#you belittle our beliefs and religious practices but still try to claim our stories are 'just as important' to you as it is to us

[former-leftist-jew]

NO.

Fuck that.

"The Prince of Egypt" is a JEWISH movie.

Every Jew in Hollywood at the time helped make it, Yocheved was voiced by an Israeli singer who recorded the song in several languages before she died, and the Hebrew lyrics during the song "Miracles" (that Christians love to sing) are from the prayer Mi Chamocha, which Jews still sing every week on the Sabbath, as we keep the Law of Moses, to this day.

If Christians had their way, the ancient Hebrew language and prayers would have been lost to time, as well as the teachings and ritual laws of Moses, in favor of the Greek-Romanified "Jesus of Nazareth," not Yeshua of Judea.

For crying out loud, the Jews' most holy text is the Torah, or the first five books of the Tanakh (what you dismiss as the "Old Testament of Jesus"), which Jews call, "The Five Books of Moses."

And some of the more devout Jews still have Daily Torah Readings, because the Torah is so important to us. And those daily readings add up to yearly reading of the entire Five Books of Moses--Hell, Jews have an entire holiday dedicated to finishing reading the entire Torah and then starting all over again for the next year.

That's how much the "Five Books of Moses" means to Jews--we have entire holidays dedicated to reading and restarting and re-studying it.

The Ten Commandments are still in effect, Jesus did not abolish the law but fulfilled it, and to get to Jesus we needed Moses.

But you threw out the Law of Moses as "old and irrelevant, because Jesus," right? And if you had your way, Jews would also abandon and replace the teachings of Moses with the teachings Jesus, just as you did.

And by God, most Christians throughout history have tried to make Jews discard the Law of Moses and replace it with Word of Christ, using every method from forced mass conversions to massacres. At best, Christians still mock and belittle us for "clinging to" the "outdated and irrelevant" laws and teachings of Moses, rather than discarding and replacing them on cue like you guys did.

... and you STILL try to pretend the predominantly Jewish-made movie honoring the Jews' most revered prophet means 'just as much' to you as it does to us?

Frankly, it adds insult to injury when a Christian who openly dismisses Moses as a lesser placeholder to Jesus, who tries to have Jews follow suit and discard Moses, turn around and try to claim, "Oh, this movie made predominantly by Jews about the Jews' most revered prophet means just as much to me, as a Christian who threw the teachings of Moses out like yesterday's trash,

(Like, I'm reading the New Testament right now, and I'm struck by how quickly Yeshua and his followers came into conflict with other Jews, partly because he disparaged and cherry-picked which laws of Moses he felt one should follow--he wasn't big on ritual hand-washing or divorce--which was ordered by Moses and thus considered a big no-no at the time. And the text treats his critics as BAD for saying, "No, the Laws of Moses are non-negotiable." A stance that most Jews have taken with many Messianic claimants, not just Jesus.)

Let no one rob it from the Jews, but us christians literally

Then please stop taking our stories and trying to make it about YOU and YOUR precious love for Jesus.

Especially since you openly consider Moses a mere placeholder until the oh-so-much-better Jesus arrived.

To Christians, story of Moses was just another part of the long, rambling prologue to the Main Event (Jesus).

To Jews, Moses IS the Main Event. Or rather, the story, teachings, and ritual laws of of Moses are the backbone and foundation of our entire religion--history, culture, heritage, ritual religious practices--not just a disposable footnote in the long history leading up to The Main Guy, Jesus.

So why the FUCK should you get to PRETEND that the film honoring the story of Moses and his considerable impact on the Jewish religion, history, and culture (that still exists to this day, despite the world's best effort) means "just as much/more to" you as a Christian than the people who DIDN'T abandon the teachings of Moses in favor of Jesus. (Mr. "We don't need to ritually wash our hands before we eat." Ugh.)

It's the ultimate, "I deserve a participation trophy just for existing," when not only did you not participate, but so many Christians actively mock and belittle Jews (at best) for continuing to honor the Law of Moses, and actively make life harder for us to continue to live by his teachings that the Christians cherry-picked and abandoned.

You don't get to have it both ways. You don't get to dismiss Moses as an expendable placeholder for Jesus in one breath, and then try to act like that the story of Moses means "just as much to you" as it does the Jews who made the film and still revere the teachings of Moses to this day.

Need this site to understand that "The Prince of Egypt" is BOTH a Jewish and Christian movie. Let no one rob it from the Jews, but us christians literally owe our faith to the same God who saw to and led the Exodus. The Ten Commandments are still in effect, Jesus did not abolish the law but fulfilled it, and to get to Jesus we needed Moses.

[paganchristian]

Another kaleidoscope picture.  Hm...  When my life and wellbeing feel extremely threatened and the path that gave me the God who transformed my heart, and my character so much, when that path also tells me I’ll go to Hell if I don’t do things I can’t bring myself to do, when my relationships, heart, joy and peace in life, purpose and mental health and my physical health and all at serious risk of falling apart, then where could I find faith?   What comfort in not knowing would let me feel content?  I’m not sure at the moment.  I have some ideas.  It is that I trust some of what I’ve been given and shown, and other things that I’ve been taught, told and instructed I don’t trust and don’t follow.  I accept my lack of trust and I’m comfortable with that lack of trust, well sort of anyway.  

But in a way that supposed faith and comfort in not knowing is not really fully true, because I am still terrified, horrified, of what I feel and fear could happen to me, not just in some hypothetical afterlife, if it exists as they say, but in this life, too, which I know exists, and all the horrors that feel like they could just destroy my feeling of purpose, meaning and peace and joy and contentment, irreparably.  No one can be faithful in that outlook, at least not all the way.  They’ll be faithful to the extent there is still hope, joy and love existing.  If there is only a little hope, joy and love, there will only be a little faith.  Why would you keep having faith unless you have something to count on and trust in, because in another sense, faith is about trust.  

And why would you trust something?  Because it’s shown itself to be trustworthy, why else would you trust it?  Not because so and so said that you have to have faith or else something bad will happen or that you have to have faith and if you do something amazing will happen.  If you only have faith because of the arguments of your religion or of other people it’s not much better than having faith in the supposed miracle cures of the many charlatans out there.  

Even if you have faith in something that has a strong foundation of beautiful ideas in it, and wonderful insights, arguments, and philosophies, ways of life and so on to help you have a better life.  That in itself is an ideological system and psychological approach to manage your life and it’s a way to improve social skills, relationships and whatever it might address.  Ok, good as far as that goes, but it’s just ideas unless you can really prove and experience anything more.  You have no more faith in it because of that than you do in, say, a self-help book that greatly transforms your life.  

Yes, it might help you a lot, but only to a point and then you need more and why idolize it and expect it to perform miracles for you?  No more than a guru would, and many people make gurus out of self-help experts, but the experts aren’t able to really help their lives in all the ways they need, and they are just putting off the work of transforming themselves on others.  It’s not that they could choose to transform themselves, because perhaps no one knows how, least of all themselves, but they want to believe the guru has all the answers and they will cling to that hope even in the face of countless evidence to the contrary.  But isn’t religion often the same way.  

In the same way I have read that people who have cancer and believe in miracle cures and faith cures often are happier, even if their supposed cures don’t cure them.  If they do this just as an extra thing, and it has no ill side-effects, then it might be ok for them.  And perhaps for some this is similar to how they experience their beliefs about gurus or belief systems.  They might derive some comfort.  Ok if it does no harm, all’s well that ends well or no worse than it would have been otherwise, anyway.  Yes,  but...  

But what is the cost for others, for not everyone is it so happy a story.  I have known people who refused treatments that would have probably helped them all because they believed they could cure themselves with charlatan cures instead or because they were so terrified of modern medicine.  And if they are avoiding the real cure, in case there is one out there, or if they try to force their cure on someone else or else try to fight them and belittle them for not following along, for voicing another view, for living another way. 

Where does real, true faith fit into any of this?  And how does it relate to religions and beliefs, because to me it sometimes seems to be quite similar, if I’m seeing things clearly at least.  What about religion- Is it just the palliative to an otherwise painful and unbearable situation?  

Though I have experienced strange graces it has still not been enough so where does faith fit in that?  I wonder.  I am not willing to free fall and expect God to catch me so where does my faith stand?  

And why would I be punished just because of not being willing to recklessly endanger myself and others in case the faith was misguided?  Hello, doesn’t the whole idea of false guides, of demons cloaked as beings of light come to mind?  Who would not want you to throw away all your safety and the care of your loved ones for presumed faith, if not such false beings of light? 

Maybe if I do have faith, it is a partial faith.  Maybe that is all God wants.  A full faith not based on good reasons seems more harmful.  What if God actually is testing us to see who is blindly faithful to harmful, reckless practices and ideas and who listens to their own heart and sense, and the former are closer to the mark than the latter,  and the latter will receive a higher grace than the former.  We have to stand outside the group, called names, called worthy of hell, and if still in spite of all that we hold on to our flimsy faith, our weak love of God, which is real and sincere, then maybe that is enough.  At any rate if it’s not enough, maybe there is nothing else for me to choose.  

The catch-22s of the religious path for me now, as I described them a few posts ago, explain why I feel there is no other good choice.  Or maybe there could be, I mean, maybe I could try church and if it doesn’t work is my real faith any weaker?  Maybe stronger still because it’s realer, more experienced in real life facts even if they hurt me and cast me out of the group, out of the promises claimed, out of the hopes untested,... Thus making my faith lower and humbler yet again.  Yes, weak, low, but real faith, for whatever it’s worth and however little is might be.  

[spilledreality]

the hippie phenomenon

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

—Robert Warshow, "E. B. White and the New Yorker"

I wanna take issue with Kerouac and Didion, not so much with their writing’s literary value but as cultural criticism. Chance aside, a prerequisite of good criticism as I see it is a penetrating, upper-percentile comprehension of the subject at hand, coupled with an epistemic humility sufficient to the task of staying open-minded. Both Kerouac and Didion, though they represent opposite sides of the cultural and political coin, seem most primarily in judgment of their subjects, rather than intrigued by them. Both their practices show a dedication to deduction over induction, which is to say the opposite of learning. There is little demonstrated effort to adequately reconcile their worldviews, motivations, and values with that of an other (in Kerouac’s case, PTA moms and nuclear families; in Didion’s, the acidfreaks of Haight-Ashbury). Any good lawyer will tell you, if you don’t adequately understand your opponent’s position, your rebuttal will follow in inadequacy, cf. Ideological Turing Tests. 

Here's Kerouac in My Woman describing a job application (one implication being that the American laborer is a drone, a zombie, whose guise Jack and his friends must take on to get hired): 

We entered [the office] with our arms stretched out in front of us [drunk] like the zombies we'd seen in a picture the other day; we made our feet go slow and automatic like the ghost of death. We asked the man for a job. The poor idiot said, 'I don't think you boys will do.' We got out of there... laughing at the top of our lungs. 

2.

As the 50s turned into the 60s, the Beat ethos into flower power, Kerouac drifted into Long Island alcoholism; Ginsberg adapted, stayed relevant. The transition between decades bridged by the Merry Pranksters’ cross-country quest to "tune out, drop out" in a refurbished 1939 school bus per Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

On assignment for The Saturday Evening Post, Joan Didion traveled to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where she saw posters of Ginsberg hung on the walls and devotees treated his opinions on the Krishna as of equal authority with the Swami. Didion saw a world falling apart, spiritually and socially in crisis. People forget, so it's worth reminding that Didion was not a progressive in this era. She was a National Review contributor and a Goldwater voter. And while I have no problem with her political conservatism, it’s important to link “Slouching” with the general moral hysteria over longhairedness taking place at the time, a hysteria which contributed in large part to Nixon's presidential and Reagan's gubernatorial elections.

The central argument (or assumption, or presumption of “Slouching” is that San Francisco is home to a generation of children (some literally, some relative maturity) who have embarked on an extended bad trip (either literally or figuratively) from which they may not ever return. Affectless and out-of-it, they show emotion only when discussing, acquiring, or ingesting narcotics (peyote, acid, smack, crystal, amps, and a now-mysterious “STP”).  “Pathetically unequipped" for the real world, they lack any serious political convictions or critical thinking abilities, instead swimming in self-delusion and macrobiotic diets.

I can't speak of Dideon's intent so I'll stick to her prose, sociopathic in its lack of empathy and interest. The essay’s divided into bits so that each section sports an ominous closing sentence cum punchline-zinger. Interviewees divide into strawmen or caricatures; none are depicted or explored as complex, flesh-and-blood human beings. Juvenile delinquents and drug dealers are picked as the primary representative spokespeople of a sizable neighborhood and subculture. There’s Debbie, 15, a runaway because “[her] parents said she had to go to Church.” There’s John, 16, who has left home because his mother “didn't like boots” and made him help out around the house: “Tell about the chores,” Debbie says. John: “For example, I had chores. If I didn't finish ironing my shirts for the week I couldn't go out for the weekend. It was weird, wow.” Shortly after her wide-eyed relay on chores, Didion recounts Debbie literally chipping a nail, then getting upset that the author isn't carrying extra polish on her. I'd say you can't make this stuff up, but I'm tempted to invoke Richard Bradley:

Some years ago, when I was an editor at George magazine, I was unfortunate enough to work with the writer Stephen Glass on a number of articles. They proved to be fake, filled with fabrications, as was pretty much all of his work. The experience was painful but educational; it forced me to examine how easily I had been duped. Why did I believe those insinuations about Bill Clinton-friend Vernon Jordan being a lech? About the dubious ethics of uber-fundraiser (now Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe? The answer, I had to admit, was because they corroborated my pre-existing biases. I was well on the way to believing that Vernon Jordan was a philanderer, for example—everyone seemed to think so, back in the ’90s, during the Monica Lewinsky time.

I can't say whether Didion fabricated these stories. It doesn't matter either way. A piece which confirms existing biases of its readers, or which confirms its own initial biases at its start, doing little more than elaborate variations on a stereotype for thousands of words, is poor criticism and shoddy historiography.

A generic structure for a given section of “Slouching”: observe events unraveling around her, hazard a guess at (and editorialize heavily on) what is occurring, entertain the possibility of asking a participant or knowledgeable observer for more accurate information, and then—inexplicably—decide not to. In other words, there’s a lack of respect for her subjects’ subjectivity, or for her own ability to be wrong. Equally as incredible as this journalistic practice is Didion’s willingness to admit to it (and in the same breath berate Time and other publications for their own misunderstandings of the hippie phenomenon).

Didion gets haughty at points, seamlessly transitioning from picking on a teenager’s amateur poetry to a bout of philosophical reflection:

As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon mastery of the language and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from a “broken home.”

For myself, I’m not so hot about the idea of a journalist who dedicates forty pages to belittling literal teenage runaways, especially when so many avenues of more substantial cultural interest are ignored. It’s off-handedly mentioned that McLuhan is read by many in the Haight community, as are the Hari Krishna and the writings of Zen Buddhism, but Didion never meaningfully pursues any of the community's beliefs.

3.

Some of the more interesting documents on this subject come from the exchanges between literary, Cold War liberal moderates and the generation of beatniks and hippies who were pulling the country toward a more radical vision. Adam Kirsch’s Why Trilling Matters charts the relationship between Lionel Trilling and his former student at Columbia, Allen Ginsberg. (Kirsch, drawing on Trilling, distinguishes between the Blakean and Wordsworthean impulse, Wordsworth a “representative of wisdom,” Blake as the blazing voice of passion. As Trilling writes, Blake's poetry would be one of the more significant influences on the art and voice of Sixties counterculture: “American undergraduates seem to be ever more alienated from the general body of English literature, but they have for some time made an exception of William Blake... uniquely relevant to their spiritual aspirations” and acting as a model for its “transvaluation of social and aesthetic values.”)

Equally good is the lifelong correspondence between Allen and his also-poet father Louis Ginsberg. Trilling and L.’s sensibilities are of moderation and qualification, both sure only of their own fallibility; the Blakean hubris is an ideology propping up conceits of heroism, a Manichean dualism where only the counterculture keeps it real. “Save me from that mixed-up, confused view of the Beat Generation which maintains it has a blueprint of Truth, obviously handed over to them in a mystic, blinding revelation from Heaven," Louis wrote to his son in ‘58.

An avid communist in the early-to-mid 1960s (before a trip to Cuba changed his mind w/r/t the freedom of its citizens¹) Allen berated his father in letter after letter over Lou's democratic socialist views, and got bit back:

Your holier-than-thou attitude, with your noble intentions, does not prove that you have a Heavenly blueprint of the truth. You may be a great poet, as I believe you are, but you can still have false ideas and false facts, despite your noble intentions. T.S. Eliot and Pound had Fascist ideas.

One more excerpt, for joy:

Dear Allen,

You have a right to your opinion, according to your lights; but I retain my energetic insistence to differ with you... on your whole Beat Generation's views that everything that is, to paraphrase Pope, is wrong. Everything, according to your views, is all wrong, all in ruins, all warmongering, all immoral—except you (plural; i.e., the Beat Generation). Nobody wants “beauty, poetry, freedom” but you (plural)... all is false; all civilization messed up, all progress in the wrong, false track; all doomed... (March 10, 1958)

The truth the Beats claimed to seek or else contain was partly religious, the result of chemical visions, Ginsberg hearing Blake’s voice come to him mid-orgasm, Cassady meditating. But it was also of the writers’ attempted escape from social structure, to chase an idea of the authentic self as the self unencumbered by the social. Trilling “...the idea of... surrendering oneself to experience without regard to... conventional morality, of escaping wholly from the societal bonds, is an ‘element’ somewhere in the mind of every modern person.” Hence the enormous success of On the Road, which functions as simulation, a virtual joyride for those unwilling, unable, or who know better than to take such a trip themselves.

4.

Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden:

Postwar prosperity had provided [sixties radicals] with the freedom to protest, the freedom to run wild, and the luxury of dropping out without worrying about a job. But by the 1970s the economy turned sour and, as I wrote in [the 1977 edition of] this book, “we could see how much the rainbow colors of the culture of the sixties were built on the fragile bubble of a despised affluence, an economic boom that was simply taken for granted.”

This is not to invalidate the legitimacy of radicals’ complaints, but to complicate the picture of inheritance in dissent.

It’s no secret the Beats were a stretch short of sainthood. Cassady and Kerouac were philanderers, promising women marriages only to subsequently abandon them (illegitimate children included). Cars were stolen only to be drunkenly totaled. And Carr, of course, infamously knifed an overly attached romantic pursuer in Manhattan's Riverside Park, dumping his body in the Hudson River under conditions still unclear today.

Tied up in this transgressiveness is the question of privilege, a critique which Diana Trilling, wife of the famous Lionel, launches in her essay for Partisan Review, “The Other Night at Columbia”:

I had heard about [Ginsberg] much more than I usually hear of students for the simple reason that he got into a great deal of trouble which involved his instructors, and had to be rescued and revived and restored; eventually he had even to be kept out of jail. Of course there was always the question, should this young man be rescued, should he be restored? There was even the question, shouldn’t he go to jail? We argued about it some at home but the discussion, I’m afraid, was academic, despite my old resistance to the idea that people like Ginsberg had the right to ask and receive preferential treatment just because they read Rimbaud and Gide and undertook to put words on paper themselves.

Alexander:

The “heroes” of On The Road consider themselves ill-done by and beaten-down. But they are people who can go anywhere they want for free, get a job any time they want, hook up with any girl in the country, and be so clueless about the world that they’re pretty sure being a 1950s black person is a laugh a minute. On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat. But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.

I would hesitate to agree that America in the early 20th century was markedly higher-trust than modern times. Rates of violent crime in the interwar period are comparable to the highs of the 70s crime wave, and despite sagging post-1945, were only slightly lower in Kerouac's time than our own. (Trust != crime, I know.) But the mechanisms of opportunity and exploitation remain in play. It is a phenomenon in which transgressive parties advocate for their transgressive way of life as a replacement to the present social order, without realizing or acknowledging that their transgressions are logistically possible through this very structure. Behavior is advocated as moral in Beat writing which would fall apart as a Kantian imperative.

In Kerouac this is both identitarian and pragmatic; J.K.’s lifestyle is possible because it exploits a trusting industrial society and its hard-earned resources. But in Maggie Nelson’s queer theory, it’s primarily a matter of identity and spirituality, where transgression is an end (autotelic) in itself. This is the paradoxical relationship of hegemony to the queer: it is at once mortal enemy and dearest ally, struggle’s basis in every sense of the word.  

The Argonauts is frequently brilliant; its idea of flux (“a constant becoming which never becomes”) is infinitely valuable. But Nelson condemns at every turn the category, the pigeon-hole, the label. Words to her are cages which imprison minds and bodies. And yet both Nelson and Kerouac seem not to acknowledge that the lifestyles and self-images they hold so valuable—the rebellion, transgression, and self-elevation practiced by Kerouac; the queerness valued by Nelson—are possible only through the existence of a majority body or structure from which to self-elevate and self-other. They are advocating for identities of negation as if they were autonomous.

[1] Ginsberg was expelled from Cuba in February of 1965 for "talking too much about marijuana & sex & capital punishment"; he traveled from there to the less oppressive Czechoslovakia.