Dave, you keep pumping these out; I'm still about a month behind you. I thought that you would eventually tire, and I would catch up, but it is now clear that that will not happen. I jump in here to ask: what, except for some type of organized Christianity, can lead Americans to a common moral field? Wherein they would commit freely to observing the ten commandments or the seven Noahide laws? They cannot all become mystics.
Hi Ehud, thank you for your kind words. You've really become one of our most dear readers I most appreciate and whose feedback I take seriously. I'm doing my best to keep pumping these out to give myself a sense of meaning and purpose, as well as to try to distract myself from the PTSD symptoms, which right now are a very deep, dark depression.
So take my answer here with a bit of a grain of salt, as it may be overly characterized by my own very low emotional state. To answer you question directly: I don't think there is *anything* which can broadly lead Americans as a general population into embracing the core of Jewish values. I tend to see America as largely a modern day Babylon. This is a chiefly Pagan nation in which the worship of the self and the almighty dollar is the primary moral field. "In God We Trust" is on our currency because THAT is the false god most Americans worship to one degree or another.
Did you see this post of mine here citing the book "American Nations" by Colin Woodson? https://godofthedesert.substack.com/p/why-i-have-no-animosity-toward-michigan?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 Take a look at the 3rd and last map I include. America always has been - and I suspect always will be - a land of major cultural conflicts. As an immigrant nation, multiple different cultural/religious groups came here for centuries. The result is that while we may be one nation, we are deeply divided by different interpretations of culture and religion. The New England "Yankees" influenced by Puritanism, are simply not going to agree with the "Deep South" influenced by slave society and their historically racist Southern Baptist church. Neither will the largely Catholic Latino population of "El Norte" or the mostly secular population of The Left Coast, or the individualist frontier/wilderness culture of the Far West.
And the various blends of these cultural traditions which occur at the edges of where they're at on the map just make things even more divided and complicated. As I wrote in the post, the Indiana that I grew up in, I regard as expressing a worst of both worlds blending of "Greater Appalachia" and "The Midlands" producing a harsh warrior individualist ethos with a "moderate" "conformist" culture which refuses to address cultural controversies and broader problems, and which detests non-conformists who fail to embrace these tendencies.
There are potentially 2 ways for America to perhaps come closer to a "common moral field" though. The one based on Jewish moral values is long-term in nature. I believe the key for more Americans embracing Jewish values/culture and rejecting antisemitism lies in introducing Jewish people/culture/religion to Americans when they're fairly young and culturally malleable and open-minded. The Jewish family friends we had while I was growing up planted the seeds for the Zionism and heavily Jewish-influenced spirituality I have today. I knew from a young age the inherent goodness which Judaism brings into the world, and saw pretty quickly how that moral value system conflicted with the Fundamentalist Evangelicalism indoctrinated into me during my teen years.
The second way to bring more Americans into a shared "common moral field" is more immediate in nature, much, much less pleasant, and won't necessarily produce the kind of Noahide/10 Commandments centered morality you're looking for. But it would certainly be greater moral improvement and cultural unity than we have now: a major war with other great power nations at a level akin to what we had with World War II, and a lesser degree the Cold War. This happened to a small degree with 9/11. For a brief time the American people had greater unity and moral clarity in being threatened by a totalitarian, clearly evil enemy. But that largely fell apart with the divisions over the controversial nature of the Iraq War.
What do you think? Am I being too cynical in my view of understanding and pessimistic in my understanding of America's divided cultural nature?
David, I grant you your "writing as PTSD therapy," and I deeply sympathize with your battle with depression. However, I propose to you that if you did not preface your posts with the PTSD disclaimer, no one would suspect that as the engine behind your productivity. Your writing is solid and powerful in and of itself, whether one agrees with it or not. And it is highly obvious, if not to you then to your readers, that you are not writing for yourself. You are writing out of an obvious love for life and humanity, making the hurt from betrayal and disappointment all the more poignant. Do you see your writing as documenting an inevitable decline, or are you crying out to prevent that decline? Why can it not be the latter?
Thank you Ehud. I unfortunately see it as more of the former than the latter. In my analysis the level of human evil is just going to get worse as the population increases, and so too the level of antisemitism as well as broad indifference to it. My mystical practice has led me to identify with the desert prophet tradition. I fear that I am just a voice crying out in the wilderness and few are noticing or caring, and that little if anything will be accomplished by my screaming.
Ecclesiastes 1:17-18
"Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
As I wrote about on Friday - https://godofthedesert.substack.com/p/2-numbers-which-reveal-the-overwhelming - the numbers of people, especially the younger generations, which have not learned the historical lessons of the Holocaust is horrifying. And I anticipate that trend to only get worse the more time passes, and the more the memories of history fade away.
Dave, you keep pumping these out; I'm still about a month behind you. I thought that you would eventually tire, and I would catch up, but it is now clear that that will not happen. I jump in here to ask: what, except for some type of organized Christianity, can lead Americans to a common moral field? Wherein they would commit freely to observing the ten commandments or the seven Noahide laws? They cannot all become mystics.
Hi Ehud, thank you for your kind words. You've really become one of our most dear readers I most appreciate and whose feedback I take seriously. I'm doing my best to keep pumping these out to give myself a sense of meaning and purpose, as well as to try to distract myself from the PTSD symptoms, which right now are a very deep, dark depression.
So take my answer here with a bit of a grain of salt, as it may be overly characterized by my own very low emotional state. To answer you question directly: I don't think there is *anything* which can broadly lead Americans as a general population into embracing the core of Jewish values. I tend to see America as largely a modern day Babylon. This is a chiefly Pagan nation in which the worship of the self and the almighty dollar is the primary moral field. "In God We Trust" is on our currency because THAT is the false god most Americans worship to one degree or another.
Did you see this post of mine here citing the book "American Nations" by Colin Woodson? https://godofthedesert.substack.com/p/why-i-have-no-animosity-toward-michigan?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 Take a look at the 3rd and last map I include. America always has been - and I suspect always will be - a land of major cultural conflicts. As an immigrant nation, multiple different cultural/religious groups came here for centuries. The result is that while we may be one nation, we are deeply divided by different interpretations of culture and religion. The New England "Yankees" influenced by Puritanism, are simply not going to agree with the "Deep South" influenced by slave society and their historically racist Southern Baptist church. Neither will the largely Catholic Latino population of "El Norte" or the mostly secular population of The Left Coast, or the individualist frontier/wilderness culture of the Far West.
And the various blends of these cultural traditions which occur at the edges of where they're at on the map just make things even more divided and complicated. As I wrote in the post, the Indiana that I grew up in, I regard as expressing a worst of both worlds blending of "Greater Appalachia" and "The Midlands" producing a harsh warrior individualist ethos with a "moderate" "conformist" culture which refuses to address cultural controversies and broader problems, and which detests non-conformists who fail to embrace these tendencies.
There are potentially 2 ways for America to perhaps come closer to a "common moral field" though. The one based on Jewish moral values is long-term in nature. I believe the key for more Americans embracing Jewish values/culture and rejecting antisemitism lies in introducing Jewish people/culture/religion to Americans when they're fairly young and culturally malleable and open-minded. The Jewish family friends we had while I was growing up planted the seeds for the Zionism and heavily Jewish-influenced spirituality I have today. I knew from a young age the inherent goodness which Judaism brings into the world, and saw pretty quickly how that moral value system conflicted with the Fundamentalist Evangelicalism indoctrinated into me during my teen years.
The second way to bring more Americans into a shared "common moral field" is more immediate in nature, much, much less pleasant, and won't necessarily produce the kind of Noahide/10 Commandments centered morality you're looking for. But it would certainly be greater moral improvement and cultural unity than we have now: a major war with other great power nations at a level akin to what we had with World War II, and a lesser degree the Cold War. This happened to a small degree with 9/11. For a brief time the American people had greater unity and moral clarity in being threatened by a totalitarian, clearly evil enemy. But that largely fell apart with the divisions over the controversial nature of the Iraq War.
What do you think? Am I being too cynical in my view of understanding and pessimistic in my understanding of America's divided cultural nature?
David, I grant you your "writing as PTSD therapy," and I deeply sympathize with your battle with depression. However, I propose to you that if you did not preface your posts with the PTSD disclaimer, no one would suspect that as the engine behind your productivity. Your writing is solid and powerful in and of itself, whether one agrees with it or not. And it is highly obvious, if not to you then to your readers, that you are not writing for yourself. You are writing out of an obvious love for life and humanity, making the hurt from betrayal and disappointment all the more poignant. Do you see your writing as documenting an inevitable decline, or are you crying out to prevent that decline? Why can it not be the latter?
Thank you Ehud. I unfortunately see it as more of the former than the latter. In my analysis the level of human evil is just going to get worse as the population increases, and so too the level of antisemitism as well as broad indifference to it. My mystical practice has led me to identify with the desert prophet tradition. I fear that I am just a voice crying out in the wilderness and few are noticing or caring, and that little if anything will be accomplished by my screaming.
Ecclesiastes 1:17-18
"Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
As I wrote about on Friday - https://godofthedesert.substack.com/p/2-numbers-which-reveal-the-overwhelming - the numbers of people, especially the younger generations, which have not learned the historical lessons of the Holocaust is horrifying. And I anticipate that trend to only get worse the more time passes, and the more the memories of history fade away.