OF JEWS AND ISRAELIS

KEITH: Of all peoples in the West, Jews strike me as being the ones who most cling to Creator worship, to a religion which stresses the Creator, or Jehovah, rather than some avatar, or Christ-equivalent figure, who stands, chronologically speaking, in between the Creator and the future Ultimate Creation ... of the Holy Spirit ... in the overall evolution of gods. Judaism would appear to be a largely alpha-oriented religion, a religion anterior to Christianity in terms of evolutionary development and, as such, many of its adherents would seem to be biased towards materialism and more capable, in consequence, of pursuing wealth as a desirable end than most of their Christian counterparts - much as though the pursuit of material gain was of moral value in itself.

ROBERT: I agree that Judaism is fundamentally more alpha-orientated than any other so-called World Religion, with the possible exception of Islam, and could therefore be regarded as pre-atomic rather than atomic. Now if there is any connection between a people's lifestyle and their religion, then it could well transpire that there is some truth in what you say about Jews being more disposed to the pursuit of wealth in consequence of their paganistic cast - not all of them, of course, but still quite a fair percentage, and irrespective of whether or not they still cling to religious devotion.

KEITH: But what makes them like that? I mean, why should they continue to cling to a pre-atomic faith when other peoples have long abandoned such a thing in favour of an atomic faith, like Christianity? Why must Jews be so materialistic?

ROBERT: A very difficult question, but one that I am not entirely bereft of ideas about! In fact, I have only recently come to the conclusion that the tradition of clinging to Judaism stems, in large measure, from the Diaspora, from the fact that Jews took their religious roots into the countries to which they were obliged to emigrate and, not possessing a national state of their own, had to cling to such roots if for no other reason than the preservation of a common ground between them.

KEITH: You mean that rather than becoming Christians or Mohammedans or whatever, and thereby severing connections with their principal form of cultural identity, they clung to Judaism even in the face of persecution, in order to retain a cultural identity with Jews everywhere, irrespective of to which country they had migrated.

ROBERT: Yes, I broadly subscribe to that contention. For although I am aware that Jews were often prohibited from becoming Christians or Mohammedans in the various countries to which they migrated, the fact that they had been forced into exile by the Romans must have produced an inhibiting effect on the degree to which they were prepared to assimilate themselves to, or be assimilated by, the country of their hosts, with a consequence that, ever desirous of a future return to Zion, they determined to cling to their religious roots in the interests of ethnic identity. Thus whilst other peoples were acquiring and furthering a semi-transcendental religious perspective, Jews remained, and to a significant extent still remain, fundamentalist at heart, clinging to alpha-oriented criteria in the hope that, one day, they would regain their homeland and become a united, independent people again, with the prospect of a new religious development, once the Messiah had come to lead them forward. Of all the civilized peoples in the world, they are the only ones who, Second Comings notwithstanding, are still awaiting a Messiah, having rejected Christ and other such atomic messiahs in loyalty to their people, traditions, and apocalyptic hopes, not to mention historical antipathy to the Romans, who of course became Christians.

KEITH: And yet we live in a century when, after nearly two millennia, the Jews once again have a homeland, which is the State of Israel, and are enabled to return to it if they so desire, that is to say, if they have remained loyal to their people and want to fulfil Biblical prophecy by returning home and awaiting messianic redemption.

ROBERT: That is so. But, of course, not all of them have remained loyal to their people after all this time. Some have become Christians and thus abandoned the religious hopes of their ancestors; some, while remaining Judaic, have become more closely integrated into the country of their adoption, or, more usually these days, birth; some, preferring to abandon all religious traditions, whether Judaic or Christian, have adopted atheistic positions in loyalty to Socialism, and thus become still more closely integrated into the country of their adoption or birth, be it Western or Eastern; and some, of course, are of mixed descent and thus hardly Semitic at all by any racial reckoning. There exists a whole range of Jews who aren't particularly interested in Zionism and a possible future return to Israel; though there also remain many who are still interested in such a prospect and are merely awaiting an opportunity to make their move. Yet others have already gone, are now in - or were before they died for one reason or another - the State of Israel, even if only briefly. Some of the Israeli Jews are still Judaic, still practising adherents of pre-atomic religion in loyalty to tradition. Others are nominally Judaic but, in practice, secular - free of conscious religious commitment or, indeed, of any orthodoxy. So it is among peoples all over the world, irrespective of their perceived race.

KEITH: Yet many Jews, whether in Israel or the Diaspora, whether Zionist or Internationalist, European or American, are still basically materialistic, given to the pursuit of wealth as a kind of virtue in itself, and consequently despised, not least of all for their unwillingness to substitute Christian criteria for Judaic criteria.

ROBERT: That may be so, but while they live in atomic civilizations, as in the Christian West, they cannot be persecuted outright, as by the Nazis both before and during the Second World War, since Christian nations are still partly pagan, or alpha-stemming, and therefore disposed to tolerate, if not openly admire, Jews in their midst, irrespective of how un-Christian or pre-atomic some of them may happen to be. Only nations tending away from atomic civilization in a barbarous political guise would be inclined to persecute Jews for being pre-atomic in cultural allegiance. For such nations tend, whether or not they're aware of the fact, towards the transcendent, and must find fault with what they take to be pagan or, in the Jewish case, quasi-pagan alpha-oriented 'laggards'.

KEITH: But surely the Nazi persecution of Jews, to which you are doubtless alluding, was conducted on a racist basis, without regard to moral or religious criteria?

ROBERT: To a large extent it was, even given the fact that one can't wholly separate religious from ethnic considerations, bearing in mind that race and culture are deeply interwoven. Yet while that may have been the case on the surface, as it were, of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, I incline to doubt whether there wasn't a deeper motive underlying it which many Nazis may not have been consciously aware of themselves, but which they were fated, as tools of malign history, to enact - a motive, I mean, connected with the moral implications of leaving a predominantly pre-atomic people at large in a world tending, from a barbarous base, towards post-atomic criteria. Admittedly, it is easy for civilized Westerners to see nothing more than a racist dimension to Nazi anti-Semitism, since this was the apparent dimension, the one most superficially recognizable. But history often makes use of superficial means to attain to profounder ends, and uses, in the process, unsuspecting accomplices in the pursuit of its ultimate goals! Wasn't Nazism supposed to be a quasi-religious ideology, opposed to 'Bolshevik materialism'? And might it not be that such an ideology was fated to pursue policies which Marxists wouldn't have understood, since subject to a different ideological prerogatives, but which history nevertheless required, if only on a short-term basis?

KEITH: Your speculation induces one to suppose that, despite its inevitable failure, Nazism may have been of some service to history whilst it lasted, and primarily as regards the liquidation of approximately six million covertly or overtly cultural adherents of a pre-atomic religion who would not have been dealt with in such fashion by Marxists!

ROBERT: Ah, but the point is: Who were those six million Jews? Were they the cream of their race, those who had fulfilled Biblical prophecy by returning to Palestine either before or during the Second World War? Or, alternatively, were they effectively betrayers of their race, of the prophecy concerning a return to Palestine which, although given ample opportunity of fulfilment, they had chosen to ignore by remaining in Europe, only to be exposed to persecution from a nation which had turned against Jews on the pretext of race? Time alone will tell, though I, for one, wouldn't be surprised if, in the decades or centuries to come, it came down in favour of the latter assumption and passed negative judgement on those who had failed, through no particular fault of anyone else, to return to Palestine.

KEITH: Yet even though millions of Jews succumbed to Nazi persecution and were exterminated in a variety of hideous contexts, one could nevertheless argue that many Jews who would not otherwise have returned to Palestine did in fact do so in consequence of Nazi pressures, and that the Nazis accordingly assisted, if indirectly and in the crudest possible terms, in the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy ... by inducing the more sensible or courageous or fortunate or fit Jews to escape to freedom.

ROBERT: Indeed, and many Jews would doubtless have required such a radical incentive for leaving Europe after so many centuries of exile there! But those who remained behind did so at their own peril and, in a majority of cases, they paid the penalty - whatever moral interpretation one chooses to attach to their demise. My admiration is less for the recalcitrant, the lazy, the apostate, the ignorant, the weak, or whatever, than for the Zionists, especially those who had voluntarily returned to Palestine, as it then was, even before the Nazi incentive came along, and in the face of British restrictions, the sort of restrictions that, duly maintained even during the Second World War, subsequently paved the way, it seems to me, for the holocaust. They are the ones who eventually became Israelis, leaving Jews behind in the Diaspora in order to forge a national identity, an identity which, though superior to an ethnic one, may yet give way to a still superior identity in Transcendentalism, assuming Israelis prove willing to accept transcendental truth and gravitate from Judaism to the new religion with an alacrity that only a people long accustomed to waiting on messianic deliverance could be expected to show.

KEITH: You mean the State of Israel will be redeemed if Israelis take a lead in adopting Transcendentalism, and thus set a spiritual example for other peoples to follow?

ROBERT: Yes, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that they should set such an example to the whole world. For, speaking as an Irishman, I would like to see Ireland setting such an example as well, in the not-too-distant future, and see no reason why it shouldn't do so.

KEITH: So while you don't have a particularly high moral regard for Jews ... conceived, in a way, as exiled tribalists, you are prepared to concede Israelis the possibility of spiritual redemption, even though, in the present circumstances, many of them cling to Judaism for want of anything better.

ROBERT: Yes, I would rather Israel became a bulwark of transcendental progress in the Middle East, and thereby fully justified its presence there, instead of simply existing in an open-society context, as at present. After all, the adoption of Transcendentalism by Israel could have extremely important repercussions on world Jewry, to the extent that a timely directive from Israel for diaspora Jews to abandon Judaism could save the latter unnecessary denigration from barbarous opponents of traditional faiths. Of course, there is always the possibility that the adoption of Transcendentalism might lead to friction with such opponents, if pursued too ardently or hastily. But if diaspora Jews are to be redeemed at some future date, then they will have to abandon Judaism for the religion in question. However, it is unlikely that Marxists would behave towards Jews as did the Nazis - regardless, in other words, of their religious, class, national, or other allegiances. While Marxists may oppose capitalists and adherents of traditional religious faiths, of which Judaism is a conspicuous example, they should not be racists and/or unconscious tools of a malign history that would be prepared to liquidate Jews on sight.

KEITH: Yet, presumably diaspora Jews would be more subject to harassment than Jews or, rather, Israelis in Israel?

ROBERT: That always remains a possibility. Though if such Jews aren't specifically intended, by historical necessity, to be in the Diaspora to further Transcendentalism among European and other peoples when the opportunity of doing so arises, then most of them would probably be better off going to Israel and working for Israeli freedom, or the right of Israel to exist. For it seems to me that the more Jews there are in Israel, and the less Jews in the Diaspora, the better it will be for Israel, which still hasn't entirely convinced the Arab world of its entitlement to exist, and could therefore do with all the able-bodied help it can get.

KEITH: So you are convinced that the State of Israel deserves to exist?

ROBERT: Provided the conditions to which I have alluded are eventually met and Israel thereupon takes a lead in affirming Transcendentalism, as taught by the New Messiah, the 'Anti-Moses' of universal civilization. Unfortunately, like Moses in the desert before him, this New Messiah, who in Christian parlance loosely corresponds to a Second Coming, won't personally enter the 'promised land' ... of the transcendental civilization himself, because its global realization is only likely to come to pass in the future, quite some time, in all probability, after his death. But he must nevertheless point the way forward for his subsequent followers, of whichever race, to tend towards and eventually enter this spiritual 'promised land' themselves, to be set firmly on course for the post-Human Millennium and what lies beyond that epoch ... in the heaven of literal transcendence. If some peoples are destined to start along the road to that ultimate civilization ahead of others, well and good! There will continue to be a distinction between 'the quick' and 'the slow' for some time yet, and he sees no reason why Israelis, in conjunction with peoples like the Irish and Iranians, shouldn't be among the former. After all, Jews have been dragging their feet, metaphorically speaking, for a sufficient period of time now to suggest that a radical leap to higher things is timely! The Diaspora may have held their religious aspirations in check, but the State of Israel, if it is determined to fully justify itself, should permit them to flourish as never before - in the exclusively omega-oriented context of Transcendentalism!