Rachel Weeps Again: Culture, Conflict, and the Collapse of Meaning…

An Fear Ciúin lives and works in the Irish midlands. He has a keen interest in medieval and early modern history. He’s actually fairly quiet if you met him, but is contrarian by nature, Catholic by choice, culturally nationalist, politically open-minded and philosophically anarchist. 

Saving Israel 

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

Tertullian

 

Take neither Jews nor Christians as guardians, they are guardians of each other. 

Surah Al-Ma’idah, 5.50

 

My heart ran forth …

but wisdom halted it, 

out far afield,

asked: did you sow this seed

around your house, 

or in the neighbour’s garden

or any nearby acreage of need?

No, then it will not grow in outer places.

Love has its proper soil, its native land. 

Jessica Powers, ‘My heart ran forth’ (1948)

 

It was in the glow of his victory at the battle of Asculum (279 BC) that King Pyrrhus of Greece realised that one more win like that and the Greeks were finished. These newcomers, natives of Latium, could be killed of course, but they continued “to pour forth sons, like water from a fountain”. Greece could look back on a glorious past, but she had run out of water. It is from that battle that we derive our concept of the ‘Pyrrhic victory’. Historians are not sure of the exact details of what then transpired, but the result was that Greece took the less glorious but much smarter path of living on through Rome and a cultural ‘blood transfusion’ of sorts took place. Rome, like all empires, attempted to eradicate the history and culture of the peoples it conquered. The one exception made was Greece. In time Rome’s own decline and fall also proved unique, as prior to death, its culture was absorbed not into the veins of a new empire, but by a religious sect, an offshoot from the religion of a people the Romans knew as the Judeans. In picking their way through the detritus of empire the sect was merely following the teaching of its founder to let the weeds grow undisturbed, for fear of harming the wheat (Matt. 13.29), to gather up what is left over, so that nothing may be lost (John 6.12) and that of its early prominent Jewish leader that, ‘whatever is honourable my brothers and sisters, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, whatever is excellent, whatever is worthy of praise, hold fast to these things’ (Philippians 4:8).

Pope Leo the Great had even purportedly gone with some of his flock to weed between the cobblestones on the roads leading into the city, so that that it would be fit ‘to receive a king’ in the days before the arrival of Attila the Hun. This was a deeply ironic turn of events, as Rome had spared no effort in her attempt to eradicate Judea. Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish War (c. 75 AD) leaves no doubt that the violence and cruelty we are currently witnessing in the Middle East is sadly nothing new. There have been many such Pyrrhic victories in history and we are presently witnessing another. 

On a recent visit to the public library I noticed a map, cleverly designed to view the modern world in a way that we self-described first worlders would regard as ‘upside-down’. It stirred a childhood memory, of holding my father’s hand as he showed me the Mappa Mundi (World Map) in Hereford Cathedral. Made about 1300, Hibernia, Scotia and Anglia were just about squeezed into its lower left edge, in perennial danger of sliding back into the abyss. There be monsters! Through its middle cuts the Mediterranean and at its heart rises Jerusalem, with it twelve towers facing outwards in all directions. What’s remarkable about the Mappa is its shape and the ‘circular’ frame of mind that produced it. It should cause us to reconsider some of the assumptions we hold about the medievals. The siting of Jerusalem at ‘the navel (womb) of the world’ is typical of the medieval worldview. The old city was not just the geographic centre of the world then, it was the place where the world’s ‘great debate’ returned for resolution, as it was where it began. It was where the two brothers, Esau and Jacob, were born, the younger grasping the heel of the elder during their delivery (Genesis 25). It was the direction where, as W.B. Yeats would have it, ‘rough beasts slouch towards’ to be born. Hopefully, they go there too to die. 

The French coined the phrase folie à deux (the madness of two) to describe a shared psychosis of mutual destruction. It is tempting to lay all the blame at the Israeli state’s feet but what is presently occurring in the Middle East is a classic folie à deux. It is the horrific culmination of three centuries of fantasy and vanity, religious and secular, and very few are innocent; not Christian anti-Semites, not Islamic anti-Semites, not nationalism, not social Darwinism, nor imperial Russia, France, Germany, Britain or the US. What is now happening there might be part of someone, somewhere’s cunning plan, but for the Palestinians there is no plan,  no endgame. It is the culmination of seventy years of rack and rope. It is not self-defence, it is vengeance and torture for the sake of it, pure and simple. The hopes and dreams paradoxically born both from nineteenth century European imperialism and nationalism, and because of the suffering caused by European imperialism and nationalism, have now returned to the world’s navel, and are being confronted by older and rougher gods. Some will object that there are other parts of the world that deserve our attention and indeed there are: Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine. Yet, this is different, and we all know it. Much is at stake; one false move and another global conflagration is not unrealistic. Yet, this is what happens when culture is forced to serve as handmaid to the interests of the state, and where those in power falsely assume that neat lines can be drawn across other peoples’ sand, and even through each human heart, to split into convenient rational and spiritual spheres. Utopia is turned into dystopia: Heaven into Hell. The road to Hell … etc. 

After all, what is the basis of culture if not the Latin cultus – “Who is your god? What is that god’s nature?” The foundations of the state of Israel, lest any of us forget, was a brainchild of the political left, no matter how much the right has recently claimed it. I am not trying here to ignore cause and effect, or give Islam ‘a pass’. As the Grand Iman Ayman al-Tayyib of Al-Azhar, Egypt (the closest thing to a pope in Sunni Islam) told Pope Francis in 2019, the scale of death and destruction successfully provoked by “those nineteen criminals” (the 9/11 hijackers) has been unparalleled in the history of the Middle East. The rotten fruit of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, like Hamas, are just the latest iteration of a rage that began with the destruction of the Sunni Caliphate by dying European empires between the World Wars. Dates are important and not easily forgotten. October 7th not only commemorates the Yom Kippur War, but also European victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571, much as 9/11 was the anniversary of the ‘miraculous’ raising of the siege of Vienna in 1683. A deeply resented lid is just about being kept on things for now, by Western military hegemony acting through local despotic puppets. Anyone lauding Palestinian resistance to Israeli aggression are of course on the right side of justice and history, but need not forget that there is more to Hamas & Co. than just resistance. Northern Ireland it is not! We in the West however know that the ‘god’ driving all the current carnage is money; filthy lucre, and the will to power that it fuels, as President Trump’s recent gold-tinted tour of fawning Arab regimes has amply displayed. Our big god however has been given a helping hand by some lesser minions, who should know better. 

Culture is important, and the danger of overplaying difference is matched only by the consequences of underplaying it; and cultural relativism has been a prominent feature Western thinking for the last fifty years. With the successive failures of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, militarism and economic bondage, the return of highly politicised religion should be of no surprise. With reason so often overruled by selfish human interest, a new rough beast has begun to rise from between the cobblestones of the age of enlightenment. The last twenty months we have witnessed a Western complacency and hypocritical silence unlike any other, as any aspiration to ‘universal values’ or international law is left bleeding and starving on the floor of the United Nations, and a culture that recently lectured much of the world about its ‘Judaeo-Christian values’ has been exposed as being nothing of the sort. We have been so busy cancelling our internal opponents, we have ended up cancelling ourselves. No doubt to cruel and cynical minds, it’s all simply a waiting game. After all, did not Hitler egg-on his henchmen by asking them, “Who now remembers the Armenians?” Real antisemitism is back, and it is unsurprisingly making steady inroads in the formerly ‘immune’ US, a situation that Zionists, in their rush to silence, cancel and even prosecute, will only exacerbate. Tensions within the Jewish state itself have widened as the dream dies through the moral depravity of its practice. Israel is now divided between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi (‘Christian Jews V Muslim Jews’ as Bernard Lewis predicted), between religious and secular and between the state and the Jewish diaspora. The historian Ilan Pappé sees in this a rerun of the Old Testament split between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. As with 3000 years ago, Judah may survive, the other is already history.

The ‘debate’ in the UK’s House of Commons on Wednesday, 14 May, is worth watching as it too will enter the history books. Hypocritical and shameful in equal measure, should we in Ireland be surprised? Our own local hypocrisies notwithstanding, it makes one eternally grateful that our grandparent’s generation sacrificed so much to rid us of that system. Only the Guardian saw fit to inform His Majesty’s subjects that the commitment his government had made not to arm Israel as long as they engage in genocide was a pack of lies. The brave consistency of John Taylor excepted, the ‘loyal sons of Ulster’ were in attendance of course, fiddling with their phones in uncharacteristic silence, as the full consequences of their decades-long, vicarious cheerleading began to dawn across porcine pink faces. After all, Israeli historian Avi Schlaim asserts that ‘everything’ the state of Israel has learned about torture, including the ‘uses’ of hunger, it learned from the government and military of our neighbour’s. Praise indeed! One would think that being among the primary creators and sustainers of the current carnage, that we would now be at that historical moment of self-awareness where we might want to show some remorse? No such luck. What kind of system would not only take the recent historical trauma of one people and encourage them to direct it into rage against another, while supplying them with the means to do so? Greeks we are not!

Modern antisemites and philosemites have been drinking from opposites side of the same well, to the detriment of the Jewish people and their faith. The key to avoiding the twin pitfalls of bigotry and cultural relativism is a robust ecumenism that respects difference but does not leave any beyond the reach of fair and rational criticism. In the long debate between Judaism and Christianity there have of course been many dark episodes, but there has also been light. Beginning with Augustine’s Letter to Faustus, there is a long tradition that expresses what the prophet Isaiah called the ‘small, still voice’ (Kings. 19.11-13), and although perhaps not well enough known, it has been a two-way dialogue. Those looking for a dispassionate re-evaluation of the emergence of rabbinical Judaism in the third century AD, along with a remarkably courageous reassessment of Jewish relations with Romans and Christians in the classical and ‘dark’ ages should look to Professor Israel Jacob Yuval’s Two nations in your womb (2006). Those looking for a thorough and refreshingly non-polemical background to modern European antisemitism should read Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s tears (1997). Although he had less success in provoking a similar debate with Islam – foolishly cancelled as it was by the whataboutery of the politically correct – for those of a more biblical mindset, the challenge posed by the writings of  Rabbi Jacob Neusner led Benedict XVI to pen his magnum opus,  a three-volume study of the historical Christ. 

All that we need to or can ever really know about ‘Israel’ and ‘the end times’ that some have seemed so keen to provoke of late, can be found in St Paul’s letter to the church of Rome (Romans 9-12). The essence of the message is that both Israel and ‘the nations’ have been ‘called’ and that ‘call’ is irrevocable, that the theological ‘split’ between us is a mystery and a deliberate one, that the mystery itself is an essential part of His ‘plan’, that God knows what he’s up to, that the test for us is in our trusting Him in this, and that one should never try to second guess that, nevermind arrogantly assume  you could push His hand. To put it in more secular terms, one could paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, when he referred to the taking of frat boys who spend six months a year surfing off Florida, transplanting them halfway across the globe, arming them with military-grade weaponry to take someone else’s land, house, livelihood and dignity, so that they can reinvent themselves as first century olive farmers. It is literally as stupid as it sounds: It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all those descended from Israel are Israel … For there is no difference between Jew or Gentile – the same Lord is Lord of all … I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not become proud: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles have come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. 

Tellingly, in the homily he delivered at his inaugural mass the new pope reaffirmed Paul’s interpretation of what ‘all Israel’ means, and before any local ‘dispensationalists’ explode in rage about his use of the term ‘chosen people’, it is neither an example of papal infallibility nor of ‘replacement theology’. It is simply a quiet confirmation, and a most welcome one at that, of the traditional understanding of this mystery, long held by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Christians, and stretching from Augustine’s Contra Faustum to Vatican II’s Nostra aetate. It’s easy to see why Dianne Bergant, who taught Robert Prevost everything he knows about the Bible, regards him as a wise choice for what she termed ‘our axial age’. The literature on Jewish and Christian Zionism is already too large. Jewish Zionism’s roots can be traced to the gnostical speculations of the Kabbalah in the 18th century Ottoman Empire; Christian Zionism dates back further, to the first Puritans in Britain. Both were rather ‘niche’ roots.

There are learned people from both religious traditions  who can guide the uninitiated through the origins and consequences of this most dangerous, modern, warmongering ‘golden calf’ (Exod. 32). The Welsh rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbock and the Anglican Pauline scholar N.T. Wright are both solid guides. On the unique ‘Irish’ seeds of much current Zionist thinking, the foremost expert is a US scholar of Ulster heritage, Donald Akenson. It would all take too long to go into, is truly depressing stuff, and filled with the usual imperial guff re ‘choseness’ and ‘remnants’ and ‘come ye out from among them’, etc. etc. In any case, it would be of no consolation to Palestinians already suffering in a way we can no longer grasp, to be informed that the vengeance they are presently on the receiving end of was partly the product of a similar impotent rage 200 years ago and 2000 miles away, reacting to Irish Catholic demands for religious and social emancipation. Still, the connections are uncanny.

Thankfully, many within the house of Israel, both secular and religious, are now finding the voice to say, “Not in my name”. Personally, I found a recent interview with actor Wallace Shawn the most moving. The still, small voice still lives. Words no more than dates are important. One does not need a degree in biblical studies to know that when Jesus told the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well that salvation comes through the Jews (John 4.22) he meant something different to what John was referring to when he used the term ‘the Jews’ to describe those the disciples were hiding ‘in fear of’ behind a locked door in the upper room in Jerusalem (John 20.19).

We can perhaps understand some of the consequential pitfalls of our own cultural relativism when we consider that the Samaritan woman only ever encountered Christ because she had no choice but to wait and only go to the well at ‘the sixth hour’ (3pm). We don’t need to imagine many Palestinian women in similar straights today waiting for nightfall. If we are to learn from the mistakes of the past and present, Christians today can decide to return to the well together. It has been noted by Slugger voices in recent times of the importance of interpreting the Old Testament through the New. Catholics should become more familiar with the words, contexts and traditions of biblical texts often so nonchalantly quoted at us by others; Protestants, one might humbly suggest, could drop the habit of ‘freestyling’ interpretation and return to the 2000-year-old well of structured authority provided in the liturgical books of the Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans.

This is even more needed now, as just like the Protestant Reformation was accompanied by a revolution in printing, our internet age is ushering in something of a post-print culture, where image, sound, soundbite and symbol are making a comeback. All of us Western Christians now require the help of our ‘elder brothers’ in the Eastern Church, as much as in Judaism, to navigate our way back to foolishly discarded sources. The martyrdom of the Palestinian paediatrician Alaa al-Najjar and the images that accompanied her suffering in recent days reminded me of a truly perverted kind of Pietà. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit … O Lord, give us hearts of flesh. Images too often speak much louder than words, especially where words, as St Peter reminds us, are too often taken by humans and ignorantly or wilfully misinterpreted, or ‘twisted to their own destruction’ (2 Peter 3.16). Are we at the ‘beginning of the end’? That none of us know. Perhaps however we are at the end of the beginning?

And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the river – i.e. as soon as Israel separates herself from the Torah, the attribute of Justice comes forth to ‘bathe’ in the blood of Israel, because of the neglect of the Torah – And her maidens walked along by the river’s side: these are the nations who persecute Israel, because of her neglect of the Torah.

Man’s fate depends in the last resort upon repentance and prayer, and especially prayer with tears; for there is no gate which tears cannot penetrate. It is written here: And she opened it and saw the child … and behold the babe wept … pleading with the Holy One like a child with his father, and she had compassion on him … And she called the child’s mother, who wept, as it is written: In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted (Jer. 31.16). The child wept, and the mother wept.

Concerning the future it says: They will come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them. For the sake of the weeping of Rachel, the child’s mother, will they come and be gathered in from captivity … The redemption of Israel cannot come until the tears of Esau cease. 

The Zohar, Shemoth, 20