Covenant Connection
April 2026/Nisan 5786 Vol. 19:3
Considering the Current War
We are living in sacred times. The People of Israel are still struggling to develop their toe-hold in the land of promise. In this current stage – following the re-establishment of Jewish life in the coastal sliver of the Land of Israel, old Cana’an, or Philistia (what Ancient Rome named Felix Palestina, “Happy Palestine,” after banishing the Jews from Cana’an/Judea) – it’s a four-front war:
• War with Persia (Iran, “the Land of the Aryans”).
• War with Persia’s surrogates, the Persians’ Arab fellow Shi’ite Muslims in southern Lebanon.
• War in the Land’s own Judea and Samaria with the so-called Filistin or “Palestinians” in the Land’s historic hill country, the heart of it, who – with considerable chutzpah (that is, gall) - claim the whole land as their own and call the Jews foreign invaders.
• And, war in Gaza, with another set of chutzpadik so-called Filistin or “Palestinians,” who attacked Israel in the notorious dastardly attack of October 7, two years ago.
That’s just the kinetic, physically violent, “hot” part of the struggle. Still, that’s a lot, considering that Israel is smaller than Chicago – in the size of its economy and population – in an area smaller than Lake Michigan. But the stakes are high, too, to say the least:
We’re taking about the prospective fulfillment of the whole Biblical story, the completion of many cycles of Jewish history – entry, exile, struggle, exile, return, exile, modern return, and continuing existential struggle – proceeding, we hope, to the glory of a blessed Millennial fulfillment: to Apocalypse!
Used in this sense, by the way, apocalypse is a good thing, signifying a great fundamental Revealing.
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Revelation's Prosaic Nature
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People talk about Revelation – apocalypse – coming all in a flash, suddenly, but that’s rarely the way of the world. Usually, truth works its way out slowly, incrementally. Consider, for instance, the great scientific discoveries of Louis Pasteur. Most of his fellow scientists, competitors, never even recognized the truth of them. Rather, they kept on teaching their old stuff until they died or retired early, with fewer and fewer students.
One revelation coming from Israel’s war in Gaza is that sometimes even supposedly reliable experts will spout risible – laughable, contemptible – nonsense. In all of human history, no territory has ever been fortified and customized for war like Gaza under Hamas. Never, ever, has anyone built tunnel networks remotely as deep and extensive – next to them, the fortifications of Okinawa and Iwo Jima by the Japanese in World War II are insignificant - and expensive, as the multi-billion dollar fortifications of Hamas. Destroying them - as they must be destroyed, lest they be used again for evil - is a huge job. That doesn’t make that job, or the rest of the physical erasure of Gaza’s terror networks, “genocide”!
I remember staying in one of the settlements, a kibbutz or collective farm, just outside Gaza – and visiting Gaza City – some years ago. The people there never imagined how deeply the people of Gaza hated them. Many of my kibbutznik hosts were butchered on October 7.
The Perennial Question
When a tree falls in a forest where no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? Yes, because there's never no one around. The Supreme Being, HaShem, the Lord of Abraham and all the Jewish prophets, is always aware and there. As He (we say “He” because HaShem is an active, rather than passive, intelligent Power, despite being beyond sex or gender) lives on Earth and on every planet, asteroid, speck of dust and breath in every galaxy and space in this and every universe.
That’s just part of what being God means: He’s involved – not as a part of but as a completely independent Being - with everything that He sustains, while He sustains everything. And, sustaining everything, giving mass and reality to everything, knows, accordingly, everything about everything.
This is not pantheism. A false teacher recently told me it is. But the great Maimonides – Rambam, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (c. 12th Century) - wasn’t telling Israel anything that the prophets hadn’t already recognized when He revealed these things to them: that HaShem, the Lord, is no more divisible than a geometric point; that He is a unity, a single Being, unified, beyond anything material - He is spirit, Maimonides declares - and beyond any thing or force that’s unified, eternal, and all-knowing, because He’s involved in sustaining everything.
People will sniff, “Well, He’s not in the bathroom.” Or, “He can’t tolerate indecency.” But claiming that God suffers from crippling delicacy insults Him. "All-knowing” means all-knowing. Of course we humans – mere animated stardust, as we are – have a hard time with such truths, but it’s good to remember that God is really, genuinely One, that most of Creation consists of hypothesized "dark" matter and "dark" energy, entirely mysterious to mortal minds; and that the One God Who hears things like trees falling in forests even in the most remote galaxies is also the One Who’s intimately involved with you, yourself. He unites Creation with His unity.
Why bring up these matters of theology? Because we’re talking about Israel, which exists as both nation and people – the two are ultimately one – to help raise all humanity to greater God-consciousness. The cause of Israel against those who would annihilate Israel is strong enough based on the pure, secular merits, that it shouldn’t need to depend on religious belief. But the fact is that religious belief – or, anyway, ultimate beliefs, based on anti-Jewish worldviews – is determinative. I’ve concluded that theology is everything in the larger struggle.
You are My witnesses, says the Lord, and My servant whom I have chosen People convinced that the Jews are just another grubby bunch of people amongst all the different so-called nations dislike the Jews’ pretensions to nationhood, national rights, and historical rights - let alone Divine rights! - vis a vis other groups who want the so-called Holy Land.
People convinced, like both Muslim and Christian supersessionists, that the Muslims, or Christians, have superseded the Jews as God’s “witnesses,” His principal missionary people, hate the thought of the Jews returning to the Holy Land (in apparent fulfillment of Holy prophecy).
People convinced that the “true owners” of the so-called Holy Land are supposedly indigenous, or native, Arabs, rather than Jews, consider Zionism – the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, bringing the Jews back to Mount Tzion in Jerusalem – to be mere window dressing for the stale old story of white racist usurpers, colonialists and imperialists seizing “native” lands.
“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.”
Here In Detroit A couple of weeks ago a naturalized American citizen of Lebanese background took a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks, and some firearms, and smashed it into the nursery school/day care of the Detroit area’s largest Reform synagogue, Temple Israel.
His brother back in Lebanon had been active as an officer in Hezbollah, the Iranian-directed paramilitary, but had been killed the week before, along with his (the brother's) spouse, in an Israeli air-strike. So he was trying to kill as many Jewish children as he could. He got bogged down, though. The Detroit Jewish community has been spending millions on security, these last few years, and security guards inside had just been drilling under the auspices of the FBI. They stopped him. After a short standoff, trapped in his truck, he used his own gun to kill himself.
A little later, somebody posted on Facebook: “Of the 3,000 people murdered on 9/11, there are roughly 30,000 grieving immediate family members, somewhere like 100,000 grieving extended family members, and about half a million grieving close friends and immediate colleagues. How many of them decided to shoot up a mosque?”
By Michael Dallen |