Frittered away sovereignty

Before we can tackle shemitta, and, indeed, before we can even study shemitta we need to study Leviticus 26, the tokhachah, the chapter that describes the exile and the attitude of the remnants of Israel who are living in exile and trying to come to terms with the failures of the generations that lost the homeland and frittered away its sovereignty. 

The more serious problem for the Jewish people is deep pessimism that masquerades as dark humor but that, in fact, keeps anyone from daring to undertake bold things in and through the halachic world. 

The observant have become cowards, and cowards cannot merit a homeland. Had the Lubavitcher Rebbe really wished to hasten the coming of the Messiah, he would have done better to teach the observant the merits of fortitude. 

Self-restraint

To honor God's covenant with Man requires Man to work less than the maximum. It requires self-restraint. 

God draws Himself in to make room for Man, and Man must do likewise to make room for God. Man and God exchange self-restraints with each other. The relationship between the parties in covenant is diplomatic. 

Remove the self-restraint and you see revealed hubris. That same self-restraint is essential to the Constitutional balance of power. 

The three co-equal branches of government must exercise self-restraint and diplomatic decorum to honor the covenantal character of their relationship with each other, of their relationship with the several states, and of their relationship with the people. To arrogate power to one branch over the objections of the other branches, or to arrogate power to the Federal branch over the objection of the state branches risks arrogating power away from the populace. 

That trifecta of hubris is precisely what the Cheney/Bush administration was guilty of. 

The first job

The chief objective civil society will need to pursue as collapse approaches will be to relieve the power elites of their duties and responsibilities before they can do any damage. 

As collapse nears people will need to administer a silent revolution to remove the bureaucrats and the functionairies from their offices so that as the calamity unfolds a different hierarchy, more dedicated to sacred purpose, can take over and do God's work. 

The first job will have to be to decapitate the military and the police. 

Resist

Since 9/11/2001 the American people have been consistently misled about the meaning of what happened on that day. Americans have been living in a society that has become fundamentally untrustworthy. As such America has become a society that no longer deserves to be trusted. 

"It's possible to imagine a reality that diverged from September 11 onward, a reality in which the first thing affirmed was the unconquerable vitality of civil society, the strength of bonds of affection against violence, of open public life against the stealth and arrogance of the attack." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 221). 

Seen in this light, the question people face is which people do they love; in which people do they want to invest their faith; with whom do they want to live out their lives and to join in struggle against the forces of oppression that come out of the institutional biases of the power elites. 

People need to resist the power elites even when they are members of the power elites because they cannot make their lives with the power elite, they can only make their lives with the ordinary members of their civil society. 

The empire of liberty

The United States is the empire of liberty. Its failures are the failures of an excess of individuality, self-reliance and autonomy. 

The United States has overshot the ethic of individuality so that it has eradicated the ordinary functioning of the communal sector. 

In a society where no-one wants to be obliged to anyone else, everyone ends up isolated and atomized. 

Honor & power

If the road to power is through honor, and the right owns the power narrative, then how ought the left to go about framing the matter of honor for the nation? 

To become political beings

Slavery is the loss of political autonomy. Slaves can neither create nor can they act with political intent. 

When the Old One takes the Children of Israel out of slavery and into freedom, He does so in order to enable them to become political beings, able to wield political power. 

The Rule of God

It became necessary to establish the Rights of Man when it was no longer possible to conduct human affairs under the Rule of God. 

As constitutions replaced the notion of the divine covenant so a code of basic human rights came to take the place of a divine beneficence. 

Negative political sentiments

The problem with democratic politics is that people can organize around negative sentiments just as easily (and often more easily) as they can around positive sentiments. Interests can be negative and full of anger, hatred and resentment just as they can be positive and full of ambition, drive and determination. Absent the institutional guidance of a well functioning social order the negative interests and the parties that represent them have an easier time of it in the public arena than do the positive interests and their parties. 

The deeper point of politics is not ideology but flavor. Left vs right is less important than positive vs negative. 

The negative political mood is the one that craves leadership and inevitably turns to strongman rule. 

Cashing out the American corporation

With the Chinese labor factor so inexpensive, the capital allocation decision on the part of the American corporate manager becomes suspect. It could be this is why there's something fishy about the excessive compensation the managers of American corporations are getting. 

Once the value of the corporation becomes financialized the temptation becomes irresistible for the corporate leadership to treat the corporate life like an asset and to take the alienable surplus for themselves. The high corporate compensation is thus a symptom of the cashing out of the American corporate sector. 

The managers are treating the corporations like assets they're inclined to sell off rather than like businesses they're hired to run. There's little point in running the corporations as businesses because the growth opportunities for the businesses are evaporating. Wherever growth opportunities diminish, the incentive to cash out the asset value of the enterprise goes up, at which point the managers’ honor code to run the company for the sake of the shareholders breaks down. Instead it becomes rational for the managers to liquidate the corporate assets and to keep for themselves as much of the cash as is seemly. 

Once they're cashing out, there's little inclination to pass along the value; they might as well hoard it for themselves. Like the American military, which is being corrupted by the paying off of the leadership, to the detriment of the lower ranks, so the American corporate leadership is, in a sense, paying itself off, to the detriment of the American stockholder and the American citizen. 

A test for the gentile world

To go into exile is to be subject to life as a stranger, as an alien, as a stateless person, outside the pale of ordinary political life. The Jewish diaspora was, of course, a test for the Jewish people. It was as well, though, also a test for the gentile world. It was important for God to see how kind the gentile world could be to the 'stranger' nation. 

The coming world-wide armaggedon in the twilight of the oil gods will be the result, in no small part, of the abuse the world has been heaping on the Jewish nation. More, more, more; and my own kind, my own kind, my own kind – these are the cries of the rational secularist, the one who denies the role of right-hemispheric God in the world. 

Israel teaching from the perch of a sovereign state

What the Masters failed to understand in the lead up to the Genocide was the political implication of the teachings of Moses. The Genocide was an instance where the world took the exilic character of the Jewish people at face value. They rendered the Jews truly stateless and homeless. In such a state, the Jews will either be cared for by the world's lovers of human rights or they will be exterminated. That was the test. We know how it turned out. 

'Never again' focuses on the wrong end of the matter. It is not about making sure the Jews are never again the butt of such a test, the point of taking lessons from the Genocide is for the world to understand how badly it failed the teachings of xenia. The UN is a pale response to so abject a failure. The world's lessons from the Genocide are going to have to be learned by Israel teaching it to them from the perch of a sovereign state. 

Either a Hebrew state or a Final solution

Just as Moshe set up the refuge cities when he began to establish the first State of Israel, so should the UN have set up a refuge country where all the world’s refugees would be entitled to enter and gain citizenship. No permanent refugee camps but a functioning country that has open borders for anyone needing a state's citizenship. That would truly be a Hebrew state. 

As it turned out, the means by which Europe dealt with stateless people was by herding them into concentration camps. Hitler didn't know what to do with his stateless Jews because no other nation agreed to take them ... so he gassed them to death as a final solution. 

Israel is a child of both Mesopotamia and Egypt

The meaning of Mesopotamia in the Bible is of a mature society that has moved past its prime. In the modern world Western Europe is Mesopotamia. Western Europe is the sterile but highly sophisticated culture that serves as the foundation for offspring cultures. Its science and art, if not its political/economics and religion, still remains as a legacy that deserves our appreciation and respect. 

In contrast to Western Europe/Mesopotamia stands the opposing empire, Egypt – the opposing cultures: variously Russia, Germany, China, the Muslim world, etc. Each claims to a vitality and a vibrancy the Western European culture seems to have lost. 

The Bible is a blueprint for how a legitimate authority might govern in a mature culture that enjoys the fruits of abundance and security. Mesopotamia is the example of how not to do it. Mesopotamia is the cautionary tale that says: too much sophistication will lead to sterility and not vitality. 

History can be seen to unfold as a series of Egypts vying to replace the spiritually depleted husks of a corresponding series of Mesopotamias. The narrative arc of the Bible is the narrative arc of history, writ large. The Bible situates Israel as the pivot around which the Egypts and the Mesopotamias contend with each other. Israel is a child of both Mesopotamia and Egypt. Israel plays out internally, within herself, the struggles of the contending empires and offers them first a neutrality they could trust; second, a buffer from each other they could appreciate; and, third, a solution to their differences they could adopt for themselves. The contending empires employ Israel as a defanged, safe, surrogate opposition, almost like a vaccine. The empires can use opposition to Israel as a way to develop their own cultural antibodies in their struggle with their opposing empires further away. 

Here is a narrative for the role Israel plays in world history that differs considerably from the role Israel plays in the Christian or Muslim narratives, narratives that serve their own Christian or Muslim imperial ambitions. We have, as it were, two competing narratives: the religious narrative where Judaism is the Mesopotamia to the daughter religions' Egypts vs the political narrative where Israel as the safe pivot between the old, sterile but sophisticated ancien regime contending with the young, fertile, brash but clumsy, rising empire. 

These two competing narratives play themselves out in two different stories of the internal struggles of the Jewish people: on the one (religious) hand, the narrative of a tired leadership that cannot muster the people as it struggles against the brash insurgents who wish repeatedly to return to Egypt's fleshpots; and, on the other (political) hand, the story of the rule of YHWH's followers who have incorporated a deeper understanding of the forces of history with which they are contending, where Joseph is Egypt; Reuven and Shimon are Mesopotamia; and Yehuda and Binyamin and Levi constitute the core of the Children of Israel. These two narratives play themselves out as, on the one hand, the diaspora narrative of religious Judaism wrestling with religious Christendom and religious Islam versus, on the other hand, the messianic narrative of political Israel wrestling with political Europe and political Arabia. 

Economic growth is a tool for acquiring power

Growth is the centerpiece of the effect of the economy on the Chinese society. Economic growth is a tool for acquiring power. The question is what other economic lever other than growth could give the society's authorities a handle on the management of the social order. 

To reconcile the nation with the state

It is not unusual for the nation and the state to be in conflct with each other. The role of the monarch, in principle, was to reconcile the nation with the state. 

With the modern era’s overthrow of the monarchy and the advent of popular sovereignty the administration of the state became a struggle between the ruling and the subject classes. What ended up holding together the interests of the state was a sense of unity that came from a common national origin. 

When people talk about a Jewish State they are playing with this tension between (natural) Jewish nationalism, on the one hand, and a state apparatus of all (legal) Israeli citizens, on the other. 

When YHWH is the monarch, the matter reverts to the monarchical original solution. 

To take the role of god onto himself

The truth of the political reality of a diety is that men will necessarily seek out gods, one way or another. Those gods can either be of the divine order or of the mundane order. When men become gods things don't really go any better than when the gods are in the heavens. 

And then there's the problem of a disenchanted society where, for a time, no gods exist. Birth rates seem to fall below replacement levels and present consumption demand overtakes present productive capacity so that such societies are unable to sustain themselves and the population members become susceptible to mass persuasion until some leader comes along to take the role of god onto himself – to become the glorious Fuhrer, father to his nation. 

A measure of talion

Why do societies cut back on government spending in a recession when the paradox of thrift clearly argues for extra counter-cyclical expenditures? Why the self-injury? Because when things turns down, people have a need for a measure of talion. They are not averse to the punishment, even seeking out the self-punishment implied in such action. 

To embrace desert – a bit of punitive justice – is to invite a cleansing, a purging of the putrifying excess that likely led to the downturn in the first place. 

There is a perverse logic to such collective behavior. 

Quick to blame

Israelis have a chip on their shoulders. It's not a Jewish thing, it's a Middle East thing. Israelis are quick to blame because they are quick to feel blamed. It makes for a smallness of mind, of spirit, and of possibility. 

In spite of the political machinery of the democracy

In the full maturity of the American democracy most of the real decisions are made outside the infra-structure of government. The real government function is happening in spite of the political machinery of the democracy rather than through it. 

The ruling elite’s ability at an industrial scale to manipulate public discourse has undermined the democratic processes and has destabilized the ship of the democratic state.