The Eternal Jew’s Tale, #122, Philistine Pillars

In this episode we read the only remaining fragments of a strange and prescient book.

The Eternal Jew’s Tale
Eighteenth Era, Part 2, 1389 C.E., Prague

Here’s all that remains of Rav Avigdor’s book:

Philistine Pillars Now Cast Down
As previously shown, the pagan gods — Ashteroth and his urgeist host — are fled from their strongholds that Adonai, like horse and rider, has cast in the sea; fled from their altars and revelries into the darkness in fury and fear, into the human soul where they plot to overthrow Adonai. Human emotions and human thought are all infused and all debased by their monstrous furies and unrestrained lusts.

How do these urgeists corrupt the soul? They build a webwork the eye can’t see, the heart can’t feel, inside our thoughts. Like a spider’s web that a fly can’t see; like a net a fisherman casts in the sea. But theirs is a net that grows and learns, a living web of desire and greed, fearful angers, the urge to control.

What knife or pruner can cut those shoots? What sledge and tongs will break their grip? If you snip off the buds — those envious thoughts, greedy urges, angry sneers — a dozen new shoots will spring from the cut. If you try to dig out the root of it, consider how the tiger devours its prey: claw and fang it tears out the guts. And so your guts will be torn out. Ashteroth has you tight in its grip.

No. You must first become aware of your threaded thoughts all tangled in knots, and filter each thought thru a fine sieve. And here is the sieve; learn* it well:
‘There is only one Law to judge us all; there is only one Lor and Judge of all.’
* others say: use

Privilege, then, is the first sin:
‘I am more deserving that you; we are more important than them.’
Privilege will disembowel every law. It orders the world to serve itself — wealth and power, land and faith.

These are the webs the urgeists weave, to knot us in conflict and choke us in hate. Us angelmen sent to improve the world, they blind us and make us seem small to ourselves, bereft of inherent virtue and worth, and only thru outward pose and display do we think our virtue can be restored: in battles for sex and power and wealth, battles of kingships fought to the death.

And even our holiest books are corrupt with kingships questing for power and land, claiming they’ll be the ones to create holy empires and holier thrones. These are the idols of urgeist faith. These are the idols we worship all day. These are the false gods we rush to obey. We have seen them before and prayed at their shrines — altars to Ishtar, pillars of Baal; obeisance to caesar and his generals.

Tear down your idols. Read your books. See how the urgeists corrupt the text. I will show it to you, clear in this light, and you will be outraged and turn on me, accusing me of blasphemy.

The Lor has said, and this I believe is pure:
“*To your seed I am giving all of this land, from Egypt’s river to the great Parat*….”
“**Set out from here, the people with you, them you brought up from Egypt land, to the land which I have promised to Avraham, to Yitzchak and to Ya’akov, saying ‘to their seed I am giving it**….’”
*-* Berraysheet/Gen. 15:18; **-** Shmote/Ex. 33:1

And many a dozen other verses. And just as clear, the Lor has said:
“*Their altars, monuments and sacred posts ‘tetotzoon, t’shabayroon, tikhrotoon’*”.
“**You must destroy all their sites and obliterate the name of their gods.**”
*-* Shmote/Ex. 34:13; tear down, smash, and chop up; **-** Devarim/Deut. 12:2-3

And in many another verse, as well. And if we do, the Lor will support; if not the Lor will cut us short. Thus, to dwell within our land depends upon our proper works. Fail; the Lor sends Babylon. Repent, Cyrus is sent to us. When Canaan’s idols appeal no more, other, different idols will take their place. So the Lor’s contingency will change as we ascend the moral scales.

Now if the Lor is the way and the truth, then the Lor will prevail, not the Ashteroth, and we no more need to tear them down. Canaan will now come to us, so let them live in the midst of peace. And this already was foretold:
“*For citizen and foreigner there is one law.*”
*-* various sources, incl. Shmote/Ex. 12:49; Viyikra/Lev. 24:22; Bemidbar/Num. 15:15

But see how Christian and Muslim alike betray this command, and betray that their souls are in the grip of the Ashteroth and the urgeist hosts at war with the Lor.

The Jew is oppressed and massacred and expelled from many a Christian land, and Christian books and commentaries are full of hate for the Jew and his Lor. They say the Jew corrupts their land, an impure spirit that pollutes the folk. This is hatred of Adonai. The Ashteroth grips their souls.

And look at Muslim law and Hadith, defying the Lor and His single law. *Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb* and holy war — these are the signs of pagan belief and pagan hate, dividing the world, that Islam is good and other rites are corrupt and false; to oppress the stranger in a dhimma* law, to sow conflict and sow hate. This is jihad against the Lor; this is the wickedness of the Ashteroth speaking inside of Muhammed’s words.
*-* two competing regions in the world, the region of peace/Islam and the region of war
* Muslim legal code that privileges Muslims

When cardinal or priest, ayatollah or imam, caliph or pope or king demands violence or hatred or disrespect on those who are foreign or alien, they speak the pagan and serve Ashteroth. How much more then for rabbi or sage, who are called on as God’s ambassadors and are immersed in Torah? The Ashteroth have infiltrated the Mosaic word, even in this Torah that has no peer of revelations in all the world. More than stories of holy men; more than sermons and homilies; more than finger-wagging reproach — all of which are easy to write — but a book full of unique things that no one had ever thought before; imitated but never surpassed. Of world creation and evolution; ethnographies and the life of tribes; ancient life and catastrophes; divine acts to re-adjust the world and God’s fine-tuning of history; plans for constructing holy spaces; instructions on how and when and why to atone and succor and thank the Lor; a core body of case law; Sabbatical and Jubilee to counter accumulation of wealth; a whole book devoted to priests and priestly duties and priestly thoughts; and most impressive and most rare: prophetic searches into the human heart, and the causes and effects of justice and sin, revealing *precise future events*, not apocalypses and fantasies, but the sorrows and horrors and rewards to come to the priestly people who wrestle with God. Yet for all that, the Ashteroth pollute and degrade this holy book, breathing their rancid angers into us.
*-* Ki Tavo and Bekhukotai

Now the face of the Lor will terrify, we so small and the Lor so vast, us vulnerable unlike the Lor. But to say the Lor is furious, full of angers and inclined to destroy, that God is impatient or confounded by us, there is no truth in such a word. The Ashteroth spreads those lies.

Spheres and gears mesh and turn and when we choose the wrong ways, we get caught in the crushing teeth, not because we angered God, but because we are blind and cannot see the troubles our misguided steps will bring. What God feels we cannot know. Perhaps compassion is the closest state for what the Lor is feel for us.

Nor does the Lor hate or curse pagan folk or pagan geists. Their own actions doom them in the slow grind of the moral spheres that remove cruelty and hate from our world.

Nor does the Lor tolerate slavery of any sort, nor plundering of enemies, nor taking their women and children as slaves. These be words of Ashteroth, coiling our Books in their cruelties.

And there be yet more falsehood and hate that I, unlearned, haven’t found, but later sages will be attuned and remove these urgeist impurities.

**********

So ends the fragment I found of The Philistine Pillars Now Cast Down.

~~~~~~~~~~

In the next episode, some urgeists break out.