Amotz Asa-El, The Jewish March of Folly (Part III)

The thesis of the third section is summarized in the first full paragraph on page 260:

לו חיו רוב היהודים בארצם, ואילולא הזמינו מנהיגיהם את רומא למשול בהם, ישו לא היה נרצח, חסידיו לא היו יוצאים לכבוש את העולם, הדת היהודית לא היתה הופכת לאובססיה של דת אחרת, והפזורה היהודית לא היתה זמינה למתקפה של האמונה המתחרה. במקום כל אלו, הנצרות שהיקום היהודי הוליד הפכה לדת הרשמית של רומא; הדת היהודית היתה לצרימה התיאולוגית שלה; והיקום היהודי נחשף למתקפה חברתית, משפטית, כלכלית ופיזית שנמשכה מאות שנים וגבתה אלפי קרבנות. בגלל הגיאוגרפיה שלהם הפכו היהודים לפיתוי ולתסכול של דת חדשה, ולקרבנות של הממשלות, הצבאות והאספסוף שדורות של בישופים, חשמנים, כמרים ונזירים הסיתו נגד העם היהודי.

Here is a translation:

Had most of the Jews lived in their own country, and had their leaders not invited Rome to rule them, Jesus would not have been murdered, his followers would not have gone out to conquer the world, the Jewish religion would not have become an obsession of another religion, and the Jewish Diaspora would not have been available to be attacked by the competing faith. Instead, the Christianity that the Jewish "universe" gave birth to became the official religion of Rome; the Jewish religion was its theological scourge; and the Jewish "universe" became exposed to a social, legal, economic, and physical attack that lasted for hundreds of years and took thousands of victims. Because of their geography, the Jews became the temptation and frustration of a new religion, and became the victims of the governments, of the armies and of the mobs that generations of bishops, cardinals, priests and monks incited against the Jewish people.

 Note: Asa-El uses "universe" as a metaphor for the Diaspora. The big bang that created it was the Babylonian conquest of the Kingdom of Judah.

I beg to differ.

The Diaspora gave us strategic depth 

 Conditions for Jews in the Diaspora were not intolerable everywhere and all the time. When things were bad in one place they were good somewhere else, and those Jews who could, migrated from where things were bad to where things were good. So, as local conditions changed, the center of gravity of Jewish life migrated from Mesopotamia to Iberia from Iberia to Poland, and from Poland to North America. Until the rise of modern nation-states, the dispersed Jewish communities were autonomous. It was the rise of modern nationalism, with its insistence on ethnic uniformity, that made a Jewish nation-state necessary for Jewish survival, and that the establishment of that nation-state was facilitated by the strategic depth provided by the Diaspora.

The Samaritans are a counterexample. We dispersed. The Samaritans remained behind. There are 14 million of us. There are one thousand of them.

We would have been persecuted anyway 

 

Even if Judea had remained autonomous, Christianity might have arisen. Herod Antipas had John the Baptist killed. There is no reason to suppose that a Jewish king of Judea wouldn't have had Jesus killed.

Even if Christianity hadn't arisen and become the official state religion of the Roman Empire, some other monotheistic religion would have. In the third century, most enlightened Romans had come to believe that there is only One True God. The only issue was who: is it the God of the Jews and the Christians, Sol Invictus the sun god, or Mithra the god of heaven? In the end, Christianity won. Absent Christianity, some other monotheistic religion would have won. It is the nature of dominant monotheistic religions to not tolerate competition.

החרדים: יהודים עובדי אלילים של ימינו II

המאמר הזה הופיע ב"יומן" של מקור ראשון ביום ששי שעבר, בנושא של הפילוג בחסידת גור

זאת עוד ראייה שהחרדים (לפחות חסידי גור) מתייחסים לרבניהם כאלילים.

ואם אני כבר בנושא: למה הולכים לחכם לבקש ממנו להתפלל בעד חולה?

אתמול, בשיעור של ד"ר דני מלאך בבית כנסת יהודה לוי, שמעתי שתי תשובות.

1. הולכים לחכם, לא כדי שהוא יתפלל בעד החולה, אלא כדי שהוא ידריך אותך איך להתפלל בעד החולה

2. הולכים לחכם, לא כדי שהוא יתפלל בעד החולה, אלא כדי שהוא יורה לך איזו מידות שלך צריכים תיקון כדי שתפילתך תתקבל

 

הוסף בתאריך 18.10.20

 

סיפור שהופיע ב"תגובות" במוסף שבת של מקור ראשון בתאריך 16.10.20

הסיפור מתעד עבודת אליל אצל הליטאים. האליל הוא הרב שך

 

 

Amotz Asa-El, The Jewish March of Folly (Part II)

Now for Herod.

Asa-El acknowledges that Herod was a paranoid psychopath who murdered most of his family. Despite that, he is a Herod fan because Herod was a master politician. Herod brought peace and prosperity to Judea (as long as you didn't cross him) while preserving the nominal status of Judea as and "ally" of Rome rather than a "subject" of Rome.

Asa-El considers the petition to Caesar to replace Herod's son with a Roman governor to be the first of the two blunders that led to the destruction of the Temple. (The second blunder was the rebellion itself.) He thinks that a Jewish king, no matter how tyrannical, would have been preferable to a Roman governor, no matter how benign, because a Jewish king would not have made the kind of culturally offensive blunders that e.g. Pontius Pilate made.

That's domestic policy. What about foreign policy? Would a Jewish monarchy have kept Judea alive indefinitely as a political entity? How sure is Asa-El that a Jewish king wouldn't have screwed up foreign policy? For a short time, Judea did again have a Jewish king, Herod's grandson Agrippa I, who got his appointment as a reward for helping Claudius navigate the politics of succession after the assassination of Caligula. Suppose that, as the Romans suspected him of trying, Agrippa had succeeded in organizing a rebellion of the Eastern provinces against Rome. He would have suffered the same fate that Zenobia suffered two hundred years later, and the Temple would have been destroyed right on schedule.

Amotz Asa-El, The Jewish March of Folly (Part I)

For each of the last several years, as Yamim Noraim approach, I have been buying a book to read to pass the time during the extended davening. This year's book is המצעד האיוולת היהודי by Amotz Asa-El. In English, that title translates to "The Jewish March of Folly".

As of this writing, I'm up to the re-imposition of Roman rule over Judea after the death of Agrippa I.

In the first part of the book, Asa-El's heroes are Ahab and Herod.

Asa-El's thesis seems to be that for the entire existence of the Israelites and their successors the Jews, they have consistently failed to thrive politically because they would rather be spiritually pure than have a strong central government.

In this post I will deal with Ahab. The next post will deal with Herod.

 Asa-El presents Ahab as the political and military genius who effectively re-united the divided Kingdom of Israel with his military alliance with Yehoshafat of Judah, and who organized the alliance that (temporarily) deterred the Assyrian conquest of the Levant at Karkar. Asa-El proposes that if Israel and Judah had maintained their military alliance instead of repeatedly fighting each other after the demise of Ahab's dynasty, they could have withstood Assyrian and Babylonian imperialism, just like the Greek city states united to withstand Persian imperialism.

He is ignoring the elephant in the room: Phoenicia. The economic power behind the coalition that faced down the Assyrians at Karkar was Tyre, under Ahab's father-in-law Ithobaal. I find it hard to believe that Israel had the economic might and the political clout to organize the anti-Assyrian coalition all by itself, especially with the next-largest contingent being from Israel's hostile neighbor Aram.  It makes more sense to me that the Phoenicians are the ones who had the wherewithal, and that it was Ithobaal who organized and paid for the coalition, in order to defend Tyre from Assyrian domination, In the long run, it didn't help. Ithobaal's son Baal-Eser wound up paying protection money to Assyria. Assyria was just too strong a military power for the states of the Levant to resist, individually or collectively.

From the biblical narrative, it appears that Ithobaal was a cultural imperialist who sought to impose the religion of Phoenicia on Israel. I Melakhim 18:4 mentions in passing that Jezebel, Ithobaal's daughter and Ahab's wife, purged the prophets of the God of Israel. That, plus the fact that Ithobaal started out as a priest of Astarte, suggest to me that Ithobaal's initial plan was to unify the states of the Levant under a single religion (his), and that Ahab was a Phoenician puppet until his subjects rejected Phoenician cultural imperialism at the Showdown on Mt. Carmel (I Melakhim 18:20-40).

Phoenician cultural imperialism also may explain the mystery of why Jezebel's daughter Athaliah tried to murder all her grandchildren (II Melakhim 11:1). Jezebel raised her to be a fanatical Baalist, and she was trying to martyr her grandchildren to save them from being raised as worshipers of Baal's Judean Competitor, just like, almost 2000 years later, Ashkenazi parents preferred that their children be martyrs to that Competitor rather than be raised as Christians.

Returning to the proposition that an Israel-Judah alliance could have withstood Assyrian and Babylonian imperialism, just as the allied Greek city-states withstood Persian imperialism. I don't buy it. The Greeks had advantages that the Israelites didn't have, like the very long Persian supply routes and superior Greek military technology (the phalanx and fast Athenian coastal defense ships). Against Assyria, the Israelites didn't have those advantages. The Assyrian army was second to none and the supply lines from the Fertile Crescent to Israel were short. Asa-El is silent about why, 150 years after repelling the Persian invasions, the Greek city-states fell to Macedonia,

The Main Thing Wrong with Ad Astra

Yesterday evening I took my two granddaughters to see the movie Ad Astra.

SPOILER ALERT: Almost everything that follows is one great big SPOILER! If you don't want a spoiler, STOP READING RIGHT NOW!

The worst thing about the movie is its premise: that the "surges" that are zapping all electrical systems on Earth and its Moon are being caused by antimatter released from an expedition to Neptune to look for intelligent alien life forms.

We can even make antimatter today. One atom at a time. So it would be hopelessly expensive today to make the gram quantities of antimatter that would be needed for fast travel within the solar system. Supposing that in the near future that is depicted it will be possible to make and store gram quantities of antimatter, it still will be enormously expensive, and the expedition would only take enough for propulsion.

Presumably, the "surges" are EMPs from nuclear explosions resulting from leaking antimatter falling into the atmosphere of Neptune. An EMP strong enough to affect the whole solar system would require an enormous nuclear explosion that consumes far more antimatter than the expedition would have on board. And with multiple surges (at least two in the movie), I need to assume that the explosion is on the other side of Neptune from the orbiting expedition spacecraft. Otherwise, the explosion would destroy the spacecraft. And the explosion would light up Neptune bright enough to be seen from Earth in the daytime, so that the source of the "surges" couldn't be kept secret like they want to do in the movie.

Then, early in the movie, one of the US Space Command generals says that the explosions that cause the surges threaten to destabilize the solar system and destroy all life on Earth. The only way that could happen is if the explosions destroy Neptune, and for that you would need a planetary-size mass of antimatter.

IMHO the producers changed the plot in the middle. The premise would have been more plausible if the expedition had encountered an intelligent alien life form that is sufficiently technologically advanced to make lots and lots of antimatter, and uses it to send scout probes around the Galaxy at relativistic speeds to identify and exterminate all other intelligent life forms. Then the movie can end with the hero and his father (the commander of the expedition) using the nuclear weapon that the hero conveniently has brought with him to destroy the alien probe before it can do any more damage, like in the movie Independence Day.

As long as I'm on the subject, the other problem with the movie, from a scientific point of view, is that the various spacewalks by the hero would be totally impossible under known laws of physics. But I loved the special effects, especially how they did weightlessness.