Thursday, October 6, 2011

Jews, Hebrews, and David Yeagley

David Yeagley, from Badeagle.com
He has excerpted and commented on
my blog post Indians Will Be Indians.
I also participated in his forums.

David Yeagley, the American Indian from Oklahoma, who writes for Vdare, Frontpage Magazine and other venues, has an interesting article at his website on the meaning of Jewishness (if that is a proper term). I think he correctly writes that there is no distinguishing the Jewish ethnicity from the Jewish religion.

Christians are united by their belief in Christ, yet they may come from groups as diverse as the Inuit in northern Canada to the Ethiopians in the horn of Africa.

Yet, there is no separating the Jewish ethnicity - their physical and physiological make-up - from the Jewish spirituality. One can only be a Jew through lineage!

This is a hard responsibility to bear. Once a Jew, always a Jew.

I wonder why God made this particular decision, to combine the ethnic with the spiritual? I wonder why he let Christians rule the world, so to speak, while confining Jews, technically, to the tiny parcel of the land of Israel, which they can only enter as Jews?

Yet look how powerful the Jews are, in people's psyche, at least. Anti-Semitism is the strangest, most virulent, type of hate for a group of people. I don't think even different races (blacks or whites) can hate each other as much as the hate directed at Jews.

I think the strength of this hate indicates the strength of God's association with the Jews. The love of God is viciously, jealously, demanded by anti-Semites, however atheist they may be. "Why don't you love us as much as you do the Jews?!"

Perhaps love is not the word, since God loves us all, sinners and saints, Jews and Gentiles, believers and atheists, alike. He might favor some more than others (but that surely is a difficult call, since more is expected of those favored), but love is another thing.

Perhaps what God is showing us is that he is a particular God, with a particular history, whose trajectories we can follow through these people he has anointed. If he can love them, follow them, chastise them, reward them, and grant them long life and prosperity, how can we doubt that he will not do the same for us, collectively (of whatever ethnicity or nationality we are) and individually?

Perhaps what anti-Semites are projecting is their fears and insecurities, that they may not be up to the standards that God expects from us (from them), and thus they blame (some to the extent of destruction) the people he has placed before us as examples, using them as scapegoats.

There is a horrible thesis that God allowed the Holocaust to occur because the European (and especially the German) Jews had become too distanced from him. In their tremendous success, they were moving away and apart from him. He had to show them that he is God, after all, and that they (we) are at his mercy.

"Cultural" Jews are an interesting phenomenon. They want the best of all worlds: prestige as Jews (through their good works), and some kind of elevated spiritual identity: We Are Jews!

This arrogant self-elevation that is observed by Jews in our era may be what their diabolical enemies are waiting for. Without God on their side, do they really think they will survive this one? So, I think the best recourse for Jews is to be true Jews.