Word Nerd

I’m a word nerd. I love to geek-out on alliteration, etymology, and collective nouns. I believe that words matter a lot. The ancient rabbis said that “words create worlds.” Most of the world's religions agree that the world was sung, spoken or chanted into being. The magical invocation “abracadabra” derives from the Aramaic phrase “I create as I speak,” or “What I said has been done.” I do believe that words are the seeds of creation, but I don’t know if I believe that words are violence, as some progressives assert. This 15 minute podcast offers some very compelling insight and is well worth a listen.

Lately I’ve been contemplating the word “enemy.”

I don’t think I’ve ever used the word enemy. Okay maybe as a small child when complaining about my brother's bullying! But a friend used the word recently and I found it quite jarring. It created a kind of ripple in my system. I definitely felt uncomfortable with the term.

A week or so later, a ceremonial elder of mine said something about how we need to dismantle the very concept of having an enemy. I appreciated her perspective; it made spiritual sense to me.

But then I listened to Sam Harris’ podcast, and that spiritual perspective seemed utterly naive.

“There is no substitute for understanding what our enemies actually want and believe. I’m pretty sure that many of you listening to this aren’t even comfortable with my use of the term “enemy,” because you don’t want to believe that you have any. I understand that. But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7th were practicing their religion, sincerely. They were being every bit as spiritual, from their point of view, as the trance dancers at the Supernova festival were being from theirs. They were equally devoted to their highest values. Equally uplifted. Ecstatic. Amazed at their good fortune. They wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone. Let this image land in your brain: They were shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) all day long, as they murdered women and children. And these people are now being celebrated the world over by those who understand exactly what they did.

That definitely woke me up. Especially having just read this article by Somalian born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a black, ex-Muslim woman who is not the least bit confused about Islamic religious fanaticism, or the threat that it poses to open societies everywhere.

Then I remembered hearing the word enemy in Leonard Cohen’s song “Lover, Lover, Lover” a few weeks ago. He wrote it while he was in Israel during the Yom Kippur war in 1973. In the song, he uses the word in the context of a blessing for the soldiers. 

“And may the spirit of this song,
May it rise up pure and free.
May it be a shield for you,
A shield against the enemy.”

I love blessings. I would go as far as to say that blessings are my mother tongue. I understand in my bones how blessings can be a shield, but now, more than ever before, I also sense their limitations. Leonard was singing this song to auditoriums full of Israeli soldiers, some of whom would be dead by the end of the week. If/how/where art and war meet, and prayer and activism meet, is one of the central quandaries of my life right now. As in… When is a song, a blessing or a prayer a shield, and when is that line of thinking a delusion?

So the word “enemy” is on my radar and in my lexicon, and I am paying attention to how and when it is used.

***

Earlier on I mentioned an article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. About 9/11 she said:

“At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West—politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts—who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi. This excuse-making was not only condescending toward Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of U.S. foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war.”

I was one of the people who did not take that terrorist attack at face value. I was immediately seduced by anti-West rhetoric, and I automatically assumed the worst about the United States. I was in New York on 9/11. I saw what happened. And yet I adopted a similar line of thinking... “We must be a terrible country if people hate us enough to do something like that to us,” was my logic. And off I went to travel the world, to romanticize foreign countries and cultures, and criticize my country of birth every chance I got. The same country that gave my grandfather’s family refuge when they fled Nazi Europe.

Here’s an excerpt from a letter that my maternal great-grandfather hand wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 asking for entrance into the USA when Poland was becoming inhospitable towards Jews.

Of course I loved being an American when I listened my best friends in high school describe what it was like growing up in Russia, Georgia and Ukraine without the same freedoms I now took for-granted!!

Look, Israel isn’t perfect, and nor, to be sure, is the United States. But I am exceptionally grateful to live in a democratic country, and I am deeply troubled the the fact that our various political shortcomings blind us from acknowledging far greater atrocities and abuses around the world, including dictators who slaughter their own people en masse.

I have long identified as a very liberal and progressive person, but I am waking up to the dangerous distortions, double standards and deep flaws within progressive movements and ideologies: the selective outrage, the social justice psychosis, the luxury beliefs, the enabling of radicalism, and yes, the glaring #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew hypocrisy.

I was blissfully unaware that I had any enemies. I was unaware that so many people hated Jews (and therefore me by association,) and I was unaware that all of us open society dwelling humans, in the form of jihadism, have enemies, too.