Judean Blood Pacts

Reading from and responding to Our God Is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us: Essays on Jewish Power, by Laurent Guyénot.

Part 1

(Art by Michelle Horsley)

Israel as a State of Denial

Preaching universalism to the Goyim in the street while emphasizing ethnic nationalism at home is the great deception. It is the essence of crypto-Judaism and of its modern form, crypto-Zionism. . . . Until the foundation of the “Jewish state,” “Israel” was a common designation for the international Jewish community. . . . Even after 1947, most American Jews remained ambivalent about the new state of Israel, knowing that to support it publicly would make them liable to the accusation of dual loyalty. It was only after the Six-Day War that American Jews began to support Israel more actively and openly (Guyénot, p. 34, 35).

As I wrote recently, the state of Israel has nationalized, politicized, literalized and exteriorized a spiritual metaphor—for an allegiance of tribal identity—in a way that (one might say) God never intended.

However, the exteriorization of the spiritual metaphor of “Israel” that finally metastasizes into the creation of a literal nation-state with pathological xenophobia can be seen—as Guyénot argues—as baked into the original idea.

As an endlessly wandering and rejected people—unable, according to their Law, to integrate with greater society without offending their God—the promise of a land of their own was central to Jewish tribal identity, the moment Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt.

A tribe that is compelled to remain separate from all other tribes, that cannot integrate, and that is literally forever without its own land, seeks (and therefore must be promised) a literal land.

Never mind if that land is already occupied, by Canaanites or Palestinians.1

Crypsis2

Once we understand the historical process of Yahweh’s outrageous impersonation of the universal Great God, we can start seeing Jewish universalism for what it is, an extreme and pathological form of ethnocentrism. And we can read through such nonsense of [sic] Emmanuel Levinas’ claim that Judaism constitutes a “particularism that conditions universality” so that “there is an obvious equation between Israel and the universal,” because “Israel equals humanity.”. . . That transformation of national Yahweh into the “God of Heaven and Earth” is a case of crypsis, an imitation of Persian religion for the purpose of political and cultural ascendancy (p. 36).

Central to Guyénot’s thesis is the idea that Yahweh was originally a volcano god, a god more or less like all other gods, assigned particular qualities, attributes, and affiliations pertaining to a local, tribal mindset; and that there was a sociopolitical agenda, a mission, and an assertion of the exclusivity and supremacy of the volcano god, via the idea of a “jealous god” who could tolerate no other gods beside it.

This is one thing when it’s within a tribe with its own pantheon of gods that decides, for whatever reason, that one of the gods is supreme and so designates the others to idols or false gods. It’s quite another when it involves imposing this idea on other tribes by saying: “Our God is better than your god.”

Guyénot’s cultural analysis, understandably, leaves the larger, spiritual question unanswered, as to who or what was Yahweh.

Yahweh’s Many Sides

The name YHVH is also the Tetragrammaton, which indicates something beyond merely the name for a specific force within creation, something closer to the foundational principle(s)—fourfold—of Creation.

Then there is the fact that Yahweh is only one of the names for the god(s) being promoted by the OT. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer (in Jesus Against Christianity) writes:

Certainly, the qualities ascribed to Yahweh (and also, to a degree, to Elohim) in the Old Testament, at least some of the time, are of a petty and destructive demiurge with some very specific limitations (he even appears in human form). He is very far from infallible, inconsistently just, and seems to big himself up at the cost of being fair-minded. He behaves as a kind of super-being, intervening in human history in a way that’s partisan and self-oriented, with a very specific, worldly agenda.

Rather as we might expect a tribal identity to think and function.

However, such dubious divine characteristics do overlap with passages that describe something closer to a universal Creator-God from whom existence emerges, who is beyond the limitations of particular qualities or features, much less worldly allegiances, whose will cannot be fathomed, and for this reason cannot be questioned (as in the book of Job).

And whose being—and doing—incorporates both good and evil, as Isaiah 45:7 has it: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.”