Diasporic Aporia

Because he wrote so much, they said that what he wrote could not be good.
I am referring to the baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann.
Thus also the multiplicity of lies told about the Jewish state of Israel ,
the world obsessed as by the  whale in Melville’s Moby Dick great tale.

I’m not baroque. The style that I prefer is Judeo-classic,
which draws me to the great Judeo-Spanish poet, Yehudah HaLevi.
My detractors might prefer another term, like Jew-Jurassic:
the line by which these terms are separated isn’t red, but trayfy.

Just like Yehudah HaLevi, I regard Jews’ exile from Israel as an aporia,
in my LA diaspora dissenting with opponents of the return of Jews to Zion,
fighting against them with my poetic words, peace-loving warrior
less literate than the great rabbinic poet, whose name the Bible links to praise and to a lion.

“Aporia” denotes an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.

In  “Scattered Seeds: The Origins of Diaspora,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2025, Malka Z. Simkovich points out that the Bible’s first reference to the diaspora of the Jews is made by the Septuagint’s translation of Deut. 25:28. She writes:

When the Septuagint’s translators arrived at a verse in which Moses predicts that the Israelites would become a horror (za’ava) before the foreign nations if the terms of God’s covenant were violated, they searched for the right Greek word to describe the Israelites’ condition. Although they were not emissaries of the high priest of Jerusalem, the translators seem to have had personal ties to the Land of Israel, which influenced the word they chose. In fact, it was one that didn’t yet exist in that form: “diaspora,” from dia-, meaning over or through, and -sperein, meaning to scatter like seeds (the modern word “spore” is also derived from the verb).

In ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Exile,’ Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2026, Shai Secunda, reviewing Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora by David Kraemer, writes:

When “Oyfn Pripetchik” was composed at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews had been living on the European continent for more than a thousand years, yet many of them still considered themselves to be in exile. The religious prayed for God to ingather the exiles and restore them to Jerusalem, visionaries dreamed up utopias where Jews would finally belong, and people sang songs like “Oyfn Pripetchik” and “Di Shoyfer shel Moshiach” (“If but David would hear the sound of the Messiah’s shofar . . . the great waters would be calmed, the leaves of the forest trees would be stilled, while David plays his fiddle and sings his song, oh his song: ‘Israel is not yet lost; Israel will be reborn!’”). Exile was something to be borne—golus shlepn in the evocative Yiddish—to be forgotten when the times allowed for it; to be overcome, as Zionists and Communists heatedly argued; but not really to be embraced. In his new book, Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora, David Kraemer whistles a more cheerful tune……

Speaking of embracing exile, perhaps the group of Jews that came closest to literally doing so were the sixteenth-century mystics who arrived in the town of Safed after the Spanish Expulsion. As Kraemer correctly notes, these kabbalists understood exile as a metaphysical state, not a geographical location. Indeed, they left us a considerable trove of exilic writings composed from the very heart of the Galilee, including remarkable descriptions of “(self-)exiling,” a peculiar practice in which one wanders across the countryside in imitation of the Shekhina—the feminine aspect of God who was, like the people of Israel, exiled from the Temple.