Time For A Rant

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As I only listen to the radio when I am driving, I probably should not listen to NPR as my particular brand of road-rage has nothing to do with other drivers (dim-witted as they can be) but in how dense, even stupid, the American public can be, something that NPR seems to spotlight in show after show.  So this past week I find out that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not require paid parental leave.  It is too expensive!!!  Yes, I realize how expensive it would be to offer.  Like Health-Care—another staple of “First World Nations”—and like universal health care I keep hearing people say “we can’t afford it.”  Well, why can’t we afford it?  We have the money.  Or, we would have the money if we (or our elected representatives) didn't  think that an unbounded supply of military helicopters, tanks, submarines, destroyers (the very word is loaded), jets, carriers, missiles, bombs, and whatever were a greater priority than our children.  And of course included in that priority over the welfare of the American family are the destabilizing wars in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the blank-check to our Israeli friends to defend themselves while despoiling Palestinians of their homes, orchards, and farms, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly know as the School of the Americas), and assorted other forays into international oppression.  Now you may say that I am departing from my concentration on the Church and entering the realm of politics, but let me put in this context: I don’t want to hear any of that “family values” crap from any “Christian”—pseudo evangelical or neo-traditionalist katholic—who opposes family leave while supporting a “defense” budget that is larger than that not only of all our allies combined, but of our combined allies together with Russia and China.  Let’s just be honest where our priorities are—and they aren’t with our families.  And the biggest danger to our the stability of our families is not from same-sex marriage but from a socio-economic-political structure that puts support for married couples and their children low on the list of fiscal priorities.   WWJD?  I bet he would just ****.  

The Ancient Roots of The Palestinian Problem

Interior of a Palestinian Christian

home in the mid-19th century

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he plans to promote legislation that will constitutionally establish the country’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people.  This will effectively scuttle the two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and it plays into the favor of those Orthodox extremists who, believing that the Land of Israel was given by God to the Jewish People and exclusively for the Jewish People, want non-Jews to be expelled because their presence defiles the sacredness of the land given them by God.  (It needs to be clarified that not all Orthodox Jews favor the establishment of a Jewish State as they believe that only the awaited Messiah has the divine authority to restore Israel.)  

The posting that I did recently on Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Teaneck New Jersey and his suggestion to relocate the Muslim Noble Sanctuary from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to “Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted” as well as his encouragement to push the Arab/Palestinian population from Israel/Palestine is symptomatic of this sort of thinking.  After all, it makes sense—the Arabs are latecomers to the Promised Land.  What claim do they have to live in this land that God promised to Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, and gave to Joshua and the children of Israel more than 3200 years ago?

There is some confusion about the Palestinian people and that leads to this racist misconception.  We call them Arabs because they speak Arabic, but their ethnic identity is a bit more complex.

There were native Syrian peoples living in the lands that today are called Israel and Palestine more than 12,000 years ago.  They began as nomadic tribes with their domesticated sheep and goats, but gradually settled down on the rich soil and began raising crops. Like other peoples in the “Fertile Crescent”—that geographic strip that runs northward from Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the East and then crescents south along the coast to Egypt, there was a flourishing civilization in the region some six millennia or more ago.  At this time—c.4000 BC—various tribes such as the Jebusites, Hittites, and Amorites migrated into the land and established their own settlements side by side with those already there. These people are often referred to as “Canaanites” but that term can mislead us to think of them as a single homogenous people. In fact, these various peoples tended to have distinct settlements with a minimal amount of inter-marriage except among the ruling class where inter-tribal marriage forged political alliances.  While they may have borrowed various cultural elements from one another and even borrowed the worship of various gods, they tended to remain distinct from one another with their own rulers and socio/legal traditions. 

Sometime around 2300 BC the Phoenician peoples made settlements along the coast.  Through this period these people tended to be even more unique than the various Cannanite tribes and the Phoenicians, being a sea-going people, branched out westwards into the Mediterranean establishing trading posts and colonies in what is today Sicily, North Africa, and Spain. 

The Israelite exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the land is usually dated between 1250 and 1200 BC.  The Israelites found the land already occupied by the aforementioned peoples but throughout the period of the Judges gradually carved out territories for themselves where they established their own towns and villages.  One of the chief concerns of the Judges, of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, and later of the Prophets, was to prevent cultural assimilation with their non-Israelite neighbors and maintain their distinct tradition, Law, and religion.  This met with mixed success as we see with the infidelities of David and Solomon as well as the criticisms of the later kings for idolatrous practices by the prophets. 

The Israelites were not the last people into the land.  Only a generation after the Children of Israel entered the land of Canaan, the Philistines came and established settlements along the seacoast.  A century later the Arameans came in. 

The Assyrians, the Babylonians, and then the Persians invaded the land in 722, 587, and 540 BC respectively.  The difference with these invasions is that the invaders came to conquer but not to settle, and so they did not leave the imprint on the ethnic makeup of the land that the various settling peoples had.  The Greeks under Alexander the Great would be the next invaders in 333 BC.  They were followed by a small but not insignificant Armenian invasion around 100 BC.  In 63 BC the Romans annexed the land as a “client kingdom” under the Hasmonean dynasty until Herod Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, ruled so badly the kingdom was taken from him and formed into the Roman Province of Iudaea. 

During the period of Greek domination under the rule of the Antiochean Seleucid Kings who ruled the land after the death of Alexander the Great, the policy had been to homogenize the diverse peoples, cultures, and religions of the land into a single Greek culture.  While most of the various peoples dwelling in Syria/Palestine/Judea acceded to this plan and began to cede their unique cultural identities, the Jews, under the leadership of the Macabees, resisted this Hellenization and did so to the point of martyrdom. 

Mark 7:26 has an interesting description of a woman as “Greek, a Syro- Phoenician by nation.”  This indicates that while there was a certain amount of assimilation, particular ethnic identities survived.  One group that was distinct that we have not yet mentioned are the Samaritans.  The Samaritans were Israelites who never accepted the hegemony of the Temple at Jerusalem but had (and have today) their own Temple on Mount Gerizim in what is today Israel.   They were regarded as heretics by the Jews for whom the Temple at Jerusalem was the only place where sacrifice was to be offered.   The Samaritans, a small community today, have retained their distinct ethnic identity to the present day. 

the Jews were expelled from the land of Judea after the failure of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 AD.  While small groups were able to remain in the Galilee, most of what is today Israel remained without Jewish inhabitants until the late 19^th century and the Zionist movement which encouraged Jews to return to the ancient land they claim as their patrimony. 

Under Roman Rule the remaining population continued to homogenize and as the Roman Empire gradually slid into its Byzantine Identity in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity gave an even more unifying force to the once distinct peoples.  Christianity was not totally unifying, however, as the segment of the population that was descended from the various Canaanite peoples and who tended more to be rural, followed the West Syrian liturgy known as the Liturgy of Saint James, while the Byzantines—townsfolk and predominately descendants of the Greeks and the Romans—followed the Greek Rite that would come to be called the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom.  The Armenians retained their distinct identity with their own liturgical rites as well as some basic doctrinal differences with both the Greeks and the Syriacs. 

In the seventh century, invaders came up from the Arabian Peninsula bringing Islam.  While they seized control of the land from the Emperor at Constantinople, they did not force either Islam or the Arabic language on the local population.  Indeed the native population remained overwhelmingly Christian for centuries and Aramaic, the common language of the land in the time of Jesus, remained the ordinary language of most of the population. 

What one had then in the land was a base population that was, except for pockets of Druze and Samaritan minorities, predominately Christian divided into their different villages according to their specific liturgical/ethnic peculiarities: Syrian, Melkite (Greek), Armenian, Maronite and with an Arab Muslim ruling class.  During the period of the Umayyad Caliphate at Damascus, Christians often held key administrative posts.  The father of Saint John Damascene, for example, was a court official of the Caliph. 

Non-Muslims were free to practice their religion but they did have to pay an extra tax, the jizya.  This tax was an exemption from serving in the military, participation in which was limited to Muslims.  Over a period of time, of centuries, more and more of the population converted to Islam, in part to avoid this tax.  Nevertheless, at the time of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, almost half of the Palestinian population, descendants of these Greek-Syriac peoples who themselves were descended—at least in part—from the ancient Canaanite peoples—were still Christian.  They were about half Greek Orthodox, with the other half divided between Roman Catholics and Melkite (Byzantine) Catholics.  There were also significant Armenian and Syriac Orthodox communities and a smaller Coptic Christian community.  As the situation in Israel made life more and more intolerable for the Palestinian peoples, many emigrated to the United States, to Canada, to Australia and to other parts of the world where they would not suffer the limits of freedom and opportunity imposed on them by the unabashedly apartheid policies of the State of Israel.  The Christians, being mostly townspeople and merchants, have found it easier to emigrate than the Muslims who, being predominately farmers, are more closely tied to the land and orchards their families have operated for centuries and which are now being confiscated and turned into “settlements” for the refugees that have flooded Israel from Russia and other Eastern European countries.  

Ya Don't Have To Be Katholic To Be A Krazy

The Temple Mount also known as

The Noble Sanctuary

Kraziness of the “religious” variety is not limited to the Katholic wing-nuts as Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Teaneck New Jersey recently demonstrated in his blog.  Rabbi Pruzansky, who heads the “Orthodox” Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in the northern New Jersey town that lies just across the Hudson River from New York City, wrote in his blog last week that “There is a war for the land of Israel that is being waged, and the Arabs who dwell in the land of Israel are the enemy in that war and must be vanquished. . .Arabs have no future in the land of Israel.” I put “Orthodox” in quotation marks as Pruzansky takes his opinions far beyond where most Rabbis would agree that Torah goes and indeed—and to their credit—the Orthodox Union—an association of Orthodox Congregations to which Pruzansky’s synagogue belongs—has condemned his views saying:

“We cannot countenance a response to terror that resorts to wholesale demonization, advocates for the collective punishment of Israeli Arabs, or calls for the destruction or dismantling of Muslim holy places. Such rhetoric is anathema to the Jewish religious tradition and has no place in civil society. Such rhetoric is wrong and must be repudiated, whether it is voiced by lay leaders, community leaders or rabbis.”

Rabbi Pruzansky pulled the offensive essay and issued a “clarification” in which he claimed that he never wrote that all Arabs or all Muslims fell underneath the epithet “savages” by which he castigated the terrorists who had brutally murdered four rabbis and a Druze policeman in Jerusalem the previous week.  That may be true—one can read the original sentence with several different interpretations—but exactly whom the Rabbi called “savages” isn’t the problem, only the symptom.  The problem is the blatant racism that underlies Rabbi Pruzansky’s entry.  While they may not be “savages,” Rabbi Pruzansky does not believe that Israeli Arabs or Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as are Jewish Israelis.   The Rabbi wrote

“Measures need to be implemented that encourage Arab emigration — the payment of stipends, compensation for property, etc. They must be made to feel that that they have no future in the land of Israel — no national future and no individual future.” And Rabbi Pruzansky went far beyond this suggestion that the native Palestinian Arab population who have lived in the land long before Joshua led the descendants of Jacob into “The Promised Land” be pushed to give up their family homes and their patrimonial orchards and emigrate.  He pushed the idea that any town or village from which terrorists came should be leveled and its entire population expelled.  Moreover, he advocated that severe restrictions be placed on the civil and human rights of non-Israelis who remained in Israel.  He further said that the Israeli police should use “live ammunition” against any demonstrating for Palestinian rights and that foreign reporters or cameramen have their notes and equipment confiscated so that they could not report on atrocities against the Palestinians.  What provokes the demonstrations against the Israeli authorities is the forcible removal of Palestinians from their homes—as is currently happening in East Jerusalem—so that those homes can be destroyed and new homes be built for Jewish Israelis.  Today’s Palestinian population are no johnnies-come-lately to Jerusalem and what is today the State of Israel but can be traced back to the Syro-Canaanite peoples who have inhabited the eastern end of the Mediterranean for over five thousand years.  How can the fortunate nieces and nephews of the unfortunate Polish and Russian and Czech and German Jews who were forced from their homes and lost their businesses before being herded into work camps and death camps because their existence was not convenient to a political ideology built on racial hatred advocate this sort of State-terrorism? 

Rabbi Pruzansky, like many others of a certain Jewish Orthodoxy, believe that the land of Israel belongs by Divine Right exclusively to the Jewish people and that all others, including those who have lived there for millennia, must vacate it.  The Rabbi went so far as to demand that the Muslim Holy Places on the Temple Mount be closed and that the shrines—the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque be “uplifted intact and reset in Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted.”  This opinion shows the Rabbi’s contempt for religions other than his own.  The “Noble Sanctuary” is sacred to Muslims as was the Temple to Jews and for both religions its sacred character is linked to the specific site of Mount Moriah and is not interchangeable with any other place on earth for its specific religious significance. 

This was not the Rabbi’s first racist rant.  He was beside himself with fury at the 2012 re-election of President Barack Obama and attributed the President’s victory to voters “primarily from the Third World” who “do not share the traditional American values…”  He went on to write “It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it.”

Christians, Jews, Muslims all must learn mutual respect and tolerance.  Christians, in their day, certainly have been guilty of bigotry and violence towards both Muslims and Jews, and no way occupy the moral high ground to lecture anyone else.  The Crusades and the pogroms and the Inquisition are all tired chestnuts hurled accusingly against the Catholic Church—but, tragically, they are all historically accurate examples of religion gone rotten.  Given our past, we Catholics are in no position to preach the necessity of respect for those of other religious persuasions, but by our example of tolerance and truth as mandated at the Second Vatican Council in Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra Aetate, and crowned by a proactive pursuit of charity and justice as indicated by Popes John Paul, Benedict, and Francis,  we Christians must get the message out that violence and hatred are no solid ground on which to build the future.  In the process of the sort of bigotry typified by Rabbi Pruzansky not only Judaism but all religion suffers a credibility gap.  Perhaps the following quote from the Dalai Lama puts things into perspective. 

Finally I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.  

Many Catholics who share the religious arrogance of Rabbi Pruzansky would shrug their shoulders and condescendingly ask what the Dalai Lama or any other teacher outside their own faith tradition could possibly have to say to us who have received the teachings of Jesus.  I suspect many Orthdox Jews would also wonder why one would look beyond the rabbinical tradition when G-d has spoken his Torah.  Maybe we need to get over our prejudices and realize that Truth has never allowed any one source to hold the monopoly on it.      

Another Sidebar: You Don't Have To Be Katholic To Be A Krazy

Have you read the segment on the baseball game in the first chapter of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen?  It has nothing whatsoever to do with Catholicism but it captures the profound hate that for pious zealots of any creed provides the foundation of their religion.  Thus we have ISIS brutally murdering Yazidis and Christians in Iraq; we have Christians and Muslims killing one another in Nigeria; we have Russian Orthodox and Greek Catholics locked in battle in the Ukraine, we endured decades of Catholics and Presbyterians in the most savage murders in Northern Ireland; we have Israeli Jews and Palestinians Christians and Muslims in a war with no end; we have Hindu terrorists killing Christians in India; and we have Buddhists killing Hindus in Burma. Amazingly all these people have become so deluded by their “religion” that they think that God has blessed their cause.  There is no way that any such cult can authentically claim to be worshipping God.  True religion—regardless of what doctrines one professes is only as true as are pure the hearts of its adherents.  Hearts shriveled and putrefying with hatred cannot possibly be filled with the love of a deity, any deity, but are in the grasp of Satan. 

One crucial example of religion-gone-rogue that is too often overlooked in today’s American media is the rabid conviction of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel that God has given the land of Eretz Yisrael exclusively to the Jewish People and that consequently the Israelis have a right—actually a duty—to drive all others out of this land which is uniquely Sacred to the Lord God.  And so farmers whose ancestors lived in this land and on this land long before Joshua led the Children of Israel across the Jordan find their olive groves bulldozed, their houses leveled, their orchards and gardens seized and the land given to the “settlements” which are nothing less than a patchwork of thievery.   And this robbery—and sometimes murder—is done in the Name of Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Israel.  What sacrilege against the Holy Name!  The Rabbis and the pious should shudder in a morbid fear at their blasphemy of the Holy Name. 

Now, to be fair, the majority of Israelis, much less the majority of Jews around the world, do not subscribe to this violence.  Far from it.  This exclusionary Eretz Yisrael in which only Jews should be able to put their foot to the consecrated land is the doctrine of only a small group, undoubtedly less than 10%, of Israeli Jews.  But given the peculiarities of parliamentary government, the party in power needs the support of the political parties of these extremists to maintain their voting majority in the Knesset (Parliament) and so hatred—hatred in the name of religion—is empowered to work its evil. 

Christians should not be quick to join in the chorus condemning the sins perpetuated in God’s Name in Israel against the native population of that land.  In many regards this precise blasphemy should be well known to Christians.  When the Jews of Europe were driven from their homes and businesses in England (1290) and then from France (1306) and finally from Spain and Portugal (1492), was it any less offensive to Almighty God?  For that matter, was the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 any less evil in the Divine Sight?  And what about the pogroms and riots in which, over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives were lost—was this true and authentic religion?  Is God ever honored by hatred?  Is he honored by hatred now in the death of a Muslim? 

When I look at the Katholic Krazy sites, as much as they view the world beyond Catholicism with the contempt of a Hasid toward the goyim,  they save a particularly bitter hate for those Catholics who disagree with them much as Danny Saunders viewed the apikorsim of the practicing but less orthodox Jews on Reuven Malther’s team.  Somehow we cannot bear that Truth or, for us Christians, Grace, could be found beyond the limits of our own narrow religiosity and that God’s favor could shine as brightly, or even more brightly, on those who are different from us.  A sign of religion-gone-bad is when our religion—be it Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, or pre-Conciliar Catholicism—makes us believe that we stand alone in God’s love.   Such religion is rooted in the hatred of others and renders us with hearts far too impure to ever offer God the Sacrifice which is due him.  Our Mass becomes a Black Mass, a Satanic perversion of the Eucharist and our Sacrifice becomes the sacrifice of Cain as our souls are stamped with the sign of his evil hatred of his brother. 

One of my favorite spiritual writers, the Dalai Lama, says:

“the aim and purpose of religion is to cure the pains and unhappiness of the human mind. …. I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.” 

Curing the pain and unhappiness of the human soul doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t have beautiful churches or magnificent rituals inside them.  No one appreciates Mozart’s Coronation Mass or the Fauré Requiem more than I, though a capella plain song is more beautiful still.   When I am buying vestments as a gift for the parish or for a particular priest, I go to Barbaconi; Gamarelli’s vestments are far too effeminate and foppish.  Gilles Beaugrand were long the best for sacred vessels, but I have heard that they are closing and would not know where to go for a chalice or monstrance now.   I can’t stand sloppy liturgy and believe that worship calls for a gravity and a seemliness that keeps us mindful of God in whose presence we stand.  All that being said, the true worship of God does not consist in the externals of rite much less of pomp, but of a conversion of the heart by which our hearts are conformed to the heart of Christ so that we can be the worthy sacrifice offered to God and transformed by his Holy Spirit into Christ for the sake of the world’s salvation.  The Dalai Lama is spot on and totally in conformity with Catholic doctrine when he says true religion will reduce our selfishness and implant in us compassion for the salvation of the world.  The person whose love is for doctrine and whose devotion is to ritual worships a false god. 

Ultimately the hatred of Danny Saunders for the apikoros, Reuven Malther, becomes a solid and transformative friendship in which their worlds merge in mutual understanding. It is the triumph of grace over the evils of hatred.   At one point the narrow view of Danny and of his father, Reb Saunders, threatens that evil will overcome good and that separation will frustrate and win out over the friendship, indeed the love, they share.  Hatred always seeks to destroy love.  Fortunately grace prevails and the friendship liberates Danny from the life of fear and its consequent hatred that would have otherwise devoured his soul.  We should pray for the soldiers of Isis, for the Israeli settlers, for the Buddhist monks who are killing Burmese Hindus, and not only for those katholic krazies who are driven by a hatred for Pope Francis or for the Church as it has emerged from Vatican II, but also for ourselves lest evil swallow up good, and hatred devour compassion.