28 January 2011

What happened to the vision of beneficence?

"Totalitarian movements use socialism and racism by emptying them of their utilitarian content, the interests of the class or the nation. The form of infallible prediction in which these concepts were presented has become more important than their content. The chief qualification of a mass leader has become his unending infaillibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 348). 
That the Genocide did not manage to disqualify the rabbinic regime is a clear example of this emptying of content the cult leaders are able to accomplish. 
How do we defeat the indoctrination of legitimacy? By introducing meaning into historical events. What happens has to matter. 
The collapse of scholarship in the Torah world results from the need of the now newly political heads of the ministerial leadership to achieve infallibility, and the only way to prove one's infallibility is for evidence not to matter. 
The problem with Torah scholarship is that it is hermetic to the meaning of the text and utterly indifferent to the meaning of occurences. Torah scholarship has no experimental process or method, ostensibly because the abstract world can reflect the spiritual world in a way that the material, experimental, evidence-based world cannot. Because evidence cannot matter, the material reality of the people and their interests and contentment likewise cannot matter. 
Thus does the spiritual leadership of a gentle people become cruel and self-serving. Why isn't the gentleness of the people offended by the cruelty and self-serving mendacity of their leadership? What happened to the vision of beneficence? When God is experienced as abusive it is not much of a leap to embrace his ministers as likewise abusive. 
So long as the people deserve God's punishment, the Torah leaders will be able to get away with their nonsense. The people have got to come to deserve God's forgiveness. The Dati leUmi conception of the undeservedness of the redemption is designed to preserve the leadership position of the rabbinic regime. 

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