There seems to be something at the heart of historical existence that’s probably incurable. It gets the name of envy or sibling rivalry. And it’s the insurmountable fear that God might love my brother or sister more than God loves me!

In the Bible, the Cain and Abel story lies at the inaugural moment of human sequential time: the precise it-starts-from-right-there moment. There is nothing deeper, more original or primordial that occurs to prepare the incident or explain it away.

Why are Jews hated – in every generation – on the basis of whatever rationalizations the culture of the moment can dig up at that moment?

I can answer that. Jews are hated because people secretly fear, and reflexively can’t stop themselves from believing, that God’s chosen people might be and remain the Jews. 

God is far-seeing. He (please, fashionable-world, pardon the pronoun) didn’t change His mind: not in Hitler’s ovens, not in Auschwitz, nor Treblinka, nor Bergen Belsen.

Nor, in the present case, has God changed His mind.

Can God cure this sibling rivalry – the outsized unfairness, this hatred? (On the question of “outsized” or proportion – just how many Jewish nations are there, compared to the number of Muslim nations?) And who in human history has been so persecuted – on whatever pretexts are in the Zeitgeist, happening to enfashion among the beautiful people in this moment’s currents of belief and attitude – whatever the beliefs and attitudes might turn out to be right now?

To the great civilization of the West, there were – if we are to credit Matthew Arnold – over its long history, two foundations:

Athens and Jerusalem

The Academy, the House that Plato built in Athens – where truth can be, has been, is meant to be – sought without fear or favor, is the philosophical foundation.

And the other, which calls for telling the truth (without scanting the difficult parts or self-flattery) about what one has lived in linear time – the historical foundation – that is the contribution of Jerusalem, the Biblical foundation.

And I can tell you that my mind, as it contemplates the menacing of Jews in the Academy, and with that the present shredding, shattering and tearing asunder of this historically and culturally joined foundation, is having a helluva troubled time getting through it!

Speaking very personally, as a person who is both a philosophy professor and a Jew, I too am substantially a compound of Athens and Jerusalem. With the result that, when the civilization based on these companion-foundations splits asunder, I can sense myself as well, quite simply and obviously …

coming apart at the seams.