“If the nations have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, it is right and proper that they should minister to their earthly needs.”
A Spiritual Founder’s Quote
Spiritual Founder
We have political and spiritual founders, and anyone who has any understanding of the basis of our spiritual foundation knows how much Paul the Apostle is responsible for the assumptions we hold in Western Civilization. The sense of equality we presume when viewing the world and identifying “bad guys” is largely due to his tradition.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. — Galatians 3:28
If Paul, the zealous Jew who met Christ on the road to Damascus, did anything with his life, it was an attempt to break down the walls of difference. He sought to destroy any form of tribalism, and bring humanity together as one people. Without that concept, we wouldn’t have the presumptions of equality nor rights with which we orient our sense of right and wrong.
So…
What do we owe the Jews? What do we owe to the Israelis? Well, according to Paul, we owe them everything.
Cultural Foundations
As Paul was going from synagogue to synagogue, and then to the gentiles (the nations) in each of the areas he traveled, he sought to gather offerings for the Jerusalem church during a great famine. His quote above, from Romans Chapter 15, verse 27, is a way to rationalize why it’s important to provide monetary relief to these people.
If the nations have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, it is right and proper that they should minister to their earthly needs.— Romans 15:27
The way I see it, we owe them for a culture that doesn’t contextualize rape as if there might be a good reason for it. I mean, what’s the difference between asking what a woman was wearing and what her ethnicity or religion was? Italian women, in 1999, were told that wearing jeans mattered when considering their accusations of rape which rightly caused a furor of anger across the country.
And have no doubt, that is exactly what is happening anytime someone provides a caveat around the events of October 7th. They will say something like, “Well, let’s look at the history of the land.” Or, “The history of colonization…” Or they might say that they are simply in favor of Palestinians being “free”, which all human beings should be.
But even our idea of freedom for every human being is owed to our Jewish heritage. When people talk about the freedom of human beings across the world, when they criticize oppression, they are doing so from a perspective so deeply entrenched in our cultural narrative that they could not tell you why they assume it to be a given. Why do they assume that people should be free? This was not always the case and it’s historically brand new.
This assumption grows out of the torah, from its first book, and is reflected in the Declaration of Independence.
All political concepts start with an assumption about the nature of humanity, and the assumption in the DOI is that all human beings are created equal in their direct relationship to God or “the God of nature.” Everything that follows in the DOI and the U.S. Constitution rests upon that assumption and is incoherent without it. There would be no reason to protect the rights of individuals without an assumption that an individual, by nature of being human, has some right that transcends any human opinion.
And this is why we don’t contextualize rape, murder, kidnapping or anything that happened on October 7th. The right of each individual human being, each individual victim, trumps the political opinions of their rapist, murderer, or kidnapper.
The instinct to look at the ethnicity or religion of the victim as a means to contextualize is the natural conclusion of identity politics. It is the exact opposite of the assumptions needed to create and maintain an America.
Ideological Consequences
One of the greatest things Aleksander Solzhenitsyn revealed in his book The Gulag Archipelago was that the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union were not simply blips on the radar committed by evil people. They were the natural consequence of the ideology. An ideology steeped in power dynamics between groups of people that led them to rationalize mass atrocities. It was the inevitable conclusion of identity politics viewing the world as groups of people fighting each other for power in a zero sum game.
What people are doing today when they contextualize a mass atrocity, is looking at the world not through a lens consistent with American ideals based on individual human rights, but as a battle ground of power between groups of people. It’s a frighteningly simple and lazy formula that looks at each conflict in terms of which group has more power, and automatically presumes them to be in the wrong. That’s it. This is why, before the bodies of the victims on October 7th were discovered and buried, before Israel even had a chance to discuss a plan for defending its citizens, people were in the street waving Palestinian and sometimes Isis flags.
When I see them twist their words in an attempt to rationalize their position, it reminds me of some child with chocolate smeared all over their face, trying to deny that they just ate all of their Halloween chocolate in one sitting. We all know you’re lying. At some level, so do you.
But when your basis for viewing the world is simply figuring out who is more powerful and condemning them regardless of any other factors, it’s easy to make stupid mistakes. It’s easy to be forced into a position that requires justifying and rationalizing atrocities. And once you do, even if you aren’t so sure about your conclusion, you’re then stuck saving face because your fragile ego can’t handle what admitting this problem means for all the rest of your bad assumptions. This is the process that created entire nations on board with the atrocities of the 20th Century, and here they are doing the same mental gymnastics, seeking out some medal in the mass atrocity Olympics.
But when a world view consists of only one thing — zero sum power — there is no seeking truth because truth is no longer relevant. To them truth is something people claim in order to maintain their power.
Cultural Impacts
So what do we owe the Jews? In some sense, we owe them everything. And if we are to come out of this conflict on the “right side of history,” we will need to look at it within the context they provided us. Through the lens of valuing each individual life as a sacred gift regardless of their political ideas, ethnicity, religion or location.
But how can we do that in a war where civilians will die? By valuing not just impact, but intent as well.
Valuing human life means that we are committed to protecting it. When we actively protect it, it may mean that we take it from those who have transgressed the rights of others to prevent their further transgressions. In doing so, purposefully trying to avoid death among those who do not deserve it should be the intent. Intent and impact do not always align, but that is an allowance we have in our civilization.
This is why we have different degrees of murder and manslaughter. This is the reasoning for why hate crimes were created. There is a difference between a lady who accidentally breaks a traffic law, hurting people in another car, and Jeffery Dahmer.
And what Hamas did was release a few thousand Jeffery Dahmers on civilians in Israel. This is why it is so much more natural to condemn them as opposed to the reaction to inadvertent killing of innocents.
When we view the actions of people with the intent to kill in purely evil, sadistic ways, it speaks to their hearts and minds. We are viewing the software they are running on and it’s frightening to imagine people can think and do that. It reminds us of our own dark shadows.
But watching Israel send out messages to a whole city to leave an area before they strike is much more understandable to a healthy mind, even if the impact is not ideal. It’s a mindset, a type of software that we can at least relate to.
When people support Israel, when they support Jews in general, it’s not simply supporting a nation or an ethnicity. It is supporting the ingredients of Western Civilization without which those who condemn Israel have no ground to stand on.
It’s not simply Israel I want to “win”, whatever that means in reality. It’s modern Western civilization I want to prevail. I want more of a world where people understand that evil sadism and rape in the service of political goals is not something to contextualize.
Thank you for this article Tommy.