On the Importance of Words in Trying Times
Howdy y’all - I haven’t posted here in a while. Life has been a lot. I often share aspects of my own spiritual development here and, of late, I have found myself going down very rich pathways, and it has not always been clear to me how to share, or if I really even want to. Between writing, music, beginning a new job, getting ready for a wedding, life has been full of late and it feels good, even when it is challenging.
When I do come to write, I find I have lost the thread a little bit. I could share what I am reading about or thinking about, but it has been hard to know who has the ears to hear - I’d love this all to be more of a conversation. I realize many people read this in their emails, but there is a comment thread on the bottom of these posts on Substack for anyone who wishes to engage.
I have found myself drawn more and more to live performance and recording myself speaking, instead of writing, when I do have something to say. The written word is flat, in many way, and, especially with the state of the world at the moment, it is easy to feel that people will project their own views onto what I am writing. Even writing this, I understand that you, the reader, have to fill in my tone and energy - so, for context, I am sitting with my cat drinking coffee, reflecting aloud into my computer.
I have written before about how words, by themselves, are sort of like shadows. Words themselves aren’t reality, but like a shadow cast by something real, a word can be followed back to its source to discover something real. If I say the word “tree” you can trace the word back to the very real idea of a tree we each understand in our minds. This is even more important for abstract concepts like “happiness”, where we can’t just point to a happiness over there… no with abstract concepts, such as those related to our emotions, we must discover them within ourselves so that we can point the word to the reality.
Things get weird when we stop treating words like mere pointers to reality and start treating the words themselves as if they are what is real. Plato already explained this one pretty well with the Allegory of the Cave, in which people come to believe that the shadows of reality really are reality. When this happens, we become very fearful of reality as it is, for we come to a place where we don’t even recognize it for what it is.
There is a great importance, I believe, to rooting the words we use into reality. There is a funny feeling a word or a sentence possesses when it simply has no such grounding. In America, we generally have a very high threshold for tolerating lying, fibbing, and general dishonesty. We sort of expect and know that politicians lie, that lawyers lie, that corporations selling us things will lie to us. When we ask someone how they are doing, we usually don’t want them to tell us how they are doing…if they are doing poorly, we often would prefer if they lied to us and told us “oh, I’m fine, what about you?” As a result, we aren’t very sensitive to the feeling of a word that lacks its truthiness - but, a word that lacks truth (i.e., a shadow that lacks a reality) always leaves a strange residue.
Today, I awoke to a news headline that the US government is going to codify a very specific definition of antisemitism into law. Now, our kneejerk reaction is likely to be that it is, of course, good to create laws that prevent hate speech - we, of course, as a people, want to protect one another and so it feels very good to pass this kind of law. We all want to live in a world without hatred, so it feels like it may make sense to pass a law that makes hatred illegal, right?
Well, the IHRC definition of antisemitism very clearly includes criticism of the State of Israel as an aspect of its definition. This, of course, creates a very convoluted situation and a difficult one to navigate. This is particularly true for people like myself: Jews that are critical of the State of Israel.
You see, by passing this law, the United States government is actually creating a legal standard for what it means to be a “good Jew” and what it means to be a “bad Jew”. This should, of course, be terrifying to both Jews and non-Jews alike. Especially as we continue to see our nation’s comfort with deploying militarized police forces against political protestors.
What do I mean by this. Well, there are a lot of Jewish people (me included) who view the policies of the modern State of Israel has being quite misaligned with our values that are actively informed by our own Judaism. Yet, what does it mean if the US government passes a law that states that my Judaism is the “antisemitic” version of Judaism? This seems, when taken to its furthest conclusions, quite terrifying. According to US law, once this passes, many Jewish Americans are also, legally speaking, antisemitic.
Now, we have witnessed in recent weeks as large militarized forces have been employed to break-up college protests encampments across the country. Strangely, in 2017, when literal neo-Nazis marched on the University of Virginia, no law enforcement was called in. On the far right in the US and across Europe, we have been witnessing the re-emergence of explicitly antisemitic movements for decades. Yet, it is only when unarmed (and, frankly, an unintimidating) lot of college students protest Israeli policy as Gaza is destroyed, that the US government has moved to create a legal definition for antisemitism. See, what does the word “antisemitism” actually mean? Is it being used to protect Jewish people or is it being used to suppress political dissent?
Now, let’s be clear, Gaza is completely decimated. If the war ended today and Israel decided that enough was enough, Gazans could not return home. Their homes are destroyed, entire cities gone…there is nothing to go back to for those that will survive. And, of course, this will radicalize an entire generation of children who survived this and watched as their friends, parents, families die while the place they called home got turned to rubble. This is the nature of Jacob’s Curse on his vengeful son Simeon in Genesis 49 - this war only makes the world more dangerous for the Jewish people, thanks to US & Israeli policy. The war must rage on, though, because, once it is over, Netanyahu is in big trouble - it is to his (and the far-right leaders he is beholden to) extreme benefit that this war does not stop. So, it won’t stop. It will get even worse.
So, I will stop here, for today. We should all find it terrifying that the US government is so willing to make overt political speech illegal, even if the intention feels like it is good. Let’s be clear, if the US government care about true antisemitism, they would actually be taking actions to address literal neo-Nazis, and not college students protesting Israeli policy. But, weirdly, it turns out that the far-right, driven by the apocalyptic ethos of Christian Zionism, actually really loves the state of Israel because Christian Zionists believe that a holy war between Jews and Muslims will bring about the rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus. They literally support Israel because they believe the wars Israel wages will destroy the Jewish and Muslim world, paving the way for Christian dominion. It is antisemitic Zionism.
This last bit might come off as a bit loony, but it is quite literally a fundamental and widely accepted view across the American Right. So, we now have a situation in which literal antisemites are supportive of the State of Israel, yet it is Jewish people who are critical of Israel who will be legally classified as antisemitic under US law. This is, of course, mind-bending, but it is also, well, real.
Antisemitism is real. But, we must be very critical of how the word is used, especially by our own government that is codifying it into law. For we currently live in a world where the far right is supportive of Israel because they view it as necessary for the end of the non-Christian world and where the far left, which contains many Jewish people, is critical of Israel because they think that dropping bombs on people is bad for the global collective. Which group is antisemitic?
The scary part, of course, is that the US is very comfortable deploying its own internal military forces against its own citizens. Police were deployed against civil rights protestors, against Vietnam protestors, against protestors of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, against protestors of the Occupy movement, against protestors against police brutality… but, strangely, police are generally not deployed at rallies held by actual neo-Nazis. Don’t trust someone based on the words they use - actions speak louder than words.
Perhaps the next law will make speech critical of the United States illegal. Or, perhaps, that has been the case for a long time already. We only have to look at where we have deployed law enforcement on our own people to know this to be true.
Anyway, thanks for being here, hope all is well for ya. I don’t really want to write things like this, my views have often alienated me from the people I grew up with…I’d rather talk about, like, the Torah or yoga or something like that, but, at the end of the day, my views on those things are just as intertwined on my views of this.
Much love,
Charlie