This is not an apologist piece for the attacks on the World Trade Center. As a new citizen of the Jewish State and a one-time emigrant from the totalitarian Soviet one, I am no more sympathetic to the genocidal and life-denying ideology of Jihad than to any other modern form of idolatry. Most of all, I carry the burden of sympathy for the families of those killed while at work in those towers, whether they were members of my people or those of the family of nations. Indeed the victims were doing nothing more than trying to keep on building the American way of life.
But this was precisely their crime. And in some way or other, whether these accountants and architects and janitors and attorneys and marketing executives and window washers and investment bankers knew it or not, in committing it each of them collaborated in charting the path to their own spectacular demise and proved that ignorance can only masquerade as bliss.
This is the story of how the American public, led by its own ignorance and naivëte into suicidal self-deception, unwittingly brought on the death and destruction of the 9/11 attacks, and how America, unless it learns what it today seems unwilling to learn, will very soon destroy itself.
It’s also a story of how the attack rang a little-heard alarm bell for one young man and led him to escape the nightmare fantasy mistakenly referred to as the American Dream, and in doing so help redeem several generations of his family from the cultural, intellectual and spiritual Holocaust of the last century, a Holocaust whose seeds were planted, and which continues to be cultivated, by his fellow Jews.
Finally, it’s a story about why every Jew, in America and around the world, who has even a drop of Jewish pride and Jewish guilt and Jewish soul, must plumb the depths of his conscience and to try to find in it the seeds of his own redemption as nothing more and nothing less than a Jew, and the true reunification of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
San Francisco, September 11th, 2001, some time before 07:00 PST
I awoke to the voice of Karen speaking to one of our friends on the phone. It was Ari calling. It seemed there was another “bombing” of the World Trade Center. Great, another terrorist attack to start my day, I thought. I took grim consolation in the thought that at least this time it wasn’t our people in Israel getting killed. The Al-Aqsa Intifada had already jaded me, and perhaps it was more than a rumbling of discontent with my identity as an American that made it shockingly hard for me to feel genuine anguish over something that, had I decided to go East rather than West, would have happened in my backyard.
I looked for a moment outside the window. Twin Peaks was still there, Sutro Tower proudly showing off its coat of red and white paint for yet another day of sparkling Northern California sunlight.
I got up, brushed my teeth and shuffled over to the living room, where the images from the television screen told a different story. I watched one tower fall, then another. I felt a mix of shock and awe, the mantra employed so effectively less than two years later by George W. Bush in his campaign to impose democracy on a reluctant Middle Eastern country. I was morbidly but genuinely transfixed by the magnificent horror of the attack - like Hitler’s continental inferno, it seems that 9/11 is an event that will remain seared into the occipital lobes of all who witnessed it and survived, which that day included most of the American public.
The attack on the Twin Towers did not come suddenly from the skies. It was almost a century in the making, and the actors in the drama, from assimilationist Jews in America to Muslim fanatics on the Arabian peninsula, have played a much larger and more important role in this process than perhaps they themselves understand.
It pays to observe an little-understood but telling twist of historical irony: The great villain of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, left this world by subjecting himself to the same fiery end that engulfed his victims – no longer able to constrain the energy of his own destructive power, the mad chemist of the Superhuman turned his pistol on himself, but only after ordering his staffers to burn his body in a bomb crater, becoming the final and most infamous victim of his Holocaust.
American society is perpetrating a different kind of mass killing, and a much more frightening, well- conceived, and complete one than even the Fuhrer could have imagined: Whereas the Third Reich aimed for the physical death of its enemies, the unstated and perhaps unconscious goal of the American global media empire is nothing less than the worldwide annihilation of the soul.
In a process that even its perpetrators are not entirely aware of, through its technological and corporate contingents around the world, the United States of America is slowly but surely eroding the fabric of the world’s quilt of cultures and societies. Through the hypnotic and intensifying-ly global reach of film, television, music and the Internet, America and its Western partners/rivals are succeeding in the goal of taking over the world, by destroying its cultural and spiritual roots.
And this assault, far from coming from an enemy of the Jews, comes from the Jews themselves.
Let’s turn back the clock: In 1910, almost exactly 100 years ago, the first film was produced in Hollywood, California. Almost immediately, a host of Hollywood production studios sprang up, almost all of them run by Jews. Seven years later, the same year that the predominantly Jewish Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the first true multimedia experience was created: A moving picture with sound, carrying with it the irresistible lure of an alternate, more beautiful and more perfect universe that flickered somewhere between the screen and the viewers watching it. “The Jazz Singer” was a Jewish production from start to finish, and its very plot line – a nice, religious Jewish boy abandons his forefathers to become an entertainer to the Gentile world – smacks of the same guilt that the filmmakers must have felt about leaving their world of ghettoized Torah, the perfect suicide note for Hollywood's Jewish past.
The Jews of Hollywood, thus having shed over 3,000 years of uncomfortable differentness, seized upon the ideological force of post-religious modern internationalism, just like their Bolshevik cousins, and like them, created an alternative religion.
From that moment onwards, Jews dominated Hollywood and turned it into something much greater than an entertainment institution. By giving substance and form to a media empire that later branched out into and intertwined film, television, radio and newspapers, Jews in early 20thcentury America would end up succeeding where Jewish communists in Bolshevik Russia ultimately failed: Creating a new, global ideology and a new world order.
Catching on quickly to the rising need for people all over the rapidly industrializing world to fill their free time with “content” and meaning, and ostensibly catering to the belief that every man had the right to broaden his horizons, the Jews of Hollywood cleverly tied together advertising with entertainment and empowered industry to rebrand the human race into a new species: the consumer.
Just as the Soviets provided a new class of obedient role models to lead their masses into unquestioning compliance, the burgeoning Hollywood empire created its own pantheon of screen gods, not coincidentally called idols. After thousands of years of supposed civilization and ethical progress, Western man was back to worshiping stars. Members of the same Jewish nation that brought the idea of one G-d to the world, that fought so hard to establish the reign of ethical monotheism, now abandoned their belief and created the most pervasive form of idol worship in history.
Globalization cannot occur without an ideological life force to unite the nations under it, and in delivering the new mantra of the globalized world, Jews were instrumental in erecting an idolatry of the most insidious kind: the worship of the self.
From the simple dance clubs of Accra to the dizzying oblivion of Madrid’s nightlife, from the pulsating electronic billboards of Tokyo to the mind-numbing rhythms on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the drumbeat of self-annihilation calls to its listeners: surrender to yourself, to us, to the brave new world. Under the cover of night and the fictions of disposable time and income, globalization, as invented and propagated by American pop “culture”, has been eroding the institutions of traditional culture and nationhood of every country in the world, while America proudly affirms the freedom of every individual to create his or her own reality by destroying all others.
As an ever-larger part of the average daily person’s life is dominated by global brands, fueled by merger upon merger of the world’s largest companies where corporate sponsorship deals decide who is exposed to which message and when, there is an inevitable loss of self and the dissolution of familial and national bonds. The news media, while purporting to serve as the sober eyes and ears of the world, play the biggest role of all of these bodies in defining what is important for people to see and hear and of propagating and accelerating the very notion of that importance. Using the smokescreen of the public’s right to know about every detail, the media outlets become the mouthpieces for whichever advertisers pay the most to have their products publicized, in the process playing directly into the hands of government leaders and the corporations that wield an exponentially growing influence over them.
While the growing barrage of advertisements calls out for viewers to identify with a corporation, to create a new reality in which his fellow man is minimized, the corporation becomes teacher, parent, friend, lover and G-d.
In the end, modern man’s constant demand for information, fueled by his desire to believe and connect with something greater than himself, furnishes his descent into the abyss of consumerism.
Thus dispossessed of their cultural traditions, their spiritual compass and their sense of belonging, the masses throng to the worship of media idols and blind adherence to the spiral of material consumption that will itself consume the world’s physical and spiritual resources.
The question is when this new cultural Reich will, like Hitler’s, consume itself, and who will be left to deal with the remains.
The World Trade Center was the symbol of America’s economic domination of the world. In the end, as all empires fall, so will the American corporate one. But the global media machine that was given its ideological roots by Jews in Hollywood and sustained with Jewish money and Jewish brainpower will continue to spread in an earth-consuming chain reaction.
So the towers in New York fell, and yet America continues to rebuild and move on, as if nothing happened, unaware even of the startling fact that the American government can no longer guarantee the safety of its citizens from foreign attack or its tenure as the dominant world power.
The shock and outrage, for the short time the media allowed it to last, was first directed at fanatical Islam. Muslim terrorism on American soil! And on such a scale! It was the perfect sensation piece, photographed, filmed and replayed thousands of times on televisions all over the world. Yes, it seemed for a brilliant, blinding flash that the unbridled evil of Islam, let loose on its most savored prey, struck a victory for the forces of Jihad.
But very few people seem to understand or even really care about what drives Jihad and what is fueling Muslim fundamentalism. Why, exactly, is the Islamic world at war with secular, Western civilization? Why are some devout Muslims willing to send their children to their deaths, and hundreds of millions of others cheering them on, in order to fight the proxy war against tiny Israel?
And why are the Jews once again facing the fury of a nationalist ideology aimed at taking over the entire world?
The Jewish sages say that G-d raises the hand of our enemies above us in order to reprove us for our misdeeds, to remind us of who we are supposed to be, to draw out those qualities within us that are lacking and force us to strengthen them. What, then, could we as liberal, enlightened, universally tolerant Jews possibly learn from a bunch of rifle-waving fanatics willing to die a thousand deaths if only to bring the rest of the world down with them?
The answer is actually quite simple: Belief in something greater than this world, beyond the here-and-now. What the Muslims are brandishing with the sword of Jihad, what each terrorist explosion loudly proclaims, is precisely that which the Jews themselves gave them but now stubbornly keep denying – The ultimately fanatical belief in one creator and one judge who created this world and who exists far beyond it.
Anyone who thinks that a whole generation of young Arabs in Nablus and Jenin can be raised to kill themselves to make a point in a land dispute, anyone who thinks that suicide bombings and the “Palestinian” resistance and the war on the West are all for the sake of liberating a tiny strip of sand almost completely devoid of natural resources, needs to look much deeper for an answer that makes even remote sense.
What the young Muslims in the West Bank are dying for, and what their supporters all over the Jihad-ridden Muslim world are cheering for has little to do with land. They have no reason to feel insecure in Islam’s triumphant march across Africa, Asia and now Europe. It’s certainly not about money – while the West continues its spiral of consumption, oil-rich Arab states will stay that way. And, contrary to what so many fervent Leftist activists, writers, professors and students in the West are fooled into believing, the Intifada is not a struggle against the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel and has precious little to do with a “Palestinian” state.
What is Intifada-global Jihad really fighting for? What do nearly two billion Muslims want more than anything else in the world, even more than eternal life in a hereafter? One thing and one thing only – the complete restoration of the Jewish nation in the Land of Israel.
As so often happens, what seems to be case on the surface is the exact opposite of what really is.
When a young Muslim man or woman in Jerusalem straps on a suicide belt, swallows his tears and his love for his family and presses the button, that young Muslim is, knowingly or not, aiding and abetting his Jewish enemy in a struggle not over land, but over the soul of this world.
For that which makes radical Islam radical is a struggle for those very same things that the Jewish nation was sent to this earth to fight for and establish – the restoration of the reign of G-d in the universe.
The cancer of materialism, greed, and worship of the self that Jews, unwittingly or otherwise, unleashed on the world is finally being met by a power that it can no longer ignore. Radical Islam, the phenomenon that many Western conservative cynics and my own Zionist colleagues trot out in order to flay as the “cancer” afflicting Western civilization, is in fact its cure.
The standard-bearers of Jihad, from bin-Laden to Nasrallah to Ahmadinejad, are very clear about what the enemy represents to them. They proclaim, openly and unequivocally, their aim of uprooting the destructive lie behind the American-born, pan-global, post-religious lie of G-dless materialism and selfishness. You don’t need to read too deeply between the lines of their polemics to understand what they are fighting against and struggling for.
In sermon after sermon, the leaders of the Muslim people call out for one thing above all else, and that is simple, honest submission to a higher power and the acknowledgement that people are servants to G-d and to nobody else.
Sound familiar? It should – Muhammad, son of Abdullah (Ovadia in Hebrew) took the heart of his faith from the Jews, and although he combined Judaism’s ethical monotheism with Christianity’s crusading desire to spread the new doctrine of Islam through conversion and coercion, and although he killed thousands of Jews who refused to accept his prophecy, he accepted the Torah’s teaching that the way to bring the world to perfection is to recognize the Creator. The difference is that Torah commands Jews to emulate the deeds and attributes of their Commander-in-Chief, to walk humbly in His ways and to bring salvation to the world by perfecting ourselves rather than trying to convince others that we're right, whereas Islam is dominated by an overarching dogma of unqestioning submission and global coercion: any part of the world that is not Dar-el-Islam (the "realm of Islam") is Dar-el-Harb (the "realm of war").
Meanwhile, the post-Christian secular West is preaching and propagating the submission of G-dliness, the very negation of G-d's presence in this world and of the divine consciousness that can only come from thousands of years of continuous and shared belief and shared identity, in favor of a neo-Hellenist/humanist religion of "individuality" where each person is a completely sovereign, perfect and independent entity, his own G-d in his own universe. And Islam is the precise antithesis and the antipodal force opposing the "anything-goes" of modern secularity and moral relativism. Both represent the warring extremes of the human condition, and both have their place in the landscape of Torah. But in an age where Jews have distinguished themselves in shifting the world to one extreme, Islam fights back on a global scale to bring it back to the center, even if it means taking the other extreme.
When the Muslim world began its modern fight against Western cultural imperialism, it also launched a Jihad against the very same unholy cultural vicissitudes that the 20th century Jews brought into the world. When a Muslim suicide bomber massacres a busload of Jews in Israel, just as when Muslim hijacker-pilots slam a pair of super-technological jet airliners into two monumental towers of unbridled capitalism, Islam attempts to strike another blow against the very destructive human forces whose spread was enabled through the global media empire largely established, and to this day directed and championed, by Jews.
Is it any wonder, then, that we as Jews living in the State of Israel, smack in the middle of the Muslim world, are bearing the brunt of the fury of Jihad? It would indeed be puzzling if the Jewish State were indeed Jewish, but ask a sensitive and devout Muslim what he hates most about Israel, and he may tell you that the modern State of Israel represents an abomination to everything that both he and his Jewish neighbors are supposed to believe in.
In fact, the State of Israel, or at least that part of it which strives to become a bulwark of the West against the traditionalism of the Muslim East, all the while priding itself on its struggle to become a post-modern secular nation just like all the other nations, represents the exact opposite of what the Torah commands of a Jewish nation. By trying so desperately to cling to a vision of Israel as the global capital and glittering showcase of wine connoisseurs, globetrotters and avant-garde intellectuals, of Bacchanalian trance party-goers, slick, bald-shaven young corporate executives, scantily clad young grandmothers and the loudest and proudest homosexual paraders in the world, avowed secularist Jews in the Holy Land are desecrating its holiness and drawing the full ire of the Muslim world that knows, in its heart of hearts, that the Jews are supposed to be a humble and G-d fearing nation.
So, far from being the Chosen People, we have chosen to become little more than sophisticated animals, and, in doing so, have come straight into the Muslim heartland as emissaries of the globalist lie, to represent that which the Muslim world detests the most. Is it any wonder, then, that we here in Israel are suffering more than any other people in Islam’s war on the worst aspects of modern life?
There is no doubt that on a subconscious level, the devout core of Muslim believers and propaganda-makers, as the representatives of a faith that is spiritually very close to the heart of Judaism, are also motivated by a creeping, immutable awareness of exactly who the Jewish people are and the catastrophic blow they represent to the pretensions of human history. The sudden rebirth of the State of Israel in the middle of their land, especially coming right after the Holocaust as it did, was to them resounding, shattering evidence - that they could do anything but acknowledge - of the supernatural existence of the Jewish nation and the immortal, divine power they radiate. They know what is happening in the Land of Israel and they are rightfully intimidated.
However, the Jews in Israel are indeed oppressing the Muslim population. While we have a historical and divine imperative to settle and strengthen the Jewish population throughout the entire Land of Israel, we cannot do so at the expense of the spiritual devastation we are causing them. Far beyond the undesired necessity of checkpoints and armed operations and collective punishments that bring ceaseless condemnation from the world, Israeli Jews are oppressing Muslim Arabs in a much more devastating way, in a way that erodes the very values they are raised with.
I am not an apologist for radical Islam, neither for the way it treats women nor for the self-suffocating tentacles of a mindlessly fanatical creed. But Islam is radicalizing not out of some innately perverse drive toward masochism and the denial of life. Students of history cannot deny that, at its zenith, Muslim Spain was the flower of Western civilization, the lone bright spot in the otherwise Dark Ages that shrouded Europe in superstition and ignorance. Islam is reacting today by distancing itself from its once relatively tolerant virtues of moderation, those that enabled it to embrace scientific and artistic progress and the creative endeavors of its Jewish subjects.
Jews are oppressing Muslims in Israel for the same reason and in the same way that we are oppressing ourselves: By abandoning the faith of our forefathers as it was meant to be practiced. Faced by the menace of a secularizing world, Arabs from the Jordan to the sea are joining their brothers in the struggle against us, not for being Jews, but for trying to be everything but Jews.
The obvious solution, of course, is for the Jews of Israel to unify under the banner of Torah and the ideals it represents. But the reality on the Israeli street is one in which the majority of Jews prefer to cling to any kind of lifestyle and ideology, whether it be European Epicureanism or radical socialism or radical capitalism, other than the one institution and way of life that unswervingly promises to create a true heaven on earth.
So why are most Israelis so resistant and rebellious toward the very Torah that is designed to redeem not only them, but the rest of the world that they once cared so passionately about as Labor Zionists and have since become so disillusioned with? Why do the majority of Israelis, who live in a country that has become a nexus of Torah study and practice, reject the way of life of their Torah-observant counterparts, thereby contributing to the onslaught of the global media machine in the one land that is supposed to be untainted by it? The problem and the solution can only come from within the “religious” population itself.
It is no secret that the fastest-growing sector of the Israeli population is also its most exclusionist. The ultra-Orthodox, who will, in a few generations, dominate the religious landscape of the country, represent the most reactionary element in Torah, and, from their perspective, for good reason: The government has followed a clear agenda of preserving a strong secular pedigree among the ruling classes, and the cultural encroachment of so-called “nightlife” into the physical and cultural domains of ultra-Orthodox communities is a genuine threat to their way of life.
The ultra-Orthodox represent the same stream of Torah that 100 years ago rejected the settlement and foundation of a Jewish state, and many among them continue to do so, because, in their view, it has little to offer them and much to take away. So rather than entering Israeli society, many of the ultra-Orthodox continue to shelter themselves and their children from the pernicious influences of the secular State.
As noted by leading writers and rabbinical figures, the destruction of European Jewry and the rise of the Jewish state, the same exilic parochialism of a Judaism devoid of spirituality that caused so many Jews to embrace the secularity of the Enlightenment also led most of the religious leadership in Europe to reject Zionism. One famous rabbi, months before his capture by the Nazis, belatedly decried this rejection by himself and his colleagues, and went so far as to suggest that the blood of millions of Jews who could have been saved was on the hands of the religious leadership that refused to recognize Zionism as the life raft it could have been.
There is, of course, a flourishing Religious-Zionist movement in Israel, strongly opposed to the ultra-Orthodox, that claims to carry both banners: Jewish nationalism based on building the land and strengthening the economy of the state, and the development and propagation of a Torah-adherent lifestyle as the ideological foundation of the Jewish State. However this group has begun to fail in both aims, as it, like the rest of Israeli society, splits into the mutually exclusive poles of the material realm and the spiritual realm. If one is to take the Religious Zionists as the heart and soul of “true” Torah Judaism, or at least its most holistic variety, we can see in their society the center point of the rift that is spreading throughout the Israeli public and the Jewish world.
Faced with the ethical and religious dilemmas of loyalty to a government that is trying to uproot much of the settlement movement, confronted by what they see as the disengagement of the Israeli public from their interests, many in the Religious-Zionist world are rejecting the authority of the state and their responsibility toward it. By removing themselves from the physical world and the organs of society, they are essentially adopting the same ultra-Orthodox stance they once viewed so critically.
These are just two examples of how the Jewish people, while reuniting geographically in its ancestral homeland, is in fact split at its very heart. The myriad flavors of Orthodox religious Judaism, and each groups’ version of daily Jewish law and practice, have made precious little progress in coming together from the exile into cohesive whole. One rabbi from one community rules one way on a very important topic, while another rabbi upholds his belief that a different way is correct. While Torah was never meant to be practiced uniformly, the continued development of religious life in Israel is undeniably crippled by an utter lack of any desire to reconcile widely contrasting practices and approaches. Is it any wonder, then, that a non-observant Jew in Israel, faced with such a bewilderingly fragmented Torah, sees something little more than the sum of very limited parts, rather than the universalist, all-embracing doctrine that it is supposed to be?
The Jewish religious establishment has so far failed in its mission to engage the world, thereby alienating secular Jews and perpetuating the very same desecration of G-d that the so-called “cancer” called radical Islam is struggling murderously against.
In order to save Israel, in order for the Jewish people to manifest their destiny in the world and to battle the encroaching consumption of culture and memory and identity, in order for the Jewish nation to undo the damage it has brought into the world in the guise of Hollywood, the religious communities of Israel must and will bring themselves together and show the rest of their brethren a way of life that will make them flock to be a part of it.
I didn’t appreciate it then, but now I can look back at that sunny morning in San Francisco and see in it the seeds of my own redemption. The attack on the World Trade Center was a wake-up call for me. Never having felt completely at home in America, 9/11 forced me to confront my true feelings about my adopted homeland.
For over a year after the attacks, I struggled to suppress a renewed feeling that I was not where I belonged, but finally the realization came to me that my destiny as a Jew could only ever be in the Land of Israel.
Unfortunately, it seems that the cataclysmic lesson of Nazi Germany has been lost on the vast majority American Jewish public. American Jews, just like their German co-religionists, are certain that nothing bad could happen to them in the most materially and culturally comfortable place for Jews to be in the world.
Nobody can foretell when and how exactly the downfall of the American empire will come, but like all empires, the United States has a natural, historical lifespan. When the end does come, it may well bring with it a wave of physical destruction to match the spiritual destruction already underway, that will swallow those Jews who most contributed to the country’s development.
A Jew simply has no business feeling comfortable in America or any other place outside his historical and G-d-given homeland, and when the global corporate media machine headquartered in the U.S. exhausts the world’s resources, the Jews that contributed most to its rise will experience a seismic uprooting and destruction of their community in that part of the exile.
9/11, in its own way, saved my life. Likewise, every suicide bombing in Israel, every death of an innocent Jew at the hands fanatical Islam, woke up another part of my Jewish consciousness and brought me that much closer to Israel and its Torah.
I therefore call on every Jew with a listening heart and with even the tiniest flicker of Jewish identity to take a hard look at his life in America and that of his fellow Jews, and to unite himself with the incomparable destiny charted for his people in their homeland. As we learned in this week’s Torah portion, when G-d spoke to Abraham, he simply told him to go to the land that He will show him, and it is with the same leap of faith that every Jew in America and around the world will one day have to leave his old life behind to rejoin with his future.
Just like Abraham, it doesn't matter that you don’t really know where you’re going or what to expect when you get there. But one day, whether by choice or otherwise, go you will.
