every grain of sand

Picasso called his painting, “the sum of destructions”, Marcel Duchamp went further into conceptual form with the ready-made, banal objects such as urinals converted into works of art. This was the so called “shock of the new” the beginning of what would evolve into much of the perversion of modernist art, as dogmatic and hackneyed and conventional as the traditional art it set out to sweep away; recognizing that traditional art could no longer articulate the modern condition, this explosion of technology and science, what began as a tentative and sublime reflection quickly devolved into the cheap out, the path of least resistance: nihilism.

And Zionism was part of this modern mess. A dreadful mess of form without substance and form without spirituality. A triumph of scientific rationality where the desert would bloom and the soul would die of a parched throat. Israel of course has been the garbage can, the spitoon,the illegitimate child in exile, but its only a reflection of Western Liberal democracies, as its basically made in their image. An unfortunate creation, even a camel designed by a committee.

Zionism in trying to annihilate Judaism, stopped just short of it despite their best efforts. The result was a caricature of Judaism, nominally recognizable as it, but otherwise a formal construction, inorganic, and devoid of human presence; an absence or ghost in the formal machine of statehood, an anachronism that could take the blame and be the scapegoat for all the contradictions of modernism and serve as an ingenious disguise for the same-old, same-old exile. But in this perversion there is no subconscious, no mystery of what is instinctive in the human race. Jerusalem is not more than the sum of its bricks and mortar and the Mount of Olives no more than a collection of old bones. As such, Judaism and Zionism seem incompatible and the latter’s efforts to subsume the former, Zionism being an ephemeral concept in the long history of the world is ultimately doomed to die a slow and become extinct like any other organism that fails to adapt.

Zionism is in a sense an austerity of form, a betrayal of human feeling and for these pioneers to market israel  as salvation and redemptive was absurd. In art, it may be possible to balance opposing instinctive forces as an aesthetic achievement, but in life, the political and the spiritual are rarely in equilibrium, rarely capable of reaching for the eternal simultaneously as one. There is no pathos in Zionism while traditionalism recognizes that feelings are anchored in the instinctive and humane. Its even plausible that at the heart of Zionism is the mindless feeling of rage; an intrinsic negativity, a life negating rage expressing itself in outrageous forms.

A certain paradox of the Jewish people is that they are inherently a purely  spiritual people; the people associated with  the  unity of god or the  bundling of the sacred as opposed to paganism and later pathologies like Spinoza. Essentially, Jewish people in exile have been forced or conditioned to achieve materialism to surmount the existential challenge in a society that pays vague lip service to  spirituality, institutionalized Christianity included, and avoids or procrastinates  accepting the concept of instinct that is an authentification of being, of being a spiritual being; our super-secularism can’t deal with it for it contains the seeds of the entire pop culture economy’s demise or at least questioning.  Add to this a spiritual consciousness that adds a sense of the oneness or unity of self that the instinctive cannot provide. Our pagan tendencies, purely instinctive, find a weird sacred in an big variety of objects, mostly fetish objects, which together lack a concentration of purpose, a sense of unity, a sense of existential purpose. Unfortunately, Zionism belongs in this category. Ultimately legitimate in an illegitimate way.

ADDENDUM:

“DANIEL BERNARD, the French ambassador to Britain, recen

uttered an ugly anti-Semitic remark at a party hosted by newspaper publisher Conrad Black. He called Israel a “shitty little country” and then asked, “Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?” Read More:http://www.rense.com/general86/boycott.htm

…. “The Zionist state’s goal, in contrast [to Tor•âh′ , religious or spiritual factors], is to “normalize” the Jewish condition.  By providing the Jewish people with its own territory, Zionism’s founding fathers hoped to transform the wandering Jew of the exile into a nation like all other nations… Secular Zionists argued that with the creation of a Jewish state there would no longer be a need for halacha [Jewish law], which served the sole purpose of maintaining Jewish unity as a “portable homeland” in the Diaspora. A new, more normal Jewish identity would be created, and the old Diaspora baggage could be dropped.” …

Thus, the birth of the modern State of Israel was accompanied by a definition of Zionism that was secular; independent, indeed scornful of, and frequently in open enmity against, Tor•âh′ . The founders of modern Israel desired to produce a “Jewish State” that would be a home—like all of the goyim nations of the world—for “Jews”—as defined not by Tor•âh′ but by Hitler and the Nazis.

More recently, there has been a movement toward linking Zionism to Tor•âh′ : Religious Zionism. This is the movement with which the Nәtzâr•im′ have been sympathetic. However, the wide acceptance of the Nazi—racist-genetic—definition of “Jew” continues to obstruct efforts to build a truly Judaic-Jewish, i.e.,Tor•âh′ , nation… and the Nәtzâr•im′ loyalty is strictly to Tor•âh′ .

“HISTORICALLY, CHABAD, like other haredim, virulently opposed secular Zionism, because its ideology proposed to replace Judaism with nationalism.” The Nazi definition is racist, including secular genetic “Jews,” homosexual genetic “Jews,” atheist genetic “Jews,” and so on ad nauseum. These non-Tor•âh′ , often anti-Tor•âh′ , “Jews” are misojudaic “Jews”; often openly disdainful and at enmity with Tor•âh′ , and dedicated to building a non-Tor•âh′ (i.e., secular) state like all of the goy•im′ nations of the world. This is why Arabs are included as voting citizens, deciding, along with the misojudaic “Jews,” the future of this state. Prospects of a Tor•âh′ nation emerging from this misguided and perverse marriage of misojudaics is zero.

The Nәtzâr•im′ unreservedly combat secular Zionism. The Nәtzâr•im′ are neither identified by, nor loyal to, any racist definition of “Jews” whether owing tomisojudaics; whether they be Nazis, Mumbai terrorists or “secular Jews.”

“In 1903, Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber Schneerson, the fifth rebbe of Chabad, elucidated his staunch opposition to Zionism in a famous letter. “They think nationalism has replaced religion, and that Zionism is now the best means for the preservation of Jewish society, and not Torah and mitzvot,” he wrote. “Zionists are more dangerous than the maskilim, because they believe that they are no longer obligated to the Torah, and that one is a proper Jew in that he is a loyal nationalist.” … The seventh and last Chabad rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who staunchly opposed territorial compromise and was adamantly pro-Israel, nevertheless was careful never to use the term “State of Israel,” always referring, instead, to the “Land of Israel.” … In a 1969 letter to former MK Geula Cohen, he explained that one of the reasons he refrained from using the word “state” was because “it implied a general approach and program among Jews to be like all the goyim… For Schneerson, the nationalist aspect of Zionism represented a potential spiritual danger. Jews were liable to believe that a secular Israeli identity patterned after gentile nations would supplant authentic Jewish identity.” (ibid.)

This is another differentiation between the Nәtzâr•im′ from Khaba”d: while the Nәtzâr•im′ uncompromisingly reject and oppose secular Zionism, in agreement with the kha•reid•im′ , at the same time we reject and oppose the backward mentality, medievalism and superstitious beliefs that are no less intrinsic to the definition of kha•reid•im′ and Ultra-Orthodox.

R. Shalom Schneerson made a good point that the Nәtzâr•im′ should adopt, however: we should express no more than conditional loyalty to the “State” of Israel, only insofar as it becomes a Tor•âh′ state. Instead, we should express our loyalty solely to י–ה and His Tor•âh′ , “Ë′ rëtz Yi•sәr•â•eil′ ” and “AmYi•sәr•â•eil′ .”  Read More:http://www.judaismtorah.net/uncategorized/zionism-vs-torah-chabadjewish-state-secular-zionism-biblical-zionism/