SCHROEDINGER'S JEW

I just don’t understand anti-Semitism; it seems silly to me. In fact, all forms of racism seem rather dense, when one gives thought to them. Yet there is a fine line between despising someone’s worldview, and despising that person themselves.
Personally, I find the doctrines and attitudes of Christianity detestable—but even I could not think of anyone in particular I would hate for it. If I dislike Jerry Fallwell, it is because I happen to know that he is not a very nice person, and because he is a businessman of dubious honesty and intent (put the words “Liberty University” and “Reverend Moon” into a search engine and see what you get). If I dislike Pat Robertson, it is because he is a fear-mongering Kingdom-Ager with dubious political intentions and even more dubious business dealings

Dubious….dubious…”dubious” is a funny word, isn’t it? (Put “Pat Robertson” and “African diamond mines” in a search engine, BTW.)

My point is, I have a lot of reasons to dislike people who happen to be “Christians,” and many more reasons to dislike Christianity as an organized religion (which have already been run into the ground in previous posts), but really, there is no reason to hate someone simply because they are a Christian, much less a Muslim, or a Jew. Islam did not bomb the WTC; terrorists did. Jews do not control the world’s banks; rich people do. I don’t pretend to know their nationality, or care. I don’t care if David Iche sees lizard people everywhere he finds a kosher dill; David Iche takes hallucinogens, and also quotes the Simon Necronomicon as a reliable source.

I like Judaism; I have no reason not to. It is not the Jews who fight against the Separation of Church and State; it is not the Jews who seek to cock-block the nation with obtuse obscenity legislation, or fight against the availability of contraceptives and reproductive choice. They rarely seek to enforce their beliefs on others, much less legislate them in a court of law. Quite frankly, the Christians have a great deal more explaining to do than the Jews ever will.

It may have been “the Jews” who crucified Jesus (if “He” existed at all), but it was the Christians who burned the witches and launched the Inquisition. And the irony? The charge to “suffer not a witch to live” appears in the Pentateuch (accepted by the Jews), but not in the New Testament (the main text of Christianity). By orthodox Christian doctrine, the laws of the Old Testament were “fulfilled” (i.e. made obsolete) by Christ’s great “Dispensation of Grace,” and Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; this is the Law and the Prophets.”) So the impetus to burn a witch or torture an “infidel” appears in the Jewish canon—but the Jews have never historically burned anyone; yet there are no such imperatives for torture, capital punishment, or cultural discrimination in the Christian scriptures…and yet Christianity has become universally famous for these things.

It was, in fact, Judaism that gave us the Ten Commandments that have most influenced the ethics of the West; it was the superstitions of Medieval Christendom that was responsible for the Black Death (their rampant killing of rat-catching cats and lack of hygiene, both of which spread the bubonic virus, were results of common Middle-Ages superstitious piety).

While no one should be discriminated against or hated for things they were not personally responsible for (i.e. my Christian friend Mark did not personally distribute the bubonic plague in Medieval Europe; it’d be pretty silly to hold that against him--although, I admit it's a funny image), I am free to hold the doctrines of an acquired worldview accountable. Few, if any, Christians in my circle have done any great wrongs in my eyes, or have ever lent credence to a discriminatory attitude; but Christianity itself, as a philosophy, has much to answer for, in my opinion. “Hate the sin, not the sinner.”

So what brought out such introspection from me? Two things: my own misguided guilt regarding my own misguided attitudes, and a fateful visit to a most hideous website.

I like to send offbeat items to my friends. In the past, I sent them odd j-pegs with every e-mail; recently, I have taken to mailing them strange, seemingly random things. This practice will likely pick up when I have more cash to blow on postage. One day, while searching for something offbeat in an ethnic foodmart, I ran across the most delightful package of Chanukah cookies. These were no ordinary holiday morsels—they contained such arcane, eldritch symbols that the Golden Dawn itself would have been in awe. These were no mere cookies: these were virtual Abramelin Squares with candy sprinkles. I had to have them.
I conspired to mail these Kabbalistic sugar treats to my friend Rick. After an e-mail or two, Rick never responded to my request for his mailing address, so I was left pondering upon who else I should bestow them to.
And then something happened; I sort of felt…well…guilty. Well...almost. For a brief moment, I started feeling somewhat racially insensitive. Maybe these symbols were more common in Jewish culture than I believed, and I was just being ignorant and immature. So I began surfing the net for info. Fortunately, it turns out that I am not a total bastard—in addition to my having a father, the symbols were, in fact, rather esoteric, and the average Rabbi would probably find them more distasteful than divine. Good: Game on…time to buy stamps.

But while searching, I also ran across something quite shameful: an anti-Semitic website/blog that managed to disturb even my jaded, pervert eyes. I will not dignify his site by naming it here; nor will I lend him fame by mentioning his name. The Nazi need not be distinguished; therefore, I shall refer to him hereon as “Prescott.” “Prescott,” of course, believes the Jews are actively, covertly promoting all kinds of heinous international agendas; in his eyes, they run most branches of the Government, the Masons, most banks and corporations, and the Illuminati that oversee them all. They are also, apparently, cannibals and baby-killers, and “genetically inferior” as a race. Naturally, these charges won’t carry much weight to the rational mind; but I had to wonder what leads a person to such thinking.

The best case against and critique of these sorts of hysterical assertions was made by Robert Anton Wilson, in an offbeat chapter of his most recent book, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution. I will borrow from it freely here.
Leopold Bloom, a character in a James Joyce novel, may or may not be Jewish. Rabbinical law defines a Jew as the child of a Jewish mother. In this sense, then, Mr. Bloom “is not” a Jew. But according to Nazi law, a Jew “is” a person with a known Jewish ancestor. In this light, Mr. Bloom “is” a Jew, via his father. Strange, how a person can “be” and “not be” something at the same time, eh?
Yet, a humanist would define a Jew as merely a practitioner of the Judaic religion. By this definition, Bloom “is not” a Jew—he eschewed religion of any sort. But Madonna, who was born an Italian, and Catholic, but actively practices a mystical branch of Judaism, “is” a Jew, by that definition.
In the phenomenological sense, a Jew “is” someone considered Jewish by all or most of the people that he or she meets. By this standard, Bloom “is” a Jew again (and Madonna “is not”). Furthermore, in Existentialist terms, a Jew “is” anyone who chooses to consider themselves Jewish. In that sense, score another Hebrew-point for Madonna, and subtract one from Leopold—who considered himself an Irishman.
To quote Wilson directly: “I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-Semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurological habit which postmodernists call “essentialism” and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word ‘is’”

This explains a lot, really. Think about it. In some sense, the value of “x” changes with the direction it is viewed. How, then, can we discriminate against anything when we cannot satisfactorily, empirically, determine what something “is” or “isn’t” in the first place? If everything is true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in another, how do we distinguish anything at all? Simple—by ascribing the values we’ve predetermined upon it, by sheer force of grammatical, semantic, or neurological habit.

So what did I do about dear old “Prescott,” then?

Simple… I sent him some cookies.

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