Since I had the afternoon free, I thought it would be interesting to reread my journal entries from 12/30/22 to the present evening. How had the past year gone for me personally? Actually, I’d expected to find chasms that had opened underfoot, challenging me to get across them. Or sheer cliffsides, at right angles to the ground, that I’d been forced to climb. So imagine my shock to discover that I’d stayed pretty much the same sweet girl at the start of 2023 as I am tonight!

Good grief! Aren’t you supposed to evolve? To grow? To slay dragons never before encountered? Well, if you are, I’m awfully sorry!

On the other hand, I’ve never believed in the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) for its own sake, as advocated by late eighteenth-century German Romantics. True, the painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) would appear to personify that style of living. Unable to support his wife, he traveled eventually to Tahiti where he painted the women of that exotic island in the “primitive” style that was then avant-garde. However, as a painter, he was not greater than Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) who ran a masterpiece-factory where his machine paintings were mass produced, meanwhile keeping his hand in as a diplomat on the side.

Talent and hysterics might go together, but I don’t see any necessary connection. And I have seen hysteria mistaken for talent.

To return to my 2023 diary entries, instead of blazing lights intermittently plunging into doomful darks, I found a smoother continuity within. At the heart’s core, a quiet, bright joy remained pretty much constant, whatever happened. This despite a surface layer of pulsating anxiety that’s been virtually lifelong.

Why do I have that quivering surface layer? Hey, look around you. What’s not to be anxious about?

What about the events of October 7 – the gratuitously cruel and sadistic Hamas incursion into Israel on its southern border that runs alongside Gaza? What about the inferno of anti-semitism, world-wide as it seems, evoked by the toxic moral contagion of what Hamas perpetrated? Of course these mark a “before and after” in the year 2023, and in the 247th year of my America. Did those events invade my inward sense of reality, to alter it?

Not really. Of course, so far, I am writing at a physical distance from the said events. So no forecasting how I would react if they were much nearer. Nevertheless, my empathic faculty can get pretty active, even at a distance. So how, most sincerely, did I react?

A vision came back to me. It was of a scene many readers will regard as imaginary, and I have no interest in disputing that point. To me, however, it’s vivid and quite real. It’s the closing scene of my incarnation previous to the present one. In it, I’m a young woman in her early twenties. I’m Jewish, not quite hiding but in seclusion, in the German town where I live. The time is not long after 1933, the year when Hitler came to power. A neighbor has informed on us. Nazis, dressed for such occasions, bang on our door and we, family and friends in that seclusion, are loaded into the back of a truck that is parked on the sidewalk nearby. The truck is sealed, carbon monoxide is pumped into it. We are all killed.

Here’s what happens as I rise out of my lifeless body: I linger above the scene, philosophically curious to know just how extensive this killing-of-Jews is, geographically. I must have risen up pretty high, because I can see the earth’s curvature. The evil is quite extensive. It reaches to the horizon and beyond. Inwardly, I resolve to fight it when I come back.

So I cannot say that the phenomenon of October 7 surprised me. Not deeply. I recognized the world it disclosed.

***

Last night, I opened a YouTube program featuring an interview with an ultra-orthodox rabbi, a real one – the kind with a long, white, forked beard. The rabbi was being asked to comment on the conflict between the Islamists – of Hamas or anywhere else – and the Jewish state. Would it ever be resolved? The rabbi looked unperturbed but smiled and answered that it would never be resolved. 

Since I imagine that I’m in this incarnation at least partly to resolve that kind of unfortunate unpleasantness, I leaned forward attentively. Never? Hey! We liberals never say never! Whatever can you mean, rabbi with the long, forked, white beard? The rabbi didn’t cite any of the twentieth- or twenty-first century dates of the conflicts pertaining to the Jewish state – each date drawing its round of reciprocally-disputed interpretations. 

The conflict, he explained, is 4000 years old. Ishmael, elder son to Abraham by his wife’s serving maid Hagar, would inherit the birthright and the blessing if Isaac, Abraham’s son by his lawful wife Sarah – and all Isaac’s descendants – were dead!

I hadn’t thought of that but it explained a passage in the Quran that’s unlike any that I know of, in any other religion. As a Hegelian, I know that we should take scriptures more seriously than we do. People die, kill and live for what they take to be holy writ. I’m thinking of the verses in the Quran that – because they are the final ones on how to deal with Jews – orthodox interpretation takes to abrogate any milder, earlier verses in the book that is holy writ to Muslims. Those verses anticipate the genocide of the Jews attendant on the triumph of the believers. That’s annihilation no matter where they may live or how nice they are!

To be sure, there are genocidal verses in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) but they pertain to limited territories to be conquered for political control, first over tribal lands and then for the Davidic monarchy. Once that’s established, we see the Biblical Book of Ruth telling us that a Moabite woman will be the ancestress of the Davidic line, although the Moabites had been among the nations fought during the period of the conquest. We see Jonah reluctantly obeying divine orders to preach to the Ninevites, even though we know that they will later carry off ten of the twelve tribes of Israel. In post-Biblical times, we even see the rabbis lifting the cherem (eternal ban) on the Amalekites because the Assyrian king has so “mixed up the nations” that there are no pure lines of descent anymore!

So, apart from the limited and revocable cherems in the Hebrew Bible, no scripture that I know of matches the never-revoked Quranic verses that look forward to the slaying-by-believers of all Jews, at history’s end time, no matter where they live. So the explanation by the rabbi with the forked beard spotlighted a phenomenon that appears unique among the world’s scriptures. But any member of any family can recognize it:

It’s a fight to inherit the legacy.

So what is really at stake is the blessing. But, as the Hebrew Bible reminds us, over and over, you can’t get it that way!

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