normal: what them worry?

Stiff necked? For sure. The perils of Pauline in the desert is clear evidence of that, an unruly nature not easily buying into the coach’s plans for victory and redemption,perhaps setting the seeds for the later exile. But today is today. To heck with salvation. They want redemption. They want the Messiah. And they want him now. At least some do. Some couldn’t care less and want things more or less as it is now, a steady revenue stream and some refinements and tinkerings with the template in place with the hope all’s well that ends well in the interest of trade.

The theory was that the modern creation of Israel, based on the doctrines of Zionism would somehow flatten those unruly and messianic tendencies, normalize the jew , create a “new ” jew that would some be like everyone else, and like Chaim Weizmann said, “be like everyone else except more so,” which negates the idea of normal and places it into the meta realm. The “other” tag has always stubbornly stuck to the stock and seems intrinsic to the nature and can’t really be avoided. Like Judaism cannot really graft atheism onto itself; as a famous atheist once said to an even more famous Rabbi, “i don’t believe in god!” to which the sage replied, “which one?”, “the one that created the earth!” id Moses could not be allowed in the promised land for splitting a stone with a rod, we can be sure that the echoes of judging by a higher standard and “otherness” seem to preclude “normal” with echoes the reverberate to the present day. If Israel began slaughtering its citizens like Syria on a wholesale level….

The logic of a Hitchens was that jews should never be a normal people because they have proved “there is no redemption.” What the Hitch failed to reconcile what that jews cannot really be objectified, the locus can’t be pinned down, that “ping” cannot be predicted. So, ultimately any attempt to crystallize means to make them self-serving into one’s own analysis. Devout atheist. Is that a paradox? Or normal?

Clearly, Zionism’s efforts, the Herzl idea, of normalizing jews as failed miserably. The quest for normal seems futile. Since its basis, if we are to escape the race category, is the Torah and adherence to it, then acts of normative seems like efforts to repress something much larger and powerful, radical and unpredictable in its potential. To say that jewish state should not have any more or less rights than Serbia or the Ukraine is the stock and trade discourse of the secular left, and theoretically, it is true, but in fact, the mystery of the jewish people is that it can never be so. The old template, the mold, seems indestructible and shatterproof. In any event, the original ideas of the founders of Zionism were racist: not towards the gentiles but towards their own. And it elements of apartheid are more firmly evident in its relations with the other, the religious, than towards other outsiders to the Zionist ethos.

ADDENDUM:

…J’s Yahweh is a far cry from the gaseous vapor God handed down by the normative tradition. Yahweh is very anthropomorphic compared to the God of the rest of the Bible (or man is theomorphic, see below). He is human-all-too-human, and frequently appears on the earth in person: walking in the garden, asking if Adam disobeyed him (when, if omniscient he should know), giving an on-the-ground inspection before he confuses the speech at Babel (again, an indicator of Yahweh wanting man to be like him, but thwarting him when he tries), closing up Noah’s ark with his own hands, allowing Sarah’s insolence when she doubts she will bear a child, haggling with Abram over the number of good people it would require for Yahweh to not destroy Sodom; allowing his blessing to be “stolen” a few times by the cunning Jacob, who wrestles with either Yahweh himself or one of the Elohim (“angels”) to re-earn it; attempting to murder Moses, his own recently chosen prophet; leading the Israelites in the wilderness for little apparent reason; and not allowing his reluctant chosen prophet to even see the Promised Land (another instance of Yahweh’s thwartations)….

Yahweh, for Bloom, is a very complex character, and there is no allegorical signified for which he stands. Yahweh, is a life-force, Yahweh is reality itself, especially in its relation to man, Yahweh represents limitations (in regard to man) and the breaking of limitations.

Hence his Blessing, which the patriarchs covet and wrangle for, is very much a Mixed Blessing. Jacob spends much of life trying to secure it, from clutching Esau’s heel at birth, to trading Esau a pot of porridge for it, to wrestling one of the Elohim (or Yahweh himself) for it in a nighttime wrestling match. And once he gets it, he still suffers. The Blessing gets passed down to Judah, the fourth son, because of the inadequacy of the elder brothers; but it seems to be Joseph, who really has the blessing, whose character it would be most accurate to say of,

Yahweh was with him. The power of Yahweh is charisma, vitality, and even good fortune, rather than righteousness, a quality that never concerns J or her Yahweh. Read More:http://www.thesatirist.com/books/BookOfJ.html
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Zizek:Jews are constituted by the lack of land, of territory – however, this lack is reinscribed into an absolute longing (“Next year in Jerusalem!”). What about an unconditional uprooting, renunciation of territory? In other words, does the Jewish identity not involve the paradox of the being-uprooted itself functioning as the foundation of ethnic roots and identity? Is there not, consequently, the next step to be accomplished that of forming a collective which no longer relies on an ethnic identity, but is in its very core the collective of a struggling universality? Levinas is right in locating the Jewish universalism in their very non-proselyte stance: Jews do not try to convert all others to Judaism, to impose their particular religious form onto all others, they just stubbornly cling to this form. The true universalism is thus paradoxically this very rejection to impose one’s message to all others – in such a way, the wealth of the particular content in which the universal consists is asserted, all others are left to be in their particular ways of life. However, this stance nonetheless involves its own limitation: it reserves for itself a privileged position of a singularity with a direct access to the universal – all people participate in the universality, but Jews are “more universal than others”: “The Jewish faith involves tolerance because, from the beginning, it bears the entire weight of all other men.”(DF, 173) The Jewish man’s burden… In other words, insofar as Jews are absolutely responsible, responsible for all of us, is it not that, at a meta- or reflexive level, we are all doubly responsible to the Jews? Or, in an inverted way, if they are responsible for all of us, is it not that the way to get rid of our responsibility is to annihilate them, i.e., those who condense our responsibility? What is still missing here is the notion (and practice) of antagonistic universality, of the universality as struggle which cuts across the entire social body, of universality as a partial engaged position.Read More:http://www.lacan.com/zizsmash.htm