A Long-Dry Wadi

Stirrings in the depths

Part 1

In 1936, Carl Jung wrote his Essay on Wotan, in which he argued that the rise of the Nazis represented the awakening of the ancient national archetype of the pagan Germanic god Wotan (Odin.) Wotan was a hunter, a wanderer, the god of the storm, of rage and secret knowledge. To Jung, Nietzsche was his prophet, Hitler possessed by him.

Jung saw archetypes as old riverbeds; the wadi may be dry for centuries or millennia, but eventually there’s a storm and the river runs again with a torrent. In Wotan’s case, World War One and its revolutionary aftermath laid the foundations for his awakening.

We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement, and right at the beginning the blood of several sheep was shed in honour of his resurrection. Armed with rucksack and lute, blond youths, and sometimes girls as well, were to be seen as restless wanderers on every road from the North Cape to Sicily, faithful votaries of the roving god. Later, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journeys. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-year-olds to veterans, and produced a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move.

The consequences of Wotan’s awakening were so evil and horrifying that Jung’s summary 1945 essay After The Catastrophe did not discuss him any more, rather seeking the roots of Nazi behavior in human alienation and dependence on the state, Hitler’s individual psychopathology, the Faustian spirit at the heart of the European psyche.

The accumulation of urban, industrialized masses- of people torn from the soil, engaged in one-sided employment, and lacking every healthy instinct, even that of self-preservation. Loss of the instinct of self-preservation can be measured in terms of dependence on the state...Dependence on the State means that everybody relies on everybody else instead of on himself. Every man hangs on to the next and enjoys a false feeling of security, for one is still hanging in the air even when hanging in the company of ten thousand other people. The only difference is that one is no longer aware of one's own insecurity. The increasing dependence on the State is anything but a healthy symptom; it means that the whole nation is in a fair way to becoming a herd of sheep, constantly relying on a shepherd to drive them into good pastures.

Nonetheless, the earlier essay was correct; archetypes-patterns of thought and behavior-exist. Some are universal, and others belong to nations and families. They may lie dormant for a long time, and then come awake at a moment of crisis, roaring to life. They are not necessarily inherently good or evil but can be turned to either, informed by free will and context.

Part 2

Christopher Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road describes the First Story, an archetypical foundational myth of millennia of Eurasian empires. A child, rightful heir of a king, is cast out into the wilderness by an unjust ruler. There, he grows strong, a warrior. He returns to the court, as a subordinate, unjustly persecuted, escapes, acquires a “following of oath-sworn warriors,” “overthrows the tyrant and reestablishes justice in the kingdom [and] founds a new city or dynasty.”

What really mattered was that the unjust overlords who suppressed the righteous people and stole their wealth were finally overthrown, and the men who did the deed were national heroes. In each case the subject people lived for a time under the unjust rule of their conquerors, and as their vassals they fought for them. By fighting in their conquerors’ armies, the subject people acquired the life-style of steppe warriors…After the subject people had thoroughly assimilated their overlords’ steppe way of life, military techniques, political culture, and mythology, they eventually rebelled. If successful, they followed the ideal pattern told in the stories and became free, replacing their overlords as rulers of the steppe.

A key element of the story was the Comitatus, a war-band of friends sworn in loyalty to their leader, who would treat them with loyalty, rewarding them with wealth and honor. These bonds of loyalty unto death allowed the young Comitatus to be far more effective than its entrenched opponents, who had been corrupted by wealth and power, often mistrusted each other for political reasons and were generally less accepting of risk. Aside from the bravery and cohesion from which the Comitatus benefitted, its reputation for success and justice incentivized the incumbent government’s clients and allies to switch patrons. In its turn, the new empire would eventually become corrupt and unjust, alienating its subjects and clients and laying the foundation for the process to begin again.

This cycle was brought to an end by the rise of Modernism, whose core idea is that “what is modern-new and fashionable-is better than what it replaces.” Empowered by industrialization and urbanization, Modernism means a permanent revolution. Its modern form is populist governance, where all the innovation is done in the name of “the people,” who are themselves no longer truly people but “masses”. Modernism is inherently opposed to religion, education as the transmission of received wisdom, culture, art: all of these are based on traditional rules emerging from a natural order and thus must be destroyed, since what is new is good and what is old is bad. Only the ability to impose change, itself determined by money, power and prestige, has value. The key sacrament is the rejection of what came before, even if that itself came as the rejection of its own predecessor. Ultimately, reason, justice and beauty no longer have an independent existence; whatever those in power say is reasonable, just and beautiful, is.

A key part of Modernism is institutions. Individuals are interchangeable. Party chairmen, university chancellors, generals come and go. The party, university, army remains, operating according to its own arbitrary rules. Even if a determined individual secretly interested in truth and justice were to infiltrate an institution and rise to its top, he would find that diverging from those rules would at best mean that his subordinates felt no obligation to listen to him, reducing him to a marionette. At worst, he’d find himself removed and condemned to infamy and ridicule. Postmodernism is, to Beckwith, “hyper-Modernism”, the same but more so, explicitly denying that which Modernism denies implicitly.

The wadi of the First Story and the Comitatus, made of bonds of personal love, loyalty and courage has run dry. In its place, you can find weak emulations, such as those in the military and police departments, paying lip service to loyalty and courage, while heavily relying upon the carrot of pensions and the stick of legal punishment.

Part 3

What does any of this have to do with us Jews? Aren’t these all goyishe schtick? No. “Jews are like everyone else, only more so.” The First Story is echoed in the Torah in several places, most relevantly in the life of King David, a despised son of questionable parentage, exiled into the wilderness to herd his father’s flocks, fighting off lions and bears, to be elevated to a warrior in King Saul’s court. Transgressed against by King Saul, David fled for his life to the wilderness, where he gathered a Comitatus of Mighty Men, warriors whose loyalty to him was bonded by their shared origins in hardship: “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.” Eventually, David established his dynasty, which will be reestablished in the Messianic Age.

David’s story is not just an episode in the Torah, but an ongoing part of our lives. All religious Jews pray three times a day for the reestablishment of the Davidic kingdom, read David’s Psalms daily, are familiar with David’s biography. For two thousand years, the streambed was dry; exiled in the lands of strangers as largely urban dwellers, always living at their mercy, we could not reenact this archetypical tale, except perhaps partially as very un-Jewish criminals or revolutionaries. Religious Jews reenacted different archetypes, those of the rabbis of the Talmud who lived by God’s grace and their wits, not as warriors (Rabbi Akiva in Bar Kokhba’s revolt being the exception that proved the rule.) When we returned to the Land en masse, it was within the framework of the Zionist movement, itself a very Modernist, institutional phenomenon. The brief, shining career of Avraham Stern was cut short by the British before he could emerge as a modern-day reenactor of the archetype. His successors’ ambitions were much more limited and ended with the flight of the British, deferring actual rule to gray company men and the Zionist institutions they headed.

The Modernist nature of the Zionist state gave way to the Postmodernism of the Post-Zionists; the Jew-ish values of the former replaced by the explicitly anti-Jewish lack of values of the latter, with an occasional veneer of lip service to the “Jewish and democratic nature of the state.” The institutions of the first decades of Israel’s existence at least claimed to espouse national values and interests. Today’s Israeli institutions don’t even do that. The cultural sphere reflects this degeneration; where Israeli architecture, art and music of the post-independence period aped those of Europe of decades past, their modern day equivalents are simply less than nothing, ranging from the hideous boxes of Ramat Gan to the grunting of Static and Ben El. Israelis became as dependent on the State, as divorced from the instinct of self-preservation, as the Germans Jung described in After The Catastrophe.

Part 4

The origin story of the Hilltop Youth or Baladi movement goes something like this. Their parents were fervent Religious Zionists, the disciples of Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook in some sense. As young people in the 1970s and 80s, they came to the newly liberated land of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and East Jerusalem and built their lives, holding out against Arab terrorism and state harassment. They served in the IDF, worked and learned, suffered privation gladly and saw themselves as the new silver platter of the State, those whose sacrifices would make it become what it had always been meant to be, the fulfillment of millennia of prophecy and yearning. Every betrayal, desecration and show of weakness by the state right up to Oslo was reframed as a step in that process, full of difficulty and stumbling and yet holy and ultimately moving to a holy goal. The state itself was holy in some sense, an instrument of God’s will, and as such it was forbidden to criticize or question except in this particular or that one. The state was to be loved, with acts of compliance like filing one’s taxes or crossing the street on green becoming reframed as acts of love, even if it showed no sign of loving us.

This schizophrenia culminated in the expulsion of Religious Zionist Jews from Gush Katif by their beloved state, the destruction of their homes by the IDF and the betrayal of their land into the hands of the murderous Gazan Arabs. The children of those Jews watched their parents’ ideology go bankrupt and die. The majority did what the majority always does: comply and live with cognitive dissonance as a fact of life. But there were a few dozen who saw things differently.

If the State of Israel betrays the Land of Israel and the People of Israel, they reasoned, then so much the worse for the State. We will continue to settle the Land. If the State doesn’t allow us to build houses, we will live in tents in the desert, just as the Bedouins do. If the State does nothing to them, how can it touch us?

Living in the wilderness, they turned into young adults and started families. They learned to earn a living and provide security for themselves in clashes with the local Arabs. The State harassed them. The modern logic of conflict management, of a bureaucracy using the problem it’s nominally tasked with solving as justification for its perpetual existence and growth, applies to the branch of the Shin Bet tasked with targeting Jewish extremists as much as to any other government agency. One effect of the persistent low-grade harassment and surveillance was that no identifiable leader emerged, neither in the political nor the ideological sense; prominence is a recipe for administrative arrests and endless harassment, and people who start having kids early and have as many as possible do not want to watch them grow up through visiting room plexiglass. Another effect is that no cohesive, explicit ideology has emerged; there are Breslovers, Chabadniks, Maimonideans, arsim, intellectuals. There are general principles, commonalities in worldview and style, but nothing set in stone.

As the movement matured, some of its members dropped out and joined normative Israeli society. Others allowed themselves to be coopted by mainstream politicians and institutions on the right. When it comes to former Hilltop Youth working for the establishment as personified by Amana, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and so on, it’s not clear who’s using whom. It may be irrelevant; what’s important is that the core group remains and grows, out there in the desert, a Comitatus waiting for its leader.

We can see the first trickles of water down the giant, desolate wadi, and hear the distant roar of a flood up the canyon.