*Literally translated, “When the Messiah Comes.”
In actual usage, a sarcastic/dismissive response, to, for example, “When can I/we_____?” or “When will you/they______?” in reply, signifying “Never going to happen.” Or “Fuck that and forget it.”
I am a Jew.
I am also an atheist.
(To be clear, I am far more devout in regard to the latter than to the former. And by “devout,” I simply mean committed to the rejection of the supernatural in any and all ways. You’re welcome to embrace any sort of mythical nonsense you like, just so long as your holy cuddle doesn’t interfere with or impose on me or mine in any way.)
And, of course, this identification raises the hackles of the Orthodox and Conservative Tribal folk.
“How can you be an Atheist and call yourself a Jew?”
To their everlasting credit, the Reformed, or as they’re known around my house, Jewnitarians, couldn’t care less. They’re too busy looking for a cantor who can shred on the electric guitar.
And, of course, this identification confuses the Gentiles of all Christian persuasions.
“How can you be a Jew and call yourself an Atheist?”
Thankfully, those misbegotten Jews for Jesus, or as they’re known around my house, Christians, are just stymied enough to keep their distance. They’re too busy looking for new ways to play the victim.
And, of course, this identification barely raises an eyebrow among the Muslims.
“We knew you Yahouds were servants of Shaitan from word one!”
To be clear, the Hamastarians’ “Globalize the Intifada” is a call to genocidally wipe the globe clean of Jews, not just Israelis, cosmopolitan global infidels as we are by their standards.
For those of my devout fellow Jews who take umbrage at this presumption of mine, their definition of Jewishness is adherence to Mosaic law, dietary and spiritual, and an acceptance of the Old Testament as the word of God, or as they prefer it, G-D.
For the devout Christ enthusiasts out there, who can’t accept the coexistence of atheism and Judaism, take it up with your spiritual leaders whose hypocrisy is on speed dial these days; and for the Papists among you, consider your use of birth control as you regret that fourth child.
For the devout Islamists, hating Jews is almost as important a part of everyday life as potentially acting out the murder of those who depict images of Mohammed that are less than respectful to his preferred manifestation of God’s presence on Earth. See also, the 1972 Olympics. Or October 7—my birthday, by the way.
Regrets for any misunderstanding, but, despite the fact of my complete rejection of any and all of your gods, anthropomorphic or otherwise; despite the fact that I regard pork as one of nature’s perfect foods—I don’t care for seafood of any kind, so I have no problem avoiding shellfish—I fully accept that I am a member of a club from which I cannot resign, whether I chose to do so or not.
It might be further worth noting that I became an atheist while remaining a Jew in the week following my Bar Mitzvah.
I had contracted German measles (yes, German, and yes, unironically; the condition hadn’t been renamed Rubella for the public quite yet), and infected thirty people at the party.
Thirty. Talk about how to (phonetically) speak Hebrew and influence people.
In bed for that week in a feverish delirium, I lost whatever residual belief I had in the supernatural, and, thanks to bedridden hours of watching 1930s Warner Bros. gangster comedies, I came to understand that everyone, in those movies anyway, who was supposed to be stupid, characterized via the shorthand of accent and diction, sounded like me.
I shed what little remained of my belief system, mostly strands of what I’d learn soon enough to understand as pointless fear of the quasi-literary tropes of karma, irony and coincidence, and began the process of exchanging my “Okay you mugs” Brooklynese for the mid-Atlantic Mr. Know It All dialect in which I proselytize to friend and foe alike to this very day.
Funny that I should mention “proselytize…” because Jews, with a barely footnote worthy exception, don’t evangelize, unlike the Christians and Muslims, who have universally regarded any others, Jews, of course, in particular, as unworthy vermin to be crushed like bugs or converted to the true faith. Wanted, dead or alive. Of recent vintage, naturally, dead is the preferred state of affairs.
Despite the fact that it’s Crusade, not Jewsade, and Jihad, not Jewhad, Members of the Tribe are still universally identified as furtive, behind the scene movers and shakers who need to be taken down a notch or two…Evangelism as Subversion by Godless communists and soulless capitalists, depending upon which platform the accusers rail from.
The irony of both those faiths shoving their belief systems down any available throat, while depicting Jews as some insidious and surreptitious invasive force, seems to have been missed by the world at large.
I have always believed that the arrival of and acceptance as their respective messiahs might very well have been a justification for the shared just cause of eliminating the Chosen People. And, just to continue with the clarity, those fucking zealots can have all their Crusades and Intifadas.
Despite whatever assumptions, and yes, it is a generalization, but a generalization that carries more than its measure of truth, Jews just want to be left the fuck alone.
Of course, as we all know, the hatred of Jews is a time-honored tradition, waxing and waning for no particular reason over the millennia, lately making a big international comeback, in shiny new and breathtakingly exciting ways.
Consider that nowadays, you don’t have to be a mentally and morally challenged nazified skinhead to carry the banner—or, for that matter, the professionally silk-screened t-shirt—of 6MWE. For confirmation of this newfound universality, just remember all those White guilt plagued trust fund Ivy Leaguers culturally appropriating the Keffiyeh in order to cosplay a White savior hero of victim culture in the name of a faith that would behead those Ivy Leaguers as an act of that faith given less than half a chance.
The smarter skinheads, or perhaps more specifically, their billionaire masters, have to be watching all those campus rallies with admiration and envy, wishing they had their rightful share of useful idiots, too.
As noted above, the Chosen People are still waiting, bereft of bated breath, to be very sure, for the arrival of the Messiah. Those above-mentioned Jews for Jesus are often, but not necessarily, Landsmen, who grew weary waiting for Mshikh and just wanted to get on with it and get with the program, too.
Cowards, for whom patience is apparently not a virtue. And yes, I do judge.
And of course it’s the Jesus folks, and the Mohammed crowd, who will never be satisfied until everybody else experiences their ecstatic state of moral acuity and charismatic absolutism in regard to their respective messiahs…and will kill as many of those resistant to that ecstasy as possible, in the name of a peace-loving God of their respective understanding.
Jews, on the other hand, as noted above, do not encourage conversion, to say the very least, and the powers that be who wield the entrance exam for this club make it a raging pain in the ass to become a member of the tribe.
No multiple choice, I might add, although these days, Google might help.
Apropos of little or nothing, my wife is a converso—not for me, for fuck’s sake, for an earlier spouse. I finally convinced her decades ago that I was so good at being Jewish, I didn’t have to practice.
The only exception to the no welcome mat is the Lubavitchers, a loony messianic Hassidic subsect—as if the Hassidim weren’t fucked up enough, thank you very much—who accost young men they presume to be Jewish on the street and ask whether they have tied their tefillin (Leather thongs of a holy nature, often mistaken and/or misused for BDSM—shhh!) today.
So, to recapitulate-endlessly, I know, I know—I am a deeply secular person, with no interest or, even particular respect, for troglodytic supernaturalism of any stripe.
That said, I still remain inoculated with all the real and genuine tropes and ethnic traditions of Jewiness, the real and actual Yiddishkeit, as opposed to the cliched vaudevillian neurotic self deprecation nonsense the banally presumptuous bullshit gentile culture has come up with over the centuries.
I also remain appalled by the self-inflicted wounds of too many self-designated representatives of the various subtribes, who have contributed their own misbegotten two cents to this cluster fucked shit fest we find ourselves in today.
In this regard, in a world where irony isn’t even a barely recalled afterthought, after all, the allegedly satirical but actually connivingly swinish monetizing of that twatly epitome of piss poor protoplasm’s “Jewish Space Lasers” pronunciamento seems like really shitty optics to me.
“How more perfect can it be,” says the Jew baiter, “than a Jew exploiting such a remark for money. They’re all like that, you know. Except the communists. And you know how they are.”
To hammer home the obvious, these shitheads don’t get the joke.
And to finally get to the point, in my secularity, I have become deeply suspicious and discomfited by the invasion, conquest and subsequent transformation of so many aspects of society, and culture, high middle, and low, by the mannerisms, techniques, expectations (accompanied, of course, by concurrent disappointments), and, most specifically, the zealously performative fervid frenzy of the most hysterical aspects of religious life, as such behaviors apply themselves to everyday existence.
I take as a given the rank hypocrisy and moral hysteria of the Christ crowd, who cherry pick all of Apostle Paul (dead name: Saul)’s own cherry picking of the oral recollections of even then long dead credulous and easily bamboozled barbarians who likely regarded the wheel as a potentially evil idea, and use those misty eyed and concocted recollections for their own political gain.
And really now, when you commit an act of terrorism involving murder and rape in the name of your god, it seems a touch fatuous to have issues with the retaliation that follows such an outrage. And yet, as noted, nothing demands moral outrage and a demand for a ceasefire like Jews defending themselves. I mean, how dare they?
And, to confuse many of you even more, I am far from sympathetic to the orthodoxies of Orthodox Judaism. Among more than a few other issues, the subjugation of women is too fucking reminiscent of Ayatollatarianism to suit me, not to mention the sex workers I have known who count so many of the payot, tallit and yarmulke crowd as regular customers.
In sum, as someone with no personal relationship whatsoever with a supernatural, invisible and all too manipulable for your earthbound and venal purposes god, I remain a bit stunned at just how much the agony and ecstasy of religiosity and its innate public hysteria so completely informs so much of modern cultural interplay, separate and distinct from churches, mosques, and synagogues.
What were once simply frivolous time-wasting pleasures of popular culture, enjoyed by slivers of society, have now taken on the mantles of holy testaments of faith, to receive as holy writ by the chosen, or to reject in an enraged apostasy by the disaffected and disappointed.
I am on record as having expected to see a secular religion emerge in the late days of the last century, and the beginning of this one. I just assumed it would be about Elvis, not something so niche market as STAR WARS, for fuck’s sake.
“May the fourth be with you?” once again, for fuck’s sake. Every fucking year, a soulless multibillion dollar entertainment juggernaut is granted a wealth of free advertising by its audience for no good or even apparent reason other than to demonstrate by the witless that they aren’t really in on the joke, which is, of course, on them…
…And then, of course, there are those miserably apostate members of that audience, in denial of the obvious fact that they are too old for this shit, who blame the shit itself for not being as entertaining as it was when they were juvenilely, credulously, and emotionally available for such pandering fatuous shit.
And that’s not just Star Wars enthusiasm, of course. Rather, this agony and ecstasy, this worship and rejection, informs all fandom, toxic and proprietary in equally loathsome measure. Listening to people who drive, vote, spawn and use currency in exchange for goods and services earnestly and often angrily arguing over the merits of all things superlaserspacemonstersorcerer
We’ve already handed the house keys over to Plagiarism Software, so give up on that wrestling match, too.
That lost hope is exacerbated by the reality of the transfer of that same holy roller religious fervor to the secular space of politics and social behavior, social media, and actual human interaction, transcendent of political alignment or actual belief system.
Now it’s that that scares the screaming fuck out of me.
That religious fanatics are convinced of their own innate goodness in the name of the invisible deities they ostensibly serve and allegedly obey, despite all evidence to the contrary, is a given.
It’s the progressives, the secular left, and their now decades old adoption of the same fervid self-confidence, that unquestioning self-regard, and yes that complete conviction born of self-righteousness, none of which is tempered in any way by self-awareness or self-examination, that leaves me in despair and, yes, just a bit of terror.
As I and others have noted, there’s very little air between the shouts of “BLASPHEMY!” and “PROFANE!” from the supernaturalists, and the similar blurts of “PROBLEMATIC!” and “CONTROVERSIAL!” from the allegedly rational cadre.
This shared moral absolutism mistaking itself for virtue at first read to me as simply an extension of the all-too-common modern pandemic of philistinism…an assumption that an emotional reaction to anything is valid, as long as you’re the one having the emotional reaction.
That whole “My truth” bullshit is a perfect illustration of such miserably chicken shit third rate thinking.
And yes, that philistinism remains a major factor in this shared zealotry of ideologies. But wait. As on the Home Shopping Network, there’s more.
I’ve come to understand that, separate and distinct from that well known punditry-based horseshoe of left to right and back again, what we have here is a shared experience of untrained lives, of unexamined lives, of lives utterly lacking in interiority. Rather, this is existence defined by surface, by presentation, by superficiality wearing the beard of truth.
These are lives where self-regard has long supplanted self-awareness, as noted above. Where the idea of restraint of tongue, of pen, of feelings, has been recklessly abandoned in the name of self-righteous fury, in which those feelings are transmogrified by that unjustified self-confidence into facts, where cruelty requires no self-justification, because it speaks to some higher truth, in the name of a higher calling.
Some few years ago, when the term was waning in its value and had lost its social momentum except for among the latecomers to the game of cruelty and denunciation, some fellow insisted, earnestly and without irony, that “virtue signaling” did not exist. The naivete in his insistence was palpable, and I recognized—while others, unfortunately did not—that he was unbudgeable in his assertion.
The reality is, of course, that he was more concerned about the dangers of his fear of the implied misuse and misrepresentation of “…virtue…” than he was about what I consider far more telling, the “…signaling…” part of the equation.
The day after the World Trade Center was hit by those airplanes, murdering some three thousand people and forever altering the way of the world as we understood it, my wife and I drove on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, to have dinner at a regular spot of ours. What should have taken fifteen minutes stretched to forty-five, as the street was jammed with people waving flags, blocking traffic, demonstrating—signaling, to be specific—their sudden commitment to their newly minted patriotism.
There were shouts and declarations that indicated that this jingoism, this nationalism, was clearly perceived by those on the rant as some brave, reckless choice, a controversial take on the current event—as if their position was somehow an anomaly, representing some previously untapped outlaw strain of freedom.
For what it’s worth, the streets were filled with what resembled less a political rally or assembly, but rather a revival meeting, welcoming sinners back to the flock.
I knew then, and said so to my wife, who is kinder than I—a low bar, and a cool breeze to limbo under, to be sure, but still—that no good could come of this, and that we were well and truly fucked.
As this nascent nationalist craziness rapidly metastasized from pseudo politics into a crypto religious frenzy, exacerbated by the Crusades versus the Saracens arc subtextually, and not so subtextually, sold to the desperate and suddenly terrified to grant a mass murder the merit of a political act of war, all that holy roller shit became an alarming percentage of the language of what passed itself off as politics.
And whereas our previous international bete noires had traditionally been political systems which were anathema to our real and imagined way of life, we now had, and of course, still have, an enemy both politically and religiously alien to that way of life.
And, true to form, a disenchanted and countercultural segment of American culture stepped up to the plate to defend that bete noire, muddying the water in its own understanding of realpolitik, right or wrong, real, or imagined, and creating an opposition to this nascent nativist/populist franchise.
This passionate embrace of nationalism, fulfilling Sinclair Lewis’ prophecy of American Fascism arriving holding a cross and wrapped in a flag, finds its mirror image in the zealotry of the new so called progressive left, which is motivated by an ideology of identity so bereft of anything resembling depth and complexity as to be embarrassing in its oversimplification of actual humanity and its behaviors.
From my own liberal perspective, I find the progressive misrepresentation of Islamic politics, sexist, racist, religiously fervid to the point of occasional lunacy, and frankly medieval in its perspective on life as it is, as bereft of comprehension as I do the regressive misreading of the Anti-Christ as the Second Coming to the new Jerusalem.
It would be easy, too easy, I think, to facilely ascribe this widespread all-American lack of interiority to the dominance of the internet and its replacement, or perhaps better said displacement, of actual human interaction with digital connectivity. Rather, I think this mindset, of the presumption of intent trumping action, has been growing for decades, and can be laid at the feet of my generation, with their comical embrace, in that postwar generation’s early middle age, of self-actualization in lieu of self-examination.
Succeeding generations, including that just coming of age, have learned and elaborated on the lessons that navel gazing bullshit inoculated into every aspect of culture, from entertainment, to politics and religion, all of which are all too often regarded as arenas for the frenzied performance of virtue, to gain approval of those who share your beliefs, and to gain coup over those who don’t.
And while the philistines of the right wrap themselves in the flag and worship a corrupt and venal old man who promises to do their smiting for them, wielding a cross, I would imagine, their spiritual brothers on the left weaponize fragility in the name of victim culture…with a capacity for judgment untroubled by anything resembling nuance or complexity.
The gap between these two alien and alienated camps is also filled by a shared capacity for offense at any opportunity, not to mention a thoughtless and casual cruelty born of a narcissism and exacerbated by that utter lack of an inner life, performed with a self-righteous glee that would make Cotton Mather rigid with envy.
This century began with a mass murder that transformed this country in ways that were unimaginable only the day before. Within days of that event, I came to feel myself trapped in a no man’s land in a Holy War between two saber rattling religious empires, each consumed with the unimpeachable knowledge that God was on their side.
This was bad enough.
The fact that what was once my sociopolitical home base has now been transformed into a viper’s den of identitarian ideology, which, whether aware of it or not, has adopted all the tenets and manifestations of religious fanaticism, rejecting logic, reality and, all too frequently science with the same commitment as the true believers on the supernatural side do precisely that. And naturally, it is a given that “When we do it, it’s okay!”
Fuck them both.
Of course, this modern American duality has left me with nowhere to turn, nowhere to go—a rootless Cosmopolitan, figuratively if not literally. And to be clear, this feeling of dissociation derives from both my Jewishness, which sets me apart from all this overwrought hysteria in its very nature, and my atheism, which, of course, rejects that hysteria by the very nature of the rejection of belief.
And furthermore, it seems more than likely that the secular identitarians, in their self-righteously gleeful overconfidence, derived as noted by a lack of interiority and a complete unfamiliarity with actual people, are doing the devil’s work, and will ultimately resist themselves into a majority in a minority run authoritarian state…and congratulate themselves for having been right all along.
Finally, as noted, I am me of little faith…in the modern left, the modern right, or any messiahs to speak of.
As ever, I remain,
HOWARD VICTOR CHAYKIN, a Prince…of diminished expectations, to be sure, and grateful to have found at least one good reason to be grateful to be old.
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