Save Israel from Those Leading it to Suicide! (A Touch Dramatic But Well…True)

lihishtaweel-justice-judaism-israel.pdf

 Hello!

Lihish’ta’weel (http://www.ricardolevinsmorales.com/writings.shtml and attached) is the best, most concise and important text I have read about Israel, and one that both answers and extends the understandings and experiences I gained by visiting Israel this summer as a birthrighter, a lone Jewish traveller, and an activist meeting friends of activists.

It does an incredible job of presentating the REALITY of the situation as it stands at its best and worse, nearly escapes all cliches (love vs. fear manages to be in there) by providing stunning examples and dis-examples from the history of similar situations, and provides a framework for reclaiming Israel, Judaism, and Justice…in one little 50 pages swoop.

This is done by laying out the most important and generally misrepresented historical engine of the conflict, Zionism, (and its commitment to repeat American colonial genocide) and the small, largely military elite that continues to keep this vision in the driver’s seat in Israel in Israel and their unmentined allies (dubious reactionary elements including extremely conservative Jews, the Bush adminstrative, and radically conservative evangelical christians in the US and arms dealers and arms dealing nations across the world including those ‘hostile’ to Israel).

But as I said this is a hopeful vision. By pinpointing and umasking the key engine benefiting from the cycles of violence–a genocidal and suicidal vision to eliminate non-Jews from Israel so as to start from a purity of place, people, and a ‘necessary’ obliteration of history, and its key rhetorical device, inevitable dystopia–Ricardo Levins Morales creates a crucial and imperative counternarrative to those who believe the conflict is natural, inevitable, or hopeless.

This vision of an Arab-free Palestine is killing Israel… and this vision is not realistic but suicidal. Creating everlasting war at all costs, and constantly preventing and in fact disavowing the possibility of real peace (as RLM breathtakingly demonstrates) is suicide. It is suicide for the state of Israel and as such a huge and historic contingent of the Jewish People. It is suicidal for a Judaism based on justice as opposed to war, on ethics as opposed to genocide or appartide. It is suicidal for creating a safer middle east and safer world, and is one of the key facts keeping so many Arabs in bad shape under the shitty Arab regimes that have consistently played along and continued the conflict for their own benefit. 

There is of course, more that could be said on this conflict, more perspectives to be included, more history, more…scholarship. This is not what is needed. What is needed is people to stand up and Save Israel! Save Judaism! Save justice! Save the Palenstinian and Israeli people who are being either starved in Gaza or exposed every day to the horrific logic of their own leaders and the constant war which that logic engenders.

“No war but the clown war!” (a slogan from a radical Israeli clown brigade for peace). Enough of the clowns in power, enough of them spreading suffering down to too many…especially to their own people who have suffered so much and need not suffer this horror any longer.

Spread the word. Get Israel and Judaism off this suicidal path, and this path for suicidal souls. Read this short little book, and then work with your friends and allies in Israel and around the world to make good on a Judaism worth living.

Jesus says “God is the God of the living!” or Nirvana is Samsara & Samsara is Nirvana

The mystery is this: the world is perfect, already and always. In the deepest sense, at the level of religious reality, the reality through which all others pass through, everything is, currently, perfect; everything, all the pain, suffering, and horror…Engels’ makes a similar statement when he says that in the last analysis, even if we can never arrive there, everything is economic, determined by class relations, or if you prefer, in the deepest sense everything is predetermined, by God or fate or geography or causality or necessary illusion—whatever.

Nevertheless, at present, perfection is hidden or fails to be linked or channeled together, and as such, all the transcendent acts of human kindness (or beauty or truth or humanity—) fall dead into earth or lay silent behind a veil…as opposed to flowing ever more brightly together, the not-of-this-world that could be, the mysterious, hidden, kingdom of heaven in your hearts

And if we are to take the shattering of the vessels at its word, how are we to heal the world and heal God? Both need healing and the processes are inseparable! The challenge, as put forth by Jesus is not to appear generous but to be generous, or in middle school talk, not to appear cool but to be cool, not to seem to be changing the world but, really, to be doing it. And so we get the confusion of another world, or of heaven, but as Jesus says, God is the God of the living!

And so we must then go beyond Christian anti-worldism and Buddhist escape to what one could call a world of bodhisattvas, but human ones, human ones in a world lost of the shall-not-morality, and hence of death, (if not of guilt and repair) even what one might call egotistical humans, if by that we mean the seriousness of childhood, and the joy, of living the present as time being spent, history being made.

This presentness, this history making living, this living not coping, this traction is the not-of-this-world that makes real the mystery and is the living out of the perfection that always, already is, the deepest meaning of existence itself…to exist/existing/ex-istence

Of course, the living out of this is not the elimination of self-alienation but the reification, the objective creation of that world, of a new commons, of a ‘non-representational’ public sphere (a public one!) a hope, a cast, a global societal transformation…

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 This is from the tradition of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah. As it has been explained to me, after God cleared some space from himself to create the world, he created vessels, matter, and then proceeded to fill them with himself…but this was too much for the vessels and they shattered, falling apart and trapping inside them pieces of God. And this is the world, the destruction of God’s creation through exposure to perfection, yet imbued with and trapping perfection inside it. Our task within this framework then, along with the Holocaust insight that when we suffer God too suffers, is to heal the world, and in doing so to heal God and in making the world complete, complete God, as well. In realizing perfection at the level of world, we realize perfection at the level of God.

 See Mark 12:27 (also, Matthew 22:23)

 These are those who are capable of reaching nirvana, but, unlike Buddhas who leave the world, they hold on to one desire so as to constantly be reincarnated back, the one desire being the enlightenment of all sentient beings…

 That is, the previous claim—“I make history” or “we make history”—is inherently spectacular, based in representation, of the appearing to be generous; what is crucial is to make good that claim at the level of life itself, everyday life.