Crazy Aunt in the Attic

Crazy Aunt in the Attic

By Michael Devolin
Sep 28, 2007 - 1:27:01 AM
There is only one Chosen People. No matter all of Islam's violence and threats and slanders, no matter all of Christianity's calumnious sophistry and laboured theologies, the Jews remain the Chosen People of G-D as defined in their Torah. And isn't this the point of contention between the Jews and all other human invention? Isn't this the one eternal truth Islam and Christianity have never been able to endure? The respective and violent histories of these two religions and their shameless mistreatment of the Jewish people merely confirm the veracity of the proverb, "Who can withstand envy?"
In defining Christianity and its theological relationship to Judaism, James Carroll writes, "The idea is that the Jesus movement, as it evolved into the Church, effectively replaced the Jews as the chosen people of God. Replacement became the motif, even in trivial way..." James Carroll, for all his posturing as a Christian who feels remorse and "contrition" about the Holocaust, fails to take the only conscionable course of action open to him after confessing to the sins committed by his fellow religious during that immeasurably horrific calamity: he fails to repudiate Christianity outright. Such a false humility and imposture is succinctly described by William Blake's pithy rhyme: "A truth that's told with bad intent—beats all the lies you can invent."
All political and military assaults on the State of Israel and the Jewish people by non-Jewish personages and nations I view as an attack on the veracity of the "choseness" of the Jewish people. Such a small nation existing precariously in the middle of such an enormous ocean of anti-Jewish hatred is the only reason powerful politicians like George Bush and Condoleeza Rice can so unctuously propel an intimidated and embattled Israeli government toward ousting entire communities of Jews from their homes and into what their G-D must surely view as an exile of immense contradiction - within the borders of the very Israel He gave to the Jews as their inheritance. Such callous disregard for Jewish national sensibilities on the part of the Bush Administration is nothing short of an attempt to controvert the validity of the Jewish Torah and the exclusivity with which it charters the Jewish people as "a light unto the nations."
If any man believe in the G-D of the Jews, as defined in their Torah, Who only is the Creator of the Universe - a belief that excludes, in my view, Allah and Jesus - then that same man would surely regard as grave imprudence any attempt to extirpate Jewish ownership of Israel or to calumniate the morality of Israel's defence against Islam's terrorists and the genocide they surely intend against all Jewish life within and without the borders of Israel. To disbelieve in the exclusivity of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, in the last analysis, is to oppose the very G-D Who designated it as such. Likewise, to excoriate Israel's military and its defence of her Jews against the violent manifestations of Islam's madmen is therefore tantamount to wishing those same Jews dead.
Some men choose to believe in Jesus and Rome, some in Allah and Mecca, but every Jew is born into the Mosaic requirement of being faithful to the G-D of the Torah and the numinous intransigence of its laws, one of which is to inhabit the land of Israel. Consequently, our world is imposed upon by Christianity and the Apostle Paul's negative and sophistic concepts of the "spiritual Jew" and the "new Israel; by Islam and Mohammed's viciously simplistic libels against Judaism and the Jew. Both religious constructs, Christianity and Islam, were conceived as calumny against the Judaism of their day and the morality that same Judaism intimated as salubrious for the Gentile world. It's no wonder then that there exists a Yiddish proverb which declares, "A half-truth is a whole lie." And contrary to James Carroll's imperious denials, anti-Judaism is definitely a form of anti-Jewish hatred.
The religious refutations both Christianity and Islam have served to precipitate against the validity of the Jews as G-D's Chosen People are, to be quite frank, uncomfortably similar to the brazenness of Holocaust denial. That these refutations, at once ugly and angry and strained, are putatively accepted by most of the Gentile world reminds me of Deborah Lipstadt's depiction of modern historians insouciantly admitting into their ranks a David Irving as "the crazy aunt the family sequesters in the attic. Everyone knows she is there, but if you don't shine a light on her, she can be ignored." Likewise many of us are cognizant of the unexposed side of Christianity and Islam, regardless the glossing over these religions inspire from their attendant sycophants and apologists. But at the same time we know for a fact that the Jews were divinely identified in their Torah as the Chosen People of G-D - long before Christianity and even longer before Islam. We choose to muffle this knowledge in order to accommodate centuries-old religious traditions, a course of action which, in the case of Islam, shall be to our peril. This denial of the truth, this our refusal to accept that the Jews and only the Jews are the Chosen People of G-D, is the crazy aunt the Gentile world has for millennia sequestered in the attic. We cannot ignore her any longer.
Written by Michael Devolin © Copyright 2002-2007 by Magic City Morning Star