Yom Kippur: Leaving Today’s Mind-Fashions

Jewish folk-tales endure, often taking new relevance in each age. The stories of “the wise men of Chelm”, simple-minded Jews who attempted to solve problems by means not thought out to their conclusions, are now metaphors for political and bureaucratic bungling; for example, the story of how the sages of Chelm ordered to build a hospital under a bridge with a hole from which wagons would fall finds its grim counterpart in the modern reality of a government that decrees that the basic training camp that was hit a few days ago by a Kassam rocket, resulting in many casualties, be given improved armoring, instead of the better-conceived move of showing the senders of the rockets that they’re better off cracking pistachios.

This coming Yom Kippur falls on Shabbat, and on this subject there is another folk-tale, of a Jew who gives excuses for his transgressions of the day before his rabbi, but makes his position worse with each excuse given:

Rabbi: Why did you drive on the Sabbath?

Jew: There wasn’t any Jewish restaurant open.

Rabbi: So you ate treifes at a Gentile restaurant?! Why couldn’t you ask for some food from one of your neighbors?

Jew: There was no one to ask from, because it was Yom Kippur.

There are variations to this tale, some making it much longer, but that’s the gist. I bring it here not only because of the date, but also because I remembered it when I read an oft-made but incorrect interpretation of Phinehas’ act (Numbers 25:10–15). A while back, having finished reading the seventh and final Harry Potter book, I did as I always do on such occasions and dove into further reading (by “on such occasions” I mean the occasion that now I have no spoilers to watch out for). On Phineas Nigellus Black, the former Hogwarts headmaster who delivers his insistent words of wisdom through his portrait, the Harry Potter Wiki has this to say (version of September 4, 2007):

In the Bible, Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, is an extremely controversial high priest who murders two persons because they were having sex on the steps of the Tabernacle (the building containing the Holy Ark), and because one is Jewish and the other is not. His example has been used to justify attacks on interracial couples over the centuries. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

I’m skeptical of that last sentence (it always pay to be skeptical of what is written in any chmod 777 encyclopedia). As for the part I emphasized, it is most instructive of the seeping of the tenets of Cultural Marxism into the subconscious of the public today. Melanie Phillips gave her analysis of the Harry Potter books as a feast of counter-postmodernism, and I find that agreeable; all the more saddening, then, if Rowling chose the name, “Phineas” as a symbol for fanatical devotion to blood-purity. For the fact that Zimri had sex with a Midianite woman was merely the culmination of transgression, à la the above Jewish folk-tale, and even then, it was not about what Leftists today call race.

Portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black.

In Jewish law, sex is allowed only in the bounds of marriage, and then on certain conditions, such as purity, both bodily (pertaining to women’s specialties) and externally (for example, there must not be a Torah scroll in the room at the time). And it must, of course, be l’shem shamayim, for a divine purpose, for the purpose of bringing forth a new Jewish family. Zimri failed on all counts:

1. His act was extramarital—Cozbi was brought to him as a sacred harlot.
2. Since she was not Jewish, she did not observe the Jewish laws concerning women’s bodily purity. So Zimri had sex with a woman who was in a state of impurity.
3. As she had seduced him, it is clear Zimri had done it only for pleasure, and not for the purpose of bringing Torah-observant children to the world.
4. She had been sent to drive the children of Israel to idol-worship, of which extramarital sex was an integral part. So Zimri ended up performing a pagan ritual in the vicinity of Ohel Mo’ed (the Tent of Meeting), then the one and only holy site of Judaism!

What we see in this analysis, which is from the Orthodox Jewish point of view, is how “race” barely figures into it, if at all. That the seducing woman’s ethnicity is mentioned is not because she was “born inferior” (that is what racism really means and why racism, if it is really racism that is the issue, is so pernicious) but because the Gentiles posed a cultural threat to the Jews, seducing them to a way that is apart from HaShem’s will for them. Had Cozbi done as Ruth, leaving the idolatry of her people and embracing HaShem, and married Zimri, and consummated the marriage with him according to the injunctions of the Torah, the account of that would be featured prominently as an example of righteousness, and the couple might have brought forth the greatest in Jewish history, as Boaz and Ruth became the ancestors of King David.

The watchword, “diversity” is raised by the cultural Marxists as a banner to rally under and to die in its defense, but in reality, the religious wing of Marxism, better known as the New Age, aims to assimilate all religious traditions to its overarching agenda. So it is that, for the Religious Left, Judaism is reduced to the mistranslation of tikkun olam (“mending the world”; the real meaning of that phrase, as I said in a post months ago, is “preparing the world [to be in the Kingdom of God]”), making the world a better place by purely human efforts, often kumbayistic and socialist; Christianity is reduced to the “Social Gospel”; Hinduism and Buddhism become nothing but their doctrines of ahimsa (non-violence; though Marxists are very, very far from non-violent when given the chance); Native American traditions become nothing but paths for “finding oneself”, though vision-quests and drug-taking and the like; and even Islam, that untouchable darling of the Left, the one and only religion which they seem to respect, is reduced to a creed of “socialist resistance against the unjust oppressor”, and its book to a Communist manifesto.

Under this view, interpreting the story of Phinehas as an example of racism is the obvious path to take. What is lamentable is how those assumptions, the subconscious worldview of Cultural Marxism, has crept unawares into the best and brightest minds. If the analysis is correct, even a relatively sane (as much as one can be in today’s Marxified and dhimmified Britain) author like Rowling can be seduced, without even knowing it, into that way of thinking. And, relevant especially to Zionists, another part of this worldview is the framing of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist dream, and one of the longest-running examples of such dreams—as a “White European Colonial Settler Movement”. The best and the brightest can be, and have been, seduced into that vile and Jew-hating lie.

[…] What’s objectionable about Zionism is not the desire of Jews to live in Palestine. It’s the desire to live in Palestine as a majority and exercise sovereignty as Jews.

– commenter “Ernie” on Left I on the News

Just so: single among the nations, the Jewish nation is the one that is expected to wander the world to the end of days. This view, an old one, having roots in medieval Christendom, has subconsciously been taken over by the so-called Progressives, dressed in the modern, new and improved finery of Cultural Marxist discourse. As is also this:

From the Age of Hooper. Note “Zion” and not “Zionism”. Apparently Doc Emmet Brown built a new Delorean and brought this man to our time from 1907.

Yom Kippur calls every Jew to remember God’s Midat Ha-Din (measure of justice) as well as His Midat Ha-Rachamim (measure of mercy). Today this is more important than ever, because it is this twofold idea, namely that God is a judge (contrary to the New Age’s pantheistic “Love, Love, Love…” spirit to which they append the name, “God”), and that the fate of the world ultimately rests with Him (contrary to the stance of both Marxism and Islam, that the world can be made a utopia by human efforts alone—hence the modern-day rivalry between Marxism and Islam as to who will attain the highest innocent body count, HaShem guard us), that guards against assimilation into the spiritual, and then physical, gulag of this evil ideology, an ideology as seductive as were the Midianite women and their idolatrous practices in Biblical times.

G’mar chatimah tovah!