I was live on Youtube discussing with a professor of Gentile Studies this week’s Torah portion of Vayigash — Genesis 44:18–47:27.
* It is a very different experience for me reading Genesis as a Jew vs as a Christian. As a Christian, the people in Genesis were characters in the Bible, religious figures, proto-Christians. As a Jew, these people feel like family, they feel like people I know, they’re the ancestors of my nation, which is an extended family. As a WASP, these characters did not feel close to me. They seemed primitive.
* The Jewish Bible doesn’t try to portray its Jewish heroes as one-dimensional and without flaws. Jews are named after the highly flawed Judah, son of Jacob, Joseph’s brother.
* Deciphering dreams seems to be a Jewish gift. Jews gave us psychology. Gypsies give us fortune telling. Gypsies are like low IQ Jews.
* Judah shows a ton of chutzpah speaking so directly to Joseph. You see classic Jewish verbal intensity. Judah says his father will die if Benjamin does not come home. “You’re killing me!” is a typical form of Jewish overstatement. “I’m dying here!”
* Jacob only loved the children of his wife Rachel. Genes matter. It is possible to love children not your own, just not as likely.
* Joseph sobbed to his brothers. Jews are more open with their emotions than WASPs.
* This clannish world is very different from the individualist WASP world, where WASPs don’t promise to kill their kids if XYZ does not happen. WASPs don’t tend to live through their children, unlike other groups.
* Pope John XXIII (baptized Joseph) greeted Jewish leaders in 1963: “I am your brother Joseph” and he proceeded to apologize for millenia of Christian anti-semitism.
One of the first acts of Pope John XXIII, in 1960, was to eliminate the description of Jews as perfidius (Latin for “perfidious” or “faithless”) in the prayer for the conversion of the Jews in the Good Friday liturgy. He interrupted the first Good Friday liturgy in his pontificate to address this issue when he first heard a celebrant refer to the Jews with that word. He also made a confession for the Church of the sin of anti-semitism through the centuries.[52]
While Vatican II was being held, John XXIII tasked Cardinal Augustin Bea with the creation of several important documents that pertained to reconciliation with Jewish people.
On the one hand, this feels good for Jews, but it may signal a weakness and decline in Christianity.
Both Jews texts and Christian texts express about equal hatred for the other, but I think only Christian texts contain prescriptions for genocides.
* Joseph, after torturing his brothers, says, “Don’t feel guilty for selling me into slavery.”
* Jewish life is intense because it is so communal and genetically linked. It’s not unknown to pray together, work together, socialize together. The most intense Jewish life is in Jerusalem. These intense family feuds remain a feature of Jewish life. Think about Jared Kushner’s father who hired a prostitute with a plan to film the exchange to try to compromise Jared’s uncle. “The witness-tampering charge arose from Kushner’s act of retaliation against William Schulder, his sister’s husband, who was cooperating with federal investigators; Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranged for an encounter between the two to be secretly recorded, and had the tape sent to his sister.” What kind of person would do such an elaborate and vicious thing?
Jared quickly called his father’s cell phone.
“Dad, are you all right?”
“Well, not really,” Charles Kushner said. “They’re going to arrest me today.”
“For what?” Jared blurted out. “Is it because of the tape? I thought your lawyers knew about that. I thought it’s not illegal.”
“Apparently they’re saying that it is,” Charles said…
Charles Kushner—everyone calls him Charlie—is, by any measure, a remarkable man. The child of Holocaust survivors, he has an engulfing charm and a palpable hunger for attention, and pushed himself to become a gifted businessman and Jersey kingmaker. “He loved being the Don Corleone of the community,” says a family friend. “He loved that when he walks into a synagogue the rabbis run over to him. Charlie saw himself as the Jewish Kennedy.” But beneath the charm there is a coiled aggressiveness. “Charlie’s good points are incredibly good,” a former employee says, “but if you cross him he becomes maniacal. He will crush you.”
* Most Jews through most of history have mostly lived in the diaspora.
* The Egyptians want to eat separately from Joseph’s family. Eating separately is universal, racist and must be overcome, says Dennis Prager.
* The brother sold Joseph for 20 pieces of silver, Joseph puts a silver goblet in the brothers’ possessions so he can blame them for stealing. Tricky legal reasoning! Not so much a WASP thing. Jews are known for trickery. Someone close to me bought a beautiful wool coat in the shuk in Jerusalem, but when the merchant wrapped it up, he substituted something far inferior. The outrage on our part was severe and clearly remembered almost 50 years later.
* This tricky reasoning shapes what we can discuss publicly. Steve Sailer wrote:
The last thing, however, that non-Jews are allowed to do in the U.S. is to objectively discuss the kind of psychological and sociological patterns that help explain why the quality of Jewish political and social decision-making has, on average, not always been as strong as their IQs, work ethic, argumentative skills, interest in public affairs, and self-confidence in their own judgment might suggest. The first President Bush understood this, but the second didn’t seem to have learned this lesson before the Iraq Attaq (although he seems to have learned a little in the aftermath, with Feith gone, Wolfowitz kicked upstairs, and Perle out of fashion).
What are some of these common self-debilitating Jewish tendencies? Off the top of my head, I’d suggest:
– Utopianism: Bombing Iraq into an America-loving democracy is only the latest disastrous project
– Cult-Worship- of- the-All-Knowing-Scholar-Sageism: Marxism, Freudianism, Randism, Straussianism, etc.
– Ethnocentric nostalgiaism: vividly seen in the current immigration debate, where Ellis Island-worship is substituted for facts and logic
– Be-Like-Meism: e.g., the common suggestion by Jewish pundits that all Mexican illegal immigrants have to do is act like the Jewish immigrants of 1906 and everything will turn out fine. Well, swell …
– Pseudo ethnic Humilityism: few Jews actually believe that Mexicans are just like Jews — they think Jews are much smarter — but they don’t want anybody else to notice that Jews are smarter so they advocate immigration policies that depend for their success upon Mexicans being just as smart as Jews. That this immigration policy is obviously bad for the country is less important than keeping up the charade that nobody mentions in the press that Jews are smarter than everybody else on average.
– Rube Goldbergism: overly complicated plans and analyses with too many moving parts to work reliably (e.g., the neocon plans for fixing the Middle East through invasion)
– Is-It-Good-for-the-Jewsism: I am a huge fan of enlightened self-interest, so I don’t object to this on principle
– Rube Goldbergian Is-It-Good-for-the-Jewsism: This could also be called He-Who-Says-A-Must-Say-B-C-D-E-Q-W-and-Zism. Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms.
– Missing-Piece-of-the-Puzzleism: One obvious problem with this tendency is that you can’t make a Rube Goldberg analysis work in the real world if you’ve banned the use of crucial moving parts, such as IQ
– Pay-No-Attention-to-that-Man-Behind-the-Curtainism: The biggest unmentionable, as the Mearsheimer-Walt brouhaha demonstrated once again, is also one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle for understanding how the modern world works: the influence of Jews.
– Enemy Nostalgiaism: Difficulty identifying current and future enemies because of emotional obsession with past enemies: e.g., the obsession with “The Passion of the Christ” combined with the inability to identify growing Latin American populism as a future threat due to immigration, etc.
– Faux Sabraism: as Francis Fukuyama pointed out to Charles Krauthammer, American neocon thinking about Iraq was motivated less by hardheaded is-it-good-for-Israel analysis — Sharon’s government was only modestly enthusiastic about the Iraq Attaq — than by What-Would-the-Israelis-Do emotions. Armchair warriors like Douglas Feith are particular susceptible to this kind of Let’s Pretend thinking..
Ironically, Jewish writers themselves are obsessed with Jewish influence, even in fields where Jews have virtually no influence, such as soccer.
* That Joseph had a divination cup indicates he was highly assimilated into Egypt, but when his brothers arrived, he was triggered back into Jewish identification.
* Do you believe in free will? I often feel in the control of forces greater than myself. Joseph tells his brothers not to feel bad about selling him into slavery. He says it was God’s will. Perhaps it is also God’s will that Jews run Hollywood and the Federal Reserve?
* The Pharoah was glad that Joseph would bring more Jews to Egypt, in contrast to the next pharoah (beginning of Exodus). Joseph gives his family pragmatic and honest advice — say you are cattlemen because Egyptians hate that work. When the Pharoah says to Joseph’s family, “The land of Egypt is before you — in the best part of the land settle your father and your brothers”, I wonder how the Egyptians felt about that? (Gen. 47:1-5)
* Joseph didn’t force the Egyptians to sell themselves into slavery (Gen. 47:15). He simply offered them a way to survive. Jews who’ve sold cheap loans, cheap liquor, cheap refis, didn’t force the goyim to become enslaved to them. They just made it easy. I am not sure the Torah is anti-slavery. It is anti-slavery when it comes to Jews being slaves, but it seems OK with the Egyptians selling themselves into slavery in a plan organized by Joseph.
Artscroll commentary on Gen. 47:20: “In practice, Joseph took possession of the land, but not of the people. According to Haamek Davar, the reason Joseph did not make them slaves was for the welfare of the state: He wanted them to remain self-supporting and not become wards of the government. Malbim emphasizes that a ruler must always feel responsible for the sustenance of his subjects; and it would have been wrong for Joseph to have made them slaves in return for bread.”
