Labors of Freedom – God and Overcoming Violence-Societies

ROUGH DRAFT, no bibliography – email me if you need a cited reference – rtilley4-AT-alumni-dot-jh.edu

See secular version: Towards Post-Violence Societies: An Outline of Interdisciplinary Violence Studies and Violence Research

See master’s thesis: PROVOKING GOD: SACRED HOPE, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND THE HEBREW BIBLE

See related post dealing with background and the reason this is still online: God is Coming for Me Soon: My Ongoing, Complex, Relationship with Progressive Theology

About me

[There are probably typos here]

Chapter One

(Re)articulation and (Re)consideration of Religion as Social Justice

Rabbi Eleazar said: What is the meaning of the verse: I Bless You all of my life, I lift up my hands, invoking your name (Psalm 63.5 JPS)? I Bless You all of my life refers to Shema; I lift up my hands, invoking your name refers to the Prayer [Amida]. Of one who does this [the Psalmist] says: I am sated as with a rich feast; even more, he inherits two worlds, this world and the next, for it continues: I sing praises with joyful lips (Psalm 63.6 JPS).

First Tractate Berakhot (Blessings) 16b

In Parashat Vaera, Hashem elaborates on an important element in the act of direct confrontation with God, naming, “God spoke to Moses and said to him, ‘I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name [YHWH]’” This naming proclamation is vital to the understanding and screening of the God-revealed scene that we recreate in prayer such as with the Shema; so it is with “So I will bless You as I live” referenced in context in Berakhot 16b. Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar refers to this overlap in naming as the “confusion to know the many names of God” and elaborates, “Shaddai, used in a biblical name for God, translates as ‘breasts,’ and invokes the images of mountains and breasts, much like the mountain range the Grand Tetons” (2000, 128). Rabbi Michal Shekel reminds us that in Lech Lecha, “Hagar names God el ro’i, ‘God Who sees me.’ This in in response to God’s naming her child Yishma’el, which means ‘God hears.’ In naming God, Hagar affirms that God sees as well as hears” (2000, 59). It is very comforting to recall, remember, re-memorialize that Hashem is One who sees and hears. In the face of post-totalitarian exploitation through a consumer society that lifts the economy of medicine – caretakers – to a cartel of legal gangsters and the cacophony or royal, oblique myriad painters of socially engineered scores and share-metrics against the backdrop of communal suffering and a withering transnational, post-colonialist movement, that we have all ceased from hearing and seeing as it is, as it is manifest in our daily lives and demands we walk its translucent stairwell towards a finer grain of oppression. We must see and hear. We must be clear.

Exodus 6:6 is not the recitation of historical story-form, but a future promise to be obtained, “Say, therefore, to the Israelite people: I am the Lord. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements.” Freedom to pursue life’s promises is inherent in the winds of abatement that we should sing – name – until our labors have been completed and we have put an end to violence; violence of the heart, violence of the skeleton; violence of the body, violence of dismissal, violence of temporal distortion, violence of intended oversight, violence of the mind, violence of betrayal, violence of the caretakers, violence of hatred, violence of abuse, violence of indifference, violence of acceptance.

The more harm we become accustomed to, the more harm we become prepared to inflict ourselves. It becomes organic. It becomes biomechanical. It becomes biolence. However, in spite of so many poets, tinkerers, judgmental continental philosophers, and aggrieved mothers, violence is not natural nor is it inescapable. Violence is not inevitable. Biolence, which I intend to roughly mean those human, animal, biological motivations towards aggression as nature indicates intellectual potential to overcome in human-trusted mechanical biolence against the opposition of an untrustworthy superficial biolence that can easily be understood as something that can be done away with. As we work towards a more perfect society, we cannot actually do so without an understanding of violence as a reality to be overcome. Without an understanding of violence, we cannot overcome it. We are overtly capable of overcoming violence with a firm understanding of it and incorporating that understanding in our push towards a free, communally democratic, secure society.

In the Mishnah, the sages teach us “All aftergrowths are forbidden” (Shebiit 9.1). This is an outward and existential “all.” The uncultivated aftergrowths in a violent civilization have proven to be our responses to it. From police states to quasi-diplomatic philosophy that understands violence as part of life and teaches these values, we have inherited a culture of violent acceptance; a rhetoric of the naming of violence that is the rhetoric of acceptance. Sacred hope is more than a beautiful idea. It is a motivation towards peaceful principles. We hold in our hearts the ability to grow beyond what has been taught to us and beyond the enculturation of blind apathy. I do not intend to ensure a call towards a passive positivism, but direct action that does not compromise values of new, sacred hope. Sacred hope is not a jester in the corner. It is among the peaks of the Grand Teton Mountains. Sacred hope is something to be practiced. It is not passive or a thought experiment. It erupts from the earth. It erupts from our souls.

The Mishnah tutors us on precedence in Zebahim 10.1:

Whatever is [offered] more than its fellows takes precedence over its fellow:
The continual offerings [daily whole offering] take precedence over additional offerings.
The additional offerings of the Sabbath take precedence over the additional offerings of the new moon.
The additional offerings of the new moon take precedence over the additional offerings of the New Year [which is also a new moon],
since it is said, In addition to the morning burnt offering which for a daily whole offering you will prepare these (Num. 28.23).

Sacred hope takes precedence over inherited inaction towards violence. It could be argued (named) with the degree of violence in history, that it should take precedence, but we are far too wide in accepting our dismissal of good nature and healthy motivations towards others from the most element and common corners of social welfare. In Lisa Diedrich’s book, Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism, she describes of the motivations and aspirations embedded in the casual thoughts of Susan Smiley who thinks about her mother with schizophrenia each time she passes a homeless person on the streets exhibiting such symptoms, stating, “Smiley’s awareness that ‘that could be my mother’ signals her attempt to find a method to witness ‘the residue of all residues’ not or not only in order to assimilate it through discipline but as a call to struggle against our impoverished response – conceptually, politically, practically, and aesthetically – to mental illness” (2016, 175). The stigma of mental illness extends to an ingrained stigma against hope through and in mental illness and the hope to rise above and conquer it or the ability to live with it. This is not unlike the stigma of sacred hope. “[C]onceptually, politically, practically, and aesthetically” we react against the best of interests of others in favor of an easy, accepting, laissez faire economics of care for ourselves and others. Through casual naming, we isolate those most vulnerable. We find it difficult to stipulate our values in a shared economy. The thought occurs then retracts to indifference and the commonality of restitute occurrence.

In the haftarah for Parashat Vaera, we again are offered the promise of restoration.

When I have gathered the House of Israel from the peoples among which they have been dispersed, and have shown Myself holy through them in the sight of the nations, they shall settle on their own soil, which I gave to My servant Jacob, and they shall dwell on it in security. (Ezekiel 28:25-26)

Michael S. Berger, in his book chapter, “Rabbinic Pacification of Second-Century Jewish Nationalism,” regards and warns that “[c]ontrary to the view of some social scientists, it is not whether, but how, God is brought into a conflict that determines the likelihood of a conflict inviting religious violence” (2007, 48). Berger argues that with the defeat of three Jewish revolts, particularly the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the enduring assault of Jewish practices were “long enough to sear into Jewish memory the reality of martyrdom, a fate many Rabbinic scholars apparently suffered” (2007, 50). The demoralizing defeat instilled a reaction to violence as a sense of the need to weaken equally violent responses.

The need for a continued spiritual practice evolved among rabbis as a practice to avoid being curtailed from hegemony and social order. Berger argues “the latter tannaim (second century CE Palestinian scholars) and early amoraim (post-200 CE Palestinian and Babylonian scholars) engaged in a deliberate program to dampen or counteract the tendencies for large-scale violence contained in Jewish texts and memory” (2007, 50). However, I would argue that what is perceived as a “practical embrace of passivity” (2007, 53) was, in fact, a religiously based tactic-laced order of resistance to the imperial doctrine of oppression through (re)naming. Berger cites Jacob Neusner, who states, “weakness is the ultimate strength, forbearance the final act of self-assertion, passive resignation the sure step towards liberation” (2007, 53). Whether messianic or passively responsive, it can be demonstrated that departing from violent appraisals was the penultimate legislation towards the photometry of articulating God-reference in the order of expressed reality. Here, I intend “articulation” in what Diedrich prompts as in “Stuart Hall’s double sense as both a form of expression and a linkage between multiple expressions, concepts, and objects” (2016, 75-76). Rabbis engaged a peaceful understanding of enforcing memory into the town squares of Jewish resistance and remodeled a scholastic order of reprimanded, gallant, formerly disheveled God-reference; a stored ensemble of written and ascribed articulation.

This double sense articulation is witnessed and even questioned regarding the Talmud. Wimpfheimer discusses Ri Migash, a Spanish scholar and teacher of Maimonides’s father, who is interrogated with the accusative questioning of the “what is between them [paradigms]” of repetitive questions in the language of the Talmud when answers have already been provided, to which Ri Migash responds:

We have seen that this thing is not worthy of question, for there are many similar instances in the Talmud where we say, “what is between them” even though we have seen that there is much between them. And the reason for this is since there are also other aspects that differ between them in addition to the ones we already know, we have seen in the Talmud that they identify the existence of such differences in the form of a question – “what is between them” – in order that it will return an answer of ‘such and such differentiates them.’ This means, in other words, there are also such and such differences. (2018, 132-133)

The trade route traveled responsa accurately denominates the question at hand by further illustrating the nature of the question ceases to oblige the interrogative nature of question and answer technique of responses to illustrative questions. The reaction to violence in the early tannaitic period functioned in a similar way that denominated the nocturnal flight of war and restorative, implemented action that created more problems than resolving an old order of acrostic sterilization of worship and ritual. Of course, the attempted extermination of Jewish practice by Roman stalwarts would be recreated as “blood libel, ritual murder, and host desecration charges all imagined Jews as invested in the visceral religiosity prevalent within Christianity” (Wimpfheimer 2018, 181). The tone of desecration towards Jewish communities is something of inherited violence that decorates the halls of staunch, performative, detracted ensembles of the pains of reaches towards justice that permeates revivals of protractive memory that must distance itself through the survival of text and ritual that points to the oppressive techniques of history.

Security – “shall settling on their own soil,” meant ontologically – is a word that has grown in a double sense and is weaponized as an enforcement tool to oppress communities. Justice is another word that within former generations evoked symbols of violence and judgment. Justice, security, these are terms that are within our ability to retake, revise, and re-articulate as homages of trust and investment towards a civil order that does not erode marginal distribution of millions as a necessity of “peace,” another word taken hostage by totalitarian despots that strive to take a foothold of an oppressive order that is already deeply rooted in all elements of worldly structure. We must see and hear and reexamine critically through a cultural dispersing of the values of sacred hope and direct confrontation.

Ruti Feuchtwanger writes about “women’s yeshivas” and batei midrash that only in the last generation began to learn and teach Talmud with divided approval in “Knowledge Versus Status: Discursive Struggle in Women’s Batei Midrash.” Feuchtwanger states, “[t]he fundamental value and power of this knowledge make it the basis of power relations between those in possession of it and those who lack it” (2009, 168). Surfacing from the austerity of knowledge comes a galactagogue of language and learning that (re)possesses an enforcement of just egalitarian values that meet and dissemble along given traits of more holistic flags of even and cool temperament. Wimpfheimer repeatedly returns to Bava Kamma 22a and takes away an articulation of negligence, “One is liable for an animal’s damages, for example, because they can be anticipated, and a failure to guard against them is tantamount to negligence” (2018, 69). This negligence is how we have treated our sisters and mothers from our own communities. It is how we have treated the sick and marginal. It is how we have inquired among the cancer stricken to defend themselves as to whether they are responsible or deserving of the illness, another form of biolence (Bhargava 2019). We are ritually negligent in a cross-border, cross-oceans, intranational, and forensic sense that should eliminate our hope for sacred intervention. However, there is the sacred hope of determination to implement change across judicial imparting of justice and mercy. With that hope, we can teach our way out of our violent inheritance.

In Meir Bar-Ilan’s fascinating and descriptive article, “The attitude towards mamzerim in Jewish society in late antiquity,” he drafts an argument of an evolution towards an acceptance and growing inclusion for mamzerim over time. Rejected from marriage opportunities, denied the right to study Torah, excluded and unbound, Bar-Ilan proposes a slow progress in Jewish society of compassion and acceptance. In Qiddushin 3:13, it is stated that mamzerim can be purified by marrying a slave with the conditions that the child, also born a slave, would then be freed – would then be purified and qualify for community and interrelated relationships with all privileges. This extreme logic forces us to think about what constitutes just inclusion and how separate exemplifications of counter-intuitive justice is meted out. Bar-Ilan, however, puts forward that:

The tales of the Tannaim and also the Qumran laws, teach of the limiting in the punishment of the mamzer over the years. Whereas in the period preceding the crystallization of rabbinic law, the prevailing religious-social law was very strict with mamzerim and included his social ostracism in all matters, even after death, the later rabbinic law as expressed in the Mishnah and Talmud shows a trend of limiting the sanction against mamzerim: establishment of the law only as a prohibition of marriage to a person of improper descent, and even this at times only through lip service. (2000, 141)

It should be noted that Shaye J. D. Cohen finds Ben-Ilan’s conclusions somewhat circumstantial and resting on assumptions about the reality of lived culture as expressed in the texts where these conclusions are drawn from (2000). However, the texts are where we elect to examine collective principles. Bar-Ilan’s recitation is growing inclusion is not missed or over-elucidated in terms of cultural stature. In that, we find a progressive elimination of cultural violence however slow or distilled it might grow.

What takes place, in this course, is a form of political violence in that it is a cultural enforcement of accepted norms to which others are subject to. In Cindy A. Sousa’s exhaustive review of literature on political violence, she illustrates the individual and collective responses and needs for the organized action against these acts, illuminating, “[p]articipation in civil society and political processes is essential for the health and well-being of individuals” (2013, 174). Sousa continues,

It engenders a sense of responsibility for collective functioning, enhancing individual well-being (Nowell and Boyd 2010). Political violence undermines individuals’ ability to engage with, and have confidence in, social and political life by: contributing to individuals’ isolation and withdrawal from society; deteriorating individuals’ trust in others, justice, and government entities and democracy itself; and lessening individuals’ abilities or willingness to engage in political activities. (2013, 174)

With greater collective and individual clarity, we must bring to the surface of our lived social lives the reality that all forms of “[p]olitical violence diminishes individuals’ trust in the moral organization of society, government entities and processes of democracy” (2013, 180). Structural violence put into perspective – either that which is historic or present day – brings us closer to examining our personal path in accepting violence as par for the course of detrimental waves of uninvited dystrophy in allied persuasion towards a just and reasonable outcome of our social experiment of civilization.

If biolence was inevitable, we would not be able to articulate methods out of its reach. Cultural precedence that our strengths lay dormant for extended periods can be found in just about any avenue of political and social history. A D’var Archer by Rabbi Max Chaiken for B’shalach states,

We might start by assuming that the Israelites, even as slaves, had the capacity to act in these godly ways all along. We have always had the ability to protect one another, to provide for one another, and to defend our very lives. Yet these powers laid dormant until Moses, and the Eternal One, helped to lure them out. When our Torah ascribes such miracles to God, then, it helps to impart the miraculous nature of these moments in which our ancestors activated a part of their humanity that resided deeply within, inactive for some four hundred years. (2019)

One cannot argue that complacency for social, political, and personal violence can be overcome without addressing the reality of its long-term persistence. Violence is persistent. It is cyclical. It countermands the inspired soft, still voice inclining each individual and collective towards a reasonable outcome. I do not argue that it takes a burning bush or witnessing the Sea of Reeds swallow the Egyptian army to find the courage to take a stand against social apathy, no. Instead, it is through an inter-communal healing and steadfast confrontation with violence and entities of violence that we can, which at times may even seem counterintuitive, demote structural oppression in all forms by having the courage to speak out, to name, to listen and hear what the collective voice of God demands we bring into the tent of our labors.

Involved in those labors is a more common, collective wisdom that centers inclusiveness as a doctrine that supersedes our inherited violence, just as Moses incorporated outside wisdom in organizing, adjudicating, and officiating the exodus project. Rabbi Shai Held writes in his exposition of Yitro, “together Exodus and Deuteronomy express a significant tension in the religious life – on the one hand, the acknowledgment and endorsement of learning from the broader world, and on the other, and understandable anxiety about that very project. Exodus, in any event, is clear: yesh hokhnam ba-goyim, there is important and necessary wisdom among the nations (Lamentations Rabbah 2.13)” (2017, 168). By taking advice from his father-in-law, Moses incorporates outside wisdom into the collective, bridging a divide that is a moral point we can all learn from. Isolation does not bring collective or individual growth and it cannot help is our struggle to overcome violence. It is possible to maintain individual and group identity while still understanding that group inclusion does not equal groupthink. As The Haftarah Commentary illustrates, “apartness does not mean separation from the rest of creation and its creatures. The holiness of God does not imply disinterest in and remoteness from the world […] A hermit would not fit the concept of k’dushah” (1996, 174). It does not rest on a purity of thought or order to an archaic wisdom of what God means to understand and confront the seeds of violence in society from a Jewish perspective or any other.

Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz returns this theme several times in Pirkei Avot: A Social Justice Commentary. In his commentary on Pirkei Avot 3.21, Rabbi Dr. Yanklowitz writes, “it is a codified spiritual practice to celebrate the wisdom found among gentiles, as if it is as worthy as wisdom derived from Jewish sources […] Judaism repeatedly directs us to embrace the unique wisdom in our religious system, but also to look to be transformed by every person we encounter” (2018, 181). What we seek to escape with intellectual isolation is a form of cultural anxiety that does not lend itself to becoming a force of light to en-culture and embrace different modes of thought and existence. That in itself is an aberration of thought to be avoided if not thoroughly cleansed from. If it is true that Jewish thought and celebration of life wishes not to be ascetic, but sensitively aesthetic in the contours of the regions of shared space, then embracing diversity where it stands is a calling for light bearing modes of expression. As Sarah Ahmed states in another – though approachable – context,

The very existence of fears and anxieties become ‘a sign of the times’, characterised as they are by rapid transformations and innovations, which had not only eroded old structures and values, but have also led to feelings of loss of control and loss of certainty about the future. (2004, 72)

This resentment found in “feelings of loss of control” brings with it resentment towards God. Hashem creates spaces for us, individually and collectively, to find out unfamiliar territory. We are to press on to find our path through some measure of adversity in order to grow to be able to outwardly and inwardly find a way to bond with others not from the same lived experience as ourselves. It leads to a spatial respite for love:

Love […] sticks the nation together; it allows cohesion through the naming of the nation or ‘political community’ as a shared object of love. Love becomes crucial to the promise of cohesion within multiculturalism; it becomes the ‘shared characteristic’ required to keep the nation together. The emotion becomes the object of the emotion. (Ahmed 2004, 135)

In the article, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History,” Joanna Bourke asks, “Is fear identical to anxiety? Is fear a response to danger or, since many fears arise in states of tranquility, is it something more subtle?” (2003, 114). Of course, within a multicultural society, and transnationally, dictations of discriminations of fear will vary.

As Bourke notes, “words used to describe feelings similar to those expressed by the English word ‘fear’ vary culturally, and this variation profoundly changes that culture’s emotional world” (2003, 119). It seems reasonable to articulate social and interpersonal fear as carriers of hate and violence, not unlike carriers of a virus that mutates as it is passed on and transmitted from one individual to another. The biolence of fear communicates interpersonal resentment towards an unholy rectification of the dowry of social disorder. As previously stated, at times the elaboration of social injustice and our responses to it may seem to come out of a seemingly counterintuitive space. Daniel Kapust points out, in “On the Ancient Uses of Political Fear and its Modern Implications,” that historically, ”[c]owardice was stigmatized, while courage was to be praised and cultivated” (2008, 356). Writers of ancient times sought to heighten emotions an impose fear and practices of resolution and a manner not unlike propaganda more than intellectual expression – however it may be assessed and discerned, yesterday or today. Fear as an evocation of political violence was long been a communal trend to spread apathy and division and grow interpersonal resentment towards the other, any other.

However, this is not the fate of our promise. Hashem’s promise is how we should articulate our collective promise to ourselves. I Kings 8:10-16 (from the 1978 JPS) offers a spectacle of a cloud and a rendering of group participation and through that participation a promise is restored and endowed upon the nation. Solomon announces in the presence of the clouds of Hashem:

The Lord has chosen

To abide in a thick cloud:

I have now built for You

A stately House,

A place where You

May dwell forever. (I Kings 8.12-13)

Solomon then moves his statement to the declaration of the promise, “Praised be the Lord the God of Israel, who has fulfilled with deeds the promise He made to my father David” (I Kings 8:15). Robert Alter renders a different translation (2018), giving us:

The Lord meant to abide in a thick fog.

I indeed have built You a lofty house,

a firm place for Your dwelling forever. (I Kings 8.12-13)

Further giving us, “Blessed is the Lord God is Israel who spoke with His own mouth to David my father, and with His own hand has fulfilled it” (I Kings 8.15). By keeping in mind the promise Hashem had made, we internalized that promise as existing today and tomorrow. If the One had made a promise than we are recipients of the promise and are able to act on its intentions. Just as God rested and dwelled in the Temple, Hashem rests and dwells among us and inside us, to be restored to an internal and outward order and resolution.

Michael Fishbane elaborates and negotiates with totality in midrash Sifrei Deuteronomy in Midrash Unbound: Transformations and Innovations, stating “Rabbi Azariah and Rabbi Judah bar Simon (in the name of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi) pondered the question of how much the Israelites actually learned at Sinai (S. of S. Rabbah 1.2). They pondered that the people learned all the 613 (principle) commandments of (rabbinic) Judaism at that time. This interpretation links the Ten Commandments of the tablets to all the teachings that will emerge through Jewish discourse” (2013, 14). This interlinking does another, subtler thing to the exploration of the manifestation of God. It shows that communication with Hashem has double rounded boundaries. It is not merely two dimensional with a single, simple message, but encapsulates a world of: Torah, to greater extension of the message of the Torah, to abled interpretation of how the Torah was communicated. There are multiple degrees through that communication just as there are layered and later unfolding promises even within the declaration of those promises initially. This arrives through a key magnifier: participation. Rabbi Sharon L Sobel focuses on this in her reification of Terumah, putting forward, “God will not dwell in the sanctuary, but rather, within them, within the people. It is the physical act itself of building the sanctuary that will cause God to dwell within the people” (2000, 156). With God’s indwelling presence, we can corner the dissemblance of mercy that emerges from our violent history and indoctrinates the citizens of repressive ages. Turning again, we can turn above, and magnify the light of overcoming an age-old manifestation of insecurity that infects common wisdom. We can prove to history that violence can be overcome.

It is right that we should articulate our hopes and dreams of a post-violence society, a peaceable world. We were created to articulate the names of Hashem and if our own hearts and lips can doubly sing such praises, it is our calling to embark towards a wisdom that consoles the meaning of congruent matrimony with a holy order. On the topic of Judaism as a faith concerned with the arena of the political, Rabbi Seth M Limmer stated, it is “[b]ecause Torah teaches us that holiness is meant to enter the world through our interactions with others. Because the prophets protested in the political realm. Because the Talmud sets forth an intricate system of law that binds us to our neighbors, whether we seek that societal connection or not” (2018, 14). This articulation from the personal to the public, from the public to the personal we inherited from God as it was God who “spoke the world into being […] God orders the universe by calling each entity by its rightful category [and] God invites the first human being to do the same” as Rabbi Shoshanah Conner expresses in her essay “B’tzelem Elohim” (2018, 20). Through the articulation of our universal guilt in having abandoned societal constructions mipnei tikkun ha-olam we can come to terms and turn towards an active socio-political unrest that assures a clear conscience has a voice at the table of public influence and determination.

Everett Fox interprets Deuteronomy 16:20 as:

Equity, Equity you are to pursue,

in order that you may live

and possess the land that YHWH your God is giving you!

Tzedek, tzedek tirdof. Repetition either by rephrasing or retelling in the Tanakh is not the misprint of scribes but demonstrative emphasis that lends itself to both practical as well as esoteric meaning. If at the start the first instance mipnei tikkun ha-olam did not bring complete equity, complete justice, we are to install a second instance of tzedek to restore the intention of creation. In February of 2019 in New York City, police arrived at the scene of a domestic disturbance. They found a man hiding in the closet who was taken out and away but broke free, grabbed a knife, and began stabbing his domestic partner. The police opened fire killing him, but saving the victim of the stabbing. Journalists Ali Watkins and Ali Winston stated they were known by police because of previous domestic disputes (New York Times, February 8, 2019). Did the perpetrator act out in response to intimidation and the coding of violence by the presence of the police? Should not have the issue between the couple have been better resolved previously since they did have that history. There are many layers upon layers of seeking to address violence and, primarily, the absence of preventive measures of the worst instance of violence occurring in this story. As such, we fail to answer the command, the impulse, to pursue justice and equity when we live on the sidelines and do not promote and enact preventions. With violence not averted, we do not inherit the land – the vision – that God had prepared to give us.

We cannot be one, echad, with creation and our intended purpose without direct action. The biolence of foreseen disillusion with the nature of the entropy of violent behavior is not conjecture but true, realized life that we are mostly only sometimes witness to, but never without participation in. This is how biolence can be understood – as that seemingly without substance that we are too distant from to distract ourselves towards the cause of preventing, but that even children know we can work to overcome and act towards justice and the resolution of principles. Lois Roisman wrote a creative work, “Looking for Lamed Vows,” (2006) which is a meditation on the thirty-six Just Sages from the Talmud. A portion of that work follows here:

When I view the news photo of the farmer held by soldiers while his olive trees are uprooted, I look in the field for the Lamed Vov who has tied himself to an ancient tree.

When I see settlers shoot into their neighbor’s olive groves, I look more closely and find another Lamed Vov shielding the olive pickers and helping with the harvest.

When, on the front page, I see a bulldozer flatten a home, I look for my Lamed Vov on the ground, blocking the driver’s way to the door.

When the women from Jerusalem and Ramallah sew as sisters, I find a Lamed Vov in the circle, stitching, stitching with the women who sew a quilt of peace.

Roisman’s Lamed Vows presents in focus where truth hides among the normalcy of violence. It is under the surface, but ever-present. If this truth can be obtained by some than it is obtainable by all. Therefore, the truth of violence is not inescapable from us. We can see it, feel it, access it, deal with it, and resolve it. We can address it and we can end it.

There is truth in the archetypal statement that violence is cyclical. Though we do no service to ourselves by thinking of an archetype as being settled law. Violence, like sexism, functions by the lack of resolve to adjust human attrition to patterns. bell hooks, discussing the sequential order of sexism in her book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, states, “Sexist men and women believe that the way to solve this dilemma [of women’s exhaustion by men’s gendered and familial expectations] is not to encourage men to share the work of emotional caretaking but rather to return more sexist gendered roles” (2004, 96). It is not that sexism, violence, hatred, homophobia, militarism are archetypes because they are unreachable by reform, but because they are expected and nurtured by a completely preventable vulnerability and that is what is cyclical, that is what is permitted violence.

The violence of permissiveness of human nature is misunderstood as an entity that is not retractable. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof. When we miscall the first instance of equity, we must – we are commanded and therefore instilled with the ability to – give order to a second instance of combined effort towards justice. We are able as a collective as well as individuals. We must not use discretion in our pursuit towards justice as something to be tailored in small measurements. Gail Labovitz offers us an intriguing orchestration of the excerpts from the Mishnah and Tosefta that illustrated nursing mothers were not understood or exemplified through motherhood but through an obligation to nurse the child towards a due labor for their husbands (2000). Certain arguments in Tosefta offer reprieve from her husband’s ownership except in cases where the child’s life might be in danger. Not without debate, it may traditionally be interpreted that the second instance of tzedek is offered in Tosefta as a reprieve and clarification for the Mishnah’s attributes of general motherhood. A calling forward to (re)clarify and articulate. However, this is not without an indiscretion of being consumed with the images of the nursing mother. This is not unlike the predication of the sages with the distraction of the woman’s body in birth and how the tragic example of stillbirth is imagined as a house (the body) that hosts what has become impure, but does not indicate the possessor as also impure until it leaves the house. As Christiane H. Tzuberi so clearly expresses, “[a]t the center of the analogy between a corpse in a house and a dead fetus in a woman’s womb is an attempt to imagine the inside of a female body and make it accessible to an outside gaze” (2015, 138). The sage’s imaginations of motherhood are more clearly described as sought after imaginations of the female body. We are instead to be echad in unity with multiple genders. We have another chance, a second emphasis that is not impassable.

From Ninth Tractate Avot, we read:

Antigonos of Sokho received [the tradition] from Simeon the Just. He used to say, Do not be like servants who serve their master to receive reward, but be like servants who serve their master without thought of reward; let the fear of Heaven be upon you!

We are to be like a cultural attaché to nobility and direct empathy between ourselves, the higher order we serve, and the relationship we have with the master who conceivably knows us well though if they do or not is not a matter of difference just as there is not a matter of difference in how the master sees us, interprets our actions, or how we intend to serve. What is important is how we might be able to impart life and light. Faith has no easy relationship with life or light. History has proven humanity’s relationship with violence is closely tied to its relationship with religion. Martin Jay comments in his book, Refractions of Violence, that “whether or not we see religion as expressing violence or containing it, the inescapable conclusion is that its potential to do both, a potential that has been realized throughout history, calls into question the easy assumption, embraced by Senator Lieberman (in the 2000 U.S. election) and so many others, that morality has its basic roots in religious experience. For there is ample evidence to suggest that sometimes the two are deeply at odds” (2003, 180). Discussing iconography of the law and the trans-suppositions of images of justice in history, however transgressed, Jay further offers us a compelling thought, that the “image of a hybridized creature, at once man and beast, divine and human, male and female, confounds our reliance on conceptual subsumption by refusing to be an exemplar of a general rule” (2003, 93). Much like the image of God given to Ezekiel (chapter 1), it is an image that refuses to be transparent and has historically been sought after as the height of the merkabah experiences.

Such then was the appearance of the creatures. With them was something that looked like burning coals of fire. This fire, suggestive of torches, kept moving about among the creatures; the fire had a radiance, and lightning issued from the fire. Dashing to and fro [among] the creatures was something that looked like flares. (Ezekiel 1.13-14)

Images of justice are fires that refuse to be seen, though they are there before us. The compelling argument that forces of oppression and religion are deeply tied give us further reason to bring direct action into our understanding of living according to light and commandment, to the mitzvot and dream of a reality where we arrive in the land. Though “deeply at odds” we understand and must give ample resource to the abatement of retrieving this images from history and giving them to the light so that we can funnel our way around the contours of history up to the first impressive by Her/His voice where the children of Israel asked Moses to speak for Hashem so that they would not quake under the mighty voice. We must be more inclined to hear that voice and see through Ezekiel’s torches to let them light our way into a post-violent Earth; without reward, without repositioning of our innate tolerance. If God was first capable of speaking to the children of Israel, than we are capable of withstanding the power of articulate, microbial light throughout the universe; facing the east in prayer, songs comminuted to when we arrive in our everywhere-Eretz Yisrael.

Labors of Freedom: God and the End of Violence

Chapter 2

Violence of Norms and Violence-Narratives

Jeremiah 1:17-19 is a heightened and transgressive displacement of inertia through the symbolic regiment of transcending violence; a confrontation to cease violence-responses from a hostile society.

I make you this day

A fortified city,

And an iron pillar,

And bronze walls

Against the whole land (Jer 1:18)

Hashem insists to the prophet, Jeremiah, that he is “an iron pillar” against the troublesome, insalubrious and tumultuous public eye. God declares S/He will assist in creating “a fortified city” against seemingly innate violence. The establishment of the prophetic order mirrors the collective establishment of protection from Old World violence of norms. God’s discursive language is retreating from the idea of violence in traditional bellicose terms of danger and decisiveness. It is the type of language that takes the approach of capturing the audience, the target, with the rhythms of their own hearts. Jeremiah 50:20-28 is equally about distributive justice; the vengeance of God is the elimination of violence in society. It is “war in the land” that is assaulted with the cessation of war.

How the hammer of the whole earth

Has been hacked and shattered!

How Babylon has become

An appallment among the nations!

I set a snare for you, O Babylon,

And you were trapped unawares (Jer 50:23-24)

Peace is the “snare.” Waging peace “from every quarter” is the wholeness and totality of enforced discipline through the cells, wrappings, and fibers of regimented justice.

Come against her from every quarter;

Break open her granaries,

Pile her up like heaps of grain,

And destroy her, let her have no remnant! (Jer 50:26)

There is a viscous transparency in God’s declaration of promoting harmony with a strong arm. Through authoritative language, peace and the end of violence is proclaimed.

Berachos 28b retells that Shmuel the Small was selected to write a prayer that calls for the demise of heretics precisely because he was the last person who would take pleasure in their destruction (Rosenfeld 2005). That voice was not in him, so he was called to vocalize the terms. Likewise, Hashem orchestrates grand and destructive imagery to calculate the end of an age of corruption and lasciviousness. How else does one end war, but with peace? The same catapult must be rearticulated in contemporary Western culture. As Judith Butler states in her discussion with Athena Athanasiou in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, “we have to continue to ask about that profound pull or temptation to counter the dispossession of human beings with more robust ideas of human possession” (2013, 35). Butler questions whether the “production of possessive individualism [depends] upon a disavowal of more primary, social, dependent, and relational modes of existence” (2013, 9). “Possessive individualism” works in concession with capitalist superstructures and reframes perspective, inducing a climate of othering. I have always felt what the apple represented in the Garden of Eden was possessiveness. It was the first instance of ownership that existed on a simultaneously interpersonal level and external, outbound maneuvering. The entitlement from the first instance of possession laid the foundation for “assigned disposability” that exist in the social-encultured dehumanizing that Butler and Athanasiou discuss (2013, 20). We betray our own reality.

Epitome scaling, that is, summaries of abstracts of perfect examples of humanness symbolic of the reducibility of capitalist functionality and normalcy of dispossession are concentrated in terms of solidifying conquest and habitual norms in a divergent society. The populist tendency to navigate from one hyper-concentrated form of epitome scaling to the next exposes a projection from being witness to ontological reduction while the more harshly dispossessed are displaced, dislocated, and dismissed by the triggers of those navigations to the new form of (un)equal expression. Between epitome scaling and those concentrated, navigating tendencies resolves a share-metrics that is a reflection of time out-of-bound. There is only one reality, we simply each share and split different lived experiences of that single reality leading to (un)shared perspectives. Share-metrics is the build up of external retreat from the resemblance of truth that our participation in this other staged reality demands of us and encourages.

Lawrence Kushner highlights the sense of a single instance of total expression of reality in The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness:

But at least you can tell them the stories. These will link them back to a time in humanity’s intra uterine childhood when everything was of one totality. When there was no amnesia. Abraham, I imagine, looks to Adam (his father), realizes he is not dying, and asks, “Why is it taught that I cannot see you until I am about to die?” Whereupon Abraham’s consciousness completes the circle of self-reflection. This near-death of self-awareness, according to Western spiritual tradition, also happened to an entire people. (2013, 47)

Jeremiah’s stern life and the consequences of this quest for Hashem demonstrate the magnitude of the dismissal of truths under the umbrellas of corruption. Still, the promises of the prophets point us to a brighter day. It is said we are not to rejoice in the downfall of the enemy. Even when those most deserving of punishment meet the consequences of their actions we are instead to magnify God who would prefer that the actions that warranted intervention had never taken place to begin with. This perpetual fall from truth that demands God’s intervention is something to consider in our search to end violence. Prevention of violence from the start is where we should turn our collective attention. Policies and educational programs have been held hostage through bureaucratic frameworks in the past have been, and will likely continue to be, subjected to such imparity. However, reshaping the initial discussions around other policy motives has shown promise to moving the needle forward. Rethinking what we think we know about violence may have the same benefits.

Though I am putting forward that there is a single reality that permeates existence behind the existential and experiential miscalculations and forced monopoly of abetting to the creation of “disposable people” I do not intend to argue for a single truth. I do not find Judaism to be “the truth,” but only that it is where I locate truth. There is not a single “truth” in locating God. We all find truth through our own means and it may come from any religion or no religion or all. It is not the singularity of reaching the World to Come. Judaism does not teach that its doors are the only way to reach God, the hereafter, or righteousness. As I put forward first in Provoking God: Sacred Hope, Social Justice, and the Hebrew Bible, Hashem prioritizes these characteristics of the lived human experience: 1.) How we treat others, 2.) How we treat ourselves, 3.) If we do something meaningful with our lives. The latter may be manifest in myriad ways and can be as varied as a parent caring for their children to a freedom fighter struggling against the oppression of capitalism or even objective scientific inquiry, which does risk playing into a trope of “the good atheist.” We must also not commit to an ableist view of how an individual achieves our taken-for-granted judgment of that final characteristic in my purported list of the well lived experience; nor glorify suffering or endowing sickness with othered nobility or helplessness.

Byung-Chul Han summarizes succinctly in Topology of Violence that the “situation in which an act of violence often arises from the system and systematic structure in which it is embedded. Thus, manifest, expressive forms of violence can be traced back to these implicit structures, which establish and stabilize a system of domination but withdraw from visibility” (2018, 77). Those equally prone to violence are not immune from sensing the reality of these low-visibility structures. Terrorism, which Han quotes Baudrillard as being “viral violence” (Han 2018, 95), was interpreted by the American political right as a systematic condition of religio-cultural conditions that were safely othered from within the counterview of evangelical worldviews equally prone to violent ethos, but not without the ability is see violence as a system, however flawed their explication in fact was. Western civilization, though endowed with violence, does not lack the ability to understand that there are methods of interpreting cultural and systematic structures involved that mask violence.

The new left that arose in the West (as well as the Mideast, though did not stem from this equation) in the post-Bush wars era grew more sensitive to the realities of political self-reflection and violence-cycles. This was an expected outcome. Violent men wanted the U.S. involved in a violent struggle on their own terms, in their own land in order to recruit and grow a new way of being, a fresh culture that would arise from that violence and the Bush administration was happy to oblige. Strongmen on the Middle East always knew getting the U.S. involved in their lands would lead to such results. Just as the old guards in those lands and that extended area understood the roots and branches of the extent of their power, which left the Arab Spring at a significant disadvantage. The distant West watches structures of upheaval and, some, reflected on the violence in their own culture and implications of violence contributed to the global pool. Still, there is no reward for not learning the lessons that the previous generation had already digested and disseminated. For many of this generation, just as the last, diplomacy was understood and proceeded as structural violence.

We carry this ingrained generational violence with us in our readings of the Tanakh. Ezekiel 34:8-16 tells us that the people will be rescued from misaligned shepherds. Those shepherds are the repetition of intergenerational violence that fails to solidify peace or understand Hashem as a Queen/King of Peace. Poor leaders often make the best scapegoats in our society, which helps them to maintain their grip on power and influence when confronted with norms and truths. “Israel” is not a land, but a peoples and in that people the very existence of peace and freedom from violence. Our collective interpretations of those peoples suffer from epitome scaling and the super-supposition of the poor as regress and entropy. Perspectives must be changed. I have always compared the constellation Taurus as symbolic of our collective perspectives. Is the bull facing towards you are away? Provoking God aimed to offer perspective that leads to action, but first there must be hope – sacred hope. Here also, to rid the world of violence we must first locate perspective that leads to action; perspective that settles the direction the bull is facing.

Just as the “cloud” in I Kings 8:12-13, or as Robert Alter states, a “fog,” represents participation, Ezekiel 34:12 returns to the communal intra-participation between Hashem of the public: “As a shepherd seeks out his flock when some [animals] in his flock have gotten separated, so I will seek out My flock, I will rescue them from all the places to which they were scattered on a day of cloud and gloom.” Traditionally thought to symbolize a time of judgment, the cloud here is also magnetically drawn as a grip, a hold onto the people from God. It is no accident that this metaphor occurs here. The cloud represents the spaces between the heavens and the earth just as it is an echad joining the people and God; an ideal oneness.

In Mohandas K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, we are given a reader response-esque interactive dictum triangulating the core of anti-violence science.

Reader: Will you not admit that you are arguing against yourself? You know that what the English obtained in their own country they obtained by using brute force. I know you have argued that what they have obtained is useless, but that does not affect my argument. They wanted useless things and they got them. My point is that their desire was fulfilled. What does it matter what means they adopted? Why should we not obtain our goal, which is good, by any means whatsoever, even by using violence? (eds. Lawrence and Karim 2007, 117).

If by means of violence and brute force such obsolescence is a rhetoric that thrives in the common articulation of values oriented towards possessiveness and granular orthodoxies, then the only totem of conjecture that remains must be reticence towards those abiding ecosystems. The response from the other participant is that this reasoning “has deluded many” and continues, “real rights are a result of performance of duty; these rights [the English] have not obtained” (eds. Lawrence and Karim 2007, 117). The conjecture of the outspoken class of rhetoricians is that violent means justify the ends. This periphony nears the absolute in Western hegemony and reverberates in and through dynamic waves of currents and calculated spires of intelligence operations in maintaining “order” in “peaceable” society. These shepherds locate common rhetoric and treat them as instincts to be nurtured, away from an imparting and peaceful Creator. It is, in its own way, a controlled narrative of the creation myth that dictates a philosophy of dictatorial medium for the engrossed and transpired, a near Nero redivivus myth that demands cosmically massive military expenditures and treaties of demise.

Rav Kook wrote, “The Torah can then appear to us as the soul of human culture, the basis of its existence, and the inspiration for its development towards its ideal form” (1988, 42). The shechinah proclaims that there is no disgrace in teaching. This statement must be put in context as we too readily accept it as an absolute truism. There are degrees of teaching just as there are degrees of disgrace. We are privileged in assuming that all teaching is in or interest or leans towards God. By that I intend, that which is good; good for all of us. This very insistence on clarity is Torah. Just as the world is created anew with each life born, so too, with each great moment. It is an ever-expanding process. We each locate our own path of redemption and we each were born at creation. What then? Having overcome and being left wanting – for echad under Hashem’s righteousness – what do we do with ourselves?

When we’ve reached stability and in the hours of creation the last house of cards has fallen, what we have left but Torah “and the inspiration for [human culture’s] development towards [an] ideal form?” Having stabilized all past crises, I again hear Hashem call, “Ayeka?” I am a prisoner of my doubts and what could I have done to hear such a breathtaking and beautiful question being asked which only leads to me identifying myself and sharing with myself my location in response to God’s call, demonstrating that I know exactly where I am at. We do not need to (re)live redemption daily to locate our well-being. I know that “Torah appears to us as the soul of human culture” and I know, as we read in the Mishkan Halev, that “Days are scrolls. Write on them only what you want remembered” (2017, 113), but like the general public at large with their thoughts I have an ingrained talent for remembering, recalling, reinstiutionalizing my weaknesses. We must learn to stop transmitting these lines to the scroll and instead encode our presence.

Most of us are doing just fine. We were simply redeemed and await the resolution of the narrative order to fill the land, but where is our petition to guide the lot of our brothers and sisters? Ayeka? As long as women are assaulted, and some of them then subjected to honor killings, then the cause or reason of our own private ontological displacement in either joy or misery is without merit. Yes, everyone’s suffering is genuine and worth immediate attention. I contend there is no wisdom to learn from suffering that cannot also be attained and gained through critical thinking. However, when rape as a weapon of war still exist in Myanmar well into the 21st century, we have to reconsider our priorities. What is my suffering worth? What is my comfort worth? How do I face God after death when I am simultaneously confronted with the summary of my earthly concerns and the exposure of the world as it really is? These dual realities are not countervailing. Do we deserve to find peace in ourselves when so many others contend with the impossibility of peace?

The truth is we are each more than capable of finding a peace in ourselves as well as a centeredness towards the end of bringing peace to others. We are not meant to hold peace silently, gripping it with greed and self-determination for the benefit of our own self-expression. There can be no real lasting, persistent peace for the individual until it

exist for the world. The two are tied, in life and Torah. From the Mishkan T’Filah, we recite,

Grant us Peace, your most precious gift

O Eternal Source of peace

And give us the will to proclaim its message

to all the peoples of the earth (2007, 179)

However, we also consider that this is woven in the fabric of the very thought of action. Our prayers put forth that “[r]eligion embraces both faith and action. / The primary quality is action” (2007, 199). Does Hashem hear our prayers according to degrees of responsiveness? Shaddai exist in all points of time. What role are we playing in our own future? Lies nest near the roots of a violent society. When we are truly honest with our Creator we will be honest with ourselves and see life on Earth as it is. Equally we will be exposed to our location on the doctrinal and spiritual map of all passing creation. Life at harmony is life at peace. Until we rid society of violence-motivations we will not know the gains of human development. We have already been redeemed. We have yet to be redeemed. Just as the Israelites agreed to the covenant, we too have always already agreed to resist the lure of a composite society that enables separation between the individual and the collective.

Contrary to popular dictum, even among self-appointed progressives, violence is not required as a type of opposition of norms, existentially or practically. There is no mandatory causation for violence, requited or prognosticated. “Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom,” Martin Buber puts forward, adding, “for this prevents the movement of return” (1970, 107). Violence is so fertile and seemingly comprehensive because it works from closed, quarantined systems. It is a dialectics and obstructive economics of mannerisms towards confined spaces and minimal attributes. It is a closed stage, to paraphrase Edward Said who wrote, “[t]he Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe” (1978, 63). Much like Western close-stitched appraisals of non-Western lands and cultures, violence is enclosed and self-referential. Like these appraisals, violence is the #1 draft pick in a wedding dress on the cover of a sports magazine, celebrated for its originality and charm. Violence carries with it an inherited magnetism that pours down the sewage caps and into spaces where those struggling to survive under neoliberal encampments fall subject to its wake and emulate the contours of its proscribed indoctrination. Violence is its own ethos of calamity; it is a sports broadcaster – microphone in hand – nursing the wounds of its own fallen mother on the defensive line. Violence believes it is enriched listening to its own narrative, what Buber warns is “the belief in doom.”

Everett Fox translates Exodus 25:37 as, “You are to make its lamps, seven (of them), / you are to draw up its lampwicks so that they light up (the space) across from it.” The lamps that are to be constructed, the light that is to shine bright enough to expose what is opposite of it, where Hashem will meet with us, is the diagnosis of violence and the dictation of the means of violence so that it is exposed. In itself there is ritual to unmasking the layers of violence in our societal kettle. The verse above comes from parashat T’rumah. There is a strikingly distinct dualism in the haftarah for this portion. From Kings 5:27, “King Solomon drafted 30,000 men all over Israel as forced labor” in the construction of the Temple. Mas, forced labor, was to be the foundation for the Temple’s construction. Violence cannot be addressed or assessed in society, being influenced from a centrally biblical source, without acknowledging the violence of God’s elect. To think that Solomon only won the right to build the Temple because David’s life was too violent speaks volumes about the degree of violence within this royal family. The lamps would not be pure gold if they did not shine visibility to what is expected and accepted. God’s engineers were violent men. How much of the blame lies with God depends on one’s level of mystical awareness, that God is responsible for all things in time and space, or one’s denominational approach, that the books of the Hebrew Bible were written by men and likewise workers in antiquity were men motivated by their own intelligences. Men, children of those liberated by God from Egypt, were drafted in a conscription for holiness campaign that mirrors what we may find in propaganda pamphlets of contemporary political parties sympathetic with totalitarian recent history and dictatorships, a natural extension of the neoliberal bubble. A feminist historian would find the use of the word bubble here to be inadequate. I only intend it to be an approximate reference towards a neoliberal regime’s fountainhead; the space from that adversarial source’s frame of reference.

For some who are devout and allegorical, there is the worldview that history is like a lesson-plan from which we teach our children to surmise good and evil and build a better society. This is a privileged worldview. More often among those historically subject to violence there is a more refined examination that these historical references would have been better to have not happened at all. There is no wisdom from suffering that cannot also be gained through critical thinking. There is no holiness, no advantage, no plane of retreat that can demarcate a type of love of benefits from once having suffered or to be in suffering. Slavery in the United States didn’t happen so that future Americans could learn the difference between right and wrong. It is not a lesson on civics. It was a not a hidden blessing so that the country might benefit from a perceived “true” source of multiculturalism. Such attempts to justify history only perverts justice. A lesson, if one is in search for a lesson, is that God prefers the individual (or country) that errs to have never erred in the first place so that sanction will not be required.

There is an expanding scope in narratives from text to imperialism. Within that scope violence-stories are distributed and nurtured among all classes so that the nature of society begins to resemble the direction those in power want to take society. It is cyclical, yes, but it is not without a motivation of intent. Narratives derived from power become intertwined with narratives derived without power. It is an intertextual hegemony creating three-dimensional global maps of violence. Those who are privileged and those who are not are all contributing to the lifeforce of these maps that sustain the unilateral direction from subculture to national project. From hate crimes to invasions, these narratives oscillate and orchestrate the same intent and contribute to an intergenerational luster based on misdirection and inherited worldview.

Violence-narratives among and tied into the social classes carry with them a sense of authenticity of the national-bound experience. Our narratives act as texts and manifest as plays to be performed. As Edward Said shows, “texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe” (1978, 94). Violence-narratives appear in contemporary societies as waking dreams that in turn become manuels for further illustrations of a point or thesis. They are not limited to those of ill intent, but also become inspiration-stories for activists fighting for racial justice, restoration in Syria, justice for families who are victims of gun violence, and science fiction that dictates a future communal democracy that stabilizes the worst indulgences of violence-perpetrators. These all fulfill the acts of violence-narratives indirectly or unabatedly. The perpetuation of violence-narratives is not dissimilar to Frantz Fanon’s explication of the bourgeoisie from European heritage to an “racketeer mentality” in underdeveloped nations:

The bourgeoisie, which evolved in Europe, was able to elaborate an ideology while strengthening its own influence. This dynamic, educated, and secular bourgeoisie fully succeeded in its undertaking of capital accumulation and endowed the nation with a minimum of prosperity. In the underdeveloped countries we have seen that there is no genuine bourgeoisie but rather an acquisitive, voracious, and ambitious petty caste, dominated by a small-time racketeer mentality, content with the dividends paid out by the former colonial power. (2004, 119).

Fanon’s bourgeoisie are maintained by violence-narratives. A consumerism capital reading of Václav Havel’s post-totalitarianism, that totalitarian regimes continue to thrive not through unrestricted oppression but through economic displacement of societies into a consumer goods dependency, reifies the opposition of power that is mutually dependent and equally participatory. They sell us the idea of money and we buy into their leadership and quasi-national sense of direction at the cost of human rights and in the contradictory spirit of the myth of self-determination.

Of course, violence-narratives also arise opposing the state and its institutions. In Uzbekistan in the late 1920s, the exchange of power away from the religious elite and players in agriculture intermixed with resentment of women being in public unveiled. This lead to a “murder wave” of unveiled women (Kamp 2007, 136, 141). Clergy encouraged the violence as a form of protest against Soviet cultural and economic incursion. The project of modernization was tainted with the redistribution of wealth outside the old guard and among the supporters of the newly, locally enfranchised. As Marianne Kamp writes, it “was religious discourse in the context of political struggle that made women the target of murder” (2007, 141). Traditional violence-narratives gave way to colonial violence-narratives and in a not unexpected treatise between the two, women suffered violence as the repercussions of the strain on societal dogma and narratives of alterity.

Contemporary women’s organizations that work to turn the tide on essentially similar social conditions that lead to that “murder wave” do not always find success either economically or in a sustainable participatory model. Feminist projects, intranational and immediately local, sometimes struggle to cover a space of activism and project management with their participants and the consequences of their intended benefactors. In an interview with Dr. Margo Okazawa-Rey, she is asked how feminists can maintain cohesion organizationally and strategically. Dr. Okazawa-Rey responds,

We as feminist need to develop a methodology that includes a much more conscious way to think about personal growth, personal development, dealing with the contradictions we face in our lives – in the ways in which we haven’t taken care of each other and ourselves, in a way that we can deal with whatever traumatic experiences we’ve had, or betrayals, or the negative experiences we’ve had as activists or in the academy – so that we’re not taking it out on each other, which is often. (2018, 27)

Dr. Okazawa-Rey is specific in mentioning twice the need to take care of each other. In fact she states this virtue before also including the need to take care of ourselves, though, of course, both are essential. This statement from Dr. Okazawa-Rey captures the complete expectations that God has for Her/His people. We are assessed by 1.) How we take care of each other, 2.) How we take care of ourselves, 3.) That we do something (whatever that may be) meaningful with our lives according to our own localized and individual world experiences. I repeat this again, having included here already as well as in Provoking God, because it is central to a whole life as well as the foundation of the religious experience that locates Hashem among both broader walls and granular observation.

It is essential that women’s organizations avoid the violence-narratives of neoliberal or post-totalitarian economic models. Feminist theory is expectionaly aware of the intrinsic relationship and evolution of oppressive regimes of capitalist and politically rigid institutions. Likewise, the mystic endeavor to experience Hashem’s promise of a post-violence social framework depends on the severity of women’s liberation and inclusion across political, social and familial relationships. Traditionally marginalized subjects of violence must be made whole. In the course of enriched communal prosperity that inoculates cultural boundaries from structural violence, we must insure a continuous presence and observation of self-reflection towards our collected participation, directly or through apathetic and permissive inaction, that reifies the centrality of a feminist-oriented necessity of the social project of renewal. Feminist interests seeks the release of subjugation of all peoples.

Mishnah Qiddushin 3 outlines that a mamzer may achieve his freedom if his parents are sold into slavery and are then freed, freeing him into normalized relations with Jewish society with all the rights and privileges thereto. Here, through ancient subjugation one finds a pathway into privileged society. Emily A. Owens, in her article, “Promise: Sexual Labor in the Space Between Slavery and Freedom” recounts the story of Carmélite, a young woman who in 1851 sought protective custody through imprisonment in order to secure her release from sexual bondage. She had been sold to the owner of a brothel under the legal jurisdiction that an enslaved person sold under such conditions would then be free, though she remained property and was not able to attain manumision and release from sexual servitude. Carmélite remained enslaved due to the terms of her sexual labor, being perceived as responsible for her own disposition and not worthy of attaining freedom.

The words “will become free” inserted a very particular temporality of freedom into the practice of enslaved sexual labor and invoked a history that linked sexual labor to freedom. As Diana Williams writes, the linkage of sexual labor to freedom in the history of African American women focuses on the agency of the women involved, unwittingly producing a narrative “that women of color willingly trapped themselves in a prison of their own making.” (Owens 2017, 181-182)

Narrative maintenance and re-provocation from slave-owners and laws assured the statutes of bondage in perpetuity without even the potential favor and release from grievances that mamzerim might enjoy. Re-victimization was assured through legal means and social convention. There was a systemic relationship of slave codes “linked to interracial intimacies” (Owens 2017, 187). Laws captured racial and sexual violence and reflected the very act of the capture of the individual. The spirit of these laws do not truly change over time, but adapt to new resonances and institute fresh policies that malign and contain rights of an individual and the assurance of personal safety. On more than one occasion I have heard white, southern men state, “I have never owned a slave” as justification to exclude civil expenditures and project a narrative to rejects the reality that history conserves its forefathers’s interests, both metaphysically and in the pursuit of sustaining alienating powers of influence.

As has been said many times, if you ask ten Jews the same question about God, or even just the afterlife, you will get ten different answers. I am also guilty of formulating my own response. I believe that when we die, we all directly face Hashem. I think we are exposed and expressed to the world-as-it-really-is and in that we are also witness to our individual walk in this world as well as our summation of life. We become witnesses to ourselves and can judge how we lived in comparison with realities of life on Earth. Did we judge correctly? Did we give proper reverence? Were we accurate witnesses for ourselves and others? It does not require a refined worldly knowledge to have pledged ourselves to truth in situations small and large, anyone can do it. Or fail to do it. Having been exposed to the reality of ourselves in comparison to the world-as-it-really-is, we then face God already knowing for ourselves where we stand, or have spent our time on Earth standing and taking position in the accordance of our lives. We then face God’s spirit and from there the terms of the rest of our existence will be meted out.

It is not a radical theology to state that all of this is the life we are already living. We are each capable to reaching a space where God dwells, through prayer or through Hashem communicating with us in some fashion, reaching out to us just as we are able to reach out to God. We all have these experiences according to our own means. Because of that, are all given the knowledge to conduct ourselves and our lives in accordance with the world, balancing our place is this particular world with the realities of God. We each are already capable of judging the world-as-it-really-is and knowing for ourselves our place in it. We can measure how we are doing…even those of us in denial or stuck in the mire of projection, anger, and disillusion. Knowing this, we can see just how possible is it to reject that knowledge or to remain stalwarts of our own indecision as though we are waiting for a larger sign to come crashing down on us. We should have faith in what we already know to be true according to whatever degrees we are certain it is the truth. We are each equally capable of being reliable witnesses according to one degree or another having each experienced life in our own way.

The same is true for our summation of violence in this world. None of us is hidden from violence. None of us, no matter how protected, is blind to the realities of a violent world. Children in America are fully aware that as adults we are doing little to protect them from school shooting and public, mass shootings in general. They are fully aware. The children will be our judges. Adults in America take their frustrations out in social media, where they find like-minded people and fall into an illusion that something has been accomplished. If it were not for social media, adults in America would have achieved a more direct confrontation with government and if it were not for the reliability of knowing that adults will accept the extent of their frustrations being resolved on social media, the government would be more apt to act. We fail the children by failing ourselves and becoming victims of our own illusions about speech, action, and about technology seemingly replacing those vital virtues. It doesn’t. Instead, we accept the funnel of violence because we give ourselves a false catharsis and accept demur as resolved action.

When comparing American adults’s use of social media and public discourse there is great visibility of the acting out of what James C. Scott refers forms of political discourse that “[insures] domination or resisting subordination” to the benefit of those in power. Social media is not very much unlike the “rupture of the political cordon sanitaire between the hidden and the public transcript” (Lawrence and Kareim 2007, 107). Through forms of contemporary resistance to power the public unites individuals to a collective gaze on power. This force of the public crossing the into and over where they share what is in their living rooms with the larger world has become and effective management tool for those in power because it stops there. Yes, there have been marches from diverse groups and interests, and that is important, but perhaps it is that diversity of interests that promises to fail to have an impact on the actions of government. Society becomes self-managed in the power of speech without reaping the rewards of public action. We block ourselves in by showing ourselves out on the pages of urls and hashtag delivery of opposition to power in the safety of sanguine rainbows that even offer the benefit of those in power from having to erect physical barriers to prevent us from crossing into a solidified threat to their authority.

That is not to say that those traditionally marginalized, even by activists, have not come to have a public voice and even public action through contemporary collective tools of opposition has led to increased knowledge by those not normally exposed to such plights. The disabled community has taken a seat at the table of this discourse and performed acts of opposition while living-in-public that have taught others their perspective even without the benefit of action from power-holders. It cannot be denied this is a benefit for society. The organization Adapt, for example, has held protests at government offices and streamed their fight on social media while simultaneously creating public figures in the disability community that otherwise would have remained unknown. When considering other fights streamed on social media there have also been benefits. Moral Mondays in North Carolina was streamed and followed on social media and led to the prominence of Rev. Dr. William Barber who would go on to lead the revival of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign within a nationwide capacity. Still, despite these positive social impacts, society relents progress in the face of fascism through a type of non-linear sponsion of territory.

Our illusions of social progress, micromovements in the course of adequate appraisal, do not disjoint the firm junctions of true history. Society has always moved towards the materialization of faith and objectification of reverence. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in The Sabbath,

There is much enthusiasm for the idea that God is present in the universe, but that idea is taken to mean His presence in space rather than time, in nature rather than history; as if He were a thing, not a spirit. (2005, 4)

God is in time and history. To imagine time as a dwelling place for the Creator enables us to free our notions in denial of the solitary neglect of teshuvah or, more secularly, of the presence and participation in our unfolding environment, both in discourse and action. We reject that we are only partially observant in fundamental participation through being involved in even the slightest knowing of opposition to norms. That is, if we care just a little we project that we care completely. We are all guilty of this self-inventory of authenticity. To again return to The Sabbath, “He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, and being yoked to toil” (2005, 13). To enter the plot of time, dispelling the kernels of post-totalitarian judgements of self-worth in economic systems of exploitation must be established as though holy, as though essential to the rhythms of history and our place in it.

This is all not to say that work is without integrity. We are fully capable as individuals and society of contributing towards the benefit of each other according to our respective talents, insights, gifts, and disbursements. A society without money, without monetary reward, can function just as well as Old World models of socialism and capitalism. A world where each individual, each family, is provided not only what essentials that are required for life, but also those things that improve life and create the potential for progress and development is possible through a type of global faith in each other and ourselves. Without money, people will still participate in the social, cultural project given that all are provided for.

Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Labor is not only the destiny of man; it is endowed with divine dignity. However, after he ate of the tree of knowledge he was condemned to toil, not only to labor “In toil shall thou eat….all the days of thy life” (Genesis 3:17). Labor is a blessing, toil is the misery of man. (Heschel 2005, 28)

A post-socialist reading of Rabbi Heschel’s explication of the origins of the necessity of liberation from the toil of, now, a “technical civilization,” affirms not only a justification of the argument of a post-monetary society, but the will to live in harmony with time and history; the fundamentals of an expressive consultation with the universe Hashem created. “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problems,” Rabbi Heschel later continues, “will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it” (2005, 28). Notice Rabbi Heschel states “independence of it” and not from it. It is not necessary to reject the technological innovations of Rome in order to reject its social and political maintenance of order. We can continue to improve ourselves technologically and spiritually. The two are not mutually exclusive nor must they be married or condemned to be divorced.

Maintaining a cycle of familial abuse only translates to a greater reinforcement of societal abuse as an act of violence upon people subjugated without rest or retort. Dr. Judith Herman, in her book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, writes that

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the tasks of early adulthood – establishing independence and intimacy – burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma. (2015, 110)

This reencounter with trauma is already a potential map of identity from personal experience to the relentlessness of overwhelming anxiety preventing escape from established cycles. Increased by degrees is the individual combating personal and interpersonal cycles of violence in conjunction of socially reinforced trauma and the violence of norms.

Once becoming parents themselves, survivors are forced to prevent their own child from the continued exposure to trauma and violence (Herman 2015, 114). For many psychiatric conditions once a diagnosis has been determined the individual maintains that label, that diagnosis, permanently with or without the exhibition of symptoms. For some it is difficult to break the created mold from the presence of the diagnosis. Likewise, the implication of the suggestion of intergenerational cyclical trauma forces individuals and families to think of themselves as under the duress of trauma whether symptomatic or not. Systems that alleviate these anxieties are just as important to treating the root causes of the systems. That is not only suggestive of healing the individual, but preventive prescriptions to alter the likelihood of trauma-occurrences. This cannot be done on the individual level with also treating societal violence and the violence of norms.

The violence-narratives of cyclical familial trauma creates a tension of permanence. Critical race theorist, David Theo Goldberg, stated in an interview when questioned how “working for justice” might assist in helping “us rethink more ethical and peaceful relations amongst the world’s people,” that,

Given social conditions inherited historically and exacerbated today in both their local and global relations, any commitment to pursuing justice now must attend to considerations of repair. Reparation, as Achille Mbembe most notably has made clear, need not be narrowly construed to focus simply on a question of “returns.” If we consider it rather in broader terms, repair has to do with remaking and reconstituting, a putting together and a making whole. (Evans and Lennard 2018, 223)

A “making whole” towards the progress of fundamental existential rest is the cause of our labors of freedom. Childhood trauma is equally deserving of proactive national restitution as a refugee crisis or toxic or contagion exposure. Repair, tikkun olam, does not rest on a return to an origins of where the trauma lays situated and the conditions that allow for it to occur continue to be promoted. We do not need a situational return, but instead, forward progress past the bowels of regimented forced returns to a precarious state, national and individual; nation-state or state of mind, “Then the Ophanim and the Holy Hayyot, / with a roar of noise, / raise themselves toward the Seraphim and, / facing them, give praise, saying: / Blessed is the Lord’s glory from His place” (Naor 2017, 538). A violence of norms is a kymograph for testing resistance. The instruments of repair must be more thorough than that which monitors the degrees we will relent to the execution of authority and debasing principles.

“It’s an irrefutable fact,” Chief Examiner Nimira tells Captain Janeway, “that violent thoughts from others lead to violent actions” (“Random Thoughts” 1997). In season 4, episode 10 of Star Trek: Voyager, members of the crew of Voyager have already been visiting the Mari planet for three days both as tourists and traders when the incidence occurred that would lead to Lt. B’Elanna Torres’s arrest for having a violent thought, or at least, the suggestion that a violent thought was present. A Mari in a rush swings by B’Elanna, stepping hard on her foot and causing a reaction that is normal for a Klingon. The perpetrator immediately goes to a seller in the market and begins beating him, bludgeoning him and destroying his shop. When Chief Examiner Nimira learns about the alteration that preceded the attack during a thought-interrogation of the Voyager crew present at the time, she determines that Lt. Torres’s thoughts of anger had spread like a virus upon contact and resulted in the violence. The violence in the Mari responsible was a result of the loss of control, external influence, and passive absorption, or so Nimira believes.

The Mari are a telepathic species. There were once a hyper-violent race, but after outlawing violent thoughts, social disorder nearly came to a complete end. The planet lives in peace and harmony with only rare incidences of violence. Unknown to Chief Examiner Nimira or the authorities, there is a rich underground market for violent thoughts that as telepaths the buyer is able to immerse in and experience as though first hand. The Mari dealer that Lt. Torres and Captain Janeway were negotiating with at the time of the violent thought, Guill, comforted Lt. Torres and placing his hands on her shoulders and asking her if she was okay. In the process, he consumed her inner temper and innate Klingon disposition for future gain, usurping the moment of the Klingon violent tendencies to be repackaged and sold to others for pleasure.

There is not just an economic incentive for violence on the Mari homeworld. There is a great dearth of violent experiences to absorb in a world with a surplus of peace, as Lt. Cmdr. Tuvok learns during his own investigation. Guill is not just a trader in the market, but also supplier in the black market trade of violent impulses. Other Mari are willing to pay Guill for this exchange of violence-experiences. Guill and the Mari that collided with B’Elanna had orchestrated evoking the violent thought from her. When Nimira learns of this underground market, she is confronted with the fact the authorities cannot simply purge of n-grams that house violent impulses as though they are isolated and self-containing. There is a larger Mari impulse, among some, to seek out exposure to violence while on the surface blending in with a peaceable society.

What are the Mari authorities to do now? Should they continue to wipe the offending n-grams from the minds of those who have harbored violent thoughts, sequestering the experience of thought as source motivation? If so, are they not attempting to make whole the individual by returning them to a previous state? This effort towards repair is not sustainable. They are not able to return to an individual to a state of nonviolence, because Mari society came from violence. Repair in instituting a post-violent society, even among the enlightened Mari, necessitates forward progress and not just the erasure of offending thoughts. By attempting to roll back to a source of origins, they did not free themselves of violence, but merely displaced it to the underground. Their methods did not repair, or make whole, but sutured the wound before sending the soldier back to the battlelines. For the Mari, the violence-narratives did not retreat under new laws. They were simply relocated and kept secret even in a telepathic society.

The relocation of violence-narratives demonstrates the agility of violence to persist and extend itself even under the duress of quarantine. Here violence only becomes more valuable to those who wish to attain its lure. Are we to believe that the same could occur in the restriction of violence-narratives in human life? Would childhood trauma and the relapse of predisposition be a sought after commodity to be attained through back alleys and meetings in dark rooms? Are we truly traders in guilt? Merchants of pain? Is there a collaborative orchestration taking place in our reality? Truly a directional approach to satisfy our need to consume violence under the illusion of commerce? Are patriotism and diplomacy, capitalism and the economy, health care and human rights, all really exterior portrayals of demonstrative “intentions” to resolve violence actually built in natural defences to preserve the continued existence of violence-narratives and the sources of predisposition?

Perhaps the neo-Freudian Ernest Becker would imply that yes, we are so driven by the hero’s quest to imitate immortality that humanity, at least in contemporary capitalist societies, has been driven to devise a system where we can feel good about ourselves for attempting to deride violence on the surface while simultaneously restricting our ability to move beyond violence-narratives and preserving the sources of conflict that restitute these narratives. Perhaps white picket fence and 2.5 children quests of norms are a form of nuclear religiosity that seeks to cement violence-narratives as being unapproachable and unrelatable in our quasi-civilized society. If we state we are living in peace with world through admirable, peaceable means – a family, a house, a stable career – then we create the illusion that the slow violence of persistence of norms is not relevant or that peace can be created in isolation against the grain of globally preserved integrated violence.

What the Mari and the cycle of childhood trauma have in common is both the persistence of violence-narratives and the dismissal of society to claim the necessity to be made whole. With both, the conditions exhibit a sense of exturbation failure under the terms agreed to in quasi-humanist (or Mari) societies. Both exist in realms guilty of fundamentalism that purges the respondent from the most immediate symptom while still relying of the tools and method of treatment that house the urtext of sourced violence-motivations. It is not unlike when The Doctor was forced to rely on the experience and insights of Cardassin exobiologist, Dr. Crell Moset, in hologram form, to assist in releasing B’Elanna from the grasp of a parasitic alien (“Nothing Human” 1998). Dr. Crell Moset possessed the skill and knowledge to save B’Lenna’s life, but only due to the experience he gained through grotesque experiments and tortures committed against the Bajoran people. Are we to save and preserve life with knowledge gained through mass atrocity? The evolution of medical sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries did just that. James Marion Sims performed painful experiments on enslaved Black women which led to him being credited as the “father of modern gynecology.” The source of preservation for some comes at the cost of extinguishing the lives of others. The violence-narratives of cyclical familial trauma creates a tension of permanence and retreat from that permanence to an earlier state is not what makes us whole, but is derivative of sequestered lies and intoxicated moments of release.

Carmélite, sold under the conditions of gaining her freedom only to be betrayed and retained as a slave. Mamzerim, sold into slavery in order to attain freedom. Lt. B’Elanna Torres, the victim of a parasitic alien and whose only path to life is to rely on a doctor guilty of atrocities, through which he gained the knowledge to save her. Relinquishing the soul to a violence of permanence of mind only contributes to these obstacles of ontological boundaries. We remain detached, consumed by consumer culture, and restive in the elapsed disparity of frank and normative concerns. Without an eclipse of these boundaries, the presence of mind to migrate past bonds of freedom will forever elude us. Years ago, when I was a student of psychology, I suggested to a professor that the field had reached an eclipse and had begun its descent into the forward motion of understanding and advanced treatment. I was young and hopeful. Full of ideas and insight suggesting to myself the pluralism I foresaw was also realized by others, projecting my positive, divergent thinking into a mold of passable standards. Of course, I was shot down by that professor. Corrected and confronted. The reality is, though we may seem to be following the natural progression of thought, the world does not see or understand how we as individuals attain insights, though shared or divided. In the course of the labors of freedom we must not be afraid to articulate, communicate, express our visions with clarity and actuating attention.

Labors of Freedom: God and the End of Violence

Chapter 3

The Violence of Poverty. The Poverty of Violence

If only Earth could be inspired by God’s generosity. If only God’s generosity could be seen clearly through the pain of the world. The poverty of violence. The violence of poverty. We are always standing at a border, awaiting the next tide of consequential indifference to bury our sisters and brothers beyond the reach of our ability to construct safe havens or freedom from chastised prisms of sustained laws. The violence of poverty. The poverty of violence.

And the people of the land have practiced fraud and commit robbery; they have wronged the poor and needy, have defrauded the stranger without redress. (Ezekiel 22:29)

Axiomatic judges of sophistry enable perpetual violence, the slow violence of norms excellerate and pitch the esteem of stalwart candidates; common day candidates that practice extortion and commit robbery. Modern consumer capitalism robs the bride and delays Shabbat. To return to Shabbat is to return to human dignity. The spirit of Shabbat is contaminated by our weekly digression. We are not still; as “those who are not vulgerized, who guard their words from being tainted, queen, bride, signify majesty tempered with mercy and delicate innocence that is waiting for affection” (Heschel 2005, 61). The affection of the poor is as the affection of Shabbat. Every mysterious reason why Hashem allows evil; at times She/He reaches into the countenance of the afflicted to be emblems of light on Earth.

The violence of poverty. The poverty of violence. We move through empty rooms though we hear the bride. The bride is Shabbat. The bride is not present, nor do these windows offer praise – compliancy, complimentary retired drones in the caustic ash of reservoir dreams. Under the temple of this sun; the bride res judaicata. The bride is suffering from terrain of childhood abuse. As we adjudicate the failed marriage of our spiritual lives, we will find that it is our children who have suffered, do suffer, and will continue to suffer more than compounded wisdom offers as restive chance. Despite this deleterious cycle “the link between childhood abuse and adult antisocial behavior is relatively weak” (Herman 2015, 113). We do not share alike in repeating violence that was committed against us, though, tragically that is not a truism written in stone. Survivors commonly fear that they will extend the cycle. However, we are not easily made monsters. Violence is not inherent. In fact, “20 percent of these children defend the perpetrator, minimized or rationalized the exploitation” and though some “adopted” the perpetrator’s traits like aggression, it is not the case that this is a form of essentialism and that outcome is mandatory (Herman 2015, 113). It is a matter of recourse that we as a society seek to blame the victim for the continuation of violence.

Collective society blames violence on survivors, mitigated or eschewed, that results in a real expressed similitude in the behavior and frame of thought for those who have been “liberated.” Many adults who were abused as children continue to care for those who abused them in old age or illness, “in extreme cases continue to submit to their sexual demands” (Herman 2015, 112). Restoration, repair, is not selectively merit based, though larger society responds to the needs of children as though it is. Due to the lack of support structures, escaping abusive environments can come at a turbulent sacrifice. At times this can mean leaving the only way of life available in order to obtain physical and emotional freedom. Crossing over into sacrifice is essential, because “[w]ithout freedom, there can be no safety and no recovery, but freedom is often achieved at great cost. In order to gain their freedom, survivors may have to give up almost everything else” (Herman 2015, 172). Where is Shabbat for this child? I will tell you. For this child, God presents Shabbat in the form of brief flashes, perhaps only seconds long, weaved into dark and desperate moments and those flashes of the knowing of Shabbat demonstrate, resonate sacred hope. This hope extends the life, the will, the challenging chance for the survivor. May Hashem free all the prisoners, all the captives, and all those who still are not free just as She/He has promised.

Just as Hannah persuaded God to bless her with a child, we, collectively, must provoke God to free survivors from unfree and abusive homes. Our work cannot rest on the intercession of God alone, but our efforts to repair a society that perpetuates this communal illness must be divergent, intersectional, and holistic. We begin to heal the violence of our communities by looking after the most vulnerable. Vulnerability and responsibility are intricately tied together in a human-reciprocal relationship. The vulnerable are at the mercy of familial and societal relationships or even intergenerational marginalization. Those of us in a position to apply power to will are responsible for our neighbors, community relations, and unilocal and demilocal tides of relatability from our household to our city to our Earth. We must not withhold what we can contribute.

Children have no voice in the public arena, no voting bloc in electoral politics, and no powerful moneyed interest group to advocate on their behalf. Young mothers are almost as voiceless. Though preventive interventions serving high-risk mothers and children would be relatively inexpensive to implement and would pay for themselves many times over in the long term, most politicians’ budgetary vision does not extend past the next election cycle. We are left, therefore, to pick up the pieces later on, when survivors turn to mental health professionals for help. (Herman 2015, 266)

While we, on the one hand, give voice to the voiceless as though to pronounce the language they are not present to articulate, it is not that survivors have nothing to say for themselves. Expressed or not, they have their own experiences to speak from and we must not presume to be so present we are entitled to speak over them. Acting on their behalf when they are not able to is a reasonable place to start, but we must not imitate those who would rob their power. It is far easier to morph from advocate to gross adjudicator than many who are not survivors realize.

God is merciful. We are called to be merciful, like God. In our quest for a merciful society we must not fear rearranging the structural order of the country. Where change is needed then it should be implemented. Among the highest values we have learned from Hashem is generosity, ruach nadivah, and if we profess to understand what it means to encounter God, even Her/His anger, we also have met God’s mercy and generosity. The Sages dispel the American concept of rugged individualism,

There are four types of character in human beings: One that says: “mine is mine, and yours is yours”: this is a commonplace type; and some says this is a sodom-type character. [One that says:] “mine is yours and yours is mine”: is an unlearned person (am haaretz); [One that says:] “mine is yours is yours is yours” is a pious person. [One that says;] “mine is mine, and yours is mine” is a wicked person. (Pirkei Avot 5:10)

There is no room for bootstraps philosophy with regard to the Sages. We should demand of each other that we abandon it as well alongside our consumer appetites that destroy each other and the environment. The thought of provoking a merciful and generous God should not seem inappropriate or inadequate. Liberation from Egypt is a central source in which God testifies that She/He is more than capable of responding to our needs. After all, “Exodus is not primarily a story celebrating human effort and enterprise – it’s a narrative of thunderous divine intervention, about a God who enters history to vanquish the forces of cruelty and barbarism” (Held 2017, 157). We can vanquish those forces again. This time, against a broader international cruelty that is not only structural, but at its roots is nested inside our subconscious motivations.

The midrash, Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva, includes these verses under the exposition of the meaning of dalet:

The Lord is a haven for the oppressed, a haven in times of trouble – Psalms 9:10

So I observed: Wisdom is better than valor; but a poor man’s wisdom is scorned, and his words are not heeded. – Ecclesiastes 9:16

Let not the downtrodden turn away disappointed; let the poor and needy praise Your name. – Psalms 74:21

The Lord listens to the needy, and does not spurn His captives. – Psalms 69:34

Who stops his ears at the cry of the wretched, he too will call and not be answered. – Proverbs 21:13

All this was made by My hand, and thus it all came into being – declares the Lord, Yet to such a one I look: To the poor and brokenhearted, who is concerned about My word. – Isaiah 66:2

(Bokser 1981, 63, JPS)

The violence of poverty. The poverty of violence. We are each guilty of contributing to the oratory of violent composure through a face of an austere compassion. The lack of compassion is both the lack of human-ness, our innate humanity, as well as God-hopefulness. There are many ways to compromise. A compromise congruent with compassion is not heedless, headstrong, nor evocative. A moderate, average person says, “I am trying hard to compromise.” A wicked person says, “I am trying hard to compromise and I should get something in return.” A very evil person says, “I am trying hard to compromise my values and I should get something in return.” Even the very evil person wants to do better. Given the opportunity to change from fair-weather to all-weather, they, too, would migrate to truth. The righteous person does not say, “I am going to compromise and give you something in return.” A righteous person says, “I am more than willing to work with you on a solution, but in the end my values will not be compromised.” As those invested in social justice projects machinate lucid, macroscopic proposals towards the ends of parity and equilibrium, we must support those efforts collectively with a group voice and decisive motivations of collective prosperity under one mind for the One God, echad justice.

God’s best kept secret is that She/He interacts with us every day. If we were to search out and unveil that divine interaction with the same youthful vigor, as well as seasoned contemplative decisiveness, that we should seek out a world post-violence, we would reach our extraordinary potential. Our extraordinary potential can be summoned across socioeconomic interludes as well as socially constructed ties to beauty. The best way to reach our extraordinary potential is to sound off on all the unnecessary clutter of emotion and capitalist doctrine. Avarice, institutionalized avarice, teaches us the illusion of selectivity of worth. We are all deserving. Love, nutrition, shelter, access, education, care, growth, but also love; we are all deserving of the fundamental promises of life. We have become so accustomed and acclimated to social avarice that we tell each other than no one deserves love, that it is a privilege and not a right. These same people preserve the lies that oppress us and continue the myth of selective worth. They are on both the left and the right and, sadly, even among some feminists. When we live in a world where we are at best only entitled to draw lots, we have lost the shelter of immediate consequence and hail only shallow mythopoeia.

God finds miraculous photographs of far away galaxies in their infancy to be “ugly.” This is because they cause us to want to leave Earth. We are not doing a very good job of being caretakers of the planet when we commit so many brilliant resources to getting off the planet, are we? God says, “I created it (Earth).” “I created this,” this planet, and we ought to live up to our created role and make certain that we carefully and meticulously care for Earth and its inhabitants just as carefully as we study the stars and attempt to overcome the limits of our localized gravity. We should overcome our limits to care for our home before we expand the horizon.

Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “[e]ach age has its own Messiah” (1997, 88). Levinas also interrogates the Sages to conclude there is a school of thought that finds ourselves in the Messiah, which we could further say is the Messiah in ourselves. Each generation perpetuates the possibility of deliverance from the bondage of violent societies. The expectation of norms is not capricious. Norms themselves divide the nurturance and expectations of societies, but our expectations are always for something better and this is a solid continuity through time and culture. We have the blessed opportunity to see the true expectation of freedom from violence much like the history of Jewish texts, from Torah to Mishnah to Responsa, the literature comingles diversity of voices along with common threads and caution to deviate from norms unless given reasonable adaptable recourse. It has always been this way. From the rabbinic response to the Bar Kokhba revolt to papers and resolutions on genetic testings and application, Jewish and non-Jewish society maintain the expectation of ideal norms to hold a parental authority over actual norms that needle into reality from tragic expectations and corrupt motivations.

We live in dual realities between what we know is true and what should be true. If we were actual diligent stewards of each other, of the people, conflict resolution studies would be integrated in our public schools’s curriculum. Leadership and discipline would be values also taught at a young age and not for the advantaged who, more often than not, are either trained from fortitude or from the most unexpected courses of life. We have now rich enough liberal arts institutions to inform and educate our youngest minds and this should never be sacrificed, no matter the immediacy and importance of STEM education. Just to give an example of our diligence gone wrong, I once met a biologist with a good career working in a lab. Upon inquiring about my education, she asked me to explain what the term “liberal arts” means. This further lead her to ask me what the word “humanities” means. If this is the result of our hyper-STEM educational model, imagine what critical thinking skills are lacking in corporate boardrooms or among the political elite. Science deprived of the humanities is not progressive or emblematic of the hope it strives to represent for the future. It is not creative and it will stall in its problem solving potentiality.

The problem with the attrition of structural resources and educational models that would contribute critical thinking skills is primary and vast. As Dr. Marc Gopin notes, “the Orthodox community […] has been particularly uninterested in confronting Jewish resources on conflict resolution, despite righteous outcries against wanton hatred (sin’at hinam) and conflict (mahloket)” (2000, 169). Dr. Gopin is extremely adept in highlighting the essential need for conflict resolution within the Jewish community and through this study we can contribute the thought for the need for conflict resolution principles for broader society, integrated and intragrated. Dr. Gopin puts forward that “[m]odern anti-Semitism has led to a certain kind of Jewish wound, a rage that is often expressed in religious observance. It is to be found in ritual practices and communal precepts that express oppositional identity, often a martyrological sense identity based on persecution” (2000, 170). This observed “oppositional identity” can be seen, not just among the larger base of us vs. them, particularly among the Orthodox Right, but also internally such as with the conflict approach taken by groups such as If Not Now and, in Israel, Breaking the Silence.

Dr. Gopin puts forwards an intriguing idea of the concept of mourning as a potential peace-building aid. I shall shortly cite heavily here for the purpose of relaying to you his articulate perspective. Dr. Gopin’s proposal of mourning as healing is not new and has been witnessed to be a functionary and indispensable tool in healing for conflicts in other societies such as in Rwanda. Yet, Gopin warns this is not a certain and pervasive tool that is always applicable. There are limits of group and individual identity. Here are some isolated components:

“If an abnormal level of mourning that seems to perpetuate itself over history is a key element of this conflict, an effective religious peacemaking program must directly confront this.”
“A peacemaking mourning process must speak to the deepest identity needs of a group and also to the groups sense of threat to its future, its fear of annihilation.”
“There is also a sense of loss of some romanticized time – real, imaginary, or a combination thereof – in which the group had a fulfilled, secure existence.”

(Gopin 2000, 171, my italics and numbering)

Dr. Gopin insists that it is mandatory that a religious component be articulated for the mourning process to be established as authentic. It must also relate the sense of the experience between the dominated culture and the dominate or oppressive culture. There must be “deep cultural roots, then it affirms their identity and does honor to them, even as it heals the wounds of the past and simultaneously builds peace” (Gopin 2000, 171). The repetition of prayer and ritual ethics that re-memorializes group pain and subjection testifies that “religious people will have the hardest time moving to a new stage of relationship with the outside, injuring world” (Gopin 2000, 171). New release that is both communal and spiritual is essential for stepping beyond static cultural disposition. The keys to relay this new entity of relatability may be coarse or rigid at the onset, but the rewards demonstrate the need for those skills in conflict resolution to not be limited to oversight committees and specialized diplomats. They must be in the community and part of the process within a familial level, helping to guide the process with familiarity and a given presence.

Interestingly, from Dr. Gopin’s perspective, the same worldview and identity prospect of progressive Judaism would also function as a guide for fundamentalist Judaism. As Dr. Gopin states, the “method of engaging conflict and peacemaking that could speak to fundamentalist Judaism would not be universalism but pluralism” (2000, 175). Pluralism is an essential value for Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism. Yes, it is even a heightened value among some Modern Orthodox Jew, but more often than not, the more traditional, the less there is overt pluralism – though underneath the message of integration it is clearly still a prime and instructive motive and accelerator for living in a non-Jewish culture. It is really obvious that pluralism be sought for a farther right and extremist division to mend social living standards. Dr. Gopin further states,

An effort to speak only in universal terms, to make everyone the same, by contrast, flies in the face of numerous religious institutions whose raison d’etre in the contemporary period (and perhaps always, to a certain degree) is to maintain difference. (2000, 175)

Pluralistic standards maintain separateness, while still preserving adaptations and room for individual groups to decide according to their own ventures and social codes how to navigate, adopt, and accept the sometimes contrasting standards of living and social developments of mainstream, secular society. Pluralism is key to health-maintenance as “despite universalism’s appealing beauty” it presents a “threat to continuity” for groups united in a front against overt assimilation (Gopin 2000, 175). It is not groupthink, but adaptation from a distance that preserves individuality and separateness.

To continue to mend along with Dr. Gopin’s study, he turns the reader to self-love as holistic and religious preservation, stating, “the religious psyche is meant to be self-loving in order to be loving in the other-directed sense” (2000, 180). Of course, this recalls Emmanuel Levinas’s many philosophical presentations of self becoming Other, from a certain perspective, as well as Sara Ahmed’s feminist self-care proscriptions. As Audre Lorde famously said, and is often quoted, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Dr. Gopin seems to acknowledge, as Audre Lorde and Emmanuel Levinas do, that self-care is essential to empathy and spirituality identifying with the other, for the benefit of not just the self, but also a progressive, healthy society. This is also an essential value that should be instructed and instituted at a young age. I highlight the importance of self-care as integral to social growth in Provoking God, taking the queue from Sara Ahmed, who, in my opinion, is one of the finest contemporary thinkers of the Western world.

Gopin further emulates, not just Levinas and Ahmed, but the Sages and Torah that love should be nurtured as prime in spiritual motivations of living a meaningful life towards a sometimes domineering society, stating, “excessive love should not be suppressed. Rather, a visionary approach to conflict resolution would acknowledge this love and give it some reasonable place within the process of building peaceful relationships” living among those intent to relegate these groups as Other, groups which must also, simultaneously, love the othering of their identity (Gopin 2000, 176). This is much like the natural evolved call and response of post-WWII, universalist doctrine with the consequences of philosophical and spiritual placement among those virtues of social mores.

A key labor of freedom is to transition from a civilization of self-actualization to an encampment of other-actualization. When the externality of the bare minimum is dominant, as though a structural foundation on training wheels, it means – optimistically – there is room to grow and fulfill our dimensions of otherness and otherhood. There is no shape of the planet without our circular interests. The human-reciprocity principles to and subjected to structural disorder and the similitude of simultaneous individualistic determinism paired with universalist projectionism demonstrate that the current state of othering reaches into a forced negation of humanness and the divine in each other-self. The fall of humanity and the perversion of our habits are upheld as instructive towards individual realization at the cost of nurtured growth towards sharing a beneficial circular interest that heals each wound that binds us as well as the planet’s finite resources.

Law enforcement, the state of institutional public education, political doctrine, capitalist interdependency, all demonstrate the fabric of bare minimum of fostering social growth. They are as though we are projecting into social order what we know are necessities, but we do so with one blind eye and barely visible sight in the other eye, impaired by our slow – through historically evolving – ideas of living with other and living while self-shaping. This precludes a more natural and nuances selfhood, sainthood, otherhood, and base understanding of the necessary reciprocal involvement of living towards the great labors of freedom that determine our evolution towards sustainability and human rights of difference and embrace of othered personal architecture.

A revolution of solidarity must replace self-interests. As Levinas writes, “[r]evolution must be defined by its content, by values: revolution takes place when one frees man; that is, revolution takes place when one tears man away from economic determinism” (1990, 102). We are more than free to, and need only be willing to, involve ourselves with the interests of each/other to liberate the conscience of dormant activity that conceals the greater sainthood and distribution of the Divine. “[T]he material needs of my neighbor are my spiritual needs,” Levinas cites Rabbi Israel Salanter, bringing to the foreground our basic, indispensable direction of non-selectivity in the hierarchy of thought and complex systems of order and structural integrity aboard the starship of destiny.

The working order towards our cohesive limitations to prop up one knee forward to make our other foot move ahead of us is what justice is made of. As I have discussed, this requires replacing systems that do not benefit us. Our spiritual collectivity, as Gopin has shown is required, proves “[i]t is not through the State and through the political advances of humanity that the person shall be fulfilled – which, of course, does not free the State from instituting the conditions necessary to this fulfillment. But it is the family of Abraham that sets the norms” (Levinas 1990, 100). This affinity towards the stranger is mostly what we need to know to begin our endeavors to an eclipse of multi-phase initiation of pluralist customs and self-involved evolution of rejecting the times of the complacency of norms.

Get down, sit in the dust,

Fair Maiden Babylon;

Sit, dethroned, on the ground,

O Fair Chaldea;

Nevermore shall they call you

The tender and dainty one,

Grasp the handmill and grind meal.

Remove your veil,

[…]

I was angry at My people,

I defiled My heritage;

I put them into your hands,

But you showed them no mercy.

Even upon the aged you made

Your yoke exceedingly heavy.

You thought, “I shall always be

The mistress still.”

You did not take these things to heart,

You gave no thought to the end of it.

(Isaiah 47:1-2, 47:6-7)

Great attention should be given to “I shall always be / The mistress still,” which JPS separates as two divided lines indicating the belief to “always be” is thought by the oppressive institution to be a permanent fixed state upon the surface of humanity. The following line, “The mistress still,” is both a continuation propping up another thought while also a new thought, or rather, an indictment of the proclamation of individual reticence in shape and home. These three ideas are represented by the line break as an accusation and a summary of wayward disposition. We can easily see into these verses the promulgation of an acceptance of norms within the tranquility of broken dismissal of greater hope, sacred hope, to preserve an order of compassion.

God tells us, “The Jewish texts are always with you,” or so I hear in a soft, still voice – deep with resonance and Holy Fire – seeing into the soul of deterred holiness. Teshuva is markedly an equation to move forward into a just society. Gopin emphasizes teshuva as a doctrine of conciliatory placement of mending patterns of disembarked recourse, stating,

The restorative or conciliatory stage of teshuva involves a confession of wrongdoing. It is ideal if this confession, if it involves wrongs to other human beings, be done in public. Joseph Karo (1488-1575) added that the public confession convinces the wronged party that the change in his adversary is authentic and thus he forgives him. (2000, 188)

Conflict resolution begins with the other. We are taught, with a contemporary allegiance, that it begins with ourselves. Through the process of obtaining forgiveness from others we can begin to mend and reshape the balance of the self and how we fit into the stars and cooperative society.

Nuclear religiosity, which I introduce and characterize in Provoking God, is ostensibly a doctrine defeating the interest of the other through the contexts and narratives of family. Feminist geographers draw attention to the potential dubiousness of understanding family in these contexts, which enforce rigid social limitations and preserve neoliberal altercations against marginalized groups. “To understand family, then, requires emplacing these relationships in context, and recognising that despite their vulnerability to spatial and temporal variations, family in the everyday and everyday families occupy much of our time and concern” according to Anna Tarrant and Sarah Marie Hall (2019, 2). There is a great dismissal of the diversity of familial contexts and superstructures while, at the same time, demanding our resources to fall at the behest of family dependence, from free support and caregiving systems to overt exploitation and demands of economic and emotional diligence.

[W]here neoliberal state restructuring in the North has led to the responsibilisation of individuals who are increasingly expected to provide social support [, in] the global south […] processes of labour migration, military conflict and occupation, and displacement have forced the reworking of family life for those in the majority world across longer distances. (Tarrant and Hall 2019, 6)

These distances that are imposed on migrant families from both forced relocation and state policy and are largely absent of strong social support outside those groups which simultaneously emphasize family has the basic unit of humanity. The form of nuclear religiosity habituates paternalistic recourse to maintain the appearance of fixed standards of privilege and inequality as dominant straight-worths of life. To conceal the elasticity of family and reframe a narrative of oppression as a metalogical truth reveals a labor of freedom of the need of teshuva from the dominating class.

A May 2019 report from NPR, “Extending ‘Zero Tolerance’ to People Who Help Migrants Along the Border,” discusses the suppression of migrants in the U.S. and the structured opposition to even assist migrants through the most simple offerings of humane treatment. Professor Scott Warren is facing a possible 20 year prison term for his involvement with No Mas Muertes, which provides water and food by leaving these necessities in the desert for migrants to find. In another case, Teresa Todd is also facing charges because she stopped to assist a dying migrant after she was flagged down while driving by the dying woman’s traveling companion. The woman’s life was saved only thanks to the fact that Todd stopped to help, but because the migrants entered her vehicle Todd is being charged with human trafficking. Again, these greater distances of family re-stabilization and return to an extreme religiosity of familial mores by the state indoctrinates social impasses with ideas of delinquency and stunted recourse on the road traveled to the sacred hope for dignity and rest.

The poverty of violence. The violence of poverty. We are wells to our own indifference in the gulf of matrimonial expectations. Though we await the bride, we seek new order in the lesser self of complacency of norms and retreat from our souls to a mitigation of reclusive burdens. Though conflict resolution studies bare basic requirements for self-involved reiteration of othered promises, they become a hope of obsolescence in the dormitory of lesser involved humanities through a proprietary exposition of the sciences of humanity. We require both a displacement of our origin story-expectation, basking in the delinquency of norms, and the reification of the origin story-rebirth with the seven days emulating the seven weeks to procreation in the renewal of the wheat harvest and the shavuot of our image-tides of visions, for hope and new acquaintance of memory.

It is truly in memory that we can restructure the violence. Hashem notices our efforts towards an indispensable truth as “The Lord listens to the needy, and does not spurn His captives” (Psalms 69:34). We have the promise that there is an age in which the captives are freed. Should we not be operating in our daily lives and according to our long term goals as though we are at that day of deliverance? We are at that day in memory. Having reached the halls of justice through even an instance of prayer, we abandon the neutral resources of the mind in favor of a biased conclusion of lived expectation for divine recourse and celebrated entrance of the bride. Ultimately, we one select group of individuals lives and loves according to their potential they, in the course of the matter, free others stationed in hope, guilt, and survival, from the barriers of the expectation of norms and reclusive reticence of restitution. It is not enough to say there is liberation in our dreams, but that one day our method of study will evacuate the violence of poverty from the wealth of our indescribable recourse to the assertion of the theophany of what is now only an afterthought, but is becoming. Stronger and stronger, the moment of our invitation of the realization of the day reaches across the seven pronouns of justice to the segue of an oath, once metered, and forever inclined, as the uncovering of the bride.

Labors of Freedom Chapter 4

The Perils of Locating Spatial Problem-Solving Arguments

Religio-ethics is easily argued against in modern society for good reason. Members of faith communities have so often lived down the promise of well-being for the individual and the community itself. This has happened across faiths and denominations. The argument of locating a place to move towards a post-violent society, as this essay attempts to do, is made confined to a small segment by ascribing a Judaic temper to the cause of the dissolution of violence. Within violence-narratives, religious narratives take no small place throughout the history of intersocial oppression and domination. No faith is safe from fault finding. No school of thought has not at some point been perpetrators of some form of violence. Of course, the goal of most of those inclined towards a life in faith is self-improvement and just like a nation, a community – or faith – that lives well to love fully must also intend to aspire as the individual does, towards something better. So, too, must we keep in mind this collaborative gesture in seeing opportunities for a faith-hearted analysis in the cause to end violence. Not only is the end of violence a reason to be, but, also, a lived faith that leads as it loves.

That was certainly how Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook lived his expressive thought. He found a harmony with his philosophical, mystical, practiced, and statesmen-centered modes of faith. Rav Kook wrote that the “perfection of faith is attained when its body and soul are well linked to each other, that is, the faith based on the inner life and the faith based on tradition” (36). Rav Kook sought a collaborative justice in the expression of God and how that is made manifest in both our ontological and material life. Rav Kook wrote elsewhere,

Even in epochs when the human spirit was on a very low place and no expression of moral refinement and noble feelings of purity could penetrate man’s heart, the voice of God did not cease to speak within him. […] The course of the human spirit does not change the character of this mighty force which includes within itself these two contending tendencies: the basic call to draw close to God, and the process of refining the forms of this closeness. (40)

While Rav Kook offers illuminative criticism of the patterns and motives of refining such a space, he contends that “nearness” is what amounts to “the light of the world” (40). Perhaps it is the few who find closeness to God that create the light that guides the many. Not that only a few may offer that guidance, but that only a few are needed to liberate the light that emanates from the Creator that then gives light for all others to find their way, or attempt to do so. From a small crack gives much exposure. It is even possible that it was the light released from the nearness realized at Mount Sinai that continues to ripple through time and reconnect us in our own harnessing of the light’s path as we seek entry into the holds of God’s closeness today; faith to take on the Torah made into tangible light that expresses our inner life’s quest for dreams uncertain.

In Lawrence Fine’s essay, “Rav Kook and the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” he examines how Rav Kook dismissed the sequestered argument against the material as an impending power towards spiritual progress, stating, “the material has no genuine ontological reality of its own” (34). In the process, Rav Kook opens the material as legitimate tools to liberate civilization for forward progress without that being a threat to the potential of a life with realized spiritual or spatial fulfillment. Rav Kook “was preoccupied with the ethical life as the foundation for spiritual realization” (Fine 34). There is no oppression from objects, no regression from tools, no threat to our inner personalness with the progression of societal development. The same virtue needs to be maintained today. It is not things that are corrupt, but greed makes it so as someone so aptly stated.

This again, is a type of collaboration; a spatial collection of light breeding towards communal release. Fine reads Rav Kook directly from the deliberateness of his sense of the congruity of ethics and law, of external and internal expression. Fine contends that “Kook locates his God in the transcendent heights on one hand, and in the closer quarters of our world on the other” (36). Both are integral towards making justice a place of peace and, again, collaboration. The rhythm of towering thought and expression do not deny the quiet, hushed tones of interpersonal development. They each bear the torch of enlightening proposals for the Master’s refined hand in the course of our persuading lives that can be dictated without being dictatorial, translucent without being opaque, and doctrinal without being an imposition towards others, either in the same encampment or neighbors of another disposition.

Rav Kook demonstrates where natural law coincides with mystical restorations of being and in the process withdrawals the light of Hashem. Through Rav Kook’s vision of nature we see fewer obstacles to overcoming violence-society. This is not the case with how many present natural order. Walter Benjamin, in his essay, “Critique of Violence,” ruminates about the natural law in a way befitting of this essay’s earlier discussion on biolence, that is, both the biological motivations to rush into and out of unrestricted violence. That is, unrestricted violence that is interpreted with many assumptions that it is in our nature to release such conditions of violence and that it is unrealistic to expect a type of humanity to emerge with conditions where this violence and the home-state-of-violence has emigrated to the past, to a previous state of order and calligraphy of time where we find ourselves in a new future of dispelling time.

Parshat Matot unveils no hidden view of the supposed righteous committing mass atrocities. Numbers 31:1-18 reveals a genocide campaign. Even Moses, the balcony portrait of leaders, condemns the troops of Israel for sparing the women and commands that they return to slaughter them as well. In “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin writes that the “thesis of natural law that regards violence as a natural datum is diametrically opposed to that of positive law, which sees violence as a product of history” (1986, 278). Benjamin ultimately interprets a circular argument in the dilation of the subject of violence and condemns lawmaking as petition towards the violence of establishing order, stating, the “first function of violence is called the lawmaking function, this second will be called the law-preserving function” in his argument of the essay (1986, 284). However, the essence of what Benjamin puts forward is that “all as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving” (1986, 287). Violence outside of the law that is condemned in the name of social order actually only comes under the statute of punitive measures in order to preserve the order and mandate of those in power. The offense is not against society and communal peace, but in challenging the dominion of the violence that belongs to the state.

To allow myself some measure of self-plagiarism,…Byung-Chul Han takes to issue some of the reading of Benjamin’s marriage of law and violence in his short text, Topology of Violence. At one point Byung-Chul Han seems to dismiss Benjamin (and Giorgio Agamben) as being relics of a previous age, an age of world wars unprepared for the new world order of organized media, which he perhaps gives too much credit towards as being an indicator of contemporary mass existence. Byung-Chul Han separates law and violence, putting forward that, “[s]heer violence alone is not capable of forming spaces or creating locations. It lacks the space-building force of mediation. Thus is cannot produce a legal space. Only power, not violence, is capable of space building” (2018, 56). Both Walter Benjamin and Byung-Chul Han give consideration to (perhaps measures and degrees of) a pure (unalloyed) violence,….and law, that can be stapled free of the meditations of willful coercion. Where Benjamin sees a marriage of necessity and form, Byung-Chul Han sees an indication of uniqueness. (cite blog post)

What is clear is the relationship between the state and violence. Where Byung-Chul Han sees a real compass of a legal code within a democratic excursion of nonviolent dialectics, Benjamin sees only a dialectics of violence-preservation. The way out of this entanglement is the way out of our modern conception of the State. In a place past the reserved order of orchestrated violence is a realistic motivation of tipping point to restore a methodical posting of guards of nonviolence that emulate an educational system and mattered diplomacy that pact the stimulation of supplemented retreat from post matters of course. There is a way out of violence-society. It starts with our collaboration on violence-narratives and ends with our very own isolation of bigotry and regret.

Marie McCormick’s article, “Through a Different Lens: The Social Sanctioning of Family Violence,” lays out the status of social distillation of familial retreat from humane principles,

Society’s ambivalence toward violence in the family is apparent in the various definitions and interpretations of battering and abuse including, physical aggression toward a child or intimate partner, corporal punishment, harsh parenting, non-accidental physical injury, assault, and crimes against women (Ateah & Durant, 2005; Rothenberg, 2002). Based on these definitions, violence in the family has been viewed as the result of individual pathology, moral failure, lack of internal control or as a crime (Worden & Carlson, 2005; Erickson, 2000). (2007, 46)

The division of responsibility is seen as independent from policy reform and in that is the strength of violence principles, that we will propagate a self-sustaining functionality of violence in place, rather despite, intervention programs that heal and nurture families and communities out of the doorstops of violence behavior. As McCormick notes, even the maintained belief of the cause of poverty is seen to be the result of “individual failure rather than as the result of failed social policies that deplete families and communities of financial resources, educational opportunities, adequate healthcare and basic safety (2007, 49). The rudimental structure of violence, if we carry to Walter Benjamin’s view of the marriage of state lawmaking power and the execution of violence, is oblique to a window of modern statehood and the political science of violence structuralism in all its mythmaking propensities and doubt deriving dualistic culture planting.

To return to parshat Matot, mass execution is more than mythmaking, it is lawmaking. It is a functionary placeholder for the building up of a state and in that the community of Israel commits violence not out of a sense of justice or distributed and coalescent judgment, but, instead, to justify its statehood (beingness) wherein is the centerpiece of violence. The haftarah for Ha’azinu (listen), Second Samuel 22:1-51, proclaims the Creator as the manifestation of vocalized surveillance of dreams: the deliverance from violence; “God is my rock where I seek shelter, my shield, the source of my salvation. My deliverer. You save me from violence” (Second Samuel 22:3). The haftarah continues, descriptively, “Smoke poured from Your nostrils, a devouring fire from Your mouth, blazing coals flamed forth from You” (Second Samuel 22:9). Hashem’s presence is certain. S/He is depicted as a dominant force that emanates fire without flame, passion without retort, and prison without misplaced jurisdiction. Here, we have a God that is more than capable of an immediate restorative justice, “You reached down from above and took me, pulling me out of the deep waters” (Second Samuel 22:17). Are the deep waters being under threat? Greif? Swelling presence lost without fortitude? Where was this deliverance from violence for the victims of the genocide of parshat Matot? The projection of the legitimacy of statehood (being) ennobles individuals into violence-crime that is far worse than crime committed out of the collaborative forces of marginalization and poverty. Within the violence of poverty, such dedications are forced upon us and threats to delineate the mass appeal of purposeful violence does nothing but force adherence to its cause.

However, violence is not neutral or natural like a law out of favor with intellectual rigor. It is a learned trait and a characteristic that is taught repeatedly with infamy in unstill mires of persuasion. Josephine A. V. Allen illustrates that degrees of violence are more derelict than impending physical harm, stating,

This definition of violence includes harm that is socially sanctioned and avoidable actions that violate one or more human rights or prevent the fulfillment of a basic human need. Violence is seen to occur in three ways: through (1) omission, failing to provide assistance to people in need, (2) as a result of repression, or a violation of civil, political, economic and/or social rights, or through (3) alienation, or severely limiting people’s emotional, cultural, or intellectual growth (Dasgupta, 1968). (2001, 48)

Allen correlates, in her article, “Poverty as a Form of Violence,” that violence and poverty, contended as collaborative with the above centered understanding of violence, means that “poverty may now be defined as any act or condition that causes injury to the health and well-being of others” (2001, 48). The many doctrinalized re-institutionalizations of the religio-ethics of poverty have yet to cease the fluctuations of its boundaries. Hashem’s primacy and established law, that “He who gives to the poor with not be in want, But he who shuts his eyes will be roundly cursed,” (Proverbs 28:27) does not shun the practice of poverty as a crime against humanity that it is, as the violence of the Ur(text) denomination of justice.

We are double-binded and double-blinded to the propensity of our will to exact a proclaimed justice that fights rather than unites, that scratches pearls for the sake of lost marriages that were intended to be so pure and defined by the laws of love that elevate life towards its higher course. Instead, we have the encumbrance of violence as its own ends and its own demeaning of definition of the livelihood of the saints. Where is this demotion located in the spatial grid of defined values? Where are we taught to understand God’s presence and seek out quarters of docile strangers, always loved in earnest and in the aid of our transparency? We are not transparent. We are doubled, each of us, in the effort of confuse our stead towards self-definition and the intent of our hearts to do good to others. Our hearts were robbed as children and as substitute we created a second self, a second soul. One that elongates the passage in time along with us, on the way to restore our immediate presence in the wedding hour we so lost as established time and meter. This second soul does hot haunt us or cause us an extenuation of mercy, no. Instead, we live below the barriers of heartened and derided judgment, ever-so graceful to the shekinah doorpost or the miserable displacement in time, were we have honor and not rejection of others, which is a more elaborate measure of the rejection of ourselves. Statehood is ontological terrorism.

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