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Manufacturing Idols Beyond God
00:05:05
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| What is the prophetic tradition in the Jewish religion? | |
| It's almost never, the prophetic tradition is almost never calling for the preemptive genocide of Amalek. | |
| It's almost always, at least in my namesake, Jeremiah, I believe it's almost always, look at our corruption, look at our corruption, look at our corruption, look at our corruption. | |
| So there is this aspect, I think, that there is a deep Jewish religious and definitely cultural layer. to even just the questions of Zionism and Israel. | |
| And that is why I call it the iron calf cult. | |
| They call everything iron, right? | |
| I've pointed out that we went from 1923 of Jabotinsky publishing the wall of iron, which basically is the architecture for what the sort of Israeli foreign policy becomes over the next century, what the Likud party ultimately is trying to pursue, to then 2023, 100 years later, in response to the alleged sort of security breakdown of October 7th, | |
| you basically have Netanyahu's regime responding with swords of iron, which is this sort of genocidal response. | |
| And as I was telling on this, the radio show that I do, Understanding Israel-Palestine Beyond the Walls, I just interviewed a Jewish-American journalist, Richard Silverstein, who has often been like the one who can transcend the Israeli censors. | |
| That's one of the reasons why we don't really know what, that's why there's questions about Netanyahu being alive and these kinds of things or what's actually happening in Israel, because there's such hard military censorship there that it actually takes like an American Jew to get sources from Israel and get some of the information that's trying to be suppressed. | |
| And these are the kinds of issues that I begin talking with him about. | |
| And so I made this point to him. | |
| The reason why I call it the iron calf cult is that we could say, and Richard has tended to say Zionism is not Judaism. | |
| It's at most it's a hijacking of Judaism of Jewish terms or something like that. | |
| But I've always said, no, there's a continuity layer here. | |
| This is sure, it's partially a hijacking of it. | |
| But my point is, is like the Jews who then tried to worship the golden calf when probably what the apex of like actual the Jewish moral proposition to the world is, which is like Mosaic law, the Ten Commandments, | |
| those are a very, I think those are a good proposal in terms of civilization and ethics in many ways, that there were those who lost faith and they started worshiping an idol and it was a golden calf. | |
| And you could say, oh, those aren't real Jews. | |
| And you get into the sort of the no real Scotsman fallacy. | |
| No, those were real Jews. | |
| They were just wrong in a way. | |
| And so these are also Jews and they're also wrong, but they're also the dominant, the major dominant faction in the Jewish world globally. | |
| The Torah is a story of the conquest of the Holy Land on some very basic level and other stories as well. | |
| Do you think that Judaism could exist in this sort of suspension of next year in Jerusalem in the sense of we'll never, much like you're waiting for the Messiah, like we'll never really do it. | |
| We'll never actualize the taking of the Holy Land. | |
| Do you think it could exist in that way or it is on some basic level, as you were suggesting? | |
| Yeah, it's a hijacking of Judaism. | |
| can grant that to some degree, but is it not a fulfillment, an actualization of the Torah? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's just at the very least, it's meant to be that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, and so there is this possibility of where there would be the actual resolution of this idol worship to some extent, which is the idea that you actually have to manufacture. | |
| If God doesn't show up for you, you have to manufacture, you have to, it's an infantile theology. | |
| It's that you have to manufacture the idol and the end times and the taking of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the temple. | |
| And all of these things also, there's, and this exists in all kinds of religious strains of thought is that you can get sway to every, the problem is usually people getting too concrete with words that were either spoken or written by men. | |
| And they are often an inspiration directly from God. | |
| And but then you then concretize it and the scripture itself becomes an idol of its own. | |
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When Scripture Becomes an Idol
00:00:16
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| And so there was always, this was one thing that I did begin to understand when I was studying religion at Williams College was this idea of that there's this sort of a God beyond the God that's talked about. | |
| So the God that that rep that that exists beyond Yahweh. | |