Bahrain, Biden and Bombast

For Jews around the world, and of course in the land of Israel, it is the season of the High Holy Days: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. There is an ancient tradition that “on Rosh Hashanah, all the world passes before God like sheep.” But beyond the expectation of the divine verdict, it is also a season of renewal and a time of hope. Nothing more epitomizes the longing for a better day than the “impossible dream” of peace between Israel and the Arab world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his people on Israel T.V., declaring: “It took us twenty-six years from the second peace agreement with an Arab state (Jordan) to the third peace agreement (with the UAE). And it took us not twenty-six years but twenty-nine days between a peace agreement with the third Arab state and the fourth Arab state (Bahrain). And there will be more…”

Some would call these developments nothing short of miraculous. Yet it is clear that their catalyst was none other than the great dealmaker, President Donald Trump, and his skillful Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner. For Joe Biden, by contrast, such peace deals are not miracles; they are “accidents.” He remarked: “I think Trump is going to accidentally do something positive here, in terms of this issue of … other Arab states.” It goes without saying, however, that for the people of Israel, who have lived in a state of cold war if not hot war with their Arab neighbors since the birth of their nation in 1948, these developments are infinitely more providential than accidental. 

The latest peace agreement, with Bahrain, was announced on the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11. Leading Israel's newscast that Sabbath Eve was a melody by the celebrated songstress of the Jewish state, the late Naomi Shemer. Its hauntingly beautiful refrain went out over the airwaves and the internet: “After the Holidays all will be renewed; Our daily life will return and be refreshed; The air, the dust, the rain, the fire; You too, you too will be renewed.” 

In today's cynical culture and vulgar political climate, it's easy to become jaded, to miss the “miracle on the Mediterranean” that today’s Israel represents. For Joe Biden and the Democrat Party operatives who feed him his lines, it’s much easier to frame not only American culture but the world at large in terms of identity politics, to harp on the essentially Marxist narrative of the “oppressors” and the “oppressed.” Biden’s party views the Palestinians as the oppressed ones, though the terrorist cadre among them have perpetrated untold acts of murderous aggression against innocent Israeli civilians. 

Their Jewish neighbors, by contrast, are without question members of the most persecuted ethnic group in all of human history. They have suffered exile, dispersion, and near annihilation at the hands of genocidal Nazis. Now that a new diplomatic horizon is presenting itself for this truly persecuted people, it suits America’s minions of the radical left to frame it as happenstance. But in the Jewish state, suffering like so many countries from the China Virus, the coming Days of Awe are indeed days of hope. And for the UAE and Bahrain, Israel at last “is real.”

Famous Amos

Famous Amos

True prophets are often the ones we least suspect of greatness. In the case of ancient Israel they often lacked social standing and possessed no special pedigree. Their authority derived solely from the power of their message. So it was with a remarkable man of righteous indignation, who arrived on the scene in the middle of the eighth century before the Common Era. His name was Amos, from a small city in Judah called Tekoa about 6 miles south of Bethlehem and eleven from Jerusalem. By this time in the history of Israel the once united kingdom of David and Solomon had irrevocably split in two. Ten northern tribes had created their own kingdom, while only Benjamin and Judah, from which Amos hailed, remained in the south. Little did anyone realize that this man Amos would be at the vanguard of Israel‘s ancient social justice movement. Oddly, we don’t know a lot about him.

Who or What Is a Prophet?

The immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. still echo in our ears: “I have a dream today.” They were a clarion call for what became one of the great movements of the modern world. Of course I’m talking about the social justice movement. The idea that all should be treated, not according to wealth or social class, but according to the content of their character. Of course Dr. king didn’t invent the idea of social justice. A century and a half ago Abraham Lincoln thunderously declared that all people are created equal. But he didn’t invent such ideas either. Nor did the framers of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Don’t you suppose it would be helpful to figure out how and when this curious notion of human rights originated?

Digging Up Abraham

They called him "the father of pots.” It takes a certain kind of temperament to spend one's life digging around in the dirt. But eccentric Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie understood how archaeology would henceforth and forever be defined: the study of pots. It was he who declared that the construction of the ancient past is best accomplished not by considering gigantic monuments left behind, but by piecing together the tiny remnants of broken earthenware, the "unconsidered trifles.”

However, in the last decade of the 19th century Petrie was destined to stumble upon something that, while previously unconsidered, was hardly a trifle. It would in fact write a new chapter in the contentious field of biblical archaeology. Who was this William Flinders Petrie? The grandson of the first person to map Australia, here was a fellow with exploration in his blood. A sickly child, his mother, a scholar in her own right, taught him Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Though he lacked formal education, his father taught him surveying, which contributed to his later career as an archaeologist. As an eight year old boy he overheard a family discussion of an archaeological dig of an ancient Roman villa on the Isle of Wight, and protested that the earth ought to be cleared away with care rather than roughly shoveled out. As an elderly man, he later wrote: “All that I have done since was there to begin with, so true it is that we can only develop what is born in the mind. I was already in archaeology by nature.”

Whose Holy Land?: Archaeology Meets Geopolitics in Today’s Middle East

Biblical Archaeology today is more than just an obscure field for academic eggheads. It’s a mine field, with implications that may well determine the course of events, geopolitically, for the Middle East and the entire world. It’s exciting enough that there are always “Indiana Jones” adventures lurking in the background, including fantastic new discoveries, as well as age-old discussions about the fate of the Ark of the Covenant, among other things. But more than that, there’s the modern struggle to flesh out a “narrative” – a story about the origins of the “Holy Land” and to whom it belongs. The artifacts of archaeology are more than just museum pieces; they’re the storytellers, witnesses in stone, relating, in unbiased fashion, what the unvarnished truth is behind who lived in this land and when. It’s not surprising then, that modern parties to the Middle East conflict would be locked in dispute about the ownership of the artifacts as well as the land. The bottom line is: Whoever controls the artifacts controls the narrative. And the narrative is what it’s all about.

Passover, Easter and the “Apocalypse”

 

Springtime is a season that's all about rebirth and renewal, and it also has as its spiritual centerpiece two religious holidays, Easter for Christians and Passover for Jews. But hardly anyone recognizes that each of these holiday has much in common with the other, though not as one might think. What I mean by that is that both Passover and Easter share an undercurrent of apocalypticism, the origin which is in Judaism itself. Indeed, the whole concept of eschatology, that is the “end of days,” normally associated with Christianity, is at its core Jewish, and intimately connected with the springtime feasts celebrated by both Jews and Christians.

Teaching the Most Depressing Subject on Earth: The Professor and the Green Screen

The history of the Holocaust. What a topic to have to teach! But of course I'm a professor, and that's my job. Complicating matters has been the fact that my course on the history of the Holocaust is totally online. So I'm supposed to assign some readings, ask for written responses, and hope we don't all die of boredom. No way! We have a gorgeous TV studio on campus, with state of the art editing equipment, a green screen, and even a Teleprompter. And nobody's using it. Of course I had to figure out exactly what to do with all this equipment. By now we've probably all seen at least a few examples of traditional video lectures, delivered by traditional professors in the traditional way. But let's face it; a lot of these are barely more engaging than reading a phone directory. The goal I've set for myself has been to reinvent teaching. Not just thinking outside the box, but teaching outside it! And that means you don't stand in front of the podium reading stale old notes. We’re producing television here; and that means it all starts with a script. I cut out everything extraneous and get to the nub of what I want to teach. Amazingly, I find that it's actually possible to compress what I would normally teach in an hour and a quarter down to 20 minutes or so. Naturally, a story like this involves a lot of historical characters. But rather than just talking about them, why not become them? All it takes is a little costuming, putting on an accent and maybe a few props. It dawned on me that I could become any number of characters in the larger saga. And the green screen can place me anywhere in the world. Of course I'll still be the professor, dressed in suit and tie, introducing the people I impersonate. But when the moment comes, it's off to the green room, where I do my costume change and return to shoot my character segment. The editing for that segment is all done in sepia color, with a filter that makes it all look like old time news real footage. The audio is even made to sound a bit tinny. What we produce in the end isn't really a university lecture at all. It's something akin to a documentary, though not exactly. What we've done is to invent a whole new medium. There's nothing like it anywhere. Potentially, we can take this far beyond the confines of academia. The possibilities are endless, and we're just getting started. Stay tuned...