Exegeting the Jewish Question/Problem.

The typical examination of the Jewish question, or problem, is often too quietly exercised since the examiner is usually busy tip-toeing through the tulips for fear of setting off accusations of antisemitism that litter the landscape like hidden landmines designed to blow up any deep examination of a question that's part and parcel of a quest into the very nature of human beingness, and thus the essence of a human being, itself, or himself. As is the case regarding an examination of mankind's deepest fear and loathing regarding his genesis, i.e., the veils that are layered and guarded so that the offending flesh of that genesis, the male organ, remains hidden from examination, so too a deep examination of the organ through which Western man comes into his most conscious being, existence, i.e., the Masoretic text of the Bible, is itself layered with veils that are guarded so that mankind might continue to live out his beleaguered and blind existence without dealing with shocks to his epistemology that he might not be prepared to endure.




John

I'm sorry, what exactly is the "Jewish problem" that we are not allowed to investigate?

Mister Emu said:

I'm sorry, what exactly is the "Jewish problem" that we are not allowed to investigate?

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I would say that if someone needs to ask what the problem is, then, for them, there isn't one. . . Which is a good thing. Problems, e.g., mathematical, political, ethnic/racial, suck. Theological problems probably suck the worst.



John

John D. Brey said:

I would say that if someone needs to ask what the problem is, then, for them, there isn't one. . . Which is a good thing. Problems, e.g., mathematical, political, ethnic/racial, suck. Theological problems probably suck the worst.



John

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In other words, the title is clickbait

dybmh said:

In other words, the title is clickbait

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Around here? Are you serious? . . . Well, then again, it reeled you in.



John

John D. Brey said:

The typical examination of the Jewish question, or problem, is often too quietly exercised since the examiner is usually busy tip-toeing through the tulips for fear of setting off accusations of antisemitism that litter the landscape like hidden landmines designed to blow up any deep examination of a question that's part and parcel of a quest into the very nature of human beingness, and thus the essence of a human being, itself, or himself. As is the case regarding an examination of mankind's deepest fear and loathing regarding his genesis, i.e., the veils that are layered and guarded so that the offending flesh of that genesis, the male organ, remains hidden from examination, so too a deep examination of the organ through which Western man comes into his most conscious being, existence, i.e., the Masoretic text of the Bible, is itself layered with veils that are guarded so that mankind might continue to live out his beleaguered and blind existence without dealing with shocks to his epistemology that he might not be prepared to endure.

O sancta simplicitas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! How we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences! how from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, lack of scruple and caution, heartiness, and gaiety of life - in order to enjoy life.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.​

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In Galatians 3:28, Paul equates Jew versus Gentile with the same sort of fundamental, substantial, real, duality that exists in male versus female. In the case of male flesh, versus female flesh, there's a genuine, substantial, real, difference, which according to Paul, inheres with reference to Jew versus Gentile. In the same sense a female can never truly experience "a man's world" (since the medium for exchange, her body, makes that impossible) in Paul's thinking, a Jew can never experience a Gentile's world, though we wouldn't be able to suggest with the same degree of confidence that the Jewish body makes that impossible. The medium of exchange, the Jewish body, is at first glance, merely ritually distinct, by means of the cut (brit milah) signifying or implying that the Jewish body is unique or distinct from the Gentile body.

In a thread here last year, Circumcision Scar as Memetic Prosthesis, the scar produced through ritual circumcision (brit milah) was argued to be a memetic prosthesis transforming the basic Gentile body into a Jewish body. In the argumentation in that thread, the production of this memetic prosthesis (the circumcision scar that transforms the formerly Gentile flesh into Jewish flesh) performs this stupendous theological feat by means of the peculiarity of a Jewish sort of incarnation of spirit (signified) and flesh (tangible sign). The sign/scar transforming Gentile flesh into Jewish flesh wouldn't, scientifically speaking, transform the Gentile flesh into a new kind of flesh as distinct from Gentile flesh as female flesh is distinct from male flesh, such that the true transformation requires that the scar causes one to "think" (memes, or thought) fundamentally differently about the Jew, the person after he makes the cut, than one did before the cut.

The remarkable thing being noted here is that making the cut that distinguishes Jewish flesh from Gentile flesh doesn't, to our normal understanding, truly transform the flesh in a fundamental way, unless the way one "thinks" of the flesh after it makes the cut, genuinely transforms the flesh by means of a new way of thinking about it. If this be the case, then the thought (and thought itself), which is typically considered to be an epiphenomenon of the fleshly body, is instead, in this case, treated as though it has causal authority concerning the flesh that allegedly generated the thought: "thinking" that a Gentile body has been fundamentally transformed into a Jewish body, in this case, makes it so, and in a manner that's as fundamental and substantial as if the transformation were to occur in the womb of the mother prior to birth.




John

John D. Brey said:

The remarkable thing being noted here is that making the cut that distinguishes Jewish flesh from Gentile flesh doesn't, to our normal understanding, truly transform the flesh in a fundamental way, unless the way one "thinks" of the flesh after it makes the cut, genuinely transforms the flesh by way of a new way of thinking about it. If this be the case, then the thought, which is typically thought of as though it were an epiphenomenon of the fleshly body, is in this case treated as though it has causal authority concerning the flesh that allegedly generated the thought: "thinking" a Gentile body has been fundamentally transformed into a Jewish body, in this case, makes it so, and in a manner that's as fundamental as if it were transformed in the womb of the mother.

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Saying the cut that transforms the Gentile flesh into Jewish flesh (i.e., ritual circumcision) performs the feat through a memetic prosthesis that's as real as though the child could "enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born again" (John 3:4) is justified by numerous Jewish theological concepts. Firstly, the organ transformed by the scar (and ritually the "blood" producing the scar, dam brit) is the male flesh that in the case of the first birth, the Gentile birth, willed the child into being by forcefully and passionately opening the veil on the mother's temple and making it (the birth) so so to say. Since throughout Jewish ritual, the ritual drawing of blood, in every single case, signifies death to the organ from whence the blood comes (so to say), therefore drawing blood from the organ that willed the first birth implies the second birth won't come by means of the will of a man, or his phallus (John 1:13), but will result in the birth of a Jewish body precisely and specifically for that reason. Secondly, in Jewish law, the flesh of the father is completely insignificant in the production of "Jewish" flesh. According to Jewish law, a Gentile father will just as surely engender a Jewish son through a Jewish mother as will a Jewish father. It's the womb of the mother that manufactures the Jewishness of the son, so that the flesh of the father is cut out of the determination completely.




John

John D. Brey said:

Saying the cut that transforms the Gentile flesh into Jewish flesh (i.e., ritual circumcision) performs the feat through a memetic prosthesis that's as real as though the child could "enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born again" (John 3:4) is justified by numerous Jewish theological concepts. Firstly, the organ transformed by the scar (and ritually the "blood" producing the scar, dam brit) is the male flesh that in the case of the first birth, the Gentile birth, willed the child into being by forcefully and passionately opening the veil on the mother's temple and making it (the birth) so so to say. Since throughout Jewish ritual, the ritual drawing of blood, in every single case, signifies death to the organ from whence the blood comes (so to say), therefore drawing blood from the organ that willed the first birth implies the second birth won't come by means of the will of a man, or his phallus (John 1:13), but will result in the birth of a Jewish body precisely and specifically for that reason. Secondly, in Jewish law, the flesh of the father is completely insignificant in the production of "Jewish" flesh. According to Jewish law, a Gentile father will just as surely engender a Jewish son through a Jewish mother as will a Jewish father. It's the womb of the mother that manufactures the Jewishness of the son, so that the flesh of the father is cut out of the determination completely.

On the eighth day he is reborn for the Jewish mission. This rebirth is on the basis of man's innate Godly freedom, for the sake of a higher level of freedom, a higher calling. The eighth day is a repetition of the first day, the day of physical birth, on a higher level----the beginning of a higher "octave," as it were. . . Accordingly, the מילה [circumcision] by itself constitutes a new beginning of life, unconnected with what came before; the connection with the physical birth is no longer pronounced. . . it dispels the notion that מילה [circumcision] is a procedure to prevent disease, or is a heathen cultic rite.

The Hirsch Chumash, Sefer Vayikra, 12:3.

4 Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? 5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee . . . That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

John 3:4–5.​

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A number of important realities are revealed in the truisms above. Firstly, Rabbi Hirsch makes it clear that the Jewish mission begins with a rebirth on the eighth day (the day the male organ is bled, and thus read out of the rebirth, i.e., is sacrificed as the central sign/signifier of the rebirth). And yet since Jewish law equates the birth of a Jew with the womb of the Jewish mother, the birth occurring on the eighth day is retroactively associated with the womb, the body, through which the first birth took place, thereby, in effect, answering Nicodemus' question in the affirmative. Secondarily, Jesus says that what is born of flesh, is flesh, while what is born of spirit, is spirit. In chapter 6 of the same book (John's Gospel), Jesus tells his disciples that his words, i.e., his thoughts, are the body of his spirit, so that believing his thinking, his thoughts, as they're revealed in his words, gives his disciples access to his spirit.

In the context of the foregoing, Jesus is saying that if you believe what he thinks, share his thoughts, then his spirit (his thinking), becomes your thinking through faith, and will act on your existing physical body, as the circumcision scar acts on the Jewish body through pondering it, therein turning Jesus' thoughts/spirit into a memetic prosthesis growing out of one's physical body thereby revealing that the body so enhanced is literally a new spiritual specimen of humanity, conceived by means of this new kind of rebirth (2 Corinthians 5:17).

In particular, the newness of this humanoid specimen is that the spirit, thoughts possessed in the soul, are acknowledged to have feedback power over the physical body free of any physical constraints related to that body. The thoughts, spirit, are the masculine element that decides if a new creature will be conceived, rather than the physical body, specifically the flesh, or phallus, of the physical male, being the arbiter of determination concerning whether a new birth will occur. What's most important in this is the inversion of gender, and thus the authority to engender new birth through thought rather than biological semen. The physical flesh, specifically the phallus, is sacrificed, the masculinity of physicality is bled dry, so that spirit, thought, becomes masculine to the universality of feminine materiality:




John

->->->-> ignore-list

John D. Brey said:

In the context of the foregoing, Jesus is saying that if you believe what he thinks, share his thoughts, then his spirit (his thinking), becomes your thinking through faith, and will act on your existing physical body, as the circumcision scar acts on the Jewish body through pondering it, therein turning Jesus' thoughts/spirit into a memetic prosthesis growing out of one's physical body thereby revealing that the body so enhanced is literally a new spiritual specimen of humanity, conceived by means of this new kind of rebirth (2 Corinthians 5:17).

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The inversion of gender that's seminal to the examination transforms the materiality of masculinity, and most specifically the carnal signifier of that masculinity, i.e., the flesh בשר or phallus, into its opposite (femininity) while at the same time transforming what comes out of the rib of the phallus, its feminine other, the semen of the brain (memes, thoughts, formerly thought of as secondary to the flesh, an epiphenomenon of fleshly materiality), into the new manifestation of masculinity:


Richard Dawkins' choice of words reveals his distrust of this new kind of replicator he knows will see the end of the fleshly realm and the collapse of the "reign of the phallus" (Wolfson). So he speaks of thoughts and ideas (memes) "parasitizing" his brain rather than seminally impregnating it. Nevertheless in his accounting he acknowledges that the biology of the human specimen has now "after three thousand millions years" of biological dominance run its course and has become the womb of a new kind of replicator inseminating the human body so that its root might grow out of that body like a quasi-phallic prosthesis able to spread its seed father and faster than anything previously imaginable: "I will make thy seed exceedingly fruitful":




John

John D. Brey said:

The inversion of gender that's seminal to the examination transforms the materiality of masculinity, and most specifically the carnal signifier of that masculinity, i.e., the flesh בשר or phallus, into its opposite (femininity) while at the same time transforming what comes out of the rib of the phallus, its feminine other, the semen of the brain (memes, thoughts, formerly thought of as secondary to the flesh, an epiphenomenon of fleshly materiality), into the new manifestation of masculinity:

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking . . . For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 192-193.

16 Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the fleshly replicator . . . for if any man be in Christ, he is a new kind of creature: old things are passed away . . . If Christ be in you, the body will die because of sin, but the spirit remains alive because of the righteousness of the non-carnal kind of life.

2 Corinthians 5:16–17; Romans 8:10.​

Richard Dawkins' choice of words reveals his distrust of this new kind of replicator he knows will see the end of the fleshly realm and the collapse of the "reign of the phallus" (Wolfson). So he speaks of thoughts and ideas (memes) "parasitizing" his brain rather than seminally impregnating it. Nevertheless in his accounting he acknowledges that the biology of the human specimen has now "after three thousand millions years" of biological dominance run its course and has become the womb of a new kind of replicator inseminating the human body so that its root might grow out of that body like a quasi-phallic prosthesis able to spread its seed father and faster than anything previously imaginable: "I will make thy seed exceedingly fruitful":

Sing O barren one who hasn't conceived in the manner of men . . . for now more are the children of the biologically infertile than the children fathered by the semen of a carnal husband.

Isaiah 54:1.​

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Justifying the foregoing to a degree that seems literally impossible, the Jewish memetic prosthesis associated with the sign of the covenant (brit milah) drains the male flesh of blood, which is then used to ornament the Torah scroll (the wimple, or cover, was often decorated with the blood of circumcision), thereby symbolizing the idea that the blood of the male organ is the seed that inseminates the Torah-text to reveal a new species of interpretation born of the blood of the original organ of seminality.




John

John D. Brey said:

Justifying the foregoing to a degree that seems literally impossible, the Jewish memetic prosthesis associated with the sign of the covenant (brit milah) drains the male flesh of blood, which is then used to ornament the Torah scroll (the wimple, or cover, was often decorated with the blood of circumcision), thereby symbolizing the idea that the blood of the male organ is the seed that inseminates the Torah-text to reveal a new species of interpretation born of the blood of the original organ of seminality.

Circumcision is not simply an incision of the male sex organ; it is an inscription, a notation, a marking. This marking, in turn, is the semiological seal, as it were, that represents the divine imprint on the human body. The physical opening, therefore, is the seal that, in its symbolic valence, corresponds to an ontological opening within God. . . The opening of circumcision, in the final analysis, is transformed in the Zohar into a symbol for the task of exegesis. . . The uncovering of the phallus is conceptually and structurally parallel to the disclosure of the text.

Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, The Circle in the Square, p, 30.

For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit . . . and have no confidence in the phallus.

Philippians 3:3.

In clever exegetical fashion, the author of the Zohar turns the Pauline view regarding circumcision on its head. . . through the physical rite the corporeal is spiritualized and the spiritual is corporalized. In the final analysis, circumcision (milah) is the true incarnation of the divine word (millah) in the flesh.

Elliot R. Wolfson, Luminal Darkness, p. 196.​

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The last quotation from Professor Wolfson lends itself to the examination in that more than turning the Pauline view of circumcision on its head, it appears to clarify the point Paul is making. To appreciate this as the case requires understanding a couple points Professor Wolfson makes in another vein:

More importantly:


Combining these two quotations with the one from Luminal Darkness (where Professor Wolfson tells us that the word ---millah----written on the tablet of the infant's flesh is an incarnation of God, i,.e., spiritualizing the corporeal flesh, and corporalizing the spiritual God, or the spirit of God), seems to engender more questions than answers? What's written on the flesh of the infant boy? And why is God using the male-principle (the male flesh of the infant boy) as though it were the female page, or tablet, upon which the writing is accomplished? Why is God writing on the male-principle, the principle male flesh, as though it were female flesh (the page or tablet), since it then seems like an outright inversion of gender as noted above?


It's seems difficult to deny that the semiological seal that marks the infant boy's flesh is treating that male flesh as though it were female such that as posited above, this divine act of writing on the flesh is transforming the invisible spirit, i.e, thought, memes, memetics (John 6:63), which the pagans and materialists, and some Jews, treat as the female principle (thought being in their mind a secondary phenomenon come from material causation) as though it (thought, spirit) were male, and the flesh, the material, were in fact secondary, i.e., feminine, so that this act of writing is utterly unique in that it's transforming male, Gentile flesh, come from the womb of a mother eight days earlier, into Jewish flesh that's in every way Jewish, contrary to all material causation, to include the alleged asymmetrical arrow of time's causation that makes it impossible to swallow the idea that this eighth day transformation of Gentile flesh into Jewish flesh is able to retroactively transform the Gentile mother into the Jewish mother of the now Jewish (after the eighth day) infant male.

This transformation of male into female, retroactively, justifies the idea that Jesus Christ’s incarnation, as the true circumcision, ala Paul, has the power to retroactively make the rituals and decrees in the Tanakh really, rather than ritually, true, correct (see The Token Jew), and that without this spiritual retroactivity (utterly dependent on the reality rather than ritual nature of circumcision), the ritual isn’t real, or is real in a demonic way (permanently ritual), i.e., as a zombi-like doppelgänger of spiritual truth eternally reciprocating ritualistically in a Derrida-like deferment of the messianic-future so that it remains eternally a hope without possibility of arrival.



John

John D. Brey said:

In the context of the foregoing, Jesus is saying that if you believe what he thinks, share his thoughts, then his spirit (his thinking), becomes your thinking through faith, and will act on your existing physical body, as the circumcision scar acts on the Jewish body through pondering it, therein turning Jesus' thoughts/spirit into a memetic prosthesis growing out of one's physical body thereby revealing that the body so enhanced is literally a new spiritual specimen of humanity, conceived by means of this new kind of rebirth (2 Corinthians 5:17).

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This statement, made earlier in the examination, is key to the primary spirit of the examination since sharing one’s thoughts with another person, though it’s no doubt intercourse between two spirits (resulting in a new spirit of unity), nevertheless doesn’t generally imply that any physical reality has been usurped in a manner that implies the thoughts shared with another person can literally transform physical reality, specifically the physical body, of the person receiving the thoughts, spirit, or meme. Furthermore, in context, it's only thinking about the circumcision, and only about the circumcision, that represents the advent of a new reality whereby a thought conceived (strictly concerning circumcision), allegedly has causal power to transform physical reality: a Gentile body really, truly, becomes Jewish, not just ritually, but in a real manner.

The dynamics of this proposition can justify Paul's claim in Galatians 3:28 that after the circumcision there's neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, but a new kind of creature, not by transforming the Gentile body into Jewish flesh, as noted above, but by redefining real (versus ritual) "Jewish" flesh so that the reality of Jewish flesh is in fact a new reality that can only exist outside the binary matrix of male/female, Gentile/Jew. In this conceptual realm, the "ritual" Jew, the so-called Token Jew, is merely a temporal, materialistic, sign, that signifies, ritually, a reality outside of the very "sign" versus "signified" domain that exists in the binary matrix of the temporal, material, world.

Augustine used a similar conception of Judeo/Christian reality to claim that the ritual Jew (the Jew content with conflating ritual with reality, flesh with spirit, temporal with spiritual) is, according to Augustine, undeniably carnal through-and-through: a Jew after the flesh only. And the distinction is cutting since it's no doubt difficult to distinguish between a transformation of binary reality, i.e., material reality, into a non-binary spiritual reality, versus a conflation of the two into material reality. Fortunately, the later (conflating non-binary reality with material reality) can in fact be categorically separated from the other kind of reality (binary reality transformed into a non-binary spiritual reality) in a manner that appears to be extremely problematic for Judaism and Jewish thought as it's been situated up until the Thinking Now Occurring.




John

John D. Brey said:

Augustine used a similar conception of Judeo/Christian reality to claim that the ritual Jew (the Jew content with conflating ritual with reality, flesh with spirit, temporal with spiritual) is, according to Augustine, undeniably carnal through-and-through: a Jew after the flesh only. And the distinction is cutting since it's no doubt difficult to distinguish between a transformation of binary reality, i.e., material reality, into a non-binary spiritual reality, versus a conflation of the two into material reality. Fortunately, the later (conflating non-binary reality with material reality) can in fact be categorically separated from the other kind of reality (binary reality transformed into a non-binary spiritual reality) in a manner that appears to be extremely problematic for Judaism and Jewish thought as it's been situated up until the Thinking Now Occurring.

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Borrowing Richard Dawkins' epistemological pronouncement, For more than three thousand million years thought has been material realitie's *****. Since the beginning of the arrow of time, materiality has been posited, and empirically confirmed, as the ground of reality though which the phantoms and ghosts of "soul," "spirit" and "freedom of thought" swirled and swooned and seduced the material world for their thin slice of the pie. As the female element of reality, they were always dependent on the passions and timing of the material world in order that they be allowed to speak their mind into being.

All that changed with the reality of circumcision. In one moment of time, or at least in one short dispensational epoch, three thousand million years of history was inverted so that thought was finally realized as the male element, the origin, that had merely been hidden in the material world's masculine facade (most specifically the fleshly analogue of that facade) all along. By taking a knife and bleeding the fleshly analogue of the facade of material masculinity, circumcision marks the very moment when that lie is laid to rest thereby retroactively reorienting everything that came before it. Now, i.e., the thinking now able to occur, every iota of past history must be reinterpreted, not as though the reinterpretation is merely a clarification of what has come before, but as though, for it's true, the new interpretation, come from the reality of thought's masculinity in relation to material reality, retroactively transforms the past fundamentally so that it can be re-read into a corrected present and future.


Justifying Richard Dawkins' dark concern concerning the new replicator that "parasites" the mind, is the fact that this new replicator isn't content, like DNA, merely to affect the future direction of life's evolutionary trek. On the contrary, the new replicator was hidden, we could even say imprisoned, for a good reason. Once released from its prison it isn't content to start a new world order starting with the present and working its way to the future. Oh hell no. It has the power, it genuinely does (since it's outside the arrow of time related to material causation and observation) to retroactively affect the past in a manner that transforms the present and the future.

When Jesus said to his hearers that they were no doubt familiar with the chazal and chachamin's authoritative expositions on the Torah text, "but I tell you something different," he wasn't merely claiming that he had a better, or more correct, interpretation of the text, as though his interpretation was competing with the chazal and or chachamin. On the contrary, he was claiming not that he had a more studied interpretation than theirs, or that he understood the text better than they, but that his interpretation, come from where it originated, would retroactively change the very meaning of the Torah text in a manner that the chazal and chachmin had no jurisdiction over, no way of refuting, or one upping. He was claiming that the Torah "text" is the materiality of its spirit such that once the facade of material antecedence, and the falseness of the intractability of the material arrow of time is cut and bled, the erroneous belief that the Torah text leads to understanding God's spirit, rather than God's spirit having full retroactive freedom to transform the meaning of the text, falls by the wayside.

When the ritually ensconced Jew tells the enlightened Christian that he, the Jew, knows what Judaism is all about, so that the Christian should stop telling Jews what they and their religion are, is, the Jew after the flesh is circumscribed by the same pre-circumcision illusion that supposes that their material antecedence to the Christian supports the genuineness of their superior self-knowledge. And yet in the same manner Jesus was able not to merely out-study the chazal and chachamin ---concerning the Torah text ----but actually transcend their relationship to the text, so too, the enlightened Christian isn't trying to tell the Jew what the Jew thinks he already knows, but to inform him concerning the pre-circumcision error of his very way of knowing.



John