“Blessed be Adonai, the God of Israel; she has come to her people and set them free….”
“Through her holy prophets she promised of old that she would save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us….”
“Morning, evening. Morning, evening. From the rising of the sun…oh morning star. From the rising of her heart...”
In the Benedictine monastic tradition, the Benedictus (Zechariah’s song at the birth of John the Baptist) is prayed each morning at Lauds and the Magnificat (Mary’s song at the annunciation) is prayed each evening at Vespers. The central theme of both of these canticles is exultation that Adonai is acting (at the birth of Messiah) on the Abrahamic promise to “free [Israel] from the hands of [their] enemies…[in order to] worship…without fear” (Benedictus). And to show “the strength of his arm,” to scatter “the proud in their conceit,” and “cast down the mighty from their thrones” and “lift up the lowly” (Magnificat).
“The promise that in the midst of trauma.
Trauma.
T-R-A-U….
TRAUMA!!
That in the midst of trauuuuauuuuauuu…
That in the midst of trauuuuama…
…trauuuuam…
That in the midst of trauma, You…
You, Oh Adonai,
YOU!
LISTEN TO ME!
You, Oh Adonai.
In the midst…
you, oh Adonai…
you…
are...”
These songs sung at the beginning of the Christ story take up the Jewish prophetic cry against imperial oppression. In the Christian tradition, we tend to spiritualize these texts in terms of a metaphysical redemption: “freedom” = spiritual salvation, “bondage” = enslavement to sin, “enemy” = Satan and invisible evil forces. But these songs’ hopes clearly do not lie in the afterlife or the unseen. In them we hear the cries of Moses and Miriam against Egypt, the cries of Jeremiah against Babylon, the cries of Isaiah against Assyria, the cries of Judas Maccabaeus against the Selucids.
These are very real cries for justice in the midst of trauma – and the Hebrew Bible is full of them. Literal, physical freedom from an oppressive, occupying imperial force is at the heart of Jewish identity and can be said to be a seed bed of humanity’s (surely Western civilization’s) understandings of justice.1 This struggle has continued in history under European Constantinian Christianity all the way to Auschwitz.2 Born in the 19th Century, the Zionist movement hoped for Jews to return to Palestine as a refuge from anti-semitic oppression in Europe. After the Ottoman Empire lost its 400 year governance of Palestine in WWI and after the horrors, traumas, and genocide of the Shoah, Zionists’ hopes were satisfied in the form of the modern Jewish state. Yet, this state sought to expand and displace the life of Palestinians already living in the land.3 Modern Israel’s hopes, dreams, and beginnings were forged in, through, and from trauma. And now?
“blessed be Adonai…”
“blessed be…”
"Benedictus…”
“Blessed be Adonai the God of Israel; she has come to…to…to…”
“…all who hate us…”
“…all who hate us…”
“…that you would save us from our enemies.”
“Promised. To Abraham and Sarah to set us free from the hands of our enemies.
“Every morning, Oh Lord, every morning I cry out to you…”
“that you would save…”
“save us…”
“save us from…”
“…all who hate us.”
“…hate…”
“…all who hate…”
“…to set us free from the hands of our enemies…”
“free to worship you without fear…”
Now?
A current leading expert in trauma, Dr. Gabor Mate – himself Jewish and an infant holocaust survivor whose grandparents were slaughtered at the hands of Nazis – asks the question: can we not grieve that the beautiful dream of Jewish redemption in Israel has become a nightmare?4
In this question I hear, “Can we not grieve that this instance of return to the land after the Shoah, this instance of ‘hoped for freedom from the long histories of oppression after the Holocaust,’ has so transformed that our leaders and other powerful world leaders endorse and encourage our use of the very nightmares that our prophets have cried out against?”
“without…”
“without…fear…”
“…fear…”
“…fear…”
“…without…”
“…fear…”
Now?
Can we not grieve that the oppressed have become the oppressor? That the state of Israel is currently engaging in blatant genocidal war crimes against thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinians (and that the occupation of Palestine has been propped up for decades by a colonizer paradigm)?
Dr. Mate quotes Eckart Tolle when he writes, “the accumulated mutual pain in the Middle East is so acute, ‘a significant part of the population finds itself forced to act it out in an endless cycle of perpetration and retribution.’”5 Trauma begets trauma.6
“…without…” “TRAUMA!!” “…genocidal fear…”
“…genocidal…genocide…”
“…without…”
“…without…”
without!
Yet, there is another layer to this travesty. Many of us know intimately the mechanics of trauma in our familial relationships and perhaps larger social groups. If we have undergone any kind of therapy we know that more often than not pain done to us is at the root of the pain we inflict on others. And so we can have compassion and understanding in the face of chaotic horrors. But how is it that two Western superpowers of “democracy,” the United States and the United Kingdom, not only turn a blind eye but empower and support Israel’s war crimes and colonial, bigoted leaders?
Democratic ideals is part of the answer. Israel is a “bastion of democracy in the Middle East,” they say. This is a lie. But it is, in fact, only one half of a powerful paradigmatic marriage that contributes to Israel’s colonial manifest destiny project. If mythologized democracy (and America’s strategic allyship in the Middle East) is one lover in this union, a violent imperial Christian eschatology is the other.
The (largely) white suburban evangelicals can give blind support for whatever Israel does (at least in the U.S.) because of an eschatology that systematizes the modern state of Israel’s existence as a precursor and prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ (Parousia). In this system the modern state of Israel is at worst literally exempt from any culpability and at best its militarism is highly idealized, romanticized, and mythologized at the service of her struggle to exist.
A “manifest destiny” paradigmatic filter powerfully shields the American mainstream media’s coverage of the state of Israel’s crimes and veils horrors. Mythologized democratic ideals are the spearhead and God holds the spear. Thus, democratic rhetoric becomes a tool in the hands of the current evangelical religion of empire.
But, the power (and horror) of this view is not just that God holds the democratic divine spear, but that this God has nothing in common with Jesus of Nazareth. Christ “first came in meekness,” they say, “he comes again in vengeance and power.” This Christ does not pray for enemies, but slaughters them. At the end of the age evil is corporeally so far gone and so incarnate that it is unredeemable. The second incarnation of Christ is resurrected, corporeal glory, and literally wipes evil from the face of the physical plane. Physical, resurrected glory cannot co-exist with such blatant evil. He “treads the winepress in His anger…and blood stains all His robes” (Isaiah 63:3).
This Christ is the “emperor-king” of a physical empire which has its seat in the modern state of Israel. Thus, the physical state of Israel “prepares the way” of the Second Coming in the spirit of John the Baptizer.
Some might think I am exaggerating for effect and that this is only a marginal view of American evangelicals. Marginal or not, evangelicals of influence in the government have succeeded in creating a culture of power in the halls of D.C. where these ideas flourish. One eye opening resource is the Netflix documentary of 2019, The Family. Another is One Nation Under God?: The Political Power of Evangelicalism, a program of PBS’s longest running history series, American Experience. This is embedded below for your convenience.
I hope, dear reader, that the parallels of the above mythology to the Nazi’s Aryan rhetoric are not lost on you. Such rhetoric makes genocide easily justifiable in the blinding light of its existential cosmic “glory.” Trauma begets trauma. But no trauma is justifiable. Will we be lulled to sleep by spiritualized nativity scenes that make us forget that Bethlehem is a present real city in Palestine under occupation? A Palestinian Christian pastor, Rev. Munther Isaac says it this way in his own words:
Now.
As the sun peacefully leaks its pink and orange hues through bare leafed trees behind my house and makes the subtle roll of snow drifts sprinkle and spark with the delicate flash of crystalline silence, I can only pray Morning and Evening prayer in spurts and starts; jagged inner ruts that disturb and poke the delicate lining of conscience behind the white of my eyes and heaviness of my chest. I cannot pray in straight lines now. I cannot pray in complete sentences now…Now. This is not the calculated irony of literature. This is the haunting slap of pictures of babies buried in rubble…
“…you have come to your people and set them free…”
This is Palestinian Christians canceling Christmas…
“…free to worship you without fear…”
This is millions starving, and dying of disease…
“…to set us free from the hands of our enemies…”
This is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying, “They don’t care about life…”
“She has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich she has sent away empty…”
This is the irony of empire.
see Marc Ellis’s incredible book Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation: the challenge of the 21st century.
Also, George Robinson, Essential Judaism: a complete guide to beliefs, customs, and rituals (New York: Pocket Books, 2000), p. 244: “Jewish law is predicated on our understanding that we are God’s partners in creation, that we alone can repair the unredeemed world….For many secular Jews, social action is what connects them to their Jewish identity. For all Jews, it is nothing less than what our tradition demands of us.”
for an incredible history of how Christianity has perpetrated anti-semitism from the Gospel writers until Hitler see James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: the church and the Jews, a history (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001). A major point of the book is, in fact, that the Holocaust could not have happened without centuries of Christian oppression of Jews in Europe leading up to the 20th Century.
There are some similarities and resonances here of persecuted Puritans (and other groups through the centuries) coming to North America for refuge but in turn displacing, killing, and oppressing the native people already living in the land.
Dr. Gabor Mate, “Israel: The Beautiful Dream has Become a Nightmare” originally in Toronto Star, July 22, 2014, accessed 01-29-24, https://drgabormate.com/beautiful-dream-israel-become-nightmare/
Ibid.