My Yom Kippur atonement
A look at the sophistry and the selective bullshit moralizing that’s built into the Jewish textual-interpretive tradition.
Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A heavy moral day for Jews, as Israel and the majority of Jews worldwide back an ongoing genocide in Gaza and a widening regional massacre in Lebanon and the West Bank.
The Jewish tradition likes to sermonize, especially on big days like this when you’re supposed to fast and think about your sins. Naturally on these days the Torah or the Hebrew Bible is used by a rabbi to draw out a moral lesson and biblical parallel for today’s believers. Since I’m now an independent rabbi — or, rather, an anti-rabbi — I’d like to follow in this tradition by highlighting one of my favorite prophetic bits so far: Ezekiel. And specifically: Ezekiel 36.
Ezekiel is a wacky, moralistic prophet of the Babylonian exile period, when the priestly and political class got deported from Jerusalem about 600 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. YHWH talks to him. And YHWH says he is not happy with the his Chosen People. That’s natural enough. All the priests have been booted out of Jerusalem. So the godly entity that is YHWH tells Ezekiel they it had cast the Israelites out of the Holy Land and destroyed Jerusalem because of their moral corruption…because of their lack of faith…their love of earthly pleasures…their idolatry…their neglect of the needy and the poor. Ezekiel likens, metaphorically, the Jews to a beautiful woman who had ruined herself, becoming a whore who lusted after giant (Egyptian) dicks and dildos and copulated with anyone who passed by. “You played the whore with the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors … You befouled your beauty and spread your legs for every passerby.”
That’s the bad stuff. Then comes the redemption.
In Ezekiel 36, YHWH tells Ezekiel that it will restore the Israelites to their former glory. It will rescue them from their exile and misery and second-class exiled status. Great! Those ancient Jews must have been doing something right! They must have been moral again, following all of YHWH’s commandments and all that. Right? Well…not exactly.
YHWH complaining to Ezekiel about the Jews. “Oy Ezekiel! The indigestion you people give me!”
See YHWH tells Ezekiel that it is bringing the Israelites back to Israel not for the Israelites but for itself, for the entity known as YHWH. See, living in exile, among other nations, the Israelites had continued in their depraved and sinful ways. As a result, YHWH’s reputation was suffering. In fact, YHWH rep was so bad now among the foreign nations where these scattered Israelites dwelled that people there weren’t seeking him out anymore. The ancient Jews were turning people off from YHWH. The Jews were ruining the brand. His Yelp page was getting downvoted. YHWH was worried about the business!
The Israelites, implies Ezekiel, were downright embarrassing. They were ruining their sky god’s name. You can’t let these folks out in public!
And so YHWH tells Ezekiel it has no choice but to bring his defiled Chosen People back to the land that it had promised them…it has to restore them to their former wealth and glory. It’s a bummer, really. YHWH doesn’t sound like it wants to do it. But even a sky god gets no free ride in this world. Even YHWH has got to do the work.
What modern political lesson can we draw from this? Well…a lot of things. As many things as you I can invent. And I can invent quite a few. But lets take a stab at:
Ezekiel 36 can be read as an alternative reading to the foundation of Israel and as a rebuttal of the Hasidic version of ancient zionism: that Jews will only be allowed to go back to the Holy Land when they become pure and holy again. In Ezekiel’s version, YHWH allowed to the Jews to come back for the opposite reason: because they were wicked and full of sin, not because of their purity. And it had nothing to do with the Jews at all. It was all about YHWH petty godly whims. It was about YHWH’s obsession with status. It was about god’s low self-esteem.
Then there’s the strange line in the end of Ezekiel 36 implying that YHWH wants new customers and new believers. That doesn't square with the whole Chosen People story we Jews have concocted for ourselves. If Jews are so chosen and so special then why is our sky god shopping around for new clients? This can be interpreted as deflating our special status…to argue against the gross concept of Jewish supremacy that permeates both secular and religious Jewish culture.
If you want to prove to yourself that Jews are somehow uniquely debased…