Genocide in Gaza

Genocide in Gaza, they scream,
a catchy slogan easy to chant
with its double G redolent of gas
calling to mind the smokestacks of Auschwitz
the chanting morons have never seen,
nor less imagined.
It’s a slogan designed to incriminate,
invalidate, debilitate,
reverse engineer the Jews
into evil incarnate
and dispose of them once again,
once and for all.
The only fly in the ointment
are all those people in Gaza
overfed on charity
and reproducing as if a war
were no different from the weather
that makes sexual congress
a less pleasant sport than it could be
if the tents were air-conditioned.

The man who coined the term genocide
was a Jewish jurist,
hoping thereby to outlaw
a repeat performance
of the industrialized murder of Jews
whom the Germans
with assembly-line precision
turned into skeletons live and dead
Allied forces uncovered at war’s end.
The upshot was another industry
now called human rights,
today turned against the very Jews
whose murder inspired the concept.
Little did the Zionist jurist suspect
that diluting the Holocaust
into the legal soup
of crimes against humanity
would enable latter-day antisemites,
shouting from their academic soap-boxes,
to accuse live Jews
of doing unto others
what had been done to them,
even though those others,
in the name of a bogus Palestine,
make no bones about their aim
to annihilate the Jewish state
and murder its inhabitants.

The death instinct,
a Jewish psychiatrist once said,
lurks in the human heart,
always ready to explode
given half a chance.
What is genocide but a slogan
 to mask the rage
which rulers always know to harness
and turn against the people
whom culture in its twisted way
has designated as the enemy,
especially if the other culture,
like the Jewish one,
prizes life by laying down the law:
thou shall not kill thy children.
Genocide in Gaza is a slogan
that tells a lie,
and the lie will come to eat alive
those who hurl it.

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Kohelet

Kohelet, son of David,
it says in the Hebrew Bible,
Kohelet, king in Jerusalem,
who secured and expanded Israel’s borders
and built the Temple
that turned out to be the First,
wise beyond the years of his reign
and yet he said:
vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Because what comes to pass
has already happened before;
because a man’s labour outlives the man
and both may be forgotten;
because the wise man and the fool,
like man and beast, come to the same end;
because riches both bless and deceive
and the memories of youth prove regret
with the passing of years;
and though knowledge is good
and wisdom is better,
the evil days will return;
so provide for the days of woe,
but eat, drink, and be merry
in the mercy of your means
as you walk in the ways of the Lord:
vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

I first came across Kohelet at summer camp
where the man who introduced me to it
insisted we memorize the text.
I disputed the instruction but complied
and years later when I saw him again
I told him he was right to insist,
and he told me he knew.
Today I realize I loved that man
who went to his grave before his time,
and wish I could tell him to his face
that the rhythm of Ecclesiastes
courses through the bloodlines of my bruised soul
and leaves me not.
For our people are slandered yet again,
our musical rhymes are banished
from the lands of the living,
and though I read and reread Kohelet
the heart that cheered me in my youth
remains an indictment:
vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

There is evil afoot in the land,
and I too was once part of the evil,
but when I repented of my folly
and worked to repair the damage
it was already too late,
though I was ahead of my time
and so remain.
But that brings no consolation,
nor do the words of Kohelet
reminding me so it has been before,
even in times I know not of
nor could have known of.
For a man with a bit of wisdom
it is always late in life,
but it is never too late in life
to eat, drink and be merry
while and when you can
and remember the words of Kohelet,
king in Jerusalem,
who knew the words of self-deception
and warned against them:
“It is better,” he said, “to go to the house of mourning,
than to go to the house of feasting;
For that is the end of all men,
And the living will lay it to his heart.”
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

And you shall be altogether happy

On the festival of Sukkot
which marks the feast of the fall harvest
when we dwell in booths
under roofs made of boughs
and shake the four species lulav and etrog
in homage to the Lord’s bounty,
we are enjoined to rejoice
with our children and servants,
yea even with the Levite within our gates,
and round up all species of strangers too,
orphan and widow and resident alien,
and be altogether happy
as never we are on all other festivals
throughout the liturgical calendar.
When I was young and sat at the table
of the Richler girls’ family sukkah
I was altogether happy,
but now that I am more than threescore and ten
it is only the memory
of that magical moment
which enables me to fulfill that commandment.
For my people are objects of slander
and no dwelling outside of Israel
feels enough like home
to make me feel other
than a resident alien
in the country that gives me a passport.
Even in Israel 
when I go there and walk the land 
with a knitted kippah on my head 
because the whole land
feels like an open-air synagogue
I am not altogether happy,
because the borders are not secure
and the resident aliens are not people
to invite into a sukkah
but sexually depraved gangsters
whom the government thinks it can subdue
to the useful and the good.
I should like before I die
to sit in a sukkah in Israel
and be altogether happy
as once I was happy
in the Richler girls’ family sukkah,
knowing that at least in my lifetime
God has returned the Jews to Zion
and the Jews have returned God His favour.

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For over a hundred years the Palestinian response to the Zionist national movement has been an implacable hostility accompanied by campaigns of lies and murder. Supporters of the Palestinian cause call that resistance, but what it really amounts to is a death wish masquerading as national liberation. Not for nothing has the rallying cry of the Palestinian cause been “death to the Jews”, accompanied by the equally mendacious accusation of “the Al-Aksa mosque is in danger,” a cry that now resounds from Ramallah to Ankara. But since the Jews have not yet destroyed the Al-Aksa mosque, the cry continues to reverberate, drawing nary a condemnation from Western leaders who ride the hobby-horse of human rights to death. It will continue to animate the Palestinian cause until the Al-Aksa is finally demolished, just as “death to the Jews” will continue to inform Palestinian strategy until the Palestinians themselves come to know the peace of the graveyard. It is unfortunate that this is where this issue is heading, but that is how it is when people ignore the lessons of history and follow the folly of their stupid raging hearts.

For the extension of Israeli sovereignty over Gaza, Judea and Samaria will entail not only a legal proclamation from the Israeli Knesset, the only response that would be in accord with the part of international law that applies, the BBC and the nattering of western governments notwithstanding. It will also entail boots on the ground, a massive Israel attack on the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria and an eventual Israeli military takeover of what remains under Hamas control in Gaza. I am not a military expert, but I am certain that the brilliant minds of the IDF General Staff would be capable of planning and executing such operations. I would hope that this time they would be exempt from taking excessive precautions to spare civilian lives and from providing aid to the enemy they have been obliged to conquer. It is to be hoped that all members of the Palestine Liberation Organization, that umbrella organization which houses the entire panoply of Palestinian groupings committed to and guilty of armed attacks against Israelis, will be eliminated. Which would leave Israel with the thorny problem of what to do with the possible two million Palestinians who remain once the dust has settled. It is not beyond imagining that many of the cities, towns and hamlets containing Palestinian non-combatants would be levelled, such that the aftermath would be one more picture of human misery following a war. The perspective is one which makes so many supporters of Israel baulk at the policy which I have laid out above. Unfortunately, the alternative would eventually be even worse, so let me answer the objections before they cascade.

There exist a number of eventualities following an Israeli reconquest of these territories and the elimination of the Palestinian criminal leadership. The first, of course, is emigration. Many Palestinians would flee the war zone, just as many Syrians fled from Assad’s troops during the Syrian civil war. Others might choose to leave once the dust has settled, an eventuality which Israel would encourage because there is no point retaining within one’s borders a population that is inimical to one’s existence. For those who do not choose to leave, Israel would be faced with two choices. One would be to make life so difficult for the Palestinians who remain that eventually they too would leave. If Israel wants to know how to do that, it can take a leaf out of the Kuwaiti playbook when the Kuwaitis, once Saddam Hussein’s troops were expelled from their country, got rid of 350,000 Palestinians for dancing in the streets in support of Saddam’s invasion. Israel could also learn how to get rid of an undesirable population from those Arab Muslim countries that expelled 850,000 Jews following the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. And then there is another option for dealing with the Palestinians who still do not choose to leave: a modification of the emirate solution which Professor Kedar has long promoted and which some Palestinian clan leaders in Gaza and Hebron have already subscribed to in their contacts with Israeli leaders. I am somewhat skeptical about its chances for success, mainly because the Palestinians have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in hatred of Israel by decades of terror and ideology nourished by Islam and their tribal society that traditional pathways for coexistence may have been closed forever.

Nonetheless, in that scenario the Palestinians who remain would not become Israeli citizens. They would have no voting rights in Israel, but they would be allowed to earn a living as resident aliens. The rules under which they live would have to be very clear cut as to what is permissible and forbidden behaviour. The following are indicative but not exhaustive. No international aid. All mosques closed. Education in Hebrew. Nightly curfews. Eventual limited municipal autonomy. Capital punishment for any violent activity accompanied by destruction of residences belonging to all relatives of perpetrators. People will squawk at a two-tiered justice system, but surely it would be preferable to death or expulsion. And of course, emigration would always be a possibility, as would conversion to Judaism.

For those who consider the above proposals heinous, I suggest they ask themselves: what are the alternatives? Continuous murderous attacks on Israeli citizens, now carried out in the skies as we recently saw with an attempted hijacked airplane? And who introduced the idea of hijacking airplanes if not the Palestinians themselves back in the 1960s before they upgraded to suicide bombings and now massive invasions of rape, murder, and deliberate baby killings, first practised not by Hamas but by agents of the Palestinian Authority? And lest I forget, this whole military campaign of reconquest should be preceded by the destruction of the Al-Aksa mosque and the demolition of its neighbouring Dome of the Rock, because nothing impresses the Arab Muslim mind that one means business more than conquering the land it holds dear and considers theirs. If a holy Christian Church could be turned into the mosque of Hagia Sophia, the Al-Aksa in whose name Hamas slaughtered over 1200 innocent Israeli civilians can be levelled to make way for the Third Jewish Temple. No better way to show Israel means business than to take the bone of contention out of the mix.

No one of course likes to discuss these proposals, because no one likes to advocate scenarios that entail war and death. But war and death are what we already have, except it is on a scale akin to water torture, drip by drip. If you go to the Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem for fallen soldiers, you see that the number of dead who have paid with their lives over the years for tolerating an intolerable situation mounts to the tens of thousands. People also ignore the terrible psychological toll this ongoing situation, what Israelis call “hamatzav”, has taken on both Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis respond with overcoming, with turning to life affirming activity to which the incredible achievements of their society testify, but nonetheless no one in Israel is exempt from grief and now from calumny simply because Jews dare to have their own state as do so many others. But no one else has to endure the hypocritical and slanderous comments of governments who mouth how they support Israel’s right to defend itself while undercutting it in practice. Now the feeling of homelessness even when you have a national home has become the lot of Jews everywhere. As for the Muslim Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, they respond with ongoing slander and murder which only rebound against them in the end, telling themselves narratives of disasters that were not the result of their choices but of their powerlessness and thereby exhorting the next generation to further acts of murder and resentment which only betray a death wish turned into a national culture. And since the “international community” indulges the Palestinians in this death wish, never holding them to account for their actions, the death wish will soon know its fulfilment.

For those who worry that the world will gang up on Israel even more and initiate even more hostile policies against it, I would tell them not to worry too much. Israel has many means to defend itself against people who would consider the Lord’s chosen easy pickings and make them pay for their unwarranted hostility. Much talk is made of Israel’s western allies, but these so-called allies have proved themselves to be worthless and morally bankrupt to boot. Perhaps they too have a death wish which they also ignore at their peril. There is nothing like the return of the repressed to bite you from behind.

Which brings us to a note on genocide. That death is the Palestinian secret wish finds expression in the charge of genocide which Palestinians were quick to level at Israel when that country responded to their turpitude. They could have found another term to protest the Israeli response. Disproportional used to be one of their favourite descriptives. Even the UN was happy and comfortable with that. Genocide ups the stakes to a distinctly higher level, out of all whack with reality but loaded with moral outrage that has its own appeal to the international community, eager to join in this moral inversion when the Jewish state is at issue. Genocide was what the people of Gaza had in mind for the Jews when they launched their attack. Hence the wanton murder and sexual frenzy at a music festival, the burning of babies in ovens, the rape, the abduction, the torture. The boomerang that came with the Israeli response reveals how the genocide which the people of Gaza planned for the Jews was, in the language of depth psychology, the death wish for which they yearn for themselves. The West’s collusion in this death culture only raises questions about its own death wish, one which already surfaced in its war against the Jews within the past century. To expect the Jews to go quietly once again is beyond everything. Enough said, I think.

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What then, the reader may ask, is a democracy? And the answer is: democracy is a form of government where power is bifurcated at the top into government and opposition, and the latter can contest and replace the former at legally sanctioned intervals. Once you have governments divided into government and opposition it is only a question of time until a limited suffrage becomes universal suffrage. The people become drawn into the political process as government and opposition parties contest political power. In the UK it was the Conservative Party that first widened the suffrage in the 19th century. Ultimately, voting itself is not the only way the people express their pleasure. Pressure groups, lobbies, civil disobedience all become means by which the people express their interests beyond the voting booth. Eventually politics becomes a year-round activity, and modern democracies become raucous and cacophonous affairs, with some people going so far as to impugn them for not being democratic enough!

Governments in democracies must however do what governments everywhere do, and over time have always done. They make collectively binding decisions which mobilize the resources of the society under their command to achieve their goals. Tribal rulers, monarchies, even presidents and prime ministers do that. It is no easy task, and under conditions of democracy where power is bifurcated at the top and the people are drawn into the political process in a way they never were before, the task is indeed formidable. The matters of government are numerous and complex, and in modern, functionally differentiated societies even more so, given that the two main resources at the government’s disposal to ensure compliance are not inexhaustible: law and money. So governments have to be very smart and selective about how they exercise power and what they want to exercise that power on. They are constrained by the people, fractious and differentially organized, from below; by the other social systems that operate with their own degree of relative freedom (the economy, the arts, to name but two); and by their own limited resources. When you think about it, it is rather remarkable that governments in modern democratic political systems do as much as they do even with limited success.

There is much more to say about the way political democracies function, but this short introduction will suffice for the subject of this essay, namely the Israeli political system and the forthcoming elections. In most modern democracies there is a tendency for the political system to work in favour of a two-party system. Some countries have managed to incorporate a third party with some hope of replacing the government, perhaps in combination with one of the two major parties. On the whole, however, a two-party system is favoured because that enables the people to choose clearly between the government and the opposition which seeks to replace it. Given the complexity of issues that confront the political system, the latter has a built-in tendency to meet this challenge by simplifying the process in an either/or confrontation so that a government can be formed and decisions made even if some of the decisions that come under the elected government’s purview were not part of the electoral debate. Hence the British-inspired electoral system of constituency-based members of parliament, contesting elections under a first past the post winner rule, the whole tending to favour a two-party system enabling bifurcation of power at the top.

In many democracies, this kind of electoral system has been modified to incorporate some kind of proportional representation as well. Proponents of this method have argued that it ensures a more accurate reflection of the people’s desires, but that claim can be disputed. In fact, it makes an already complicated political system even more complex, makes the formation of a government more difficult, and can easily convert narrow interests into a potential partner in government, which the latter must then add to the list of considerations when making decisions on behalf of the entire society.

Israel has one of the most extreme forms of proportional representation. The proportion of votes a party needs to pass the threshold to gain seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, is only 3.25%; it used to be even less. People vote for party lists in Israel. There are no geographically based constituencies. Party members sometimes participate in intra-party elections to decide who gets to be on the party list for the Knesset and where on that list a candidate gets placed, but in practice the leader of the party has a disproportionate say in the process. The Israeli electoral system therefore favours the multiplication of parties, some with very narrow interests, and renders the political system even more complex than in two-party democracies because the chances of any single party forming a majority government are exceedingly slim.

Complexity, however, requires simplification, because the outcome of an election is the formation of a government capable of taking collectively binding decisions. Hence in spite of the multiplication of parties in Israel, pressure arises to frame the elections as an either/or choice. Both the leaders of the parties and the pundits who conduct polls and thermalize what is at stake frame the election as an either/or choice between the coalition and the opposition (even though neither group is clear where they will stand when the dust has cleared), or whether the country is or should be for or against Netanyahu, or as a contest between left and right, as if those shorthand formulations can deal with the thorny issues of national security and sovereignty, haredi army service, judicial activism or Arab crime. Implicit in this way of presenting electoral choices is the presumption that a voter who approves of Netanyahu will necessarily vote in a way to increase the current coalition’s chances to repeat, and that such an alignment dovetails with a coherent position on those other thorny issues.

Nothing could be further from the truth. People who dislike Netanyahu might be very much in favour of extending Jewish sovereignty over Gaza, Judea and Samaria. People who like Netanyahu might think he nonetheless ought to step down and allow a new generation of Likud politicians to emerge. Haredi readers clearly will refuse any attempt to draft their eligible young for military service and will not join a coalition like the outgoing one if they do not get their way on that issue. The Democrats who embrace the designation of left are not in favour of judicial reform, but alone they can hardly form a government. Some of the parties designated by the pundits as constituting the opposition bloc may come to realize that allowing people with no standing to petition the court on matters of law is no way to run a legal system. Netanyahu himself, having declared that no Palestinian state will emerge under his watch, has not presented what he would do to put an end to perennial Palestinian hostility from Judea and Samaria other than once again “managing the situation” via an increased security presence without calling it that; and though it is often said that Israelis have for the most part given up on a two-state solution, that is exactly what most of the parties tacitly support unless they are willing to go on record that the Oslo Accords should be abandoned and Israeli sovereignty extended to Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Indeed, so far the leading opposition party to Likud headed by another former general has said little over any of these issues other than criticizing the outgoing government for all matters great and small, epitomized by the failure to appoint a commission of inquiry to investigate the calamitous failure of October 7 2023. As if that is enough to justify being given the keys to the kingdom. But there is nothing like a simplistic yes/no framing to try and mobilize voters’ passions.

In fact, however, given the extreme proportional representation in Israel’s electoral system, the real decision on who will be making collectively binding decisions will only emerge once the horse-trading is resolved between the various parties after the elections. Which means that the elections in Israel are not likely to resolve any of these crucial issues facing the country. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to see these issues being debated clearly and openly beforehand. Will the haredi parties engage in a spirited defense of their refusal to countenance a military draft on national television? Will any party leader other than Smotrich or Ben-Gvir stand up and offer something other than “mowing the grass” 2.0 to put an end to the festering Palestinian sore that provides the fodder for malign international interference in Israeli affairs? Or are all these questions to be decided in post-electoral back-room deals between party bosses? This is how the disastrous Oslo Accords came into being, adopted by one vote in the Knesset when Rabin’s government managed to get opposition members to come over and vote in favour with the offer of ministerial posts. And what about the proliferation of Arab crime which terrorizes the Arab community, extorts money even from state institutions and collaborates with the illegal import of weapons to Palestinians living in areas A and B and to Arabs living in Israel proper? Is that too a left or right, coalition or opposition, pro or anti Netanyahu issue? Will the Arab parties so committed to denouncing the country in which they live freely have anything to propose about tackling Arab crime?

Yes, democracy does have its discontents, especially in Israel, with its fractious populace and even more fractious electoral system. Governing becomes highly personalized given the power of the party bosses, and the inevitable coalition politics makes accountability difficult, everyone pleading they would have acted otherwise were they not constrained by their partners. But given that Israel’s existence is constantly put into question by people who claim to defend it, often using the useless formulations which emerge to reduce complexity and shape voter preferences, it would be nice to see the country change tack, change its electoral system, and confront head on the issues which enable the lazy and ignorant of this world to batter the only Jewish state by invoking those facile formulations. There are many world leaders waiting for Netanyahu to fail, many antisemites watching to see the country turn left and indulge the Palestinians even more, many idiots deluding themselves that the upcoming elections will bring peace and security by turning the current batch of leaders out of office. How surprised they all will be to find out that democracy finds a way to produce an ever rising tide of discontents, especially since they fail to understand how democracies really work.

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Deep-seated is indeed the right description. Palestinian society, or what passes for it, is so crazed that nothing can save it. And it has so infected the Arab Muslim world that only a radical excision of this depraved and demented political excrescence can put an end to this running sore in both the Jewish homeland and the Muslim Ummah which the Palestinians wish to restore to imperial splendour. Hence the Palestinian need not for a state, but for a dentist who will lance the abscess and then remove the rotten tooth which, left untreated, will continue to infect everything around it until death alone will relieve the pain and end the suffering. The abscess is the PLO, the dentist is the IDF, and the rotten tooth that needs to be extracted is the Palestinian population in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Which, translated into policy, means Israel has to reconquer all of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, kill the entire PLO membership in all its acronyms and then expel the Palestinian population that has been unable and unwilling to overthrow its leaders and seek accommodation with their Jewish neighbours in the two-state paradigm that western leaders continue to voice as their goal, forgetting that the “two-state solution” was only ever a Jewish idea, never a Palestinian one.

To understand why this is the only feasible solution to the running sore of a Palestinian state one has to grasp how Palestinian society and the Muslim Arab world in which it is embedded works. To say it works, of course, is a bit of a misnomer, for it is totally dysfunctional in the everyday sense of the term “works.” But even an infection has its logic, and unless one understands how it works one cannot combat and get rid of it.

First off, Palestinian society is a gangster society. The PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) comprises many rival gangs - Hamas, Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, countless other cell groupings like the Lions’ Den. These gangs rule territories like Gaza and the areas in Judea and Samaria under Palestinian Authority Control, some of which are towns or cities populated by specific clans, like Nablus, Jenin, Jericho. The PLO is the coordinating committee for this mafia band of brothers, but the boss groups tend to dominate in certain areas: Hamas in Gaza, Fatah in Judea and Samaria. All are ruthless, extortionate, and criminal, ensuring that the population they “care” for supplies them with the manpower and funds necessary to maintain their rule. To do that they maintain the population in a constant state of anger and resentment against Israel which they call “the Zionist regime” and educate the rising generations in the same tide of grievance they and their predecessors have nurtured for over a century. Of course, these gangsters themselves live in relative luxury, siphoning off international aid funds into Swiss bank accounts and ensuring their lives and those of their extended family members are as comfortable as can be. Arafat set the tone, and all have followed.

But all this could not work if this gangster elite did not have Islam to back them up and reinforce the hold their destructive agenda has on the population they govern. Islam itself means submission. It arose via the sword, spread through conquest and subjugation, and exacted of the populations over which its carriers triumphed conversion or humiliation. But it exacted of its faithful a terrible price as well, enmeshed as it was and is in a patriarchal kinship society where male honour drives social relations and male tyranny governs sexual relations. Caught in a web of blood relations which leaves individual men little room for individual expression outside strict social norms, these same men can only experience freedom inside the domestic tent where, released and unbridled, it expresses itself in similar dominion over their wives. Sexual passion in Arab Muslim society has only one outlet: rage, and the rage exercised over women gets turned back against the men via their children. Not for nothing do Palestinian mothers raise their first born sons to become martyrs and hand out sweets at their funerals, thereby silently taking revenge on their husbands for the humiliation and control they have exercised for years over their wives’ bodies and souls. All of this repressed sexual desire turned to rage is socially united in the mass funerals the PLO gangsters conduct to celebrate the martyrs they have sent to their deaths. How many times have we not seen thousands of men following the coffins of dead Palestinians, arms outstretched, cries of anger and pledges of revenge filling the air, thereby committing another generation of Palestinians to implacable hatred of the Zionist enemy and condemning them at the same time to personal and national suicide?

The attacks of October 7 2023 revealed this pent up sexual fury at work in all its gory horror. And the resulting support of the Palestinian population for what the Hamas branch did only reinforces the sad fact that the people whom the PLO govern in Gaza, Judea and Samaria are totally wedded to the grievance and revenge tandem which inhabits Palestinian society from top to bottom. Where the people dissented in their support was only in their sadness that Hamas did not succeed, thereby bringing down upon them a second naqba which shall remain etched in their souls until the next round. So blinded are they by the fury which has reached deep into their psyche, they do not even notice that the Hamas invading force failed to continue on to military targets because it was distracted by the prospect of frenzied sexual release at an Israeli music festival and the settlements they had surprised with their initial attack. Young Gazan Muslim men took time out from their military duties to send home messages detailing their gruesome murders and sexual depredations which they mistook for victory, certain that the home front would be equally impressed and proud.

And if all this is not enough, the PLO gangsters who preside over this insanity have wedded Islam to the secular eschatology of revolutionary marxism, anti-colonial struggle and national liberation for the wretched of the earth. The only truly wretched people here are the Palestinians themselves, trapped in a downward spiral of their own making which western countries only encourage and fund. Indeed, they even exacerbate it with calls for a Palestinian state and sanctions against Israel, whom these western governments blame every chance they get for a situation they hopelessly yet wilfully misread. Unfortunately, Palestinian depravity is now so much a part of Palestinian life that nothing short of lancing this abscess can bring a modicum of relief. The gangster rulers must be destroyed and the Palestinian populace driven out of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, out into the wide wide world where they can be given a second chance to make something decent of themselves. Perhaps freed from the mass psychosis in which they have been held suspended for decades they may do that. This option should be front and centre in the policy debates taking place as the Israeli public goes to the polls next October 27; should be if the skies over Israel are to clear one day soon.

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The sociological theory I am referring to is the one developed by the late Niklas Luhmann called autopoietic systems theory. It can be applied to biology, psychology, sociology. It defines a system as the difference between the system and its environment. Systems are composed of communications that circulate within them and hence are particular to them. One of the corollaries of this approach is the knowledge that society is not made up of people but of the socially valued resources that circulate within them: money, power, love, etc. Throughout history there have not been too many ways societies have organized that. One way has been through kinship systems. Another has been through status relationships, what we used to call class society. A third way has been through functional differentiation, which is how sociologists using Luhmann’s approach understand modern society.

In modern societies this means that no one social sphere contains all the socially valued resources that circulate. Power and wealth are not concentrated in the hands of the aristocracy. Everyone falls in love. A Georgian peanut farmer can rise to become President of the United States. Religion no longer dictates moral choices or aesthetic preferences. To put it in terms that the lay reader can understand, each social sphere has its own function in which socially valued resources circulate and no one social sphere controls all the rest. The upshot is more and more people have access to more and more of the socially valued resources that circulate throughout society. And because of that individuals have more and more freedom, making it harder for them to be controlled by any one tribal chief or social class. Difference comes to be cherished because the society requires its tolerance, even its embrace, in order to function.

If you understand this and recognize that this is how modern society functions, you understand how ridiculous it is to denounce modern society for being heartless, power-driven, structurally unequal and fundamentally racist. All those terms and ideas belong to the 18th century and were already coming to be outdated when Marx took up his pen. Only morons can still believe that we should be fighting battles over this ideological corpse. This does not mean modern society is problem free. On the contrary, precisely because modern society is functionally differentiated it produces more problems that it can handle. Its very wealth and progress keep throwing up ethical dilemmas that people previously did not have to face and raise choices of public policy that are not easy to resolve. Genetic engineering. Transgender surgery for children. Spiralling public debt. A welfare state out of control. The education of our children. Need I go on? The list is too long for this essay.

I, however, have a pet peeve: the incredible outburst of antisemitism on a scale that recalls that which preceded the Holocaust. It is unfathomable. Shocking. And unacceptable. Nothing can justify it. Nothing Israel has ever done can justify it, yet the calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state can be heard from music festivals to parliaments throughout the modern western world. Every day I read of some anti-Jewish horror show. Comedians boycott a festival in Portugal because Seinfeld will not denounce Israel. A Jewish numbskull who happens to be the UK foreign minister announces a boycott of Israeli companies citing a litany of lies as justification for his government’s actions, though beneath his breath he promises to exclude companies selling medical goods his country’s National Health System needs. My Canadian Prime Minister joined his call, presumably having imbibed the peculiarly British form of antisemitism during his seven year stint as Governor of the Bank of England. I have given up answering the lies because the lies levelled against the Jews are part of a vast echo chamber so out of whack with reality that I realize there is no counter to it but Israel’s thriving and Jewish muscle wherever Jews may live. The people who are engaged in vilification of Israel and the sequestration of Jews from social life are the same people who have no clue about the society they live in. Nor do they have a clue about the societies which threaten theirs, using Israel as a Trojan horse with which to conquer them.

Palestinianism, if we can coin that term to designate the mindless assault which modern societies have launched on their own achievements, is the perfect storm bringing a depraved tribal society, which has soldered militant Islam to the revolutionary marxist tradition, in cahoots with the domestic educated fools of the West who prattle on about the need to dismantle a power structure that does not exist. This, I suppose, is how societies disintegrate. Its leaders, unable to see accurately how their own society functions, thereby undermine it from within; and in modern societies, given that the people are drawn into social life at every pore, the people too happily join in the process of decline and fall. Today, only Israel stands firmly against this form of suicide. It has a thriving birth rate, a populace willing to sacrifice for the society’s existence, a widespread intelligence eager to embrace modernity and its challenges. And it refuses to knuckle under to a rag tag crazed and murderous nearby population that has broken every accord it signed and never ceased to threaten its neighbour with annihilation. Indeed, the only reason Palestinians are still alive in Judea and Samaria is because the West has never held it to account but instead showered it with praise and funds, as if Palestinians were somehow an extended part of the western welfare state. And because Israel has long thought it could do something that would induce these latter day devotees of ancient Sodom to live with them in peace. We should, of course, thank the Palestinians for showing us what the welfare state is all about: how individuals who make bad decisions can unload the consequences of their bad decisions onto the public trough.

People who are cognitively blind wind up becoming terribly evil. That is what is happening today throughout the western world. People are so antisemitic they do not even recognize they are being so, and their blindness is commensurate with their failure to begin to recognize how their own society actually functions. In the academic world where I spent a good deal of my career I adopted Luhmann’s theory because I saw it was the most powerful analytic framework with which to analyze modern society and its dilemmas. My colleagues near and far preferred to stay locked in the entrails of critical theory and all the garbage it produced. What they wound up producing was generations of misinformed educated youths who have eagerly embraced Palestinianism as the epitome of all that is wrong in their society. A proper sociological understanding would cure them of their illness, but that is not likely to happen because the people who practise sociology are all wedded to Palestinianism as well. So sociology cannot put an end to the war against the Jews. But a nuclear bomb or two could. Perhaps it is time to remind the world of that. Nothing like the gallows, a smart man once said, to sharpen the mind. Being but a reasonable man, I would settle for Israel taking over Gaza, Judea and Samaria and expelling the Palestinians. A good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing that would leave them to live their lives elsewhere rather than fill heavenly graveyards, but I suspect I will have to wait for Passover for that to happen. That’s when Jews change their dishes. In the meantime….

I wish all my readers a happy and sweet new year, which is the traditional Jewish blessing at this time of year in the month of Ellul and its Days of Awe.

I’m reading Pasternak’s poems these days*

I’m reading Pasternak’s poems these days,
first the Yuri Zhivago ones
and first of those the Hamlet one
where I too imagine myself the prince
looking up at a crowd of black binoculars
and seeing only Stalin in uniform,
beyond him a line of black marias
conveying victims of denunciations
to Voronezh or Siberia
while I declaim how conscience
doth make cowards of us all;
and then I wonder how my contemporaries
act as though none of this happened
and want to bring it all back again,
ignorant of the Russian proverb
the poet penned at the end of his poem:
Life is not like walking through a field.

The Zhivago poems are followed
by a marvellous collection
called ‘When The Skies Clear’
in which the poet concedes
he has utterly lost man
since ever he was lost by all.
So do I. And yet, and yet,
the poems are redolent of Russian
rivers and forests, seasons and perfumes
like the meadow-sweet air of July,
the wind-swept landscapes of autumn
or the snow-covered crossroads of winter,
conjuring for me Jewish tales
from a land of settlement
that lingers in the soul in spite of man,
teaching me that the soul,
and only the soul, speaks the truth.
So I read what the poet said
across the stretch of years long dead:
And never for a simple instant
Betray your true self, or pretend,
But be alive, and only living,
And only living to the end.
Only a great poet could teach me
to cherish the bread of my affliction.


*Boris Pasternak, In The Interlude, Poems 1945-1960, translated into English verse by Henry Kamen.

I love Vincent

I love Vincent
as one can only love a man
with whom there has been
no commingling of fluids.
He arrived in my life unexpectedly
one grey autumn day in a grey sweater
to announce I was the first professor
to wonder who he was by failing him
for not showing up to class.
He seemed as frail as crystal
and as tough as wood,
and his frankness disarmed and charmed.
Like the collusion
between Rick and Captain Renault
at the end of Casablanca,
thus began a beautiful friendship.

Vincent was sharp,
and smart,
and combative.
He wrote songs and played the guitar.
He also boxed,
in the gym and in academia,
and took guff from no one.
He still takes guff from no one.
When he had earned enough degrees
to become a college professor,
he taught his students how to see
the world they thought they wanted to overthrow
because that’s what their other professors - 
his colleagues my colleagues had taught - 
fed them as breakfast cereal
for sociologists.
Instead he taught them what I had taught him,
only better, sharper, more combative,
and laughed at the folly
of so-called educated men.
I imagine him daring them
to step into the ring,
this latter-day Socrates asking questions:
since when is the earth sick?
what’s wrong with a market economy?
shall we take away your freedom?
And if he wanted to up the ante:
how about autopoietic systems theory?
Unlike Socrates he was young and beautiful
and had no intention of drinking
from the chalice the intellectuals
of the western world raised
in homage to the panopticon
they claimed was ruining our lives.
He is still young and beautiful
and always will be,
though now a husband, father, cook,
and handyman about the house and yard,
doing every day an honest day’s work
and phoning me from time to time
so I know I am not alone
as I walk to the valley of my death.

How can you not love a man like that
with the same name as the world famous man
who also taught people to see the world
in ways to which they were not accustomed
by putting paint on canvas
like a boxer in the ring
and asking them to have a good look
at the way colour cuts across wheat fields,
roads turn to sea-blue waves,
and the outside of an empty cafe
becomes an invitation to dance
in someone else’s movie
the next century on?
Some Vincents of this world are blessed
and rightly so,
for we are blessed for knowing them.

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In Basel I founded the Jewish state

In Basel I founded the Jewish state,
Herzl wrote in his diary
after the first Zionist congress,
adding in fifty years
it shall certainly come to pass.
And so it did.
Fifty years later the United Nations
voted to recognize the existence
of a Jewish homeland
in Eretz Yisrael through public law
as Herzl had insisted and foretold.
It is now seventy-eight years
since the State of Israel
proclaimed its independence,
yet the United Nations now works
to trammel Israel’s thriving
by twisting public law into lies
that heathens of all stripes have amplified
and turned into travesty.
The Jewish question,
as people like to frame it,
remains unsolved.

Born two years before Israel,
I first encountered Hebrew letters
in nursery school.
By grade three I had learned to sing
Abraham’s get up and go.
Soon thereafter I graduated
to the great confrontation
between God and the man God informed
his wife would bear him a son
but the city where sojourned his nephew
would be destroyed.
Abraham plucked up his courage,
pleaded with God on the city’s behalf
and worked Him down to save it
if ten just men could be found therein.
But ten just men could not be found;
the city went up in flames
and burned to brimstone.
The Jews applaud Abraham
for his courage to ask God to weigh
the plight of the collateral innocent
when fixing the punishment
of unredeemable evil;
but they never sympathize with God
Who time and again has to destroy
to keep Creation alive.
Maybe they think God never cries.
Maybe they should think He does.
Maybe then they will see
the Jewish question
is only a question
for the descendants 
of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Middle East

The Middle East.
A name. A joke. A cause.
A place on a map carved into states
like sliced short ribs
about which people can argue
the right and wrong ways
to do the slicing,
unaware that the story has nothing to do
with butcher technique
and much to do with deserts and camels,
orchards and honour, tribe and sex,
the whole lot chaperoned by gods,
some wise, some foolish
like their prophets
and the people who follow them.
The Hebrew God talks a lot
but the people He directs talk back
and certainly more than one.
The Muslim God says little
and only through His prophet,
who liked to keep a monopoly
on things as do the rulers
who follow in his ways.
Little wonder the thrashings
in the tents at night
are followed by murder in the morning.
Throw in some drugs and books
about colonialism
and orientalism
and you wind up with western women
pining for hijacked airplanes
and murdered Jews.

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Yes, the IDF is sitting in a little over half of Gaza. It used to be seventy percent, but US pressure trying to make its lunatic Board of Peace work forced the IDF to retreat a bit. To help Trump’s crazy plan which he claimed was going to bring peace to Israel for the first time in two thousand years, Israel for the first time has allowed foreign troops on its soil. But Hamas has not disarmed, has no intention of disarming, is up to its old tricks running a reign of terror in Gaza and rebranding itself in Judea and Samaria. Even the IDSF (Israel Defense and Security Forum) has long stated that the IDF cannot be in Gaza without Jewish settlement there, but only a few days ago Netanyahu forbade some Jews from conducting Elul prayers in the part of Gaza the IDF controls. Verily, peace, peace when there is no peace is as true today as when Jeremiah first warned over two thousand years ago.

Yes, the IDF now sits in southern Lebanon and its engineers are busy destroying Hezbollah outposts, making the latter’s shelling of Israeli northern communities difficult indeed. The Lebanese government, conducting talks with Israel under American auspices, keeps repeating its worn-out mantra that Israel must withdraw, UNIFIL must return, and the Lebanese army be permitted to disarm Hezbollah, which so far it has refused to do. If the Lebanese government were serious, it would send in its army to crush Hezbollah and assert its own sovereignty, but everybody knows this will not happen. Only the IDF can crush Hezbollah. The negotiations are a pure front to enable Trump’s ambassador to Turkiye of Lebanese descent and envoy to Lebanon and Syria to continue to run interference for Erdogan and add his voice to the chorus of Israel’s critics on behalf of the vile antisemitic president of Turkiye. The IDF also sits atop some of Syria’s Golan Heights, ensuring that no direct menace to Israeli northern communities comes from that rebranded jihadist country. But the threat remains, as it has since the state of Israel was proclaimed, regardless of who rules that hapless Syrian nation. More endless diplomatic negotiations are recommended by Israel’s American ally, pushed under the guise of deconfliction, which only allows the problem to fester instead of calling Israel’s enemies to pony up for peace. True peace. Not the phoney kind that exists between Jordan and Israel or Egypt and Israel. Peace, peace when there is no peace all over again.

Which brings us to the growing new threat that comes to Israel precisely from Egypt and Jordan. From the Sinai peninsula drones carry weapons into the Israeli Negev, recouped by Bedouins who channel them to Palestinians or Israeli Arabs bent on nefarious activities against Israeli citizens. To this one must add the tremendous increase in Arab crime in Israel, whose extortion rackets reach even into Israeli state enterprises in addition to the terrorism these perpetrators practise on their own Arab communities. What can this unchecked crime do but corrode Israeli society from within? And where is Egypt in all this, signatory to a peace deal with Israel that forbids its oversized military presence in the Sinai peninsula which does nothing but prevent Muslims in Gaza from leaving the Strip?

But the real and most dangerous existential threat to Israel, these other fronts notwithstanding, comes from the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria, whose criminal hold is a direct result of the Oslo Accords which the PLO signed with Israel and proceeded to break as soon as the ink was dried. Much is made in the West about so-called “settler violence”, but the vastly greater violence comes from Palestinians who eagerly murder Israelis whenever they can on either side of the so-called Green Line. Weapons, many emanating from Iran, are smuggled in via Jordan. The IDF has had to devote considerable military personnel to prevent recent attacks, confiscate weapons and break up terrorist cells, but the situation continues to be problematic and cannot be otherwise as the Palestinian Authority continues to inculcate Jew hatred and violence against Israel in its population. As does Jordan, one ought to remember. Just the other day an Israeli soldier driving through a Palestinian village stopped at a well-known store to purchase a pack of cigarettes and was knifed by a sixteen-year-old Palestinian youth who had had a fight with his father. Muslim law directs one to respect one’s father, but killing a Jew is lauded and rewarded. The incident speaks volumes about the ongoing situation in the entire area of Judea and Samaria which can only continue to fester - there is no other word for it - and provide Israel’s critics in the EU and the Anglosphere with material to continue to criticize the only modern democracy in the Middle East and threaten it with sanctions on behalf of a gang of murderers millions strong.

All of which is to say that the real threat to Israeli citizens comes not from Iran but from the Palestinians, from the pathetic excuse of Palestinian society running from top to bottom which continues to regard the Jewish state as an entity to be annihilated. This refusal to come to any peaceful agreement with Zionism, with the Jews who returned to their ancestral homeland after two thousand years of exile, reclaimed the land and built up civic institutions resulting in their re-established state in 1948, has lasted now for over a century. It predates Palestinian nationalism. It is rooted in Muslim supremacism. It is carried forth on a banner of lies and intimidation going back to Ottoman days, refurbished under Muslim riots, murder and pillage during the British Mandate - 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-9, 1947-8 - continued thereafter under fedayeen and reborn and rebranded under the PLO since 1964, supported by the Arab League and the rest of the Muslim states in what is known as the Middle East. Britain colluded with it as the EU does today, joined by Canada, Australia, and now a significant swath of American elites. And it will not end until Israel puts an end to it, because no one else will do that. If Israelis do not realize that after October 7, then the situation is truly hopeless.

The world-wide explosion of antisemitism, all the more shocking in western democracies, cannot be answered with better hasbara because contemporary western societies have shed all interest in truth and history. What is needed instead is to remove the source of the conflict so that all the Palestinian supporters in western societies will be deprived of their cause. Put simply, Palestine will no longer exist, not as a watermelon banner, nor as a sliver of territory on which people who call themselves Palestinians sit. Israel, in short, must conquer Gaza, Judea and Samaria, therein proclaim Israeli sovereignty and expel the Muslims who live there because the latter will never accommodate themselves to living peacefully with Jews, side by side, state by state. It is not the prettiest of solutions, but it is the only realistic one, given that the so-called world community refuses to call the Palestinians to account.

One more little piece of proof. I read today that support for Hamas has dipped in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority not because the population disapproves of what Hamas did on October 7, but because it did not win. In fact, the Palestinian population in Areas A and B would vote for someone they believe will be more effectively intransigent with respect to living in peace with Israel. Clearly, the Palestinians are so heavily invested in their falsely declared naqba, which they falsely attribute to Israel, that they can only envisage another more deadly one. It is time Israel put an end to this “situation”. It is time Israel too stopped deluding itself that a negotiated peace is achievable, that neighbours who kept the doors to Palestine shut while Jews were being murdered in Europe are going to open them to Jews who managed to return home. Zionism is indeed the enemy, which is why the morons marching throughout the West in the name of anti-Zionism are also responsible for marching Palestinians to their doom.

Netanyahu, to his credit, steered Israel’s ship of state to its current position, which is much more secure in military terms than it was on and prior to October 7. He did that under pressure from the Biden administration that was hostile to Israel even as it offered some military protection. His government, working in tandem with the Trump administration, succeeded in bringing many of the hostages home. Iran has been weakened. Nonetheless, he too played his part in the casual comedy, as Yeats once put it for the Irish one. He too overemphasized the Iran bogeyman while ignoring the daily, weekly, yearly Palestinian threat which meant Israeli casualties in Israeli cities year after year. He too believed in the “conceptzia”, that Hebrew term which meant that Israel could manage the situation with the Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria; and he clearly still believes it. As do the vast majority of his compatriots, which is why I do not hold him responsible for the October 7 disaster. The astounding feature of the current elections is that the Israeli public still subscribes to that outlook as well, for many are willing to vote for the leader of another party who was himself one of the architects of that policy and still subscribes to it, albeit in its present version. Incredibly, the few voices who keep warning the Israeli public that the Oslo Accords must be jettisoned and Israeli sovereignty extended to Gaza, Judea and Samaria do not command a large following. Nor is that question part of the electoral debate. Israelis seem to think they can keep muddling through, while I keep remembering the fate of Or Eshkar, who was stabbed to death in March 2023 on a Tel Aviv corner I traversed six times a day for six weeks on one of my visits to Israel.

‘No more Or Eshkars’ should be the electoral war cry of Israeli politicians. No more Oslo Accords. No Palestinian state and no Palestinians in the land of Israel. Lucky are the Arab citizens who currently live in the State of Israel, though they too should be put on notice when their political party leaders have the gall to ask the EU to monitor Israeli elections. Perhaps they should ask the EU to monitor Egyptian elections, or Jordanian ones, or Saudi Arabian or Qatari elections should they occur. And to make it perfectly clear to Muslim Arabs all over the Middle East and to the scurrilous Muslim nations beyond the Middle East’s borders that Israel means business, Israel should demolish the Al-Aqsa mosque which the Palestinian and Jordanian Muslims have falsely claimed is in danger for over a century. There, Israel could say, for once you were not lying, even if it was your lies that brought this about. The Muslims have Mecca and Medina, and that should suffice them, just as Hagia Sophia delights the Turks. In for a penny, in for a pound, after all, meaning Israel must decide if it is willing to incur further western displeasure in order to protect its citizens from neighbours who are much more deadly. Ireland will not like it. Britain will not like it. Nor will Norway or the Netherlands. Spain will scream. France will pontificate. Greeks will assault vacationing Israelis. But as the foreign minister of Spain once quipped, few of them have nuclear weapons. Eventually the world will calm down. Israel, like Canada, is not without its resources when under attack. Maybe the West would prefer to do without Israeli medical innovations, smart phone technology, military defense systems or drip irrigation because a Palestinian death culture is more worthy of being indulged, though without a Palestinian presence on Israeli territory there would not be much to criticize and cavil. The world today is a very big place, and if Israel has to cut its ties for a century with the West to which Jews have been long attached, as it has had to do with most of the Muslim swath of the planet, so be it. Vietnam, I am told, makes excellent coffee. After all, why be fastened to a dying animal - Yeats again - when Jeremiah is still waiting?

One more note, since there is a linked issue which the elections in Israel have raised, but which also is not debated head on. That is the issue of haredi enlistment in the army. When I say it has not been challenged head on, I mean the main political parties whose leaders aspire to the premiership are not willing to engage the haredi establishment in a debate on its own terms. The haredi rabbis like to claim that Torah study is equivalent to army service because Torah study kept Judaism alive throughout the period of exile. Aside from the fact that the Torah itself did not shrink from commanding the Israelites to go to war when necessary even as it enjoined them to inscribe the words of the Torah on their hearts and remember it in their minds - King David himself went to battle with the ark in the midst of his army - we have to remember that throughout the exilic period Jews were exposed to wholesale slaughter. The ravages of the First Crusade in the Rheinland, the expulsion and expropriation of Spanish Jewry, the Holocaust and the Gulag, the expulsion of 850,00 Jews from the Muslim Arab states all occurred to Jews who studied Torah. Torah study preserved Judaism, but not all Jews; just as military prowess and technological genius protects the Jewish state, but not all its citizens. It behooves all Jews, however observant, to protect the state - and the land - which alone today offers guarantees that Jews are not to be trifled with, just as it behooves all Jews to see to it that the state does not get derailed by the niceties and intricacies of diplomacy which exposes its inhabitants to murder and intimidation. How often do I read that after October 7 most Israelis no longer believe in the two-state solution, but no political leader aside from Smotrich or Ben-Gvir can stand up and say the Oslo Accords are finished and Israel is annexing Gaza, Judea and Samaria? Why does the Israeli public not demand that? Beyond left and right. Beyond the blocs. Beyond the imaginary coalition and opposition. In the Book of Maccabees it is said that God did not give the nation for the sake of the land but the land for the sake of the nation. So too the Torah. All of it - the land, the nation, the Torah - are part of the Jewish inheritance. Together it is called Zionism. Let’s see the Zionist parties talk about it. And diaspora Jews affirm it.

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If you live long enough

If you live long enough
everyone betrays you -
your country,
your friends,
your children, 
you’ve even betrayed yourself -
and you find yourself
on the runway to the grave
more alone than when you first
arrived on the scene.
You walk along streets
you are tired of walking,
take buses from one stop to another
to buy groceries from necessity.
Now and then you see
little dramas that once made you smile -
breadcrumbs of the human race
whose story leaves you indifferent.
Only numbers do not disappoint,
and stars with their silver beauty,
and geology heedless of malice.
What is left?
Words and time.

We live in dark times

We live in dark times.
The grocery shelves are stacked
but we live in dark times.
The elites are mindless, their children worse,
their hands not yet sullied by Jewish blood
but well on their way back to history
their grandfathers fought to outlaw.
The shame spreads like the plague
though the people refuse to see it
until the corpses pile up
which the electric vehicles
will have to avoid or roll over.
But there will be no escape.
Jewish rockets will rain down
on the play-acting company
of the western world,
and all shall be laid waste,
For as they sow so shall they reap.

Bereshit bara (In the beginning)

Bereshit bara. In the beginning.
In the beginning there was nothing
and in the end there will be nothing,
and in between beginning and end
there is also nothing
though people think there is something
other than onomatopoeia
as happiness.
The living should bury the dead
and forget about love.
The living should also bury the killers
who would turn the living into dust
before their time.
The living should remember 
because that is who they are,
an hourglass of regret
and some felicity.

How easily the death instinct
rushes to the surface,
as if there is no time
to recollect those moments
of happiness,
no time to fill
the restaurants of boredom and resentment
with promise,
for what is happiness
but the promise of happiness
and what is the promise
but recollection putting things right?
I love flowers, she said,
Id love to have the whole place
swimming with roses.
Who would not?
To life, to life, we toast.
As for Proust and his alter ego,
I imagine him happy in bed
with his writing materials,
and his driver,
and Celeste bringing him breakfast.

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The professorate furnishes the theory and the rationale. Their students spread out into the worlds of communication, the literary and entertainment world, the civil service and the NGOs, and spread the denunciations and accusations under the specious cover of international law, human rights, settler colonialism and any other ideology which mobilizes the do-gooder sympathy of citizens for the supposed downtrodden. Jews are banned from sports competitions, music festivals, and publishing houses and when not banned, denounced. The authorities do nothing but issue platitudes, all the while offering support for a non-existent Palestinian state on behalf of people who have rejected every attempt at creating one that involves recognizing Israel as the Jewish state. These same elites neither condemn nor punish the perpetrators of violence and discrimination against Jews, while paying lip service to the idea that such manifestations are unacceptable. At the same time, they denounce Israeli actions taken to defend its citizens, adding to the pile of lies that circulate with respect to what goes on between Israel and the Palestinians, ignoring the constant Palestinian breach of the Oslo Accords since they were signed. Indeed, the governments of Western Europe, the Anglosphere, and a significant part of the American political establishment all collude in denouncing Israel, recognizing a Palestinian state which does not exist, and advocating boycotts of Israeli goods as part of a concerted effort to squeeze the Jewish state until it collapses. If you read how Nazis organized the extermination of six million Jews the playbook would be familiar.

But all this comes not from self-declared Nazis, but from self-proclaimed progressive camps working on behalf of what these anti-semites see as a noble aim. Such was how the members of Czarist Russian revolutionary left-wing parties also cloaked their assault on the powers that be of their day and wound up liquidating Jews in Siberian prison camps once they seized power. They are joined in all this by the over one billion Muslims who inhabit the planet, whose religion and history have inculcated them with, and accustomed them to, domination over infidel Jews. The Muslim street believes this and so do nearly all Muslim governments far beyond the Middle East with no territorial conflicts with Israel other than the fact that it is a Jewish state. Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkiye are but a few of the ringleaders of this world-wide Ummah, financing and abetting the millions of individual Muslims who have immigrated to the West bringing Muslim Jew hatred with them. And lest we forget, there are also the Muslim countries in the Middle East itself, like Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, who speak always with forked tongue and consider fanning the flames of antisemitism under the guise of support for Palestinian brothers totally compatible with peace treaties signed and projected.

When the Nazis undertook their program of extermination they made sure to enlist Jewish organizations under their control in a web of deception that ultimately led to Jewish annihilation. When the Stalinists sought to liquidate the Jews, they too worked hard to make sure the Jews contributed to their elimination through show trials and public confessions. The upshot was that the Jews, defenceless because they could not believe that what was happening to them was possible, that human beings could do this to other human beings, went to their deaths without organizing resistance until it was too late. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 stands out as a belated and last-ditch stand to retrieve Jewish honour. What shall we say of today’s Jews with all that we know of the twentieth-century horrors that befell our compatriots? Shall we once again be lulled by the lies which our enemies, authorities and citizenry combined, spin so that we will be deceived about the true nature of the threat that confronts us? Or shall we learn from the past and arm ourselves to carry the battle to our enemies before they have succeeded in getting their hands on the levers of power to crush us with impunity?

Yes, we have Israel, the Jewish state. And yes, Israel is not defenceless. But it is under attack and so are we. Every Jew is a Zionist and every decent person in the world should be one too. If you are Jewish by birth but not a Zionist, you are not a Jew who is worth the word’s three letters. Together, the Jews of the diaspora and the Jews of Israel are engaged in the same battle. Israel has to defend the Jewish homeland and the diaspora Jews have to do so as well. An attack on Israel is an attack on Jews, as we see in the streets of the countries of the Western world where Jews live. The Catholic Church and the Protestant Churches have abandoned us. The musical bands and the homosexuals have abandoned us. The courts and the political elites have abandoned us. Calls to murder us stream from every pore of the society. Mayors involve themselves in foreign policy, denouncing Israel and cutting ties between cities that twinned with Israeli cities. Jews, Israelis, Zionists are attacked and harassed in cafes and restaurants. The writing is on the wall and it is time to arm ourselves.

Israel has to put an end to the Palestinian question and warn governments that actions to punish it for doing so will be taken as declarations of war. So will attacks on diaspora Jews. In exchange, diaspora Jews have to arm themselves and carry the battle to our enemies wherever they may be, making it clear to them that they will pay for any and every attack on Jews or Israel. How that would work should not be beyond the imagination of Jewish community leaders once they understand that throwing money and letter writing at the problem is not the way to go. It did not work in the twentieth century and it will not work now. Never again is more than a slogan. If we do not understand that, never again, which already is happening, will have turned out to be the greatest deception we have wreaked upon ourselves.

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Why?

Why don’t the Palestinians
do themselves and us a favour
and kill themselves?
I know it’s a shortcut to martyrdom,
but isn’t it time they spared a thought
for their neighbours,
let alone their supporters world-wide
who mobilize their daily energy
on behalf of that well-watched movie
called Murder in the Middle East?
And if they won’t, O Lord,
why don’t You send a plague
as You did to the ancient Egyptians
and let Your exterminating angel
wipe them off the face of the earth,
given that Your people still refuse
to rise up and rid themselves
of this generation’s Amalek?
And while You are doing that, O Lord,
why not also send down Your fire
to destroy the heathen mosque and dome
that sit atop Your beloved city,
then bid me rebuild Your temple
and anoint me CEO,
that I may name the clergy
who shall officiate at its service
and lay down the rules of succession
in this the third Jewish commonwealth?
I would ask for more, O Lord,
did I not know,
courtesy of a clown or voice workshop
I attended years ago,
that why is the one question
a young boy asks that has no answer.
But not so prayer,
as my grandmother knew
when she cursed out Nasser at my wedding
and wished him dead of cancer
with a lump in his throat.
I wish no less
for all the enemies of Zion.

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It is the task of the living

It is the task of the living
to keep faith with those who sleep in the dust.
But we have not kept faith.
We have allowed liars and snakes
to sweet talk and slither in the garden.
We have made pacts with murderers
whom people we call allies protected,
trusted in princes not to be trusted,
forgot covenants for the sake of peace
that is no peace and will be no peace.
Even the goat sent to Azazel
knew his atonement was worthless.
When the attack came the slaughter was great,
so crazed beyond belief no one believed,
but the body parts and photos remained
along with the rusted cars
and the corpses of those who ran
to defend the broken covenant.
Others soon followed, adding to the names
of those who now sleep in the dust
yet still we have not kept faith,
still not driven out the heathens
who turn the good land to wasteland.
Verily, I say unto you:
if once again you do not cleanse the land,
the Lord of Hosts Himself will no longer
keep faith with those who sleep in the dust.



 My life is wormwood

My life is wormwood
Rebekah thought to herself
when she overheard her first-born son’s threat
to kill his brother once his father died.
I am vexed and weary, she told Isaac,
because Esau has married out of our family;
pray you send our youngest Jacob
back to the old country to find a wife.
Because Isaac so loved his wife
he did as she did ask,
thinking it better to send the blessing
whence it came.
Rebekah calculated otherwise:
Jacob’s sojourn back east would be short
but long enough to leach revenge
from his brother’s heart.
She was right about the leaching,
but wrong about the sojourn.
Jacob took twenty years to return
and by then the blessing was in shambles.

My life too is wormwood
I think to myself.
Jew hatred has exploded
in the modern West
like the First Crusade in the Rhineland.
Foxes and lions, donkeys and brays
all pillory the Jewish state,
rage to kill it and kill the blessing
they are too stupid to embrace
and which we can send nowhere else
because now we are once again home.
To whom shall I turn with my request
to rid the land of our enemies
and send them back east forever?
To the government?
The people who elect the government?
The commissars of Jewish etiquette?
No Isaac loves me as he loved his wife,
and the blessing is still in shambles.

I feel much the same way writing another piece on Israel and the Middle East. How many times can one repeat oneself, after all, even when events have proved me to be right time and time again, yet still no one listens? Nor am I alone. The scribblers are all busy at work and the host of actors who keep the Palestine question alive and well with their various takes do so shamelessly. Even more surprisingly, so many Jews themselves do not seem to have learned the lesson that the whole business is one big charade in which the many actors - Palestinians, Arab Muslim elites, Muslims and Muslim leaders beyond the Middle East itself, western governments, western university professors in the social sciences and humanities along with their students who have graduated from the campus to the streets and from there to jobs in media and government, even in corporate life, Israelis still clinging to the shibboleths of left and right, diaspora Jews bemoaning antisemitism - cannot bear to put an end to the farce which seems to have no solution. Only it does.

The Palestinians could simply say enough to their self-imposed misery and declare for peace with their Israeli neighbours. They could but they won’t because their culture of resistance demanding the end of Israel has so penetrated the sexual and emotional core of their being that they cannot escape the mantra of the nakba they relentlessly pursue, caress and cherish. Locked into a death be not proud trance both religious and secular, they and their malicious patrons will continue to the bitter end. It remains therefore to the Israelis to put an end to this horrible drama once and for all by conquering what remains of the bits of land which Israel conceded to the Palestinians in spite of its military victories and expelling the Palestinians therefrom. In short, there is no solution to this mess other than Israel’s army conquering all of Gaza, Judea and Samaria once again, destroying the PLO in all its variants and seeing to it that the Palestinians leave. Where will they go? people will ask. Listen to me carefully, Sophie: anywhere in the wide wide world they can find a place, as surely they will. Of course, the clamour and denunciation of Israel and the Jews will at once reach a very high decibel, but no matter. Countries willing to go to war on behalf of the Palestinians will think four times before doing anything but condemn and slander the Jewish state, lest they too become the equivalent of the open-air latrine into which Gaza has now turned. With Israel sovereign from the river to the sea as it should be, the world will turn its attention to other matters, not least of which will be the medical and technological innovations Israel’s ingenious citizens keep producing, and which the same countries that sanction its leaders and denounce its policies have no compunction using.

As for the Jews themselves, they will simply have to admit the sorry realization that there is no other solution to their ongoing conundrum other than to rid their country of a people who refuse to live peacefully with them. No country can tolerate in its midst a population that refuses to abide by its laws and seeks its liquidation. Such a situation is a recipe for endless strife and ultimate dissolution and destruction. It is already enough that Israeli Arabs march in the streets of Tel Aviv to celebrate Nakba Day, while some move on to murder Jews at random, as happened only a few days ago. To have Palestinians from Judea and Samaria arming themselves constantly and crossing into Israel to murder Jews any time they succeed is intolerable. All Israel lacks is the will to stop this lethal circus and leaders who will champion this option. The solution is as old as the Bible itself. Moses warned the Israelites of old of what would happen should they tolerate idol-worshippers amongst them, and the Palestinians are idol-worshippers par excellence, not even stopping at child sacrifice. Indeed, they have infected the West with their idolatry via the entire ideological nexus of genocide, international law, ethnic cleansing, human rights and settler violence which the morally corrupt morons invoke to berate and hammer Israel. So vast and omnipresent has this nexus of lies become that the only adequate response is to give its proponents what they want. Or as our parents would have said: You want a nakba? I’ll give you a nakba. And if you want to upgrade it to genocide that can be done too, the word itself having become totally debased in the lexicon of Palestinian victimhood.

Listen to me carefully, Sophie. The Palestine question has become a death trap for everyone involved. The stink from the open-air toilets in Hamas-controlled Gaza has already made its way into the chancelleries of western powers, undermining the way of life of that thin slice of the globe which once managed to create a society that had freedom built into it. Unfortunately, even its elites misread how that society works and misreading it, misgovern it. So doing, they are also spreading wrong ideas throughout the population, making for a lethal cocktail. To put it bluntly, modern society is a complex society, institutionally diverse, where difference is rampant and welcome. But that creates problems and requires discrimination. In a way we are held together by our problems, not by our morals, but that does not mean anything goes. It means people have to think, to study and to learn, to know history as well as technology. We all have to be smarter than we ever were and psychologically astute. Slogans and memes are not enough. Indeed, the last thing we need are men and women without qualities, or antisemites. The last thing we need are more Palestinians. If anything, we need more Jews. But they too need to be smarter. And more resolute.

As I watch the looming Israeli electoral landscape nowhere do I see an outline of just such a solution to Israel’s security from any of the major contenders. Yes, there are Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, dismissed as usual as outliers beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. But when it comes to the motley group of aspirants to run the country, I see no one but those who long advocated simply mowing the grass as the way to defend it; and though Netanyahu steered Israel through a very trying time with much skill, he too has reached the time to retire with grace and leave a legacy that the country can improve on by finishing the job. But there’s the rub. For it was not only the Israeli leadership that had long argued they could manage the Palestinians once it became clear that Oslo was not going to work - even though they doubled down with the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza - but the entire population who bought that illicit bag of goods in exchange for espresso shops as good as any you could find in Europe or America. So what if they had a few knife stabbings and car rammings now and then? Other countries have traffic accidents, don’t they? It will be okay, it will be okay, people said, and carried on. Until October 7. But even though people now say no longer, meaning no longer is peace with the Palestinians in the cards, poll after poll does not indicate any political change is coming. And then of course, there is still the problem of haredi enlistment in the army, foreshadowing an Israeli version of kulturkampf. It used to be, in the old days, that Jews would only go to battle with the ark and the Torah it contained. Today the ultra-orthodox rabbis, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, betray that practice and the prayers that celebrate it. Instead, their pockets full of state coffers, they follow the exilic tradition of turning godliness and goodliness into courtly wealth and power. Oy vavoy, Sophie, things are going to end badly. Listen to me. Listen to me carefully. I have not even mentioned the hammerlock on political power the legal guild is reluctant to relinquish.

And what about diaspora Jews, who need to stop writing letters to governments and voting for the best of a bad lot and wondering how they can improve the world because they still think tikkun olam is what the Ethics of the Fathers is all about? How about organizing Jewish militias that will take the battle to our enemies, make them pay tit for tat for the harm they inflict on us, force governments to do something serious to protect Jews and punish the offenders, Muslims and socialists united, who act as though it is permanent open hunting season on the Jews? And why not when European governments want to haul Israeli ministers before the courts for crimes when the latter arrest and simply deport the gangsters who tried to run the Gaza blockade? Those impostors should have been thrown in jail for what they did and their governments have had to negotiate their release and pay for it. Instead Ben-Gvir forced them to listen to the Israeli anthem with their hands tied and their behinds in the air like good Muslims at prayer. Hardly rape and torture, but what lies will the antisemites not promote when their compatriots haul Jews out of parades marking European liberation from Nazi rule, as they recently did in Italy? It’s the Zios, they will say, to whom they object, but every Jew is a Zionist; it comes with the inheritance. Like Italy to the Italians, or Ireland to the Irish, even when expatriates, even unto the fifth or tenth generation. Only misguided Jews think otherwise.

The world is clearly askew, as it often is. Once again, strangely, we live in dark times. But Israel by all comparative accounts is thriving, and if it will only put an end to this endless predicament and noxious issue called Palestine, it shall once again do the world a favour which the world is unable to appreciate. Listen to me carefully, Sophie. I shall not speak again.

But the Jews do not get that. And they do not get it because even at Sinai they were ambiguous about the covenant onto which they had signed. The incident of the golden calf was a sin of enormous proportions, which means it was a traumatic event that has scarred Jewish history ever since. Until Jews confront it, see how they reproduce it in every generation even as they recite in the Passover Haggadah how in every generation our enemies rise up against us but God delivers us from them, they will not assume responsibility for their actions. They will bemoan, they will criticize, they will try to find a way out of the dilemma of Jew hatred which travels from one part of the globe to another; they will even try to seduce their enemies into making peace with them and pretend they have allies when they do not. They will do all that but they will not do the one thing that would cut the gordian knot and allow the Jews who have returned to their ancestral homeland to live in peace every man and woman under their fig tree and not be afraid when they wander about this spectacular land as if it were the open air synagogue it truly is. And if they do not confront the trauma it is because they do not read and re-read the Bible, many of them consigning it to the dustbin of history as religious dogma which would constrain the desires modernity has now placed within their reach, including the sentiment that the wolf shall lie down with the lamb in the paradisal version of utopia they assign to history and apply today to their conundrum with Palestinians.

But the Hebrew Bible is proof enough of the disaster that befalls a people when they hearken not to the voice of God that speaks through the Law He gave down at Sinai and which Moses fleshed out in four of his five books and especially in the Book of Leviticus. Indeed, Leviticus is the one book people, modern people, are glad to skip over because it is replete with laws governing the relationship between men and women and between humans and God. Pages and pages of sacrifices in all their picky detail interspersed with pages and pages of rules for how we treat our bodies. Boring, they say, and understandably, because modern men and women do not cherish the thought that the self is not the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, good and evil, where everyone, after all, is entitled to his or her opinion but not pay for it. But the Lord was not fooling around when He said it was a terrible thing He was doing, taking one people out of another to take them to a land where they would then have to drive out the inhabitants in order for the difference that would make a difference He was trying to establish to take hold. That difference was truly miraculous, for it held that henceforth everyone in the Hebrew commonwealth would be equal in so far as everyone would be subject to the law. And in this sense ancient Israel did become the seedbed society of the West. Martin Luther hurled the Hebrew Bible at the Catholic Church, inaugurating a process of reform, bloodthirsty though it was, that led to political equality for people of different faiths. The founding fathers of the American Revolution also looked to the Hebrew Bible as they sought to carve out a republic that would preserve its citizens from the scourge of tyranny. As for the rule of law, it is not merely ideological hyperbole, as the marxists and all who think in their vein maintain, but a complex system of rules which requires deliberation and pleading and judgment so that people will be held accountable for their actions as the price they pay for their freedom from tyranny.

Which is the real meaning of the Book of Leviticus and all the chapters and stories that make up the Hebrew Bible for thousands of pages. Do not shed blood. Do not even eat of the blood, for the life of the flesh is in the blood. Do not lie with man as with woman, an injunction useful for homosexuals because that is exactly what they do not do, although today they would deny that, demanding the right to marry because that is what a man who lies with woman may do. Do not covet what your neighbour has, the tenth commandment wisely asks us to abjure, which again the virtue-seeking modern person would criticize in his or her quest to render everyone equal to everyone else, an impossible task given the plethora of differences which makes us all different from one another in spite of our common morphology. But goyim no less than Jews have thought they know better than God Himself and have already tried to do precisely that, not paying much attention to Marx’s dictum that atheism is the first step to communism; and the fact that communism led to totalitarianism with its untold deaths and horrors has not stopped a new generation of true believers to set their shoulders to this ungodly task. As for those who claim religion is not for them because God is a fairy-tale they do not believe in, the only rejoinder one can make is that it is not God you have to believe in; you only have to read His story. And if you are Jewish and observe the Passover or celebrate the Jewish New Year, know that you cannot sit down to the meal without inviting God to do so as well. For He is part of the family, and as everyone knows you do not choose your family.

Judaism in this sense stands alone, a light still shining brightly from atop Sinai if people will have but the sense to read the Hebrew Bible and meditate upon the text. Not only has it no connection to Islam, whose holy text contains no stories, only dogma which demands nothing but obedience and imposes itself only by the sword. It also stands in opposition to the New Testament whose apostate Jewish authors faithfully reproduced its stye, but whose central story stands in stark contrast to the central story of the Hebrew Bible. In the Passion of Christ the first-born son is indeed murdered, and not any son but the only begotten son of God Himself, thereby transgressing the first and oft-repeated injunction of the Hebrew Bible: thou shall not kill thy children. Little wonder that the now suppressed religious sensibility of the once Christian West resurfaces in its secular hostility to the only Jewish state on Earth.

It behooves Jews, therefore, to read and re-read this Bible which is their inheritance, for it contains wisdom that has informed the stories people have been telling themselves through the ages, all of them variations on a theme, that theme being how men and women are blind to their passions which, once followed, lead them into trouble, very great trouble indeed. Shakespeare knew it, as no doubt he knew his Hebrew Bible, the curses he had the Dowager Queen Margaret in Richard the Third spew forth on the upstart murderous villain as venomous as anything Moses laid out for his miscreant children of Israel. Tolstoy also knew it when he had Anna Karenina hurl herself under a train. And Robert Musil knew it when he wrote his great anti-utopian novel, A Man Without Qualities, when he had the protagonist’s father explain the dangers that awaited the law once mental illness became an admissible defence for murder. Perhaps one can understand the overly long focus on sacrifices in the three middle books of the Hebrew Bible as God’s way of telling people that if you must follow your passions, at least channel them in a way that would lead you to recognize their consequences and provide you with a path for atonement that would lead you to avoid its necessity. One more good reason for Israel to raze the Al-Aksa mosque, dismantle its neighbouring Dome of Omar to be sent to Damascus or Riyadh, and rebuild the Temple where Jews could bring their yearnings and hopes for the future.

Perhaps that too is the message of the drunken debacle at Sinai and all that followed. For every time Jews read that story they have to ask themselves the question: are we done with our ambiguity about signing onto the covenant about which we said we will do and we will listen? Are we finally ready to leave the Book of Genesis, leave the children of Jacob behind and become the children of Israel, one nation under God, sovereign in our land and ready to claim it in its entirety in accordance not only with the right conferred by war and international law, but also with the word of God Who brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, because finally we have decided to leave Egypt and never return? So may it be His will and ours, and let us say amen. Amen and amen. Amen selah.

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And Moses blessed the children of Israel as follows. God came from Sinai and shone from Seir to bring you the blessing of the law, and the law shall bind you, sons of Jacob, into the kingdom of Israel. Let Reuben multiply. Let Judah contend for his brethren and Levi teach them, poor Levi who knew not his father and mother and had no time to acknowledge son or brother. And may You, Lord, be with them, that the people may heed the Urim and Tummim and the loins of their enemies collapse in fear. Let Benjamin be God’s friend and may God dwell in his shoulder. Let Joseph enjoy again the fruits of the heaven and the deep, the fullness of the earth and its everlasting hills, and the goodwill of Him Who dwelled in the bush. And may his horns be the horns of the wild ox that gore the peoples of the earth, the thousands of Menashe and the tens of thousands of Ephraim. Let Zebulun rejoice in his going out and Issachar in his staying home, and between them let them suck the abundance of the seas and the hidden treasures of the sand. Let Gad who ravages like a lioness be bolstered; for he shall rule and execute righteousness. Let Dan like a lion’s whelp leap forth from Bashan. Let Naphtali possess the sea and the south, rich with the blessing of the Lord. Let Asher dip his foot in oil and his strength be as great as his days are long. And may Israel dwell in safety in a land of corn and wine, where God shall bathe you in His dew and shield you with His sword. For your enemies shall dwindle before you and you shall tread on their high places. And always God in His splendour shall ride the skies above you.

When he had finished blessing the children of Israel, Moses did not gather his feet beneath the bedclothes, nor did he turn to the wall and expire, but slowly and calmly arose and walked through the assembled throng. As he walked the people stood aside, forming two walls of human souls as once the sea they had crossed had formed two walls of water. Some bowed their heads as he passed. Some looked him straight in the eye as their own welled up with tears. Some tried to smile, hoping to shine on him the light he had so long shone on them. Now and then a baby cried out. Youngsters in their parents’ arms watched with their mouths open, their eyes fixed on the man and the crowd while on and on he walked, down the path they parted for him until all human cries were beyond his hearing. Into the plain of the Aravah he walked, over its stones and sand, until he came to the foot of the mountain and started to climb it. For a while the Israelites in the camp could still see him, but as he climbed he grew smaller and yet again smaller, until people could only think they saw him. Over here, someone said, and another voice answered no, over there. But it was all guesswork, for Moses had vanished into the mountain as though it had consumed him.

But the mountain had not consumed him. For Moses made it to the top and looked out on the land as the Lord had promised him. And for the last time he talked with God, Who showed him the purpose that had really consumed him. They will go there, God assured him, and inherit your blessing, as far as the sea beyond Judah’s hills, across the valley of Jericho into the southern plains, north of Gilead to Dan and the land of Naphtali. You can even see the heartlands of Menashe and Ephraim, doubly, doubly blessed in the book you left behind. When Moses had seen, he let himself down into a cleft of the mountain that no one ever discovered, and died as he had learned to live, a servant of the Lord. And the children of Israel, who this time did not await his return, mourned him for thirty days in the plains of Moab and remembered all he had done to bring them out of Egypt, remembered the signs and the wonders, the mighty hand and the great terror. But when they would be settled in the land, they would remember the book he had written; remember it, forget it, and become it.

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As for me, Moses said to the sea of faces that rippled as far as the mountain opposite, I shall not cross over and that is no great matter. For the Lord Who forbade me to go shall go with you, and He will deliver unto you the nations you shall dispossess as He delivered Sihon and Og, the Amorite kings, into your hands. And you shall do unto them all that I commanded you to do. Be strong, therefore, and courageous and fear them not, for God will not fail you or forsake you, as He has not failed or forsaken me. And Moses turned to Joshua, and before all the congregation of Israel that stood before him like a murmur of his own heart, charged Joshua also to be strong and courageous, for you shall lead them, Moses assured him, and God shall be with you as He was with me, and they shall inherit the land He has always promised. Only be not dismayed at whatever they do, Moses added as he surveyed the crowd that swayed before them like a wave of wheaten fear in the desert wind, for they are capable of much, as we both well know. But if you are steadfast, God shall be steadfast with you.

Then Moses turned to the priests and charged them to read this law to the children of Israel at the end of every seven years, at the feast of Succot, when all Israel shall gather at the place God has chosen to dwell therein. For then you shall be in the land and enjoy its fruits, but your children and your children’s children will not have heard the law as you have heard it and seen it in your desert hardships, and known as you have known the fire that consumes the fire of the burnt offering. Thus shall they learn to fear God and follow in His ways, that their days may be prolonged on the land He has given you.

As Moses finished his charge, he went with Joshua to the tent where he talked to the Lord in His glory. The people watched from a distance as the cloud of the Lord descended and wrapped them in its mystery. And out of the cloud Joshua heard God’s voice speak to His servant Moses. Behold, the voice told Moses, you are about to die, and Joshua shall lead the people you have led these many years across the Jordan. But the time shall come when they shall forsake Me. They will grow fat on the fat of the land and forget the covenant that brought them there. Then they shall worship other gods, carved by human hand and conceived by human thought, and My anger shall be kindled against them. I shall turn My face from them and they shall be afflicted by so many evils they will cry out in amazement and regret, saying: have not these evils befallen us because God is not among us? But I will not heed their cries. They shall flounder in their distress and I shall not come to their rescue, but this song shall be My witness that I have warned them and forewarned them. For I know this people, know their crooked hearts and their penchant for outsmarting even themselves, quick to give their word and quick to break it, long before I have brought them to the land I swore to them. Write down this song, therefore, and sing it to the children of Israel, that its words may echo in their ears to convict them of the temptation they will be unable to deter. But let Joshua be of strong heart and good cheer, for his work is to settle My people in the land, not save them from the sins of their settlement. And this he shall do, and your spirit shall go with him.

So Moses told Joshua when he saw how Joshua had paled at what he had heard from the midst of the cloud. Then Moses wrote this coda to his book of laws and gave it to the Levites to place in the ark of the covenant. As a witness against the children of Israel, he said, so that all should know, Joshua and the people he will lead across the Jordan. For I know, said Moses, addressing now the entire assembly of Israel, how in my lifetime you have resisted the Lord and mutinied against Him, and know you shall do so after my death. And Moses looked out on the mass of faces that did not believe his words, smiled at them, at Joshua, at God, wondered if he too completely believed the words he was about to pronounce. For what is a man who speaks a truth he abhors and what is his life whose joy is its sorrow? But this man who has done what he did and seen God in all His glory lifted up his voice once again and sang God’s song to the children of Israel who would deal corruptly with the Lord and reap the evil they will do in His sight. And this was the song.

Give ear, o earth and heavens, to my words that drop as the dew upon the herb, for they speak of the glory that began as light and the power that comforts like a rock. I proclaim the name of God, faithful and just across the arc of time, Whom corruption runs off like water that has never fallen. But not His children, who requite the Lord with mockery and oblivion, lusting after foreign gods and forgetting the stories of old, when He separated them from the peoples and settled them within their borders. For Jacob was His inheritance, a gift He gave to all the nations, plucked from the cauldron of Egypt. As a mother bird he watched over them; on His eagle wings He carried them. Alone He brought them through the wilderness; no other gods were with Him. He gave them honey from the flinty rock and they ate from the fruit of the land, curd and wine and the fat of the lamb. But abundance proved their undoing and routine their forgetting. Wealth and power became their custom and the gods of their neighbors became their friends. The rains they thought their due, the desert their misfortune, and the stories of their forefathers bedtime tales fit for children. What is a rock but the earth, they said, and what is light but a star. And so they consulted any wisdom but not the Book of the Lord. And the Lord’s wrath was kindled, for they roused Him to jealousy. I will hide my face from them, He said in His rage; I will send a vile nation to destroy them and blot out their memory from among the nations. And when their enemies, whose tongues speak venom and whose hearts burst with the poison of asps, boast that their might has done this, I will smite them too. My arrows will drink their blood and My fire will devour their flesh, for they are a no-people and their gods are no-gods. And all shall know that I am the Lord, Judge and Avenger of My people.

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Drawn from the waters I was, and maybe that’s all anybody is. I never wanted the job, told Him straight away it was not for me. But God insisted I was the man and saw to it that I became him. The hidden things are indeed His, but what is left to us? The accidents of birth, of the way your heart is twisted around itself and others’ are twisted around theirs, and of the choices you turn that into. To go, to stay. To linger, to hurry. To listen, to murmur. And no way to know if the choice is right except in the short run of a lifetime. So why do I talk to them of the days to come as if I were a bush that burns but is not consumed, I who shortly shall be consumed and my eyes closed on this people I cannot do without? What pleases me other than the simple fact that we are here to tell the tale? Here and not in the iron furnace of Egypt. And that I long to see them live long in the land and prosper, and shall long for that forever.

And again, for one last time, Moses addressed the assembly of Israel gathered outside his tent. When you cross the Jordan, he told them, taking up his speech as a traveler takes up his bag, you shall build yourself a wall of stones and plaster them with plaster and write upon them the words of this law. And you shall build an altar of unhewn stones and sacrifice your peace offerings to God upon it. And six of you shall stand upon Mount Gerizim to receive the blessing and six upon Mount Ebal to receive the curse. And when you are so placed the Levites will cry out so all of you can hear and answer. And this is what they shall cry. Cursed be the man who makes a graven image. Cursed be he who dishonours his father or mother. Cursed be he who removes his neighbour’s landmark. Cursed be he who makes the blind go astray. Cursed be he who perverts justice due the stranger, the orphan and the widow. Cursed be he who lies with his father’s wife. Cursed be he who lies with any manner of beast. Cursed be he who lies with his sister. Cursed be he who lies with his mother-in-law. Cursed be he who smites his neighbour in secret. Cursed be he who takes a bribe to kill an innocent person. Cursed be he who does not uphold all these laws. And to each of these curses you shall answer amen, you who are on Mount Gerizim as you who are on Mount Ebal, for the six tribes who stand on Mount Gerizim are no better than the six who stand on Mount Ebal. One people are you all, from Reuben to Naphtali, and to all of you belongs the choice whether to embrace this covenant or not.

Embrace it, I urge you, for to embrace it is to choose life, that you and your children and your children’s children may live long and prosper in the land you are about to enter and conquer and possess. Remember, when you stand upon those two mountaintops to contemplate the future, that you shall stand there as you stand here today, standing not alone but in the company of your forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to whom God promised this land, and in the company of their descendants, your fathers, who sojourned in Egypt and left and wandered never shoeless these forty years in the desert. Nor should you forget the generations not yet born, who shall stand on their mountaintops as you shall stand on these and have to choose as you have to choose between life and death, blessing and curse. And this is your choice.

If you listen to the voice of the Lord your God and observe His commandments which I have laid out for you this day, this day and the many days we have journeyed together, then blessings shall rain down upon you like the rains that shall fall in their seasons. Blessed shall you be in the city and in the field. Blessed the fruit of your body and the fruit of your land and kine. Blessed shall be your barns, your baskets and your kneading-troughs. Blessed shall you be when you go out and blessed shall you be when you return. And you shall rise up above the nations and vanquish your enemies, who shall set forth against you on one path but flee you along seven. And all the peoples of the earth shall see that God is with you and blesses your labours in the land He has bestowed upon you.

But if you hearken not unto God’s voice and follow not His commandments, but go and serve other gods, cursed shall you be in the city and in the field. Cursed the fruit of your body and cursed the fruit of your land and kine. Cursed shall be your barns and your baskets and your kneading-troughs. Cursed shall you be when you go out and cursed when you return. And the Lord shall sow discomfiture and rebuke amongst you. He shall smite you with pestilence and drought, with fever and mildew, with blasting and consumption. Your sky shall seem as brass and the earth beneath your feet as iron. Dust and powder will fall as rain until you are destroyed. When you go forth against your enemies, one path shall you take, but along seven shall you flee. Your carcasses shall be food to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. The Lord will smite you with the scabs and hemorrhoids and boils of Egypt that never heal. He will strike you mad and blind and your hearts shall be amazed with dismay. At noon you shall grope in darkness, a prey to robbers from whom none shall save you. You will betroth a woman, but another shall lie with her. You shall build a house, but another shall dwell in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but not enjoy its fruit. Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, your sheep shall be stolen and given to your enemies. Your sons and daughters shall be abducted and given to another people, and all you behold shall drive you mad. The Lord will bring you and the king you set over you into captivity, where you shall serve other gods and become a byword for derision among the nations.

All these curses shall come upon you because you did not listen to the Lord your God and keep His statutes. And the curses shall become a sign and a wonder for you and your descendants as the blessings God bestowed upon your fathers in their exodus from Egypt once were. For you disdained to serve Him in gladness and abundance, and therefore He shall bring a cruel and fierce enemy against you, a nation from the end of the earth that shall swoop down upon you like a vulture. He shall eat your corn, devour your flocks, and besiege you in all your gates. But before your high and fortified walls come down, you shall eat your own children, even the delicate and tenderhearted among you, man and woman alike. So great shall be your straits in your besieged cities you will not even share the flesh of your children with those of your offspring that remain, and a mother will eat her afterbirth. Thus shall the Lord bring the plagues of Egypt back to you and worse. And while you dwindle in number He shall rejoice, and He shall pluck you from the land and scatter you among the nations where the sole of your foot shall find no rest. Your hearts shall tremble, your eyes shall fail and your souls shall languish, for day and night you shall live in fear. In the morning you shall wish it were evening, and in the evening you shall crave the morning, and the Lord shall return you to Egypt in ships, to that land I told you you shall see no more, and there you shall again be sold into bondage, but none shall buy you.

And the foreigner shall come and see the desolation in the land, the earth as if scorched by salt and brimstone and the people that remain like sticks in a field that would not scare away the birds, and know that the anger of the Lord was let loose upon the land. And when the nations ask what provoked the Lord to such anger men will answer: because they forsook the Lord Who brought them out of Egypt and went and served other gods. Then shall you remember the blessings and the curses I set before you this day and the covenant I implored you to uphold. And you shall return to the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. And He shall gather you from the four corners of the earth and the farthest reaches of heaven and bring you to the land you and your fathers once possessed that you may enjoy it again, even more than in days of old. And the Lord shall visit on your enemies who persecuted you all the curses He visited upon you. This shall He do if you keep the covenant you dare to renew, faithfully, steadfastly, diligently.

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If a man should urge you to leave your faith, saying God has spoken to him in dreams and prophecy, listen to him not, but put him to death. If a relative should come to entice you in secret to serve new gods, listen to him not, but put him to death, even were he your own son. And if a city has combined to serve strange gods and lure others to do so, turn it into a heap of total destruction. Be zealous in this regard, for your lives and the life of the land are at stake.

Appoint yourselves judges and officers throughout the land, and let them administer justice impartially. They shall take no bribes and favor no person. Justice shall you pursue in matters great and small, and if a matter be too difficult for a local jurisdiction, then bring the matter before the priests and judge of the High Court. As he renders judgment so shall you obey, upon pain of death. No man shall be condemned by a single witness, not even a man who would lead you astray to worship other gods. If a man bears false witness, you shall do to him as he had intended the person against whom he testified to suffer. Even the king whom you shall one day set up over you is not above the law. He shall not return you to Egypt, nor multiply his wives and gold. He shall have a copy of this book written out and he shall read it all the days of his life, so that he fears the Lord and his kingdom endures.

And what is it to fear the Lord? you may ask. And I tell you it is all of this and more. Make no cuttings in your skin. Do not sacrifice any blemished animal. Do not muzzle an ox when he treads the corn. No man that is maimed in his private parts shall enter the assembly of the Lord. You shall not mix sex with prayer, neither men nor women, and you shall not use the wages of whores or dogs in the service of the temple. Redeem your vows, but if you would not redeem them, then cease to utter them. Do not mix seeds when sowing your vineyard. Do not harness an ox and an ass together. Do not wear a wool garment mingled with linen. If you chance upon a bird’s nest, do not take the dam with the young, that your days be long and prosperous. When you build a house make a parapet for your roof, that no one may fall off. If you find a corpse in a field, take the elders from the nearest town and an unyoked heifer from their herd, and have them break the heifer’s neck in a valley that has not been cultivated. And the elders shall wash their hands over the heifer’s broken neck in the presence of the Levites and atone for the innocent blood that was shed. If a man is hanged upon a tree bury him by nightfall, for his corpse is a reproach to the Lord and defiles the land. When you enlarge your borders, set aside three more cities of refuge for men who murder by mistake, such as a man who cuts a tree and his ax falls from his hand and slays a passerby. Do not seek to consult ghosts. Do not deal with sorcerers, necromancers or diviners. Do not cause your sons and daughters to pass through the fire. Whosoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord.

And what is it to fear the law? When you go into battle fear not your enemies, even when they seem stronger than you. And when the battle draws nigh let the priest approach the people and remind them that God is with them. But before the battle the officers shall send home any man who has built a new house but not dedicated it, who has planted a vineyard but not enjoyed its fruit, who has betrothed a wife but not taken her. And if there be among you a man faint of heart, the officers shall send him home too, lest his fear infect the rest. When you besiege a city and the city submits, you shall place it in tribute to you. But when it refuses and the Lord makes you victorious, then you shall slay all the males in the city and the rest you shall take as spoil. That is the law for distant cities, but for those of the nations God has given to you as an inheritance no spoil is allowed; you shall slay every thing that breathes. And when you lay siege, do not cut down any fruit-bearing trees of the city you war against for bulwarks, for the tree of the field is not man that you should besiege it too.

A woman you capture in war and fancy you may take to wife. You shall bring her home and let her mourn for her parents a full month before you go in to her. If you then find you do not want her you shall release her, but you may not sell her for money, for you have humbled her. If a man has two wives, one he loves and one he hates, and the hated one gives him his first-born son, he must so acknowledge him and give him a double portion of all he has. If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who hearkens not to his parents though they chastise him, and they bring him to the elders of the city to recount their distress, adding he is a glutton and a drunkard, the elders shall stone him to death and all Israel shall hear and fear. If a man takes a wife and hates her and then claims she was not a virgin, the elders of the city shall make inquiry. If the man’s claims prove false, he shall pay his wife’s father a hundred shekels and keep her as his wife to the end of his days. If his claims prove true, however, the men shall take the woman to her father’s door and stone her, for she played the harlot in her father’s house. If a man is found lying with a married woman, both shall be put to death and the evil extirpated from Israel. If a man finds a betrothed virgin in the city and lies with her, both shall be stoned; the woman because she did not cry out and the man because he humbled his neighbour’s wife. But if the same thing happens in a field, only the man shall die, for one presumes the woman did cry out but there was none to save her. If a man seizes a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall pay the woman’s father fifty shekels and she shall be his wife to the end of his days.

A man shall not take his father’s wife nor uncover his father’s nakedness. A man shall not dress in a woman’s clothes. A man shall not remove his neighbour’s landmark. A man shall not return a slave that has escaped from his master. A man shall not take a mill or upper millstone to pledge, for he thereby takes a man’s life to pledge. When you lend a man something, do not go into his house to fetch his pledge. If he is poor, sleep not with his pledge, for what can it be but his garment and how shall he sleep without it? If you hire a man, let not the sun go down upon his wages. Carry not in your pockets diverse weights and keep not in your house diverse measures, but just weights and measures shall you have at all times, that your days be long on the land the Lord has given you.

If a man divorce his wife and she remarry and her second husband die, he is not to take her back. If a man has a new wife, he is not to go to war but cheer her for a year. If his brother dies, a man shall marry his brother’s wife and the first-born of their union shall carry his dead brother’s name. But if he refuses, his brother’s wife shall, in the presence of the city elders, loosen his shoe from his foot and spit into his face, and his name shall be known as the house of he who has had his shoe loosened.

And what is justice? you may ask, Moses said. You may eat grapes in your neighbour’s vineyard, but not put them in a basket. You may pluck standing ears of corn with your hands, but not take a sickle to them. A man who kidnaps another Israelite to sell him into slavery shall be put to death. Fathers shall not be put to death for their children’s sins, nor children for their fathers’, but each shall pay for their own crimes. When you reap in a field and forget a sheaf, do not go back to fetch it. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean more than once. What is left shall be for the widows and the orphans and the strangers you once were in Egypt. Remember Amalek, and when you are safely settled in your land, blot out their name from under heaven. There is more. There is always more. And it shall be written down. For one law breeds another, and justice asks that rules be weighed and sifted, like the barley and flax which bloom early and the wheat and spelt that ripen late. And though what is hidden belongs to God, you now have more than enough laws to keep you busy and holy.

Therefore, when you come into the land, take the first fruits of the ground and put them in a basket and bring them to the place where God shall choose to lodge His name. And you shall say to the priest who is priest at the time that this day you have come to the land the Lord swore to our forefathers He would give to us. And then before God you shall tell our story. A wandering Aramean was our father, who went down at the end of his life to Egypt and sojourned there, few in number. But his descendants waxed great and the Egyptians dealt with us harshly. We cried to God in our affliction and He heard our cries and brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and terrible signs and wonders. And now He has brought us to this land flowing with milk and honey, and so I have brought Him the first of its fruits. And you shall rejoice in all the Lord’s bounty. And in the third year, when you bring the tithe for the poor, for the Levite, for the widow and orphan and stranger, you shall again say before the Lord that you have fulfilled His commandments according to the law and beseech Him to look down from His holy dwelling and bless His people Israel and the land He has given them. For this is your covenant, blessing to blessing, vouchsafed and renewed this day and every day, the law everlasting.

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For forty years I taught you what God taught me, the laws and ordinances that were to make us a holy people. During those forty years we followed those laws as best we could. Some were easy to follow, having little to do with place. But others required we wait until we enter the land God had promised our forefathers. And some were only half put into practice, because our mettle would only be tested once we were sovereign in our own land. Now you are about to enter that land, enter it, conquer it and settle it. I will not be with you. Not that I would not have liked to be with you, but you all know that God has forbidden me to cross the Jordan and you all know why. But even had I entered with you, I would not have been much use. I am old, too old to do what the young are fit for, and soon enough I shall be called to my fathers. For that is what the old are fit for. Fear not, however, for instead of me you have the laws and the laws will keep you holy. That is why God chose you. Not for what you are or have done, not for all your grumbling and transgression to which you seem so attached, but for what you may become, for the promise He saw when Abraham one day withheld his raised arm from his son’s throat. I will have laws rule men, not their passions, God told Himself. And you are the result. You are the promise in the promised land.

As you conquer the land, therefore, make sure to destroy every place of worship where the nations you shall dispossess bend the knee to their gods. Their groves, their altars, their high places, you shall uproot and demolish, and every vestige of their idols burn to ash. For they sacrifice children to these graven images, their sons and daughters do they burn in the fire, and that is anathema to the Lord and you should abhor it. But should you show mercy to these people, saying to yourselves they know not what they do or belittling the harm a temple full of idols can do, you shall find yourselves one day having to fight and destroy them all over again. But this time the Lord shall not be with you, and your children and your children’s children shall go into the fire of battle and be consumed. And the Lord shall weep because you too have sacrificed your children to Moloch, but His tears will not stay His anger and He shall expel you from the land from which you refused to expel the gods He detests. Remember, therefore, and be ruthless, that you may live long in the land and realize its promise.

Once you have settled the land and rule it with your laws, there shall be one place where God shall choose to live, and there and only there will you bring your sacrifices, your burnt offerings and tithes and firstlings of your herds and flocks, the redemption of your firstborn and the fulfillment of your vows. All other meats you may eat within your gates as it pleases you to do and as your income may allow. But the blood you shall pour out upon the ground. Remember when you eat the flesh of living beasts there are those that are clean and those that are unclean, and of the unclean you shall not eat, not meat, fish or fowl. And of the birds you shall not eat the vulture, the glede and the falcon. Not the raven nor the hawk nor the owl of any kind. Not the pelican and cormorant, not the stork and heron, not the hoopoe and bat. Nor shall you eat of any animal that dies on its own, though you may give it to the stranger within your gates. For you are a holy people unto the Lord. And you shall not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.

In the month of the spring you shall keep the Passover. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread in memory of the night the Lord brought you out of Egypt. Not within your gates shall you eat of the sacrificed lamb, but in the place where God shall cause His name to dwell, on the sundown of the day you left. And you shall remember this all the days of your lives. Seven weeks from the end of the Passover you shall count, from the time the first sickle is put to the standing corn. And when they are passed you shall bring the first fruits of your harvest to the Lord, a freewill offering as the Lord has blessed you. And there where He has caused His name to dwell you and your entire household shall rejoice, and your servants, male and female, and the Levite that is within your gates, and the stranger and orphan and widow within your midst. For once you were a bondsman in Egypt and the Lord brought you out to give you His laws, the first fruits of His harvest. And you shall keep the feast of the tabernacles in the seventh month, after you have gathered your wine and your corn. Seven days shall you feast in the place God has chosen that the Lord may bless you in all the work of your hands. You and your son and your daughter, your man-servant and maid-servant, the Levite and the stranger, the widow and the orphan, all who are within your gates. And you shall be altogether joyful.

Remember the Levite has no inheritance in your land, but depends on you for his survival. Forget not the tithes you owe him each year, nor the tithe of the third year, which you shall lay up within your gates. And as you remember the Levite so remember the poor. At the end of every seven years you shall release your neighbour from his debt. Of a foreigner you may exact it, but not from your brother, for there should be no needy within your gates. For God has promised: you shall lend money, but not borrow it; and you shall rule, but not be ruled. Keep not your fist tight when your brother opens his palm. Do not release your slave with a grudge in your heart. And when you send him out, send him not empty-handed, as you would not appear before the Lord empty-handed. You too were once slaves and now you are blessed. And blessings beget blessings, even when the blessings come and go.

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Hear O Israel, you who are about to cross the Jordan and witness the fall of nations whom you have described as giants. Do not think the Lord’s fire shall devour them because you are righteous and your hearts upright. No, the Lord shall drive them out for they are wicked, and settle the land with you because so He promised your forefathers. As for you, what are you but a stiff-necked people, who provoked the Lord from the day you left Egypt and challenged Him at every turn? Remember at Horeb how you so angered Him He was ready to destroy you utterly? Forty days I had spent atop the mountain, eating no bread and drinking no water save for the word of the Lord, when the Lord bid me hurry and go down. For the people have dealt corruptly, He told me, and I hurried down with the two tables of stone in my hands. And I saw the molten calf you had made, corruption of corruptions it was, the first commandment barely given and already transgressed. And I took the two tables of stone and hurled them to the ground where they shattered before your very eyes. And I ground them into dust and cast the dust into the brook that flowed out of the mountain. Again I climbed to the top of the mountain and again I neither ate nor drank for forty days while I pleaded with the Lord not to blot out your name under heaven. For Aaron too I prayed as I prayed for you and as I prayed many a time before and since, when you complained about the manna and wailed for meat and lusted after flesh and longed for Egypt because water was scarce or the land you were supposed to conquer seemed too fierce. For forty days and nights I fell down before the Lord and begged Him to remember His promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and His greatness in bringing you out of Egypt. Overlook their sins, I begged the Lord, let not their stubbornness and their wickedness get the better of You, lest the nations of the promised land belittle Your promise and greatness and spread it about how Your people drove You so crazy they rendered You powerless when Egypt was unable to do so.

And God relented. Take another two tables of stone, He told me, and I will write on them the words as I wrote them the first time, and make an ark of acacia wood to put these two tables in when you go down. And so I did and there they are today as you can see. And the Lord bade us take up our journey and we did. And though Aaron died on the way and the earth swallowed up Datan and Aviram and their households and I separated the Levites from your midst to serve the Lord, we have come to this day where you, if not your children, have seen it all and remember. Remember the glory of the Lord and be stiff-necked no more. Circumcise the foreskins of your hearts. Fear God, love the stranger, and be just to the widow and the orphan, for so does the Lord Your God, Who looks not at the status of a man but at his heart and Who loves even you, crooked as you are and were, strangers in a strange land. And He took you out of Egypt to bring you to the land He swore to your fathers as an everlasting promise that you may become His holy people and make the land holy. For the land you shall possess is not like Egypt. Contrary to your fathers’ complaints, the land to which you go is a land that drinks the rainwater of heaven, watched over by the Lord whose statutes you shall obey. Then shall the Lord send the rains in their seasons, then shall the grass grow in the fields, and you shall gather the corn and the wine and the oil and the cattle and not go hungry. But if your hearts be deceived and you go and worship other gods, the rains shall stop, the ground shall not yield her fruit and the cattle will grow lean, and you shall quickly perish from this goodly land which you will have repaid with evil.

Understand then, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse. A blessing if you follow the commandments of the Lord; a curse if you choose to turn aside from His ways and follow other gods. And so it shall be, when the Lord brings you into the land you shall possess, that you shall set the blessing upon Mount Gerizim and the curse upon Mount Ebal, those mountains on the other side of the Jordan behind the setting sun, in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Aravah over against Gilgal, by the terebinths of Moreh where Abraham first came into the land.

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