fellow on whom life has smiled. He’s even lucky at cards. I’ll call him Paul (not his real name). A few months ago we were talking about the wars in Israel, and he said, “I used to be a Jew.” It’s a phrase I never heard back East, but I’ve heard it several times out here in California. It’s a thing.

The other day, the talk at poker returned to Israel. I think I said something about how tough it still was on my kids being Zionists in Northern California. Paul seemed startled. He asked sincerely, “You’re Zionists? What do you mean?”

I said, “I’m Jewish. So I’m a Zionist. God promised the specific land of Israel to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob thousands of years ago. That’s the origin of Judaism. It’s in the Bible.

“Huh! I never heard that!” Paul said.

“What did you hear?”

“I thought it was an extremist view by a few crazy Jews.”

Failure on the Seventh Front

Hamas brutally attacked Israel October 7th, 2023, raping, torturing and slaughtering. It was followed literally the next day by a global surge of raw hatred of Israel. It seemed spontaneous, but it was fueled by a long-prepared strategic propaganda campaign by a perfect storm of forces conspiring against us, including Islamic states, Western academia, the UN, communist countries, many European countries, progressive politics, media bias, the long-suppressed violence implicit in the hyphen Judeo-Christian …. The assault is global, stark in its persistence, and personal. It’s depressingly resistant to fact or reason. It’s frightening in its emergence from spaces we thought safe, even in our strongest Jewish havens outside Israel, like NYC. Every day brings new propaganda atrocities so absurd they would be funny if they weren’t so malign and effective.

Judging by Paul, it’s working. It sure seems like the world is trying its hardest to finally extinguish Israel, The Jewish State, and with it all the Jews who, our enemies tell us, are Zionists by default. Maybe our enemies know us better than we know ourselves.

Many Jews were forced to declare they were not the kind of Jew who supports Israel. They agreed with the enemy to be a good Jew means you were not a Zionist. Some even became prominent “as-a-Jews” (as Bari Weiss, Bret Stephens and others call them). They performed the charade: “I am Jewish. I denounce Israel because (yes, it’s committing genocide, starving Gazans, racist, colonialist, imperialist, fascist, Nazi…)”.  Younger generations of Jews are turning away from Israel, let alone Judaism.

Israel as the Jewish State doesn’t intend to go away. It has won many victories in its ongoing war against six enemies simultaneously: Hamas, terrorism on the West Bank, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, Iran, and Syria. Astonishing tactics and surprises have given it victories, like the pager maneuver against Hezbollah and the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear weapons. But it’s pretty clear that in the long run to survive, it must also win the war in the “airwaves”—on the “seventh front” of global political discourse.

Jews who remain Zionists responded with a mixture of grief, fear, solidarity, activism and counterpropaganda. Israel reinvested in telling its story (hasbara). In and out of the Diaspora we had great arguments: Jews were there first. We are fighting on the front lines of civilization against barbarism and terror. Israel is just like other nations fighting for our survival, why are you focused on us? Biased media, influencers and nations: you are purposely lying about Israel. It’s not fair.

Of course we need to continue these efforts to shield Israel and hold off the world. But without a deeper foundation, our arguments devolve into fortresses built on desert sands. Our cry for “fairness” or claims “we were here first” or that “we’re defending Western culture” or “truth” are doomed to fail against overwhelming odds – eight billion against fifteen million – much fewer if we count the Jews who even want to fight on our side. We need a firmer, permanent, global basis for how Jews defend Israel’s existence.

Z0

“Show me a place to stand and I can leverage the whole world,” Archimedes said.

Let’s find the place Jews must stand. Let’s boil it down to the bone, the most fundamental axiom, one that will survive the worst sandstorm of Jew hatred and violence in the 21st century:

To be Jewish is to be Zionist.

This is not a proclamation, it is a definition, a simple statement of fact. Jews are heirs to an eternal covenant between a single family and God.

THE COVENANT THAT DEFINES JEWS: As long as this family, its descendants, and converts – adopted into the family – keep their side of the deal, God will give Israel to them and guide their destiny. They will thrive and become a model to the whole broken world until it’s perfected.  

The deal was first announced to Abraham in the 20th c BCE. It was reiterated to his specific descendants Isaac, Jacob (Israel) and his twelve sons who became the Twelve Tribes – the Children of Israel. In the 14th century BCE at Sinai, God then made the deal with them all – Hebrew slaves newly liberated from Egypt, along with plenty of details that He gave to Moses in writing and orally, The Torah. It gives plenty of specifics of what the party of the first part (Jews) has to do to fulfill their end of the bargain and what the Party of the Second Part (God) will do if they don’t. Since then there has been a continuous, documented transmission and elaboration of the deal to us today (the rest of the canon, Talmud, and all that follows) by our tradition.

This covenant is more profound than a contract, more enduring and intimate than a quid pro quo. It’s an understanding that goes all the way down to the deepest sense of self. As Rabbi Sacks said, “A Contract is about interests; a Covenant is about identity.”[2]  Its outlines are simple, though the terms are complex. It’s more like a marriage where there are implicit as well as explicit understandings, things that go unsaid, ineffable intimacies, in this case with a transcendent Partner

When God announced the Covenant to the entire family of Israel and gave it to them in writing it changed the world. It created an entire empire of morals with its source in an absolute authority. The Torah lays out the laws of a utopian, holy nation – Israel – founded on them. It’s the world’s foundational document of liberation, where in Israel everyone is family and slaves all go free.

To put it another way, Jews have a divine right to Zion. God is on our side. All our other defenses stem from this fundamental axiom. Jews and the Jewish State can’t define themselves coherently without it.

I call this Z0 – Zionism 0.0, inspired by my friends, Zack Bodner and Rabbi Amitai Fraiman of Palo Alto who created a growing and powerful movement called Z3. In Bodner and Fraiman’s construction:

Zionism 1.0 is the dream of Herzl in the 1880s that led to the founding of the state in 1948.

Zionism 2.0 assumed Israel would be the sole focus of Jewish life and the diaspora would fade away, a national ideal that sustained Israel from 1948 to early 2000s.

Zionism 3.0 – Z3 – recognizes the mutual strength and interdependence of both Israel and the diaspora, equal partners in ensuring the life and endurance of Jews. Z3’s goal is to map the way forward.

Z0 solidifies Z3 by specifying the immortal bond between Jews everywhere and Israel. Jews in the Diaspora and Israel share a common, cosmic identity, belief and purpose. Z0 declares what they believe, to others and themselves.

The Sturdy Few: A Formula for Survival: She’erit and Pletah

Yet, Z0 is the single fundamental declaration that the some Jews in the Diaspora are unable to make. Even those who passionately support Israel or identify as Jews with one of the brands of Jewish religion (Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative…), or are culturally but not religiously Jewish or already assimilated can’t bring themselves to declare that God gave Israel to the Jews to be a light to other nations. Even many Orthodox Jews, who believe Z0 in their kishkes as an article of faith, keep it to themselves. Over thousands of years of exile, Jews have developed a completely understandable allergy to claiming that they are The Chosen People. As a guest in other nations at very best it’s impertinent, at worst suicidal.

Z0 is the declaration most Jews can’t say even though our religiously-motivated enemies all over the world attack us with a similar weapon: They claim Hamas (Hezbollah, Iran, the Islamic world…) has the right to extinguish the Jewish State because their version of God told them so. A few others – on the Left, the Right, in Europe and Islamic or communist countries – don’t share their belief in a Jew-hating God, but sympathize with their cause to extinguish Jews anyway.

Maybe that’s the Jewish problem. The fierce declaration we need to make sounds like the thing deplorable, benighted and barbaric nations say to justify bloody campaigns. We Jews are too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan, too ethical and compassionate, too civilized, too empathic.

Z0 is exactly the firmness we need to defend ourselves. We need to believe – or at least act like we believe – that we’re marching on a mission from God. We aren’t a race, ethnicity, people, or even just a nation. We are a family who’ve made a Divine Deal. This is the bedrock of emotional and spiritual strength for Jews in the Diaspora and Israel as we face overwhelming forces gathered to annihilate us together.

Z0 counters and resists the malevolence of “as-a-Jews” and the ignorance of many others who have separated Jews from Zion. It sends us into battle on the Seventh Front with a powerful weapon: the conviction that Israel’s destiny transcends our current crises and will survive the frothing of a noisy anti-Zionist world that threatens us.

Z0 is an invitation to everyone who calls themselves a Jew, by definition.

Yet we know some Jews will define themselves out of the Z0 definition. Awe may lose more Jews. Many, including Israeli Jews who’ve bled and suffered in waging these wars since 2023, won’t and don’t accept it. It sounds like it demands becoming religious.

Z0 means declaring that God gave Israel to the Jews, but it doesn’t require religion. It doesn’t require wearing a black coat or even observing the Shabbat or keeping kosher. It doesn’t mean following the strictures of Judaism. It only means knowing and acting like Israel’s right to exist as Jewish State and being Jewish are completely identical. Jews and Zion are born inseparably at the same instant in history when Abraham and God shake on it.

Nevertheless, we know Z0 will lose many Jews. They won’t be able to make this leap of faith anyway.And while we need as many Jew-Zionists as we can get and it seems unnecessarily zealous to draw this line in the sand, it’s not a numbers game.  Our history clearly demonstrates that after every cycle like the one we’ve now begun, only a fragment of Jews remain to carry on. And our Torah prophesies it.

A single remarkable verse in the book of Genesis encapsulates the prophesy. Joseph has become the viceroy of Egypt through his obvious talent and a miraculous-seeming series of coincidences. The famine that Joseph prophesied drives his brothers from Canaan to Egypt to seek refuge. They come before the imposing Viceroy of Egypt. They don’t recognize him, having assumed Joseph is dead. Joseph stays in disguise and plays the role to the hilt. He exacts some revenge and gets them to fetch his little brother Benjamin and aging father Jacob to Egypt. Only then does he reveal himself. After a tearful reunion, they are remorseful for their original crime and seek his forgiveness. Joseph comforts them with this remarkable phrase:

   וַיִּשְׁלָחֵנִי אֱלֹקים לִפְנֵיכֶם לָשׂוּם לָכֶם שְׁאֵרִית בָּאָרֶץ וּלְהַחֲיוֹת לָכֶם לִפְלֵיטָה גְּדֹל

V’yishlachani Elokim liphnaichem l’soom l’chem she’erit ba’aretz olhachayot l’chem l’pleitah gadol

And God sent me before you to place you as a remnant(she’erit) in the earth and to keep you alive as a mighty survivor (or “as a great rescue”) (pleitah). Gen 45:7 

She’erit means “the remnant.” Pletah means the “act of deliverance” or “the survivor.” The plain sense is this: God orchestrated a painful fate so that Joseph would be the remnant, the solitary Jew, who ploughs the field of destiny for the survival of his family. As viceroy, he restructures the whole nation of Egypt and secures Goshen for his family, paving the way for the survival of all the Children of Israel.

This verse encapsulates a prophecy of the entire Jewish story and models a strategy for eternal survival:

The small but faithful remnant of Israel survives catastrophe to be the seed of a mighty renewal.

Against all odds, millenia of Jewish history fulfills this prophecy over and over again, confounding historians:

  • Moses only took a fraction of the Hebrew population out of slavery in Egypt. A stunning 80% stayed behind. They died because they preferred the material guarantee of survival over belief in the abstract God of Moses. In other words, they assimilated.
  • When the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, they slaughtered, enslaved, or dispersed ten of the tribes. They were lost. Judah (the Southern Kingdom) remained, but barely.
  • Babylon captured Israel in 586 BCE, laid waste Jerusalem and the First Temple, exiling several hundred thousand Jews to Babylon. Fifty years later Cyrus of Persia set Jews free and urged them to return and rebuild the Temple. But only a small minority did. Ezra gives a marvelously specific census: “42,360 Jews, 7337 servants and 200 singers came back under Zerubbabel.” Only a fraction returned – maybe 5-10% – because Jews thrived and became materially comfortable in Babylon.[iii]  Our tradition tells us that Judea after the return was “poor and thin” in population.[iv] Only the “righteous remnant” returned,[v] “to rebuild.”[vi]  Modern historians confirm this picture.[vii]
  • When the Seleucids (Greeks) reigned over Israel in the second century BCE, many Jews adopted Hellenism. It was modern, enlightened, liberal, sophisticated. It had an alluring, rational, scientific picture of the cosmos. In 164 BCE, Mattathias and Judah Maccabee led a faithful core of a few thousand to an impossible victory against overwhelming odds. They purified the Temple and initiated the Jewish revival we now celebrate at Chanukah.
  • The Great Revolt of 66–70 CE ended with large-scale destruction and depopulation of Israel. The Romans destroyed the Temple and renamed the devastated country Palestine after the Jews’ perennial enemies, the Philistines. Josephus reports over a million Jews were slaughtered and a hundred thousand enslaved. Although his numbers are likely inflated, archaeological and demographic studies confirm Judea’s population shrank to a few hundred thousand.[xii] Shimon bar Yochai survived (he wrote the Kabbalah while hiding in a cave for thirteen years). He emerged to lead a small remnant of Jews to regroup at Yavneh, reestablish a court and maintain the traditions.
  • A Roman historian reports that in the failed Bar Kochba revolt (132–135 CE), 580,000 Jews were killed, a figure modern historians treat cautiously but accept as indicating massive losses.[xiv] Again, a remnant survived. They relocated to Galilee, where the sages eventually produced the Mishnah around 200 CE.[xv] Josephus reports that only about 6,000 Pharisees preserved halakhic Judaism.[xi]
  • In the centuries following Hadrian, Judea remained sparsely populated by Jews, while Babylonia held a large and thriving community of hundreds of thousands.The remnant there, thriving from the original Babylonian Diaspora, developed the Babylonian Talmud, 1500 years later still the central text of traditional Judaism.
  • In the millenia that follows Rome, the cycle comes every four generations or so virtually everywhere Jews have tried to make a home. The countries that formally expelled and/or systematically killed Jews is a dark trace of history itself: Byzantine Empire, Almohad Caliphate, Mamluk Sultanate, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Hungary, Russia, Soviet Union, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Croatia, Slovakia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco…

We Must All Be Maccabees

The same formula traces a dark fall line with mechanical regularity through the chaos of history, as if a divine force is stirring the pot of Jewish destiny.  Jews disappear because they are slaughtered or assimilate. They have forgotten or given up hope or simply abandoned the covenant, and with it, the promise of the Promised Land of Zion that defines what it is to be a Jew.

After Oct 7  we are willy nilly facing the same choice. We have to reconcile to the facts and embrace Z0 as our definition, our strategy, our destiny. We don’t need to be religious zealots. We need only claim that to be a Jew is to be a Zionist. It is our impregnable rock against the enemy’s attempt to split every Jew from his or her essence. Only Jews who are firmly convinced that they must fulfill God’s deal will ensure Israel’s survival. Now, we must all be Joseph, or Judah Maccabee, or Shimon bar Yochai.

This remnant-survival cycle may be depressing, as we see our Jewish family splinter and get lost, but it also strengthens us collectively and psychically as individuals. It explains our history and why we are so few. It gives us the courage to fight and the promise that we will. Against all odds, after horrible catastrophe, we’re still here: refined to a core of what Paul, my “used-to-be-a-Jew” friend, thinks are the crazy, zealous exceptions.

Anyway, it sure seems like God is on our side. How else should we explain that we’re still fulfilling an ancient prophecy, the remnant sent ahead to keep us alive until the perfection of the world?

The Angel of Death Visits the 21st Century

David Porush1 Comment

After Oct 7, Passover reminds us to outwardly perform being Jewish

  “For here the day comes burning as a furnace” – Malachi 3:19

This Passover, many Jews will celebrate another seder with special intensity. Oct 7 sharpened the knowledge that we are in history. The Angel of Death still hovers on the threshold of the Hebrew home.

The slaughter on Oct 7 was atrocious enough. But Jew hatred erupted all over the world, stunning Jews and making many cower. On campuses, in the workplace, on the streets, Jews hid their kippahs, Stars of David and even mezuzahs. Maybe this was forgivable self-preservation. But there were other Jews who joined with those who outed themselves as Jew-haters, their old political allies who want the West and Israel to disappear. Their betrayal is hard to forgive.

The Bible tells us where they went wrong and gives us clear advice for how to survive our post-Oct 7 crisis when it tells us how to celebrate Passover.

The original command

As the Hebrews await the tenth plague of the Angel of Death, the Book of Exodus instructs them how to keep the Angel of Death away. Here’s a fairly literal translation:

Then take a bunch of hyssop and dip [it] in the blood collected in the basin,
and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with some of the blood which is in the basin, and don’t go out, any man from the entrance to his house, until daybreak. God will strike Egypt and see the blood on the lintels and on the two posts and God will pass over the entrance and will not allow The Destroyer to enter your homes and strike you.  (Ex 12:23)[1]

It concludes by telling them this is not just for Egypt but for all time:

And you are to keep this thing as a statute for you and for your children, forever! (Ex 12:24)

What’s “this thing” we’re supposed to keep forever?[2] It should be obvious but the Sages see a problem: no one has smeared blood on their doorposts since Egypt. That cannot be the ritual which we observe for all time. Normally “this thing” simply refers to what just immediately preceded it. “This thing” must instead refer to something else. But what? The majority conclude it’s not marking the doorway to avert the Angel of Death, a one-time event, but to sacrificing the Paschal lamb, the enduring centerpiece of the seder. The trouble is, that was mentioned way back twenty-one verses earlier in the Bible, a really lost antecedent![3]

A solution

However, let’s take the Torah at its word and read “this thing” in its plain sense of referring to what came before. Then we see smearing the blood on the door is only the culmination of a continuous set of instructions about how to observe Passover. The Hebrews are told to identify the sacrificial lamb, to sacrifice it, to share it among households, and to eat it. They must also save the lamb’s blood in a basin and use it to mark their doorways.[4] In other words, it is all one piece, connected by the lamb and its blood.

So for all time, rather than choose between the eating of the paschal lamb, as the Sages would have it, or smearing of blood as a marker for God, as grammar and logic suggest, it should be both/and. But are we literally supposed to smear the blood on our doorway?

Message for today: Don’t bait the Angel of Death

A tradition they don’t tell you in Hebrew school is that 80% of the Hebrews died in Egypt. They preferred their miserable but tangible reality as slaves in Egypt to the intangible promise of an uncertain redemption promised by an abstract God. They were chained to a secular, materialistic vision of the world, unable to make a leap of faith despite the awesome display of plagues God performed for them. These Hebrews, like so many generations after them did, disappeared with the empires they assimilated to.

After Oct 7, some Jews have donned the keffiyah, literally or figuratively. Perhaps they think that placating the Hamasniks will preserve them, though weakness, denial and submission only incite the bloodthirsty to attack. Maybe they are genuinely reacting to Israel’s response in Gaza out of misplaced colonial guilt, or simply following the crowd on social media, or naively following the lead of tv news, or joining the rallies on campus to be cool and skip classes. Maybe they are too committed to a progressive ideology to change their minds, or too lazy or ignorant to look at the evil of the terrorists and the horror of their acts. But these Jews are like those Hebrews lost for all time back in Egypt. They’re baiting the Angel of Death. They forfeit God’s protection. They’re abandoning their own and their descendants’ immortal identity.

Being a Jew Means Performing It

The Talmud says the seder is a performance for children, a night of elaborate stagecraft to get their attention so they will transmit it to their children.[5] Oct 7 teaches us that the transmission includes performing the outward sign of being Jewish, repeat the ritual of the lamb not just in the seder but always, openly, visibly, especially when it’s most scary out there.

Billboard in California on Hwy 101.

It’s hard to believe that even in the 21st century, we should publicly display our Jewish identities for the Angel of Death to pass over us. The Nazis made Jews wear yellow stars to make them easier targets for round up, which contradicts this advice to go public. Jew haters attacked identifiable Jews in New York, Amsterdam and many other places after Oct 7, and Rabbi Meir Kogon was killed in the UAE. But the Passover command in Ex 12:23 suggests the need to be courageous anyway, make public signs of our faith (unless, of course, there is imminent danger to one’s life).

Three other Hebrew words suggest this in the our verse.

וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה לְחׇק־לְךָ וּלְבָנֶיךָ עַד־עוֹלָם׃

And you are to keep this thing as a statute for you and for your children, forever! (Ex 12:24)

Chok [חׇק], “statute,” refers to a special kind of commandment, one with an impenetrable rationale that transcends normal understanding, like the commandment of the Red Heifer.

The second is et [אֶת], a preposition that points to what comes next very particularly, in this case “this thing” we must observe. Rabbi Akiva tells us that this almost insignificant and often overlooked particle actually contains deep secrets, hidden intentions of God, and requires extra interpretation. We are on supernal ground here and should tread carefully before drawing conclusions about what God intended for all time.

The third is d-b-r [דבר], the “thing,” the “matter” we are to observe. But the Hebrew as it is written in the Torah scroll – without vowels – could also mean “plague” if we pronounce it dever instead of davar. So we could read the verse as

“Guard – give heed to, be on the outlook for – this plague for all your children forever. [שְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־הַדָּבָר].”

The world burns. The tenth plague returns. Jews again have to choose between Egypt and redemption. Now is the time for a courageous, affirmative public sign, We Here Are Jews! After all, what more powerful act could we to perform for our children this Passover?

ENDNOTES

Thanks to Marcos Frid for fixing a big error I made in the original draft. I’ll sure there’s more to find if he looks.

    [1] My attempt at a literal translation.

    [2] Called in grammar “the antecedent.”

    [3] The Sages untangle the contradiction by noting other occasions in the Bible when a commandment and its reference were separated.

    [4]  In fact, the command in Ex 12:23 is first mentioned in Ex. 12:7 in the middle of these instructions. The repetition indicates the continuity of the Passover instructions.

    [5] Pessachim 108-109. Thanks to R. Feldman for teaching me this.

    Sinwar, Simchat Torah, Sukkot and Peace

    David Porush

    “.. to take refuge from the fiery stream and rain, when You rain coals upon the wicked”

    “May it be Your Will”- Prayer said in the succah

    Israeli soldier prays in sukkah in Gaza. Courtesy of Israel Live News 70 on WhatsApp Oct 20, 2024.

    Yahya Sinwar orchestrated the October 7 massacre by Hamas to inflict maximum pain on Israel and Jews.

    Whether he timed it for Simchat Torah, the most joyous religious holiday on the Jewish calendar, may never be known, but our enemies always know us better than we do ourselves, and Sinwar was an assiduous, if evil, student of Jews and Israel. 

    Almost certainly he also knew about the Nova Festival of Peace, a wonderfully soft target on the Gaza border that week. The festival organizers did schedule Nova deliberately for the last days of Sukkot because it is an Israeli national holiday. Maybe they and all the festival goers consciously intended it as an alternative Simchat Torah, a secular celebration of the religion of music, peace, sensuality, drugs, sex, and indulgence. In any case, the targets were ripe. Israel was caught off-guard. Hamas went on a rampage. They raped, murdered, beheaded, burnt, and tortured unspeakably any Israeli they could get their hands on. They took almost 250 hostages to the hell tunnels of Gaza.

    On the first day of Sukkot the next year, 2024, Israeli troops assassinated Sinwar in Rafah, where they long suspected he hid.

    I’m writing this sitting in my succah, sunlight streaming through the straw roof. It’s the one time of the Jewish year when the mitzvah surrounds us, envelops us, shelters us: we are in the mitzvah as opposed to the mitzvah being in us.  And so it’s hard in this placid moment staring at the calendar not to reflect on the coincidence of dates: Sinwar’s terror the day after Sukkot; his assassination a year later on the first day the next year.  It opens a space on the calendar, a temporary parenthesis that alters consciousness, a week that happens to be Sukkot, when we live as if we just fled Egypt and dwelled in temporary wilderness huts 3200 years ago. In the succah we dwell in the temporary, the temporal. History accordions in on itself. What does it mean?

    Of course, if you see the world filled with miracles, there are no coincidences.  God is talking to us through His time, His calendar. In His time, infinite opposing currents can be true, tumbling into and flowing over each other in dense layers of meaning. Past and future collapse into one unifying vision of truth.  Looked at this way, the signs are explosive, hard to ignore, like reports of gunfire around the corner. Maybe we can read His mind about the week:

     Enter My space, the canopy of peace. My soldier’s rifle is nearby. Bullet holes riddle the wall outside the window. Light halos him. This is a temporary if holy peace. The succah roof is makeshift, gerryrigged over destruction, yet My light streams in. My soldier summons seven heroes from the Jewish past. They faced horror and survived disasters and are now his guests. He has carved out a bittersweet moment of peace on the battlefield. It is fleeting. That’s the nature of human time, but it looks forward to a future of permanent and perfect peace.

    Patient Zero: 

    David Porush

    The source of the Jew Hatred virus is a negative miracle

    The nations wish to vex God, but cannot, so they vex Israel – Exodus Rabbah 51

    Jews and Jew-hatred were born together.  The Bible’s case study of Pharaoh, Patient Zero, shows the source of the disease is, like the Jews themselves, Divine.

    Jew hatred as plague

    After October 7, Jew-haters worldwide have mounted massive and terrifying protests against Israel and Jews. Otherwise ordinary citizens seem to be spontaneously afflicted with Jew-hating fever. They rip down posters of women and children who were abducted by Hamas as if it were their righteous duty. Mobs took to the streets of Western countries in the hundreds of thousands waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “From the River to the Sea.” Even when many of them couldn’t name what river or sea they were referring to, they understood what they wanted: celebrate bloodthirsty Hamas, prevent Israel from retaliating, and erase the Jews and the Jewish State from the map. The global pandemic of Jew hatred this year makes “Never Again” only a self-delusional slogan

    A black hole. Image from NASA.

          The multiple ironies will drive you mad. As early as the next day, before Israel had even acted in Gaza, a chorus of calls for a ceasefire began as if a huge population was waiting for just this sort of moment to act against Jews. It is still intensifying today. Absurdly, after suffering the largest pogrom since the Holocaust, Israel was tried for genocide at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, though the word “genocide” was invented to describe what was done to the Jews by the Nazis and though Israel was trying to stop Hamas, terrorists explicitly dedicated to the genocide of Jews, or at least Zionists. The charge was so unfounded, even the ICJ, no friend of Israel, found no grounds.

    Israelis are routinely called Nazis. Such evil inversions are one of the hallmarks of the Jew hatred.

         The UN, world leaders and governments, noisy Palestinian partisans, well-meaning but naive and ill-informed peaceniks on social media, Hollywood stars, reflexive liberals – all were in truth calling for Jews to lay down their arms and suffer barbaric slaughter without responding, to be less than human. They devalue Jewish lives while demanding that Jews show superhuman forbearance. Jew haters attacked Jews in what they thought were their safe spaces: Western countries, Jewish cities like New York, on U.S. college campuses, even in public schools and town councils in the US, and in their private psychic and political bubbles. Jews who faithfully signed up for the agenda sympathetic to all victims – Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ rights, DEI, undocumented immigrants and all the other array of intersectional and righteous victims now suffered cognitive dissonance. How could my allies not only refuse to express shock at the worst Hamas atrocities, including the weaponized rape of women, but celebrate them?  Their comrades’ implicit response was, “The Jews had it coming to them.” In the algebra of this ideology, Jews can’t be victims of Palestinians. They’re white colonialists. The implied conclusion was a familiar one. “Die, Jews!” 

    In short, Jews found themselves in their history again. Jew hatred is as old as the Jew. Eventually it happens everywhere we live. There’s a Jewish tradition, rooted in both mysticism and statistical truths about the order of the world, that our hosts in the Diaspora only suffer us for about four generations before they expel or kill us. Many Jews deluded themselves into believing America was different, but now it seems they are doomed to join their forebears in Spain or Germany or anywhere else we enjoyed a few decades of peace and hospitality. What explains this? Over the last centuries, millions of words and thousands of books, articles, and scholarly papers have documented this phenomenon and tried to diagnose its cause.  They blame politics, culture, psychology, education, history, sociology, demagogic ambition, human nature, scapegoating,1 jealousy, Jews’ insularity, or some combination of these. They inspire paranoid conspiracy theories, blood libels, superstitious fears, and psychotic fixation: their allegiance is to Zion, to an internationalist family, to their network of global finances, to a secret cabal, to dark arts, to bloody rituals, to religious “protocols.” While every psychic, political and social route ends in forced conversion, state-sponsored genocide, expulsion or genocidal violence, none of these theories have satisfactorily explained the multiform ubiquity, irrationality, fluidity, virulence, spontaneity, disproportion, and inevitability of Jew hatred. In other words, no one has identified the root cause, much less offered any remedy.2 

    Many have said that Jew hatred is a disease, an ineradicable virus. If the analogy runs deep, then let’s be rigorous about applying the methods of epidemiology to find a cause. When epidemiologists study a pandemic, they talk about finding “Patient Zero,” the first person they can identify as having the disease. If they find Patient Zero it sometimes enables them to pinpoint the source of the virus, then the virus itself, and then formulate an inoculation against it. This is our goal here: to identify the cause, what legalese calls the “cause in fact” as opposed to the many “proximate causes” that we often confuse for it.3  

    Patient Zero

    I believe this Patient Zero has always been right in front of us, hiding in plain sight in the Jews’ own origin story of their time in Egypt. It is the aboriginal and archetypal Diaspora for all future Jewish Diasporas, from Babylon through America. Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is the first leader of another nation who contends with the Hebrews after they’ve dwelled among them for several generations. He is also the first to exhibit all the symptoms of the full-blown Jew hatred virus.4 Here’s his back story:

    Slave traders bring a captive Joseph to Egypt. Pharaoh dredges him out of jail because he has learned that Joseph has a special gift for interpreting dreams. Pharaoh is tormented by a strange nightmare his own wise men can’t decipher. Joseph tells him that his dream means that seven years of abundance will be followed by a seven-year famine in Egypt. Pharaoh is so impressed by Joseph’s preternatural insight that he appoints him as his second-in-command of all Egypt to put in place a strategy to prepare the kingdom for its impending disaster. Joseph’s first act is to rescue his eleven brothers, his father, and all their family and livestock from Canaan and settle them in Goshen, the fat of Egypt, on the Nile Delta in the northeast, closest to the land promised to their patriarch Abraham. Joseph then reorganizes the whole power and economic structure of Egypt to prepare them. He institutes a system of taxes of grain and produce to set aside during the fat years for the lean years, and builds a network of storehouses.  During the famine, Egyptians run out of food. Joseph sells them the reserves of food and grain. When they run out of money, they sell him their land. When they run out of land, they have nothing to sell but themselves, and they beg Pharaoh to accept their offer of indentured servitude. Finally, Joseph makes all Egyptians move from their hometowns and resettles them elsewhere, presumably for efficiency. In short, Joseph has created a completely re-organized Egyptian empire consolidated under Pharaoh, who is now the complete hegemon and absolute ruler of the state, nominal owner of all the land and all its citizens. If ever a ruler owed a debt to another party for giving him power, it is Pharaoh to Joseph and his descendents. However, as the Bible says:

    And Joseph died, and his brothers and their entire generation. And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and grew very, very mighty and the land was filled with them. 

    Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who didn’t know Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Look! The people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Let’s deal wisely with them before they multiply, and when we’re at war they will advocate for our enemies and add to the hatred and go up out of the land.’  Therefore, they set taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, namely Pithom and Raamses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they loathed the faces of the children of Israel. And Egypt made the children of Israel labor hard, and they made their lives bitter with hard servitude, in mortar and in brick, and in all kinds of slavery in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was severe. 

    And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives…and he said, “When you midwife the Hebrews … if it’s a son, then kill him…” And the midwives [failed and] said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are animals, and birth before the midwives come to them.” .. And the people multiplied, and grew very mighty. …And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, “Every son that is born you shall cast into the River…”

    A Clinical Evaluation of Patient Zero

    As this Pharaoh observes his empire. I imagine him in a high tower of his palace in Memphis, surveying a bustling capital city filled with many peoples like any cosmopolis. He looks just to the northeast, up the Nile Delta to the fertile Land of Goshen. The Hebrews are flourishing. Instead of seeing his diverse nation with satisfaction, he is unnaturally focused on the Children of Israel. Their success and growth don’t just unsettle him, they anger him and make him afraid. He conjures an Israelite population bomb and sees them filling the land when, of course, that was impossible. His paranoia makes him see them as a fifth column, lying in wait to join Egypt’s enemies in the event of a war, adding to some vague foreboding “hatred” for which he has no prior evidence. The accusation is all-too familiar; we’ve heard it throughout history from demagogues in Europe and Arab countries, and even in America at various times: those Jews don’t have patriotic allegiance, nationalist loyalty. They are simultaneously lower, dirtier, more animalistic and coarser than us natives, and at the same time threatening in their outsized dominance and superiority, as they succeed in the marketplace with preternatural ability and arcane practices. At best they have dual loyalty, dividing their dedication between us and Israel, the land promised to them in their mythology. At worst, they are just awaiting their chance to betray Egypt, already actively plotting against us in secret, stirring up imaginary hatreds among our enemies. Fueling his animus, although the Bible tells us that this Pharaoh has no connection to, no memory of and therefore no allegiance or gratitude to Joseph, it’s much more likely that he is all too keenly aware of the debt he owes to him and his descendants for the power and control Joseph gave him, and like many tyrants he resents any claim on him, so he seeks to erase any legacy with murderous intent.5 

    Seized by his sudden irrational hatred and fear of Jews, he riles up his counselors. “Come,” he urges them. “Let us deal wisely with them.” He hatches plans to suppress the Israelite population. First he imposes “taskmasters” to extract progressively more burdensome taxes from them.  He starts oppressing them physically, appropriating their labor to build treasure cities.6 Then he turns to genocidal plotting, first hiding his crime by conspiring with midwives to strangle Hebrew males at birth. When this doesn’t work – the Egyptian midwives compare the Hebrew women to “animals” who give birth too quickly – he goes public, rallying his nation as many tyrants did after him, declaring a pogrom to kill first-born male Hebrews. Clearly he must have prepared the way with demagoguery and propaganda to turn his people against the Jews and arouse their collective hatred.7 Pharaoh’s hatred becomes a national obsession, the virus a pandemic. Since he controls the airwaves – hieroglyphic scribes are closely held priests of the pharaonic cult and most of the population is illiterate in the complex script8 – he is able to move the culture, and so it turns on a dime. 

    What arouses Pharaoh’s hatred? “Mighty and swarming” Hebrews

    Pharaoh may have had many proclivities, habits of mind, environmental circumstances and personal attributes – narcissism and megalomania – that made him prone to infection by Jew hatred. Like any king, he was responsible for foreseeing and planning to avoid threats to his kingdom. Like many tyrants, he is thin-skinned and defensive, quick to declare himself the victim of imagined slights, easily inflamed by his own imagination. Everything is personal. He sees no distinction between attacks on the state and attacks on himself. (L’etat c’est moi.) He is volatile, prone to sudden, extreme bouts of anger and changes of heart. He’s tormented by psychic events, like his dreams, and he acts on them.9 Where did the virus come from?

    The original Hebrew of the Bible holds the key. As always, furtive meanings play across the text. Hebrew is at once more impoverished and yet richer and denser than our English. It contains hidden messages in the multiple connections among words. More akin to poetry, words skip their meanings across the text like stones on a pond, spreading ripples of overlapping echoes and meanings. Many of these hidden intents are lost in translation into English, which simply reads more stiffly than Biblical Hebrew.10

    The Hebrew word for their proliferation is “rav,” Pharaoh sees Jews filling the land, overestimating their numbers wildly. Magnifying the size of the Jews (not to mention their power and influence) is one of the symptoms of the disease we’re studying.11 He conjures a dark future when the Hebrew population bomb overrun his kingdom.The Torah in its typically allusive fashion, echoes his dark vision in the swarming plagues (arov) that overrun Egypt. Pharaoh’s malign delusion about the Hebrews as a plague – the metaphor for the Jews throughout their history used to arouse natives to loathe them – manifests it in his divine punishment. God has a sense of humor – or at least of *poetic* justice. The plague of Jew hatred is answered by divine plagues. But the equation is made. They have a common source.

    The core of Pharaoh’s pathology, what sickens him, though, is his absurd hallucination that the Hebrews are “mightier than” Egypt.  That’s even more fundamental than his distorted vision of their numbers, for surely were he to go to war to subdue the Israelites, he could easily do so with all the state military apparatus at his command. The root of the Hebrew word for this perceived mightiness is atzum. Two verses before Pharaoh’s vision, the text tells us that indeed, the Hebrews grew “very, very mighty” (וַיַּעַצְמוּ בִּמְאֹד מְאֹד). Here he says “many [rav] and mightier [atzum] than us” (רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ).

    The word for might, atzum, also mean “bone.,” It is a relative of “tree” etz [עֵץ] and “spine”; in other words, the sturdy, deeply rooted core or essence of something. It is used to describe the logic of an argument. Pharaoh has an instinctive and profound insight into the Israelites’ strength: they have backbone and interconnectedness, like roots and branches of a tree. Like his dreams, his irrational argument has a tinge of prophecy in it. He perceives that the essence of the Israelites is that they are all one family.  However numerous they become, they are still aware of and feel a deep blood connection to each other. They are all literally one family tree, all the “children” of Israel – Jacob’s second name – the father of the twelve brothers who come to Egypt and spawn the tribes of the nation-to-be. 

    The Darwinian Jewish Project: to evolve Domestication

    This idea of the Hebrews as a family is not just a nice theme or metaphor, it is the deepest premise of the Jewish story in the Bible. The Hebrew epic adventure of their origin is filled not with mighty warrior deeds, but episodes that unfold a vast Darwinian project across centuries in selective breeding. Its purpose is to evolve a properly domestic human with the sensitivity to nurture family.12 In Genesis, the sons or their wives who are selected to carry the “Jewish” gene are the domesticated, sensitive ones. God wipes out Noah’s whole generation with a flood because they corrupt family purity. Abraham favors the meditative well-digger Isaac over the angry Ishmael. Isaac chooses nurturing Jacob over the violent Esau. Jacob prefers the creative (if overweening) Joseph over his unreliable older brothers. Even the little we know about Cain is that he was sensitive (perhaps too sensitive).The civil laws throughout the Bible assume that all Jews are branches of a single family who deserve the respect and allegiance of blood loyalty. Converts attain the same status. This is one family you can join. 

    The result is a culture of divine domestication. When Esau and Jacob finally reconcile and Esau offers to accompany Jacob on his journey home, Jacob draws the line as keenly as any place else in the family saga when he averts the dangerous offer as diplomatically as he can:

    ‘My lord knows that the children are frail and that the flocks and herds, which are nursing, are a care to me; if they are driven hard a single day, all the flocks will die. Let my lord go on ahead of his servant, while I travel slowly, at the pace of the cattle before me and at the pace of the children, until I come to my lord in Seir.’ (Gen 33:13-14)

    The other great thread of the Bible is that the laws it promulgates at great length are entirely aspirational. They form the utopian constitution of a nation not yet created, the prospective State of Israel that won’t be founded until the Jews finally reach the Promised Land forty years later. The chronicle of the Five Books of Moses ends just before this point, the world’s first and greatest cliffhanger, so while the entire story of the Hebrew is looking forward and idealized, the foundation is in the family, the blood shared among all citizens. Pharaoh sees the Israelitish idea is revolutionary and disruptive to his hegemony. Imagine a code of laws where justice is based on familial senses of allegiance, gentility, fraternity, generosity, mutual responsibility – even tenderness – instead of punishment. The Bible often uses the word “achim” – siblings – for the citizens of the future state of Israel. It took three thousand years for the French Revolution’s ideal of fraternité to re-imagine a nation based on it. Even the harshest of civil relations imagined in this future country, when a Jew becomes the slave of another Jew, is an economic transaction borne of unfortunate necessity, not oppression. Slaves have rights and their “owners” have responsibilities to them and owe them measures of respect. Slaves are still included in the religious circle of Judaism. The endpoint and goal of slavery everywhere else, (say, the Old South) was for the slave to be a perpetual motion machine for wealth: free labor with the great boon of making more slaves for free. The goal of Jewish slavery was for the slave to achieve freedom after seven years. At the end, owners must give their liberated slaves livestock, grain, and wine as a parting gift. 

    A nation defined by this mystical unity of blood is awesome and threatening indeed. Egyptian citizens are serfs and supplicants, not brothers and sisters, at least since Joseph reorganized the Egyptian economy for his predecessor. The Jews’ numerical size is not their threat, it’s their idea of humanity and nationhood. Their omnipresent, omniscient all-powerful infinite God demands that all humans treat each other as one family in order to make the world holy and thereby, know Him. 

    The plague of the Jews is a negative miracle

    This plague of the Jews has terrible ambivalence, two meanings at once: it both plagues them and makes their enemies see them as a plague. Even without a metaphysical explanation, we can see why it has no cure: Jews and Jew-hatred are twins. Pharaoh helps give birth to them; he is in effect their midwife. His dark plot leads to their enslavement, but also to their redemption. Everywhere we exist outside our home throughout history it follows us. It is the dark, mystical aspect of Jewishness itself, the other side of our coin. Jews cannot exist without Jew hatred. Our charge is to keep ourselves distinct – that is the meaning of the Hebrew word for holy (kadesh), but our distinctiveness arouses hatred.

    Personally, the irrationality, inexplicability, spontaneity, persistence and ubiquity of antisemitism are dark testimony to the existence of God. Traditional Jewish writers often say antisemitism is “causeless [or baseless] hatred” [sinat chinam]13 which at first seems tantamount to a shrug of the shoulders. But there’s nothing in the cosmos that doesn’t have a cause.

    When an inexplicable reality intrudes on ours we call it a miracle. In the instance of Jew hatred, it’s a negative miracle, evidence that the Finger of God stirs the pot of history, the violent price Jews pay for their mission, a negative miracle among the many positive ones that intervene in our history or surround us every day. It’s as if God needs both a holy force to encourage Jews forward to their redemptive destiny, and an evil one to drive them there. Perhaps it’s why the leaders of Jew hatred always seem to know more about us, our mission, than we do ourselves. It is no accident that Hamas perpetrated their horrors on Simchat Torah. The source of Pharaoh’s hatred isn’t that he is deluded about the Israelites, it’s that he sees the truth of them. If the superior Israelitish manner of organizing society is allowed to spread, it will drown him and his world. When Jews forget or abandon their mission and become more German than the Germans, the goad is waiting to remind us. This is the summary of all the Prophets on one foot, the story we tell ourselves.  

    The realpolitik calculations of a supreme ruler like Pharaoh or a sheerly materialistic view of society like Marx’s or Epicurus’ don’t explain the cause of Jew hatred. Its provocation and foundation is in a supernal realm that unites everything in the universe. If they are honest and insightful enough, when confronted with a superior paradigm, worldview, or system of organizing culture, or operating the cosmos, or being in the world, they will see the truth, just as scientists when presented with a superior theory must ultimately bend to the truth. 

    If Jews really do pose a threat to their host country, it is not by their number, nor by the potential for sedition or violence against their hosts, but by the transcendentally mighty idea they represent.14 As history has sadly shown, you can repress their number but not their symbolism. Even if they are a tiny fragment of a remnant in the world – less than 0.2% of the global population, and even if personally any particular Jew has little attachment to their tradition – they have a vision of the cosmos that enables their success, protected by a greater unity that no power on Earth has so far succeeded in eradicating. 

    The cure?

    If indeed the source of Jew hatred is transcendent and congruent with the idea of the Jew itself, then there really is no cure short of the vision written into the other part of the Jews’ script: complete redemption of the world. 

    In the interim, while we endlessly await a Messiah, there is a kind of inoculation that might work with individuals, Jew-hater and Jew alike. Before the individual hater grabs a gun and comes to kill, before the psychic virus has completely dominated the reasoning faculties of a patient, before he or she joins the mob bent on pogrom, then perhaps there is still time. But it’s the exhausting, never-ending battle for truth. Jews, as they do in the International Court of Justice and the twittersphere, must continue to face the hatred with truth. For the Jew-hater has a weakness. He always lies, usually by first stealing the Jew’s truth, then trying to cover up the crime by erasing the witness, spiritual parricide. Though they invented the monotheism at the core of Christianity and Islam, they are its greatest enemy. It’s an exhausting and often fruitless fight, but it’s the only one that gives Jews any hope.

    2024

    1. Even the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the U.K., embraces this conventional and powerful explanation. He writes, “Much of the theoretical basis for analyzing the scapegoating phenomenon was laid several decades ago by the French-born philosopher Rene Girard. In Violence and the Sacred [ Johns Hopkins U Press (1972)] he wrote, ‘The victim or victims of unjust violence or discrimination are called scapegoats, especially when they are not punished for ‘the sins’ of others, as most dictionaries assert, but for tensions, conflicts, and difficulties of all kinds…Scapegoating enables persecutors to elude problems that seem intractable.” Girard’s definition covers many aspects of the scapegoating of Jews and Israel.” With all due respect to R’ Sacks, he misses the point. Rene Girard was my thesis advisor. He was a devout Catholic who understood that the source of scapegoating was theological, following the typology of Jesus who was for Girard (and Christianity) the ultimate archetype of the sacrificial scapegoat. But he expresses this in a veiled way, in terms of sociology and innate human instincts (he calls it mimesis): the phenomenon that leads to scapegoating begins with  mimicry, then jealousy, then rivalry, then antagonism, and finally violent confrontation of the Other, ending when the stronger vanquishes and erases (or murders)  the weaker. R’ Sacks was correct when he saw that this dynamic perfectly explains the repetitive violence against Jews.  After all, Jesus was also a Jew. ↩︎
    2.  The Wikipedia article on “Antisemitism” has over 300 bibliographic entries and “The History of Antisemitism” another 300. Many offer explanations, few offer solutions, and the ones that do have obviously failed. ↩︎
    3. The other car veered into my lane and hit mine: that was the proximate cause. But the cause in fact is that the driver was drunk because he just broke up with his girlfriend and was trying to drown his sorrow. ↩︎
    4. Peter Schafer, writes, “Antisemitism may have originated in Egypt and been spread by the Greek retelling of Ancient Egyptian prejudices.” In modern history (since the Greeks) it becomes “universal and virulent.” Schäfer, Peter, Judeophobia, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 208
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    5. Some speculate that this Pharaoh represented a new regime that rose to power when the Hyksos rulers of the Fifteenth Dynasty (c. 17th-16th c BCE, who have been closely associated with a “Canaanites”)  were supplanted by the Eighteenth Dynasty of Akhmose in the 14th c BCE. ↩︎
    6. Ironically he is following the script by which Joseph both rescued and subjugated the Egyptians for his predecessor. ↩︎
    7. Midrash – commentary on the Torah by Jewish sages – say that at first, the Egyptian public were still admiring of the Hebrews and would have been too civil and thus resisted Pharaoh if he suddenly declared war on them.
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    8. See The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 2 and The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 3 ↩︎
    9. Theodore Rubin described the psychopathology of antisemitism in depth. He calls it “symbol sickness.” In Anti-Semitism, A Disease of the Mind (NY: Continuum, 1990), he shows how antisemites project onto the Jew whatever psychic frailty they suffer from, externalizing their  internal conflicts: guilt, envy, self-doubt, defensiveness, scapegoating, identity confusion. Yet, these describe the mechanics of the disease, rather than its cause. Why do Jews particularly become the symbol of deep seated troubles rather than, say, Hispanics or Asians? ↩︎
    10. It has a lexicon of only about 9000 words as compared to, for example, the 200,000 in English; it lacked vowels, so the same three consonants that form the root words of Hebrew could have more than one possible meaning at a time and many other technical features. See “Literature, Letterature, Liturgy” at Literature, Letterature, Liturgy 
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    11. On a flight to Albany, NY in 1995, I sat next to a history professor at Williams College. When he made a remark about the Jewish lobby controlling our foreign policy towards a presumably evil Israel, I asked him, “How many Jews are there in the world?” He seemed startled and then said, “Oh, I don’t know. About a quarter of a billion?” When I eventually told him the real number (15 million maybe), he didn’t believe me, got angry, and didn’t talk to me the rest of the flight. Similarly, many people are shocked to see the true size of modern Israel on a map of the region, let alone the world.
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    12. See  The Mystery of Mysteries” Part 2: The Bible’s Darwinian Experiment ↩︎
    13. Dovid Fohrman, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/watch-what-is-sinat-chinam-or-baseless-hatred/ 
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    14. There’s never been a case of Jews mounting sedition against their host country in all the history of the Jewish Diaspora, unless we count pathetic ones like the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII or in Egypt in 115 CE, both of which were crushed (by the Nazis and by Rome, respectively). ↩︎