Have you heard the news?  The "old covenant" between G-d and the Jews is no longer in effect.  Sinai has been superceded.  But not to worry; the Jews still have an important place in this "new testament," even though their role has changed radically.

Yes, once upon a time the Creator of the Universe chose the progeny of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to teach the world about G-d.  They were given the Holy Torah and the Land of Israel.  They built a beautiful Temple in Jerusalem and on behalf of mankind conducted the sacrificial service G-d gave them.  But that's all over now.  And it's all because of The Passion.

Have you heard about this?  Oh, you have.  You just don't realize it.

You see, the time eventually came when the Jews had to leave their haven of Theocracy and go out into the big wide world.  And there they encountered generation upon generation upon generation of people who allegedly believed in the Jewish G-d but hated the Jews.  And that's when their atoning sacrifice began.

The medieval mobs spat on them; the Crusaders scourged them; the pogromming Cossacks crowned them with thorns.  And then came the truly awful yet inevitable conclusion: the Genesis-kissing, Bible-thumping chr*stian mobs (probably made up of people named Reuben, Caleb, and Jedidiah) crucified them at a place called Auschwitz.

And then a new world began.

For you see, the Jewish People really performed the greatest service humanity has ever known.

They died for us.  They redeemed us.  And they opened the door.

They saved mankind from the awfulest scourge it had ever known: religion--especially any belief in the Jewish G-d!

What else are we to make of the bizarre situation we live in today, when we dare not hope for a return to the seeming moral sanity of less than forty years ago, and the Jewish People, the People who taught us all that reactionary, "fascist" morality in the first place, is invoked as the reason?  Why else do we find ourselves in a world where the "right" to blaspheme HaShem and His Torah is considered absolutely essential for a "decent" society but where denial of the Holocaust is against the law?

Make no mistake about it; societies--all societies--punish the denial of their foundational myths, and the Holocaust is the foundational "myth" ("myth" in this context means not something that didn't really happen, but a societal foundational narrative) of the post-modern world.  Every other event in Israel's long history--from the Creation of the world to the Great Flood to the election of Abraham to the Exodus from Egypt to the Revelation at Sinai to the historicity of King David--is subject to militant doubt and skepticism.  Only the great slaughter of the 1940's remains, and it is considered so foundational, so essential, that it is the one event in history whose denial is a crime.

Not please do not misunderstand me.  I am neither a Holocaust denier nor an apologist for Holocaust denial.  But I do question why this event from Jewish history is given a dogmatic binding force by law while so many other events in Jewish history are considered fairy tales.  Is this not bizarre?

I maintain that a new religion has grown up around the Holocaust: a religion that has in its effects repealed the Covenants of Noach and Sinai and absolutely reversed the role of the Jewish People in the world.  Where `Am Yisra'el were once the G-dly People, the people-of-religion par excellence, they are now the chr*st-figures whose death, burial, and resurrection redeemed the world from religion (though the "resurrection" seems to be highly problematic to the more extreme advocates of this new religion who think the State of Israel is a "betrayal" of the reason the Six Million died).  Now every mitzvah, every minhag, every manifestation of Judaism has been shorn of its essentially Theocratic message and turned into a sign of "religious freedom," "pluralism," "multiculturalism," "tolerance"--in effect, of total and absolute religious subjectivism.

The kippah (skullcap), once a sign of submission to an objective Supernatural Order, is now interpreted to mean that "personal expression" (eg, tattooing) is permitted here.  The distinctive gabardine of the Eastern European-derived Chassidim, originally in imitation of Polish nobility (because the Jewish People are G-d's nobility among mankind) now merely means that this is a tolerant society that permits "gays."  The holy Seifer Torah (the very source of the "fascist" King James Bible) teaches us that no one has a monopoly on religious truth.  The thrice daily prayers (a bit of a burden for a "non-religious" people) simply demonstrates that no one has the right to tell anyone else that he can't worship Satan, or Molekh, or himself.  We have religious freedom in this country, and in the entire Western World--and the Jews died that we might have it!

And of course, in the most egregious example of all, the chanukkiyyah (Chanukkah menorah), especially when placed on public property, tells all those chr*stian bigots that "everyone is welcome here" (even Jew-hating moslems).  Of course, the creche can't go there because it implies the opposite, merely because it is the religion of the majority.  Even the notorious "Red Ken" Livingstone, London's rabidly anti-Israel and pro-Arab mayor, has giddily kindled a public chanukkiyyah while happily chattering about the contributions to "cultural diversity" of the Jewish People (he mentioned Marx, Freud, and Einstein in particular--he's apparently never heard of Abraham, Moses, and David).

One could even make the point that just as the Covenant of Sinai validated the Genesis narrative of Creation (since only G-d Himself actually witnessed those events), so the great slaughter is often used to vindicate the theory of ultimate meaninglessness and the completely random nature of creation.  After all, people who believe in Meaning kill Jews; therefore belief in Meaning must be discouraged lest more Jews be killed.  Never mind that these opponents of Meaning never seem to lack for motivation for any number of "progressive" moral/ethical crusades.

It is unpleasant, but it is true--we are told over and over and over by the forces of irreligion and immorality that "we can't go back to a simpler world" because of the Jewish experience that culminated in the Holocaust.  Once the people whose role was to teach the rest of humanity about G-d, they have been made into the people on whose behalf belief in G-d must be eradicated.  And there is no doubt that this has helped to increase anti-Semitism among certain religious groups, especially when they notice that Orthodox Jewish belief and practice is allowed to continue unaltered on the grounds that it represents an "early warning system" or a "canary in the coal mine" that warns the anti-religious cultural elite that religion is about to rear its ugly head.

These essays of mine use the word "irony" quite a lot, but that is because the situation--the actual content of the Jewish religion as opposed to its context as a "minority religion"--is simply overflowing with ironies.  One of the greatest is that the separation of "religion" from life in general and its relegation to an innocuous private practice has been achieved in the name of protecting the Jewish People when the separation of "religion" from the rest of life is totally alien to the entire world of Jewish thought up until the "enlightenment."  In fact, there isn't a real Hebrew word for "religion" because "religion" apart from the rest of life and reality simply doesn't exist.  G-d created the "real world" in which we live and all the phenomena in it, and everything in traditional Jewish life is governed and regulated by "religious law"--from prayer to eating to communal law and government to which direction one's bed lies in to how one ties one's shoes in the morning.  And liberal Jews still have the unmitigated gall to claim to be "good Jews" while insisting that "religion" is a subjective, private affair with no real connection to objective reality?  Pardon my language, but peresh par!

Yes, life must be based on a foundation, whether the life of an individual, a family, a civilization, or of humanity as a whole.  But Auschwitz is a terrible foundation on which to base life in the modern world, especially for Jews who are made to feel guilty and "un-Jewish" when they act like their ancestors who fought holy wars and destroyed the enemies of HaShem rather than meekly submitting to be killed so that we can have a G-dless and "more humane" world.  Israel in particular is constantly scolded and labelled with the "Nazi" lable by people who claim to appreciate Jewish suffering during World War II but who can't appreciate Jews in any other context than suffering.  Just as the chr*stian "new testament" and its claim to have superceded Sinai must be rejected, so must the religion of "Holocaustianity" with its deification of the suffering Jew and its concomitant demonization of the Theocratic Jew.

There is a reason that both the chr*stian and liberal "new covenants" try to retain the central place in human history of the Jewish People; it is because that place so objective that it cannot be denied.  This being the case, why this need to create continual "new covenants" on which to base our lives when one already exists?  The Covenant of Sinai (which includes and finalized the Covenant of Noach for non-Jews) is the final, definitive Revelation of G-d to mankind to which all further revelations must defer for judgement.  It neither allows for nor authorizes any "new covenents" that supercede it or change the Jewish mission from what it has always been.  Since the centrality of `Am Yisra'el in history is so obvious, then the authentic Jewish Covenant should be equally obvious.

Only a world based on Sinai will be safe from more Auschwitzes.  A world based on Auschwitz, that celebrates the mass murder of Jews as somehow redemptive of mankind, can only implicitly call for more of the same, G-d forbid.

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