Beyond all that failed modernity

About three centuries ago in Europe the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment brought in the modern era. At about the same time and in many ways as a result of the proliferation of that modernity the Jewish people in Europe and in the West underwent the Emancipation and began to experience their own Enlightenment pressures. The Industrial Revolution opened up large scale mass marketing opportunities and the development of large scale (military) technologies, both of which favored the advance of democratic nation-states that extolled the Enlightenment values. Those states emancipated their Jewish communities while the Enlightenment values in the host societies beckoned most Jewish individuals out of their traditional folds. 

Dealing with the after-effects and the side-effects of the Jewish exodus from their traditional political (increasingly clerical) frameworks (i.e., the Orthodox kahal) has defined most of Jewish experience throughout the modern era. In some places, like Germany and France and Russia, the Jewish exodus away from clerical control registered in the host culture as a harbinger of their own European modernity. Where the state leadership of the host societies were themselves weak, there a brand of virulent and exterminationist anti-Semitism found a congenial culture in which to grow. No Jewish community had the self-possession and self-understanding to define itself in the modernist public eye. As a result, the scoundrels and fanatics and plunderers in gentile societies were able to use their own definition of the Jews as levers for the gaining of control over their own societies. Ultimately, the establishment of the State of Israel was the natural, modernist response to the industrial-strength, mass-marketed, state-sponsored terrorism and genocide that came out of and alongside of the failed kahal of the early 20th century.

Now the modern era is coming to an end. The world is beginning to move past modernism: past the seductions of the Industrial Revolution; past the fascination with mass persuasion, mass communication, mass culture, and mass politics; and past the power of the democratic and market-driven nation-state. In short, the world is beginning to move past imperial America. Israel, because it lives in the interstices between empires, must be among the first to reframe its self-understanding so as to accommodate the post-modernist tide that is beginning to run throughout the world. Beyond the Industrial Revolution and beyond the Emancipation and the Enlightenment and the artificially inseminated mass movements that are being spawned by the industrial strength public relations campaigns of the ruling elites, beyond all of that failed modernity waits the ancient teachings of the biblical regime – Zionism 2.0.