ACUTE ANGLES 97 East Versus West – Where Should Jews Stand?
Dear Rabbi Ingram. I enjoy your essays very much but I did not understand your last one. You appeared to be equating America with Iran? Isn’t this the moral equivalence that the hard Left are doing? Yours in puzzlement. J. L.
Dear J. L.,
For the benefit of readers who may have missed it, my recent essay entitled Days Of Old Are Days of Now cited a remarkable Talmudic reference to Poras, i.e. Persia/Iran and, possibly by extension, its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the Houthis, and Romi, i.e. the “holy Roman empire” and its progenies the Church and the Western world in general, as being the only world powers other than Israel the eternal nation, which will endure until the coming of the Messiah. “Until,” I said, “but not beyond” – with the implication that neither societal model (and I am speaking of societies, not individuals, as I intend to clarify), neither “West” nor “East,” will deserve to survive beyond then.
I did not exactly “equate America with Iran.” However, as Jews, it behooves us to view the world through the lens of Torah, not through the lens of our personal ideological preconceptions borne of the secular societies we inhabit.
What is loosely termed “the West” today – the post-Christian secular democracies of Europe, North America, and Australasia – is in essence no more of a Torah ideal today than “the East,” embracing fanatical Islam, repressive communist China, and despotic North Korea.
In recent times we as Jews have been made to feel far more comfortable in “the West” – though for how long remains to be seen. Who has not felt an insidious and alarming shift in the political sphere since 22/7? Not for seventy-plus years have not only Israel but Jews worldwide felt so misunderstood, so misrepresented, and so disliked. Anti-Semitism has suddenly become fashionable again. Not only in the Islamic enclaves of “the East,” but also in our havens in “the West.” Even in the USA! Especially in the USA, according to an exceptional and very atypical recent editorial in the New York Times warning how easily anti-Zionism can spill over into anti-Semitism. Perhaps it has already in the Big Apple. How else is it possible that an Israel-hater like Zohran Mamdani, embracer of the slogan “globalise the intifada,” is the front runner to become its new mayor?
Yes, we are still the beneficiaries of equal rights under the law; our governments support our educational, welfare, and security arms; we admire the succour provided for the underprivileged, the health care systems, the ability to boot governments and local councils out after a few years if we don’t like them. But we as faithful Jews cannot fail to denounce the moral decay, the erosion of the traditional family structure, the promotion of “alternative lifestyles,” the gender discombobulation, the contempt for the sanctity of life both at its beginning and its end, the rejection of G-D, which is the root cause of all the above ills.
On the other side of the coin, while we view with revulsion the cruel fanaticism of radical Islamism, its hate-doctrines (especially against Jews), its violence, its espousal of jihadism, we can still admire, dare I say, the zealous singlemindedness with which it pursues its goals in the, albeit woefully misguided, “name of All-h” and wish that we were as single-minded in our zeal “to perfect the world under the dominion of the Alm-ghty!” in accordance with Torah principles and our noble perception of who G-D is and what He represents..
So yes, there is, in a sense, good and ill in both “East” and “West.” We can learn positively and negatively from both, and neither comes anywhere near to our messianic vision of the perfect society.
When it comes to individuals within societies, they are sometimes able to rise above their jurisdictions and demonstrate true nobility of character and spirit. Donald J. Trump achieved this in his epoch-making recognition of Jerusalem as our undivided capital, his historic brokering of the Abraham Accords, and now his courageous air strike on Iran.
In doing all this he has donned the mantle of ancient figures such as Cyrus, King of Persia, who also rose above his controlling empire to grant permission to our ancestors to rebuild the Temple; and Antoninus, the Roman emperor whose extraordinary friendship with Rebbi (R’ Yehuda haNasi, compiler of the Mishna) shed a fleeting light in the darkness of the Roman rule. Similarly, Trump’s exceptional goodwill and advocacy towards Israel may have an assortment of motives – he after all has Jewish grandchildren and his constituents include the powerful pro-Israel evangelical lobby – but he had every reason to refuse Israel’s request to bomb Iran due to fierce opposition from his own party. His moral courage was undeniable.
On the other hand, Jews experienced a “golden age” of prosperity, cultural flourishing and religious tolerance in the Muslim Spain of the 10th to 12th century. And these past two years, I have been enriched by making the acquaintance of a noble young Muslim who has volunteered at the Sydney Jewish Museum and who requested me to teach him Tanach and classical Hebrew grammar.
But sadly these are exceptions. Today we are seeing how a visceral hatred of, and antipathy towards, our nation is growing, like a toxic bacterium, in the body politic of both East and West,
As the (rather ungrammatical) old song lyric goes: East is East and West is West and the wrong one I have chose. Either choice is wrong for the Jew. He stands head and shoulders above them both. And he will outlive them both!
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A BRIEF THOUGHT FROM SIDRA PINCHAS
“as G-D had commanded Moses and the children of Israel who were coming out of the land of Egypt” (Num 26:4).
Hadn’t they already exited Egypt almost 40 years earlier?
Yes! But only now did they cast off Egypt from their psyches. Ongoing, there would be no more rebellions, no more subversive thoughts, no more turning back. They are at last ready to enter Eretz Yisrael. It had taken one day to get Am Yisrael out of Egypt. But it took 40 years to get Egypt out of Am Yisrael!
The galut mentality is so challenging to shrug off!!