Candidates for elite military units, the Navy Seals, Green Berets, and British SAS, conclude months of torturous weeding-out with a final ordeal. A physically exhausted, sleep-deprived, injured SAS applicant related his test’s end. He arrived at the designated finishing point, within the time limit, barely able to walk. There were the instructors on a truck’s tailgate, with an urn of coffee and fresh donuts, smiling congratulations. As the recruit reached the truck, it drove off.
These selection processes are composed of physical tasks, but designed primarily to test the applicants’ will. For, however challenging the test, had they been applied not to Olympic-grade athletes, but to regular folk whose lives depended upon their completion, it’s possible the pass-fail ratio might not be drastically different.
The training memoirs all cite the magnificent physical specimens who opted out during some phase of training when other less likely men persevered. Which was the purpose of the training: to select those who could learn to make the body do the mind’s bidding.
***
Israel’s secret weapon, as Golda taught, was Ain Brera: No Alternative. A companion phrase is Herzl’s Im Teratzu, ein zo Agadah. This is generally rendered “If you will it, it is no dream.” A better translation: “It is no fable (or tale).” The tale to which Herzl refers is The Torah. I understand him to mean that it is not merely a tale, that it is a promise: that God will return the Jews, from the ends of the earth, to their homeland. Herzl’s phrase is a reminder that the promise will be fulfilled, but we must act to fulfil it. That, as the age of miracles is past, God can only act in the world through human agency.
The handiest and most destructive phrase for the challenge begins “I wish”. No desire framed as a wish can ever be fulfilled. For who would fulfil it, if not the utterer, whose plea is actually a confession of failure? The replacement of the introductory “I wish…” with “I will” is Herzl’s instruction.
Through the Five Books of Moses — the Jews repeatedly face the lesson of the SAS: the test does not begin until one is assured the test is over and he has failed.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThank you, David, for sharing this beautifully written article with us (the light shines from within). Happy Hanukkah to you and yours.
“The proper response is not to curse the darkness but to light a candle.” (Yitz Greenberg)
Superb piece.
I’ve been enjoying your writing for a long time…about the Jews….and the plays too, mostly….your opening anecdote reminds me…with a stretch to be sure of the Jews who’d been delivered to the “showers” after being starved…hurry, hurry there’s hot coffee waiting for you…..I wouldn’t last two minutes in Seals training….so wisely never signed up…..I like your ending paragraph too. And I wish I had a donut and coffee right now….Happy Chanukkah to you…keep writing about the Jews….so few Jews do….too busy with more important matters like the whales as you wrote years ago.
Hanukkah is the holiday of the light. The word light in the book of Genesis is in order the word number 25. The interesting thing is that Hanukkah starts on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev. But between the time the book of Gensis was written and the first Hanukkah feast there are about one thousand years.Happy holiday.
I am not Jewish or even religious but, when I reflect upon the positive things that Jewish people have given humanity, I am grateful that they have been among us. Subtract those contributions and the world would be a coarser and less enlightened one.
What a load of tripe
Billy Bob – no one can stop you from oversharing your internal anger with the world, but, in turn, you can never remove the peace that exists within others without their personal consent.
I truly hope you can find inner peace during life’s journey.
I’m not angry, I’m fairly content with my lot to be honest. I also don’t need a bunch of fairytales to bring me inner peace.
However that doesn’t alter my opinion of the essay, in that I feel it’s a poor attempt to forge a tenuous link between some religious stories and real world events
Well said. Aren’t we all just sick of hearing the sanctimony oozing from the “righteous”. when their beliefs are the source of so much grief and suffering in the world; each separate belief system vying with the other to the point of conflict and death for the past two thousand years.
Enough, i say.
Perhaps we give too much credence to religion when we contend it is the cause of so much death and destruction over the centuries.
I think we do well to accept the social psychological findings about in-group/out-group orientations that seem to be baked into the human condition. I believe that it is our fundamental desire to destroy others in order to save ourselves that is the overarching problem.
Some religions have teachings that urge their followers to see those in the out-group as being equally human as those in the in-group.
Christianity is one.
As if you have magically transcended all belief systems yourself.
Boomer atheism
You could read Karen Armstrong’s ‘Fields of Blood’. She deals with this theme in some depth.
Tell us how much better the world will be when we just oust God from it Lancashire Lad? I’m all ears. Because there’s little of God left in society today and I’m at a loss to see society in any way improved by His removal. In fact just the opposite.
If you’re not angry, why be so demeaning in your response?
Your response tells us there’s a high probability you’ve never read and certainly never studied the stories you demean. Could be wrong, but I doubt it.
Those who sit on their own thrones, only worshipping themselves, are most deserving of our prayer. It is the best example of how a hardened heart can perverse human thought. I can’t even imagine living my life like ole Mr. BB. but thank God every day I’m not.
Mamet writes beautifully, of course, but usually a load of tripe. Actually in this piece his basic principle, that whatever you want to happen will indeed happen if you really try, is entirely valid, less the fairytales.
However the premise about only having to face the trial once is, in the current situation, entirely false as if the state of Israel continues on its current path it will literally never ‘win” or not without killing every single Palestinian/ Arab/Muslim in the world as it is trying to eradicate everyone in Gaza and indeed it seems the West Bank as well.
You have it backwards. Piecemeal and indecisiveness never work in the Middle-East.
The real question is what to do with a population whose minds have been irreparably damaged by hate-promoting lies from birth? Can the Arab Muslim populations of Gaza, Judah, and Samaria, be quarantined (at reasonable cost) for a generation or two until healthier minds, able to live in peace, prevail?
“Oslo” should have brought us to where we needed to be now. Yet more than 30 years have been worse than wasted. Why? Do-gooders pressured Israel into turning a blind-eye to the failure of the PA to fix the hate-indoctrination problem, while rolling out more and more cash-in-advance “autonomy”.
What was a manageable problem 30 years ago has been made all but intractable by people who, like you, thought leniency and forbearance is always the answer. Such idiocy has cost many lives and living deaths.
If you want the lives lost in the present war not to have been wasted, you must allow Israel to have and keep a decisive victory. Then peace can be achieved. The alternative to physical eradication is cultivating peace within the souls of the still Hamas-supporting Arabs and their children. Indecisiveness never works in the Middle-east.
What “indoctrinates” the Palestinians to hate Israelis is the latter’s behaviour.
When your civilian relatives are routinely being slaughtered by land-grabbing racial Supremacists, you tend to develop antipathy regardless of the degree to which someone else is telling you to like/dislike them.
You obviously buy the lies of the Arab politicians who use Israel as an alibi for their own oppression of poor Arabs. Arab elites lie and people die.
No, Israel is not trying to eradicate every Palestinian. If that were so it would have done it by now. It’s trying to eradicate every terrorist that wants to murder every Jew. And once they’ve accomplished that will murder every Christian and definitely all LBGTQ+ members. But you know that. You are simply choosing to virtue signal with the ignorant students on campus who are practicing rampant anti semitism, too. Useful tools for terrorists.
This is a helpful and thought-provoking piece about the interplay between our will and God’s will.
Christians resolve it thus: “Pray as though everything depended on God, work as though everything depended on you.” (attr. St Augustine).
Prayer aligns us to God’s will. Our actions, trusting in God, aim to achieve the seemingly impossible.
Happy Hanukkah. A Mamet piece was a wonderful way to close my day.
Yes, thanks!
Hanukkah is a strange one. After the emergence of Judaism, set out below, Hanukkah was historically a very minor festival until almost into living memory, and in much of the Jewish world it still is. But it does provide an opportunity to pre-empt each year’s round of lazy claims that Christmas is a taking over of some pagan winter festival.
There is of course a universal need for winter festivals. But the dating of Christmas derives from Hanukkah, not from the pagan Saturnalia or anything else. No British or Irish Christmas custom derives from paganism. There is little, if any, fokloric pagan continuation in these islands, and little, if anything, is known about pre-Christian religion here. Most, if not all, allegations to the contrary derive from Protestant polemic against practices originating in the Middle Ages, and usually the Late Middle Ages at that. The modern religion known as Paganism is an invention from scratch, the very earliest roots of which are in the late nineteenth century.
Furthermore, the dating of Christmas from that of Hanukkah raises serious questions for Protestants, who mistakenly exclude the two Books of Maccabees from the Canon because, along with various other works, they were allegedly not considered canonical at the time of Jesus and the Apostles.
But in fact, the rabbis only excluded those books specifically because they were likely to lead people into Christianity, and they are repeatedly quoted or cited in the New Testament, as they were by Jewish writers up to their rabbinical exclusion. Even thereafter, a point is made by the continued celebration of Hanukkah, a celebration thanks to books to which Jews only really had access because Christians had preserved them, since the rabbis had wanted them destroyed.
Indeed, far from being the mother-religion that it is often assumed to be, a very great deal of Judaism is actually a reaction against Christianity, although this is by no means the entirety of the relationship, with key aspects of kabbalah in fact deriving from Christianity, with numerous other examples set out in Rabbi Michael Hilton’s The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press, 1994), and so on.
Hanukkah bushes, and the giving and receiving of presents at Hanukkah, stand in a tradition of two-way interaction both as old as Christianity and about as old as anything that could reasonably be described as Judaism. As Rabbi Hilton puts it, “It is hardly surprising that Jewish communities living for centuries in Christian society should be influenced by the surrounding culture.” There are many, many, many other examples that could be cited.
These range from the Medieval adoption for Jewish funeral use of the Psalm numbered 23 in Jewish and Protestant editions; to the new centrality within Judaism that the rise of Christianity gave to Messianic expectations (the Sadducees, for example, had not believed in the Messiah at all) or to the purification of women after childbirth; to the identification in later parts of the Zohar of four senses of Scripture technically different from, but effectively very similar to, those of Catholicism; to Medieval rabbis’ explicit and unembarrassed use of Christian stories in their sermons.
Many a midrash – such as “to you the Sabbath is handed over, but you are not handed over to the Sabbath” – is easily late enough to be an example of the direct influence of Christianity, yet Jewish and Christian scholars alike tend to announce an unidentified common, usually Pharisaic, root, although they rarely go off on any wild goose chase to find that root. I think that we all know why not.
But the real point is something far deeper, arising from the definition of the Jewish Canon in explicitly anti-Christian terms, and from the anti-Christian polemic in the Talmud. Judaism hardly uses the Hebrew Bible directly, rather than its own, defining and anti-Christian, commentaries on it and on each other. Jews doubting this should ask themselves when they last heard of an animal sacrifice, or which of their relatives was a polygamist.
Judaism, I say again, is not some sort of mother-religion. Rather, I say again that it is a reaction against Christianity, and specifically, like Islam, a Semitic reaction against the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire; there are also, of course, culturally European reactions against that recapitulation by reference to Classical sources, as there always have been, although they are increasingly allied to Islam.
Thus constructed, Judaism became, and remains, an organising principle, again like Classically-based reactions, for all sorts of people discontented for whatever reason with the rise of Christianity in general and with the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in particular, including all the historical consequences of that up to the present day, without any realistic suggestion of a common ethnic background.
Above all, Judaism’s unresolved Messianic hope and expectation has issued in all sorts of earthly utopianisms: Freudian, Marxist (and then Trotskyist, and then Shachtmanite), monetarist, Zionist, Straussian, neoconservative by reference to all of these, and so forth. They are all expressions of Judaism’s repudiation of Original Sin, Christianity’s great bulwark against the rationally and empirically falsifiable notions of inevitable historical progress and of the perfectibility of human nature in this life alone and by human efforts alone.
It is Christianity that refers constantly to the Biblical text. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Temple, Jesus Christ, Who prophesied both the destruction of the Temple and its replacement in His own Person. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Priesthood. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Sacrifice, the Mass.
And it is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that is the religion of the Hebrew Scriptures. Including the two Books of Maccabees, the origin of Hanukkah. The true form of which, as of so much else, is Christmas.
Judaism cannot be a reaction against Christianity because it preceded Christianity by so many centuries.
However, Christianity is clearly Jewish and Christ was promised in the Hebrew Scriptures.
No, Judaism is not many centuries older than Christianity. You are thinking of the Old Testament, which is not the same thing.
I don’t think that Judaism can be a reaction against Christianity as it precedes Christianity by many centuries.
It doesn’t. The first thing that undergraduates are taught about the Old Testament is that its religion “is not Judaism”.
What a load of rot. The Christian Biblical canon varies across the Catholic, Protestant, Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac Churches. None of the many canons existed during the life of Christ or any of his Apostles, all were fluid for centuries and, in the Western Church not fixed until over three centuries after Christ.
To aver that Christianity predates Judaism is gross ignorance and that the later exists as a reaction against the former is beyond ridiculous.
You are used to being agreed with, aren’t you?
In response to David Lindsey below: Judaism is continually evolving via contemporary and localised adaptations on ancient themes. That is why Judaism is ancient yet forever young.
Rabbinic Judaism is an offshoot of Pharisaic Judaism (as was Jesus’ own philosophy) that came to prominencein Hasmonean times. Therefore it is intimately related to the Maccabee revolution and the ideology behind it.
Yes, there are practices in Judaism that are reactions to neighbouring practices (including Christian). One example re Jewish Nazarenes, dating from the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-135 ce, is the 19th Amida Blessing (“Minim”).
Jesus’ stance on the Sabbath is definitely Pharasaic. It is the doctrine of “Piqua`h Nefesh” deriving from the Torah (Deut.5:30) and Prophets (Ezekiel 20:11).
And while monogomy is the general rule amongst Jews it is only mandated amongst Ashkenazim. I am descended from the younger of two simultaneous wives in the late 18th century.
Pharisaic Judaism is one branch of the fruitful encounter between Judaism and Greeks. Pauline Christianity is another.