10/10/2024
Thinking about responsibility, between Oct 7th and Yom Kippur.
So much of what we find ourselves scouring our selves to feel responsible for is not just the lame things we do, but the terrible things we let happen, don't seem able or willing to stop.
In Israel, it's a cognitive challenge for most people I know to experience this in terms of human destruction since many-if-not-most of us are deeply, deeply comforted and even inspired by our capacity for, and recent aggressive willingness to wield, violence on a state level involving a mix of bomb machines and, less popularly, but all the more solemnly, humans on the ground. Vulnerable in their immanence are the soldiers, who we here know as All The Kids, but aspirationally dominant. An acquaintance in shul in Williamsburg who had just been serving in Tulkarem described the friendly fire fatality rate as having gone from a high of about 50% of Israeli fatalities to only about 20%.
And I wonder, deeply, with some dim-witted humility, what responsibility is when it comes to managing violence.
I have thought for so long of State-Sponsored violence as something like a natural force, something I could claim and feel no responsibility for, in light of my disassociation from most armies.
It's so different in Israel.
I am not any more a Nationalist but I am and have been so nourished by (Jewish) nationalism, in ways I have no right to deny or misrepresent. As a kid, it made so much sense, in the context of all our resistance to a global European (Edomite!) fiat that seemed to rule through etiquette and brainwash as a marketting of the peace and conventionality of surrender to the rules as such, and I blamed every Jewish crime on our willingness to take their money or their offers of success on their terms. I really understood Jewish Nationalism, like the local parrallel Latino, Black and Irish Nationalisms as our only authentic way of organizing around the responsibilieties and treasured connections that really did feel like, or seem to be our closest, if not only, hope for representation regionally and even globally.
I don't believe that any more but I can't help but notice how much I love my friends, my families, however distant but all the more so most nearby. How responsible I want to feel to whatever makes the good more accessible.
And like a psycho, I still want to hear and believe the Torah that offers to be a long term promise of a long term better way.
But it's not the violence that we used to use.
It doesn't matter if Jesus or the Baal Shem Tov tell us-- the fundamental nature of success in this world are on the one hand, all forms of violence (Mars) and all forms of the desired (Venus) with the all encompassing procurement medium (Mercury) of one through the other, managed and negotiated either verbally (hypnotically) or tacitly.
And so, the fundamental truth of all Idols and Idolotries is the fundamental priority they represent.
In the Torah, these are, on the one hand, the three main prohibtions that one dies rather than commit: Murder, Perversion, "Idol-worship". Only one of those three includes the other two, and is thus both conceptual and thoughtlessly practical: the excuses we make, and don't even believe in, or make sure to believe in, are still Idols, specifically in the hermeneutic-marketing aspect.
I worry about murder more than perversion, to be honest. I fear Esau more than Ishmael. I notice how much of fear of love, trust, and humanism parrallel and mask our fear of the full bonding that would change everything between/amidst Us and Them, and how much this is part of the war for "them" too.
Part of what was so threatening and unacceptable about Oct 7th was the specter of sexual violence that was not "bothered" to be proven, instead just attested and presumed. Whatever evidence there was was disappeared, surely to some degree because whatever documentation would endure would soon become something like popular po*******hy, globally, and this is not an acceptable accomplishment here.
Because our violence, at it's most respected and romanticized, is in defense of our boundaries, so that we could feel good about enjoying the good that we already have and are.
The responsibility to party
to celebrate,
to dance
to rejoice and enjoy so that rejoicing and enjoyment can be modeled, and circulated
has felt like the realest work to me sometimes
why I admire my dancer and performer
artist and comedian
farmer and minister
builder and speaker friends so much
there is so much to do to make things right
and I wonder about security
knowing how much security is a euphemism
for the specter of violence
our security people and not theirs.
as forms of prerequisite for the right to party
feeling safe, through totemic signals
to make sure it's ok
if only for now
is why we have holidays
and once our entitlement
and enjoyment
turns us into the priviledged impatient
insisting on protection through a violence that does not want to hear what's going on
because we're doing something
I am so scared
of either pretending to understand, incorrectly
or refusing to understand
what's important and why
So much of what is and was most heartbreaking about Oct 7th
to me
is how much those seemed like the best people ever
all those people killed
and the ones held, alive
didn't seem unfamiliar
or alien
They seemed like the coolest, most good hearted people I have known, just trying to do good things.
The people living in very, very left-wing border towns
unafraid to be close to Gaza, but instead
afraid for what was happening to and in Gaza
afraid of what we could be doing
or would be
or have been
People who believed in a party holiday
"Simchat Torah"
The Joy of the Gospel/the Way
enough to find a party fun enough to trip at
unafraid to get close to borders
I'm so sad about the wrongness of the lessons
of a betrayed trust in how fine it is, don't worry
these are my favorite things to believe
it's fine, don't worry
be cool
be love
We have learned, globally, so much about how much just letting things happen is the crime that we are all accountable in but alas
we haven't found a way to deal with violence that isn't something like violence.
well, we have another way: don't feed the beast
don't fund the project
Boycott the State, the corporations, the collaborators
sure
but that's hard nowadays
mostly totemic, unless supported by a large scale consensus
which tends to come around eventually
only to be quickly co-opted by the predatory commercial forces
that we all must become, from hunger and knowledge
to be responsible for that which we will raise.
my oldest daughter was so angry at me
for arguing that the fear of the Left-Centre Jews in Tel Aviv and everywhere else
Is just not to be N***s.
"Because we are not being N***s!
We are justified! For all the reasons!
We never did an Oct 7th in Germany or Poland
and we are not doing genocide!
we are doing what any country would do"
And I sighed
happy that she can feel this defensive of a place where she really is from, and maybe really can feel some meaningful degree of responsible for.
and sad because I had to explain
We don't know how bad it already is
we don't know how much we've already done
and if we ever did become as bad as any nation ever
Esau, Ishmael, or Amalek
would we even be able notice?
We would not
as long as the main thing we knew was that we are not that.
and can never be that.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz's use of the term "Judeo-Nazi" was an expression of his distrust and unfaith in the Torah of R Kook,
something I have never been able to overcome in myself, or in my conversations
The faith in our children
to be and show us a better way
the secular enlightenment to trust
the real that they notice to be real
along with the honesty to warn them
about what we have known and noticed.
I wonder what responsibility is.
I wonder how much education is corruption, or vaccination.
I wonder how much identification is the work
or is a wider identification available?
What is the work? When we don't want to be n***s but don't want to fail our kids? What is the work? When we don't want to lie about the danger that other people are, or the one that we are? Maybe all we can do is honestly describe the humanity and inhumanity that we have seen, and felt, and acknowledge how real all those lives are.
Which is hard when it's easy to just know how much they, in fact, are the N***s that we are protecting ourselves and everyone else from. Zionists and Terrorists alike, united in the fear of us that organizes so much of everyone else to just hold their kids a little closer, for as long as they can, until the kids themselves push us all away, to fight and love in their own way, furious at our support and incapacity alike.
Maybe responsibility is mostly about affectionate reflection, followed by just taking care of everything. I wonder how much armies can do that. Our armies or theirs. Our dissidents or theirs. Our critics or their. Our kids, one and all.
It's hard to imagine an endgame that isn't utopian after all this: the better Islam and the better Judaism hand in hand, softly educating the better secularism about reverence, taste and the experience in the depth of the heart of a sobriety and devotion that knows to love, as well as to distrust, the self that cannot identify with the other, my neighbor as myself, a calmer G-d between us, praying for rain and delighting in the taste of the fruits and cured things. I wonder what responsibility makes the better future, the one that in it's own stupid way, feels so inevitable, more inevitable and more whole.
I wonder how much it starts by just refusing to steal. Or hurt. Or pretend. Or threaten. Or win?
