"The rush to finish cooking ended just before sundown and 32-year-old Hannah, very pregnant with her sixth child, turned to me. 'Do you light?' she asked. For a moment I thought she was asking how I coped with power failures in the American economic twilight. She took me to the 10-by-12-foot living room. Just above a photograph of the spiritual father of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Avraham Kook, a bearded man with a fur-trimmed hat and heavy-lidded eyes, stood a row of candles on a tiny shelf. I suddenly recalled Friday evenings in my grandmother’s apartment in Philadelphia and was unnerved to find myself, an assimilated Jew—an atheist, no less—standing in Kiryat Arba, once again brushing up against Orthodoxy. I nonetheless took the matchbox, lit the candles, and stood there quietly for what I hoped was a decent interval.
Later Hannah filled me in on her theory of Jewish superiority: all of creation, she assured me, is suspended in a great chain of being. On the bottom: inanimate non-living things. A link farther up: animate vegetation. Then, non-human animal life. Next, animate non-Jews. On the top, of course, were the Jews. 'This may shock you,' she said, 'but I don’t really believe in democracy. We believe,' she faltered for a moment, glancing at Zvi who was sitting quietly beside us cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks expertly onto a plate, 'in theocracy. Right, Zvi?' 'Not exactly,' said Zvi. 'Not a theocracy. The government of God.'"
~ Ellen Cantarow
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-settlements-violence-gaza/
No comments:
Post a Comment