Weary of the Sun: The Plot to Remake the World

Part One

"I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate of the world were now undone."

Macbeth

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As I write this, the Syrian government has just fallen to Al Qaeda/ISIS affiliated rebels, who had been armed and organised by the US, and aided and abetted by Israel and NATO-member Turkey. Christians are being massacred yet again.

Why is it that the ‘West’ always appears to favour political forces that seek to erase history and culture, who seek to re-make the world from scratch?

Below is the beginning of an answer.

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There is a prayer in Jewish liturgy that reads, “Let the time not be distant, O God, when all shall turn to You in love, when all the brokenness in our world is repaired by the work of our hands and our hearts, inspired by Your words of Torah.”

The original Hebrew for ‘repairing by the works of our hands’ is tikkun olam.

Note the prayer says, by the work of our hands, and it refers not to sin or evil or redemption, but brokenness and repair.

The prayer does not come from the Old Testament, but rather from the Talmud, collated in Babylon some centuries after Christ.

Although the concept would be familiar to many, particularly American, Jews today, it was obscure for centuries.

The idea was kept alive within Jewish mysticism, namely Kabbalah.

In Kabbalah, the world is an emanation of the sparks of God’s being. And thus reparing the world is equally repairing God, by making the deity whole once again. Re-organising the world into God. This also means a wicked creation, a world which wearies us, is undone. The material ceases to exist in the End.

Tikkun Olam came to be used in modern Jewish parlance in the midst of Zionism, when in Jerusalem, a few decades before the founding of the modern state of Israel, the chief rabbi, associated ‘repairing the world’ with re-establishing a Jewish state.

After World War II, the concept would be radicalized even further. God had abandoned creation. Humanity was now required to take the lead in repairing the world. And we soon had a United Nations, a World Bank, and a World Health Organization, designed exactly to that end.

(This notion of being ‘God’s elder brother’, of improving God, is not specific to any one tradition. Tolstoy and Thomas Jefferson both re-wrote the Bible, literally, to suit their tastes, while the Masons imagine themselves to be architects of a new kind of earthly temple that transcends sectarian differences. One could even make the same case for Buddhism in relation to Hinduism.)

The concept of tikkun olam is now more often used in America than in Israel, and in reference not so much to the modern state of Israel, but to causes like racism, pacifism (sometimes), and environmentalism. The term would be explicitly invoked by the likes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Joe Biden would implicitly reference it when he made his notorious speech on Jewish heritage in 2013:

“The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you.”

“So many notions that are embraced by this nation that particularly emanate from over 5,000 years of Jewish history, tradition and culture: independence, individualism, fairness, decency, justice, charity. These are all as you say, as I learned early on as a Catholic being educated by my friends, this tzedakah.”

“The embrace of immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements.

“I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said. That’s why he spoke out on gay marriage “apparently a little ahead of time.”

“It wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was ‘Will and Grace,’ it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” gay marriage, Biden said.

“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good.”

The idea of a kind of tikkun olam tradition, taking the lead in re-making the world, would be explored sociologically in important books like The Ordeal of Civility by John Murray Cuddihy (published in 1974) and The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine, himself a Jew, and published in 2004. (I will deal with The Jewish Century in a subsequent post.)

Cuddihy, a sociologist who taught at the City University of New York, proposed that in assimilating to the Gentile world from the Russian Pale of Settlement, European Jewry underwent an ordeal of sorts. He points to the examples of Freud and Marx, in this regard, proposing, firstly, that Freudian psychoanalysis reflected Freud’s own personal struggle to integrate into Viennese society.

Freud believed that all humans are subject to deep, subconscious forces, in conflict with a societal super ego. Cuddihy suggests that the primal meaning of Freudianism is personal; it is a kind of allegory of the ordeal of civility, this struggle between his personal Jewish identity and ‘Western universalism’ in a fraught process of assimilation.

Freud is not only ‘projecting’, presenting himself as the ego justifying the id to the super ego, his work equally has the effect of suggesting that all human beings have the same psychological experiences. Because by our nature we are all tempted to kill our fathers, any particularist identity should matter very little. At the same time, he is de-legitimizing any society that seeks to repress or stigmatize our basest desires. The sentiment is: ‘This society in which I do not belong is to blame for my alienation.’ One wonders what Freud would have made of Biden’s favourite TV show, ‘Will and Grace’, that normalized bourgeois homosexuality for its viewers?

Cuddihy expounds a similar thesis regarding Marx. Marx’s father had abandoned the Jewish faith and baptized his son, Karl. It is no stretch to suggest that Marx’s theory of the alienation caused by capitalism reflected his own feelings of alienation, and that his great criticism of bourgeois society, of religion, and even his criticism of Judaism, reflected the ordeal he had faced in this attempted assimilation. His revolutionary spirit represented a grand rejection of the society with which he could not come to terms.

Moving beyond Cuddihy, I would suggest that his thesis has explanatory power when we trace how Freudianism and Marxism, along with the mythos of Darwin, would form the foundation of a great modern European self-critique. What if our faith is just a lie, an opiate? What if our moral code is mere psychological cruelty? What if all our wealth, science, and art are necessarily the function of oppression? Can we begin again? Can we atone?

This self-critique would reach new heights after World War II, when the now notorious Frankfurt School came to dominate the humanities in western academia (many of whom were funded by the US government).

Inspired by these same ideas, given new life after the world wars, thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer (all of whom intriguingly shared the same ‘ordeal’ as Freud and Marx) suggested that paternal authority and repressed homosexuality were the root causes of fascism. ‘Never again’ could only be ensured by a totally new approach to family life, sex, the economy, and race, as well as a suppression, or intolerance, of the ‘intolerant’, those who criticized social democracy or held on to suspect identitarian views. Such people must be considered ‘potential fascists’ owing to their anti-egalitarian tendencies.

No, the new world must undo the old, and it must be built anew by enlightened intellectuals in a grand alliance with society’s ‘victims’. Only then can a broken God and a broken world be repaired by the work of our hands.

I turn to The Jewish Century next. A later post will conclude and cohere these thoughts on ‘world-building’ as well as the modern instantions of this revolutionary spirit.

To be continued.