Dissolve the Jewish People

After the Israelites worshiped the Golden Calf, God pleads with Moses to let him destroy the people and start a new nation from him–from scratch, without all the scars and neuroses that slavery produced.

But Moses defends the Israelites and pleads with God not to destroy them. Unfortunately, God acquiesces, and what follows is a bitter history of much heroism and achievement, but, unfortunately, much more persecution and death.

The hallmark of the Jewish people for the past 2,000 years, and now today, has been great intellectual achievement amongst terrible suffering. In almost every age, they have been the subject of attack and destruction: the Babylonians, the Hellenists, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims, with the most gruesome attack being the Holocaust my grandparents survived.

There have been bursts of light within the darkness, with Jews defending their lives, like with the story of Hannukah, Bar Kochva, and the founding of the State of Israel. But they were just bursts, and the first two were eventually put down. I fear the third will follow.

As soon as some Jews fight for their lives, other Jews give it away through capitulation to agents hostile to Jews. For example, Jews valiantly defended their lives against attack in the Six Day War and rightfully conquered territory. Today we see the process of Jews giving away that victory for the sake of the larger “Jewish collective” for two major reasons: 1) world approval, and 2) the preservation of a racial Jewish majority.

Jews have kept tradition after tradition, ritual after ritual, custom after custom, community after community, only to get slaughtered time and again, living on the run, living with the uncertainty of their survival.

Shouldn’t that make us wonder: Of what value is Jewish “tradition” and peoplehood if none of the prayers, rituals, customs, and community-building keep Jews alive? What ideas and values are Jews living by if, overall, they produce such short-term achievement alongside continual persecution?

This may be why some Jews reject Judaism and eagerly seek to assimilate, whether as an individual or group. They don’t want to get slaughtered. But it often doesn’t end there. In resentment of the hold Judaism and Jewish peoplehood have on their lives, these Jewish defectors become persecutors of their own race, often aiding and abetting anti-Semites.

On the flip side, some Jews have become so obsessed with safeguarding the Jewish “people” at all costs that they sacrifice individual Jews for the sake of what seems to be collective preservation, such as the case of the forced evacuation from Gaza. Furthermore, they become overly concerned with the Jewish “reputation” that they will seek to purge Jews whom they believe reflect poorly on the Jewish “image.”

It is time for the Jewish people to be dissolved, not physically—God forbid—but spiritually. Let each Jew and Jewish sect go their own way, and let the governing principle of a state for the Jews be the simple values that created what was once the most moral nation on earth, the United States, and which actually took inspiration from the Hebrew bible: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Grant complete freedom of worship, so long as that worship does not trample upon individual rights and the universal ethics made famous by the Ten Commandments.

After 2,000 years in the Diaspora, living among various nations, evolving under different philosophical systems and governments, we cannot expect Jews to ever stand united on any issue anymore anyway. Today, Judaism is made up of sects so disparate as to render each sect essentially its own religion, with only race, in most cases, tying them together.

The Holocaust has proven that race, and not what Jews believe, is enough of a factor for Jews to seek refuge together as a people, as an ethnicity. Hitler has given moral justification for a state that gives preference for Jewish immigration. But Israel’s ultimate moral right to exist, as with any state, should be based on an ethical system that protects life, not merely racial purity. Otherwise, Israel has just become one big ghetto.

As for me, I want to live on this land I love, but I no longer want to be a part of the Jewish people. I don’t want any Jewish government, or individual for that matter, to think it can impede upon any part of my life just because I was born Jewish. Even as a Jewish citizen of Israel, I consider myself occupied by a foreign ruler, no matter the politicians are ethnically Jewish. Leaders who would set murderers loose to appease world opinion are not my people. Leaders who would move Jews around as pawns in a political game are not my people. Leaders who grant different moral standards to Jews than they do Arabs are not my people. I grant them no claim over my life.

In case you think I’m being too hard on Jews, then let me add that Arab peoplehood, especially Palestinian-ism, must be dissolved even more so. It is far worse than Jewish peoplehood because guiding it are Islamic principles that are essentially inimical to life, unlike many Jewish principles.

So I think Moses made a mistake to plead with God to save the Israelites, but it’s not too late. The Jewish people should be dissolved and a new nation should arise, one based on human freedom, for Jew, Arab, Christian, atheist, whatever.

Some will call this outlandish, outrageous, blasphemous, but I didn’t start it. Maybe this is what God wanted all along.