Happy New Year (we hope)

It’s the five thousand, seven hundred and eighty second birthday of that fourteen-billion-year-old ball of rock and water we call home (see Happy Quantum New Year for the math).  The day is relevant to all humans, not just the Jews.  After a year like 5781, everyone should take it seriously.

It’s not just that the COVID pandemic is so intractable.  There’s also the inability of many to have a calm discussion about it.  “Follow the science,” but science isn’t on a single path.  At times, we have to rely on common sense, a resource that’s been sorely lacking this past year.

Now let’s take Afghanistan.  Oh, wait, it’s already been taken by the Taliban.  They’re now in possession of billions of dollars worth of abandoned high-tech weapons developed by western nations such as Britain, the US and Israel.  The Taliban aren’t our friends, and we can be sure that this technology will soon be in the hands of our enemies, such as Iran and China.

Choose Life

It’s an accepted principle in Judaism that our fate for the coming year is written in a book on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year.  But just before the holiday, we have a Bible reading that says “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Choose life.”  Rabbi Ronnie Hasson cites the medieval sage Maimonides that the verse teaches that “anything that a person wants to do, he has the ability to do…” and God will not interfere.  We must take responsibility for all that happens to us.  God rewards and punishes precisely because we have free will… Our success is due to many factors including the effort we put in, the decisions we make, the opportunities we capture, etc. We can’t blame God for our failures if we haven’t made the appropriate choices.

The Canadian government chose to allow Chinese scientists (later expelled) to work at the virology lab in Winnipeg.  The Americans chose to fund the Wuhan lab.  Should we say the pandemic is God’s will, or the result of horrible human choices?  When our own weaponry is used against us, whether in acts of terrorism or acts of war, is it God’s will, or people’s (leaders’) stupidity that’s the cause?

5781 is over.  What will we choose in the year 5782?

I wish you a healthy year, I wish you a happy year.  I wish that you make the appropriate decisions, and choose life.

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I’ve been victimized by sexual violence.  Lucky me; it’s happened twice, and I was horrified.

Let me clarify.  I wasn’t horrified when it happened.  I thought it was funny back then, and laughed.  Rather, I was horrified when told that what happened to me was sexual violence.  An educational program I’m taking recently obliged all students to take an online course on that subject.  Catcalls, they said, was sexual violence. A quick grope also fit the category. The course to prevent sexual violence trivialized it instead, and I think that’s horrible.

I don’t remember exactly what those gay guys yelled at me as I passed, but it was lewd.  I don’t even remember where it happened, just that it did. My response was to wave back at the guys, blow them a kiss and continue on my way.  I didn’t think much of it till recently, when the sexual violence classification upgraded my experience.

Even more violent was the grope.  I had been hitch-hiking to my newspaper route at four in the morning.  When the driver stopped at my destination he reached over and grabbed my crotch, making a lascivious remark.  I smiled, got out of the car, and delivered my papers. I decided not to be upset, and promptly put the grope out of my mind till it was horribly brought back by this online course.  Now I wonder if I have PTSD or need years of therapy to help me recover.

Intense Anger

Nope.  Except for intense anger, I’m good.  I’m not mad at the guy who groped me or the fellows that made lewd remarks as I sashayed past them.  I’m furious with the people who put together that online course, the people who equated catcalls and a quick grope with physical violence, with forced sexual contact.  I’ve talked with women who have been raped, or beaten for resisting rape. It wasn’t something they could laugh about afterwards. It’s a qualitatively different experience.

In my novel Quantum Cannibals the main character is gang-raped.  A friend of hers is gang-raped. Revenge is the only therapy available to them.  Read the novel to find out how they dealt with it.

In the #MeToo era, every act, every word can be spun into being a form of aggression.  True sexual violence, brutal sexual violence gets buried under the detritus of hurt feelings and trumped-up sensitivities.  When everyone’s a victim the authentic victims don’t get the attention, certainly not the revenge or catharsis they deserve.  The online course that I took was in itself a form of sexual violence.

What Is Suffering?

Half a century ago suffering was looked upon as a moral, religious or even philosophical issue. What did it mean, and did that meaning provide any comfort to those who were suffering?  With the intense secularization of western industrial societies in the latter part of the twentieth century, suffering became rationalized: an issue to be treated either through drugs, psychiatry, or the wide range of happiness industries.  With #MeToo the ordeal of sexual victim-hood regained a moral flavor, but without any chance for meaning. The only treatment is to widen the definition, name more culprits, identify more people as victims.

That’s the spirit in which my two experiences were labelled as violence.  It’s not a comforting spirit. How much worse it must be for the people who have suffered real, physical sexual violence.

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My wife was shocked to find fecal matter on our kitchen table.  She called me over right away, and pointed to a photo:

“ENTRANCED: Gifted Montreal designers Fecal Matter admire the mastery of legendary Manfred Thierry Mugler at the official launch…”

There it was: in the Social Notes of the Weekend newspaper.  Also in attendance at the launch was the Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (hosting the event), Kim Kardashian, supermodel Tyra Banks and other representatives of the social elite of western society.

Seeing these turds was jarring.  I had been happily trying to remember the lyrics of the song “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma,” when my wife summoned me.

Oh, What a Beautiful Morning

“All the sounds of the earth are like music
All the sounds of the earth are like music
The breeze is so busy it don’t miss a tree
An’ a ol’ weepin’ willer is laughin’ at me

Oh, what a beautiful Morning’
Oh, what a beautiful day.
I’ve got a beautiful feelin’
Everything’s goin’ my way.
Oh, what a beautiful day! “

It’s corny, no argument about that.  The lyrics aren’t deep, they don’t raise any major social issues.  The words reflect the carefree, self confident America of the nineteen-fifties, where everything appeared to be going its way.  It was a society whose artistic theme was optimism and appreciation rather than poop.

Fecal Matter is a Montreal-based fashion duo, whose surreal and stomach-clearing creations have garnered international recognition.  They’ve been featured in Vogue and other fashion journals.  Artslant magazine described them as “the design provocateurs subverting fashion’s throwaway culture” who “express solidarity with other outsiders” (emphasizing their progressive credentials).  In an interview they said:

“Calling our platform Fecal Matter was really a stab at the heart of the industry—showing that all of these material belongings we are all collecting and harvesting is all just shit at the end of the day.”

You don’t protest sh*t by adding to it.  It’s more radical to declare “Oh, what a beautiful day, I’ve got a beautiful feeling everything’s going my way.”  The folksinger Phil Ochs (1940-1976) put it this way:

“In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.”

The Banality of Evil

Offensiveness is banal, not creative; crudeness is certainly not protest against the social order.  It’s high fashion, as shown by the fawning socialites who celebrate Fecal Matter.  It’s evil when society normalizes deviancy, shrugging its shoulders at widespread coarseness and nihilism.  Fecal Matter and their sycophants are not revolutionaries or radicals stabbing at materialism and power.  They are the establishment that must be overthrown.  Let’s do so by following the advice of Phil Ochs, and Rodgers & Hammerstein: fight back with optimism, beauty and decency.

The post A Beautiful Morning, or… appeared first on Quantum Cannibals.

The Jerusalem Talmud teaches “The generation in which the Beit Hamikdash, the Temple, is not rebuilt is to be regarded as though the Beit Hamikdash was destroyed in that generation.” Can we establish a corollary that those not working to rebuild it are furthering, or at least mocking the destruction? Those who fast and sit on the floor while denouncing the actions or existence of a sovereign Jewish homeland would be better off eating a bacon cheeseburger on the 9th of Av then pretending to care about the destruction that took place two thousand years ago.

We are closer than we have ever been in the last two thousand years to rebuilding the Temple.  We have Jerusalem.  We are nearing the Temple Mount.  The prophecy of Zecharia (8: 4-5) has been fulfilled; old people sit, children play in the streets of Jerusalem.  Those in between shop at Mamilla Mall.

True, the Temple is not standing, but these things don’t happen all at once.  True, the government of Israel is not a religious one, but is that a problem?  The Jewish people weren’t considered to be in exile during the long reigns of a number of idol-worshiping kings.

When the Israelites were in the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt, they were sustained by a series of miracles.  As they approached their destination, the land of Israel, they realized that they soon were going to have to sustain themselves, earning a living through their own efforts, not God’s, not by sitting in Kollel.  Many were terrified and rebelled at the thought, preferring to stay in exile in the desert.

At the onset of that journey through the desert, faced with a choice of drowning in the Red Sea or death at the hands of Pharaoh’s army, the people cried and prayed for help.  God asked them why they were whining to him and told them to take action on their own.  Starting with Nachshon, a few brave chalutzim took the initiative and walked into the sea on the road to Israel.  The lesson is the oft-repeated ‘God helps those who help themselves.’

Mocking the Destruction with piety

Those who oppose the Jewish people helping themselves reclaim Jerusalem, reclaim the land of Israel are like the infamous spies in the desert.  They opposed entering the land of Israel, resulting in the Jews wandering in the desert for forty years.  The Satmar Chassidim, Neturai Karta, J-Street, Jewish Voices for Peace are the reincarnation of those spies trying to keep the Jews from redeeming the land they belong to.  Their fasts and lamentations on Tisha B’Av are crocodile tears over the loss of the Temple.  Their ideologies, their actions are mocking the destruction.

Get to work

If you want the Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt, yes fast and lament on Tisha B’av, increase your religious observance.  Move to Israel.  If you can’t bring yourself to make that big step, work with an Israel advocacy organization, such as The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Stand With Us, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Honest Reporting (Canada), or any of the many such organizations.  If you can’t bring yourself to get involved with an organization, write letters to the editor, complain to the media about their lies and distortions.  Promote Israel on social media.

It’s important to cry to God to bring about the redemption.  It’s also important to get off your rear end, and make it happen yourself.  To do the former but not the latter is mocking the destruction of the Temple.

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Holding the Victim to Blame

Whenever there is a terror attack against Israel, the world media finds some way to make Israel the accused, whether for provocation or retaliation, for people dying or failing to die, for killing the terrorists, or failing to kill them.

This is not a new phenomenon.  Two thousand years ago, a significant Jew was murdered by non-Jews, and for two thousand years the Jews have been persecuted for his death.  In the current era, Jews are being blamed by anti-Semites for provoking the holocaust.  They have been blamed for its horrible death toll, with their accusers putting the blame on Jewish passivity, and failure to resist.  It is this latter blame that my father Yehuda Elberg addressed in a lecture approximately forty years ago.  He was a holocaust survivor, a member of the Jewish Underground in Poland, and part of the Ghetto uprising.  Immediately following the war he worked on smuggling Jewish survivors to Israel (then known as Palestine).  Below are excerpts from his lecture We, the Accused.

***

On the 35th anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, a great deal was written about this in Jewish newspapers the world over, especially in Israel. The influential Maariv carried an article by Chaim Baltsan entitled: “Yom Ha-Shoah 1978: Is it Different from Previous Years?” Among other things, Baltsan wrote: “Much has already been written and said about the heroism — and under the circumstances it was extraordinary — the heroism displayed by the Ghetto rebels and the organizers of the uprisings in the camps. We are proud of that heroism, we will always be proud of it. But not so with the Shoah, that dark and bitter phenomenon in which it is impossible to find even the tiniest spark of light. Yet we are compelled to couple it with the heroism and to utter words in the same breath. We have linked the Holocaust with the heroic uprising in order to conceal the unacceptability of the pain, more accurately the shame; when we recall how millions were led like sheep to the slaughter…”

In brief, they are ashamed of us, they are ashamed of the survivors as well as the fallen. We are guilty of having put on the yellow badge. Better we had all died than let ourselves be so degraded. We are guilty because we did not revolt against being locked up in ghettos; proud people do not allow themselves to be locked into cages like animals in a zoo.  We are guilty because we let ourselves be herded into cattle-cars and did not counter-attack the Germans with our fists…

I want to tell you about the individuals and let the Chaim Baltsans be ashamed of their own ignorance, their own narrow mindedness, their own heartlessness, their owned blindness to the heroism of the Ghetto even when that the heroism was not as spectacular as in the Hollywood film.

An episode from 1940:

The Germans had given the Jews out of a shtetl in that part of Poland which had been annexed to the Reich. They packed in Jews into trucks. One young woman with a baby in her arms was having difficulty climbing up into the truck. A German soldier politely took the child from her and helped her into the vehicle.  When she stretched other arms to take the child, he throw it to the ground.  The woman jumped from the truck.  The German pointed his rifle at her.  She didn’t budge.  He raved and raged and threaten to shoot her and the child.  She still didn’t budge. He then raised the muzzle of his gun and threatened to shoot all the Jews in the truck.  The woman dragged herself back into the truck.  When they arrived in Warsaw, she was out of her mind.

Who can evaluate the greatness of that sacrifice?  Who can measure the boundless love for her fellow Jews, that gave her the strength to make such a decision and incredible courage to carry it out?  The knowledge of what was going to happen to her baby burned so fiercely in her brain that consumed it.  Her nerves were strung so tautly that they snapped.  Yet she still managed to weigh and measure.  Her hands — a scale of destiny. In one hand the compulsive desire to remain with the child; in the other the lives of the few score Jews.  She made her decision and even succeeded in carrying it out before her unbearable anguish destroyed her brain.

Hunger, fear and pain weaken a human being physically, and diminishes his mental strength.  There’s no need here to recount what the Jews went through from the beginning of 1940 until the summer of 1942.  In the proceedings of the Nuremberg trials you can find the testimony of one Herman Graebe, a German who was present during the slaughter of the Jews at Dubno.  A group of naked Jews stood at the edge of a ditch.  Behind them we Germans were loading their rifles.  Among the Jews stood a woman with a child in her arms.  The woman tickled the child, and began singing to it, so the child was laughing merrily when the German bullets cut down the mother and baby, and they both fell into the pit.

Psychologists tell us that when a person stands face to face with death all the emotions are paralyzed.  Terror, hope, anger, love, hate, all disappear at the moment when one looks death in the eye.  Emotionally he is already on the other side of the fight.

Our martyrs, however, demonstrated that it is not necessarily so.  Maybe fear has vanished, maybe all hope has died, maybe anger and hatred have been extinguished.  But one thing in this woman continued to live—love.  The emotion of love remained awake, strong, self-sacrificing.  I do not know any poem more lofty.  I’ve never heard any song more beautiful, never seen any deed more holy than the singing of that mother to her child in Dubno.  The chuckle of her infant, on the edge of the grave, sent out into the world’s void a resounding testimony of Jewish love and self-sacrifice.  The giggle of that child is the most exalted ode ever sung to the Jewish mother…

I come back to the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and I must begin with a prefatory observation.

Some years ago there was a fire in the movie theater where everyone pushed for the exits.  People stepped on each other.  More people died from the panic than from the fire.  Similarly, on a sinking ship, everyone tries to get to the lifeboats.  People grab the rope ladders out of each other’s hands.  The result: nobody gets to the boats.

The Warsaw Ghetto was a flaming inferno, a sinking ship.  But what happened with the people there?

On the day before the uprising began it was like Yom Kippur Eve in a pious Jewish household.  People spoke quietly, walk softly.  A kind of reverential air spread over the Ghetto streets, a trembling, but not out of fear.  Out of exultation.  A decision had been made, responsibility assumed.  But it did not weigh onerously on the people.  It hovered over their heads like an aura.  A whole community of Jews went forth to meet the inevitable with the purposefulness, with a sense of mission, and one could feel the presence of the wings of history, the duty to future generations.  Some sixty thousand Jews marched forth into greatness within the almost festive tread…

We, the Accused

It burns me when I hear someone say that the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto saved the honor and dignity of the Jewish people. No! Jewish honor stood high even when Jews were expiring with a quiet, unspectacular death. It was the honor of the entire humanity that was in mortal peril. And it was the greatness of the Jews in the ghettos, with their sanctified life and their heroic death that saved the honor of the human species, and gave flesh-end-blood mortals back their image of God.

I said that Jewish heroism did not begin with the uprising; it also did not end with the uprising. I need not describe the terror, the anguish, the scientific dehumanization system in the concentration camps. According to all experience in history, according to all the laws of psychology, the survivors should have emerged from the camps embittered destroyers, venomous killers and incendiaries, filled with hatred for a world that had led to all this and then permitted it to go on. Their physical health was destroyed. Their homes were destroyed. But the image of God within them was not.

Overnight, upon the liberation of the camps, a social life was created, with culture, with ideologies. The skeletal fingers did not yet have the strength to hold a pencil steadily, but they were already writing books, issuing newspapers.

I could tell you a great deal about the wonders and the miracles performed by the brands barely plucked out of the fire. Instead, let me quote from a letter by Professor Zelig Brodestski, the then head of Britain’s Jewish community, written to the survivors in Bergen- Belsen after he attended one at their congresses, immediately after the war.

“It was difficult for me to accept the task of coming here to you.  I did not know what to expect, how beaten or wretched you would look But you presented me with e picture of a proud Jewish life, a picture which I shall use in order to instill more pride and more life into the Jews in England. I had thought that perhaps you had fallen in your own esteem. But I have never experienced a more dignified congress. I had thought you would look with anger upon the Jews from abroad, who were able to do so little to save you from the Nazi murderers: but you welcomed me with love and warmth, and you spoke to me candidly and earnestly.  I was afraid you would only weep and lament but you combined your tears with the smile of the eternal Jew.  I had feared your disillusionment and hopelessness, but you displayed a faith and a resolution which all the .Jews in the world would do well to learn from you.”

There is an old legend about the flag of Jewish faith and determination which was hoisted over the Holy Temple in Jerusalem after the victory of the Maccabees.  Two hundred and thirty-five years later, when the Romans set fire to the Temple and the flames reached the mast, a whirlwind lifted the flag, the legend tells us, and carried it off to a faraway place to keep it safe for a future generation of Jews will redeem the Maccabean flag with their faith and determination.

To live and see this flag redeemed was my most ardent prayer and cherished dream since my childhood.  My dream came true in a strange and traumatic way. It was decades ago, the Warsaw Ghetto rose to fight a formidable enemy, and I was there when the blue-white flag was hoisted over the tallest building in the Ghetto.  It seemed to me that I had seen this flag before.  The dreamy blue and stark white flag was soon consumed by red flames together with the fighters.  It was then that I recognized the flag of my dreams.

Four years later in the Gulf of Lion, in the the harbor of Sete, over five thousand holocaust survivors boarded an old ship to fight the British blockade of the shore of Palestine, a ship later to be known as Exodus 1947.  Again I was there, watching the lineups of boarding passengers.  When I noticed the rolled-up banner under the arm of one of them, I immediately knew that this was the flag of my dreams.

I was not in the lines of battle during the Israeli War of Liberation and the subsequent wars of defense, but I knew that the Maccabean flag was there.  The legendary heroism, the devotion and self-sacrifice of the fighters are proof positive that the flag of faith and resolution inspired them.

***

We shall often be the accused.  But it no longer matters.  The flag that was over the Temple, over the Warsaw Ghetto, over Sete, is over Israel: it’s a flag that shall not fall again.

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This Wednesday evening, April 15^th, 2015 is Holocaust Remembrance Day. On Thursday, April 2^nd, 2015 an agreement was reached between Iran and the United States to lay the groundwork for another Holocaust, one much more technologically advanced, one much more capable of carrying out its goals.  On what day will we commemorate the future Holocaust against Israel? Or will there be anyone left to remember it?

Remembering Past Holocausts

After all, the Nazi Holocaust wasn’t the first; it was just more effective, using the most advanced technology of the mid-twentieth century. Weapons and instruments of torture based on seventeenth century technology led to the brutal destruction of three hundred thousand Jews in what was essentially a feud between the Cossacks and Tartars, Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine, with a mix of rivalry between branches of Christianity.

The gas chambers of the Nazis, the scythes and pitchforks of the Ukrainian peasants were nothing compared to the killing power of nuclear weapons. In the future Holocaust, Technology developed in large part by Jews may be used to rid the world of the Jewish state.

It’s clear that Israel cannot depend on the United States to protect its interests. The U.S. has abdicated its role as the world’s policeman, allowing gangs of religious fanatics and dictators to run rampant, pursuing their own evil agendas. It’s clear that Jews cannot depend on local police forces to defend their safety in cities and countries throughout the world.

It also seems clear that the Jews cannot depend on God alone to protect their physical well-being.

Many scholars and thinkers have been asking whether the unparalleled event of the Holocaust did not create a most serious existential crisis in which the text by definition was invalidated. After six million Jews, including nearly two million children, lost their lives within five years under the cruelest of circumstances, can we still seriously speak about a viable covenant in which God promised to protect His people?… The Holocaust, they believe, proved that we have only ourselves to rely on, and that even the return to Israel is to be understood as a secular liberation of the galut experience.

To write God out of the picture would be to write Judaism and the Jewish people out of the picture. So that too, is not a viable course of action.

Preventing the Future Holocaust

In fact, there is no correct answer, no proper course of action. There are too many variables, too many characters acting with their own free will; acting from a set of beliefs and values that are totally alien to us. Only hindsight may enable us to know what were the right and wrong choices in dealing with Iran’s promise to annihilate Israel, to destroy the Jews.

My great-grandfather was the senior rabbi in Warsaw during the Nazi holocaust. Prior to the war (following the death or Rabbi Kook), he was offered the position of Chief Rabbi of Palestine (Israel). Knowing difficult times were coming, he refused to leave his community in Poland, although he encouraged others to move there. At the outbreak of the war, Jewish leaders wanted to evacuate him to safety. Again, he refused to leave his people. When faced with a round-up by the Nazis, he made his decision. (A few rabbinic leaders made a different kind of decision)

Rabbi Zvi Yecheskiel Michelson, dean of the Warsaw rabbinate, deliberately remained at home while a large roundup was on. He did not go out as the Germans ordered, but put on his prayer shawl and phylacteries and stayed inside. He preferred to be shot on the spot, hoping that this his boy would be thrown into one of the wagons that accompanied the roundup and find a last resting place in the Jewish cemetery. So he willingly opened the door to the search party, but when the Germans saw the tall old man, with his long silver-white beard, they became uneasy. One of them mumbled, according to the Jewish policeman who accompanied the search: “This must be Moses in person.” They slammed the door shut and left the aged rabbi alone. He must have decided then that staying with his people in their last moments was even more important than being buried in a Jewish cemetery. He rose, went down to the courtyard, and joined the marching ranks of Jews towards the Umschlag, from which the people were sent to Treblinka. (p. xiii)

May the blood of my great-grandfather be avenged. May the future holocaust be prevented.

Your comments are welcome

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The Bible Names Its Enemies:

The Bible names its enemies: Egypt, Amalek, the Philistines, and many others.  For each of them the Bible spells out why they are considered the

enemy, and what to do about them.  We are told not to hate the Egyptians because we were strangers in their land. We were also refugees there, and military allies.  Though Pharaoh did evil, Egypt doesn’t embody wickedness.

Amalek is the face of evil in the Bible,  the paradigmatic bad guy.  The nation attacked the Jewish people shortly after the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea. The Bible, in response, promised “a war for the Lord against Amalek from generation to generation.” Amalek is linked to Haman, who tried to eradicate the Jews of the Persian Empire. Even Nazi Germany is fancifully tied to them.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is a global religious leader, philosopher and moral voice for our time. A towering intellectual and prolific author, he is respected and revered by Jews and non-Jews alike. He examined the face of evil in a recent essay in which he wrote that the Egyptians hated and enslaved the Israelites, because they feared their strength. When the reason for the hatred would disappear so would the hatred, because of rational self-interest.

Amalek, on the other hand, attacked the Israelites simply because they could. It was an irrational hatred that could not disappear when the reason disappeared, because there was no reason. Rabbi Sacks explains it is this irrational face of evil that the Bible demands we remember.

The Face of Evil Beneath the Heart:

The Rabbi explains:

It is easy at times of peace to forget the evil that lies just beneath the surface of the human heart. Never was this truer than in the past three centuries. The birth of Enlightenment, toleration, emancipation, liberalism and human rights persuaded many, Jews among them, that collective evil was as extinct as the Amalekites. Evil was then, not now. That age eventually begat nationalism, fascism, communism, two World Wars, some of the brutal tyrannies ever known, and the worst crime of man against man.

In the peaceful times that followed World War II, many Americans, Canadians, and Europeans forgot again about the face of evil, the irrational hatred which dwells in many hearts. The troubles in the world were attributed to the evil acts of the strong and powerful, to legacy of colonialism. The violence in South-East Asia, the Middle East, were explained away as rational responses to the legacy of western imperialism.

Refusing to Recognize the Face of Evil:

On September 11, 2001, it became impossible to ignore the face of evil, casting its evil eye. Although many people still searched for explanations or conspiracies, there was nothing to rationalize the brutal terror unleashed upon America. Rabbi Sacks declares:

Today, the great danger is terror… (emphasis added)

…That is why are commanded to remember and never forget Amalek, not because the historic people still exists, but because a society of rational actors can sometimes believe that the world is full of rational actors with whom one can negotiate peace. It is not always so.

The Rabbi Is Wrong:

Rabbi Sacks is wrong. The greatest danger is not terror. It’s radical Islam, which is the source of virtually all contemporary terrorism.

One cannot remember, never mind confront the face of evil if you refuse to call it by its name. We are not commanded ‘not to hate’ the chariot riders (Egypt), or to remember what the attackers of the weak (Amalek) did. We don’t identify these enemies by their military techniques. Terror is a technique, used to demoralize and crush. It is being used by the adherents of a specific religion, in the name of their religion. Victims may refuse to identify the purveyors of fear as Muslims, but the terrorists aren’t shy about it. A politician, a journalist, a Rabbi might say that terror isn’t Islamic, but the Muslims terrorists say it is. An Orthodox rabbi is not a higher authority on Islam than the many Muslims who proclaims terror as an integral part of their faith.  The Muslims who oppose them don’t deny the nature of their violence. A Brooklyn Imam, identifying radical Islam as a “cancer,” said:

“These scholars consider any verse that calls to treat people with kindness to have been abrogated. All that remains valid is ‘Kill! Slaughter!’ Is that the only thing that God tells us? …Muslims of the religious sector are time bombs.”

Put a Name to the Face of Evil:

If we refuse to name the contemporary Amalek, surely we cannot remember them.   If we’re too afraid to name them, they are winning.

In the first Biblical encounter with Amelek, Moses, the leader of the Israelites held up his arms during the battle, and the people were inspired to victory. The leaders of today such are not raising their hands, and the people hesitate to fight back. Rabbi Sacks says the evil is “terror.” The Dalai Lama says it’s not fair to associate terrorism with Islam.  Gandhi, the icon of nonviolence rationalized “…if Hindus became Muslims to save themselves from death, it was …not forcible conversion.”  The failure to identify, never mind remember the face of evil, the contemporary Amalek, is a violation of an obligation to God, of a responsibility to mankind.

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A More Human Mouse

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently spliced the human gene associated with language into the brains of a mouse.  While the rodents didn’t say anything about the experiment, they were better able to find chocolate in a maze then regular mice.  This is perhaps another example of science mimicking science fiction.  In H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau an evil doctor attempts to humanize wild animals through surgery and psychological conditioning.  The animals rebel, overturning the pseudo society that the doctor tried to create.  The MIT mice are docile so far, lacking the drama of Dr. Moreau, or Planet of The Apes.

The joining of human and animal isn’t shocking for many aboriginal Americans; for them the animals see themselves as human,

just with a different form.  For example the Wari’ of Brazil know a jaguar kills its prey with tooth and claw, and eats it raw.  But for the jaguar, or rather, from the jaguar’s point of view, he kills his prey with arrows like the Wari’ do; he takes the prey home, gives it to his wife and tells her to cook it.  While jaguars look like cats to the Wari’, in the eyes of the jaguar humans look like pigs, like prey.

It’s not good to be a pig or a mouse when a jaguar is hunting.

A Mouse is Always Prey

There’s of course another group of people, over thirty thousand strong by current estimates, who simply erase the boundaries between human and animal behavior.  The members of ISIS, while retaining human form, are more like predatory scavengers.  According to Franz Kafka,  jackals are disgusted by Arabs.  Certainly, the jaguar bringing a meal home to his wife is more noble than the humans who chain a little girl to a fence.  Even a jackal is above that.

The blending of species through grafting of human genes into mice has the potential to advance our understanding of memory, cognitive flexibility, and the evolution of the brain.  The blending of species by the predatory behavior of ISIS scavengers has the potential to reverse centuries of human social, intellectual and moral development.  The Island of Doctor Moreau is a happy children’s tale by comparison.

ISIS thus challenges the civilized world to respond: does it meekly acquiesce to the rape and enslavement of women, the torture and beheading of children?  Or does it act boldly to eradicate such savage, inhuman beings?  Will Western civilization behave as a man or a mouse?  It’s dangerous to be a mouse when jaguars, jackals, or ISIS supporters are on the prowl.

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