Why Should Every Jew Support Sanders for the Position of the World's Most Powerful Man?
In an editorial, the Honorable Rabbi General explains why he - a longtime Trump supporter, sworn capitalist, and deep religious-right man - is praying for Sanders' election to the presidency. Has the editor-in-chief of The Degeneration of the Nation opened a massive short position on America? Has his ethnic chauvinism driven him mad? Has he gone crazy to think that a warm Jewish heart beats within Sanders, or is he identifying other pulse beats in the arteries of history? Sanders versus Trump as a test for Jewish ethnocentrism: Is every Jew really preferable to every Gentile, or will reality subjugate fantasy?
The Jewish story is not a realistic story. If the biblical narrative, for example, or the legends of the Sages, were written today - critics would certainly attribute them to the genre of magical realism. One moment describes the harsh, everyday, authentic reality of the Iron Age, and the next moment iron chariots are sinking in the sea or flying in heavenly fire - and therein lies the power of the story. In fact, the power of the story is the historical power of Judaism, and therefore the considerations that Jews apply throughout the generations when approaching history and operating within it, and which they should apply today as well, are not realistic and utilitarian historical considerations, but literary and narrative ones. The true meaning of the idea of chosenness is that unlike other "normal" nations, the question we as Jews should ask is not what is good for the Jews (and certainly not for GDP) - but what is good for the story. Which development will create a better story? History as a story and as fiction - this is the essence of the idea that created the Bible (and in the ancient world, God is certainly part of the story. The innovation was that God is part of history!).
For hundreds of years, the realistic genre has become the central genre of history. But unlike Western and many other nations, and unlike the Zionist vision, which tried to transfer Judaism to a genre, the realistic genre is not the genre in which our history is written (and therefore operates). In fact, the Zionist vision failed not in reality, but precisely in taming the narrative, which slipped through its fingers in the miraculous event of the Six-Day War, and since then has scattered to classic Jewish realms, albeit not particularly biblical ones. After all, it is not the vision of the kingdom of David and Solomon that drives the current Jewish-Israeli heart, which prefers to try to recreate the trauma of the shtetl, the landowner, and the dog (and therefore its dramatic and emotional center of gravity is not directed at all towards the Arabs but towards the Europeans - it's not the Muslims who really bother it but the Christians). The Zionist story failed to capture hearts precisely when it tried to turn from a fantasy story into a "normal" realistic story, because within the Zionist historical story of yesterday, a dog must always suddenly appear.
The way realism is woven into fantasy is what makes Kafka (and not Proust, for example) the great Jewish writer of the twentieth century (and in retrospect, unfortunately without a worthy competitor, the great writer of the great Jewish event of the century - the Holocaust), while the realism of Israeli literature will fail it in the test of generations (as it failed to give proper literary representation to the Holocaust - which only a fantastic genre would have suited its dimensions). Realism is the genre of humanism and enlightenment - and will perish with them. Any realistic, rational story, like that of the Democratic Jews in the United States (which they also imposed on the rest of the Democrats) - will fail to excite the imagination of the world, and Sanders is no exception to this.
The writer of these lines indeed supported Trump all the way, and is actually pleasantly surprised by his success so far, and certainly believes that Trump is good for the Jews (if only in the cognitive blow he delivers to the world). He is also very pleased with the impact of the Trump precedent on the representation of the weakened population of dyslexics suffering from attention disorders, and the personal example he gives in breaking the glass ceiling of promoting psychotic people in society (yes, we can too! Identity politics in service of the invisible psychotics). He certainly does not suffer from appreciation for Sanders, detests the Democrats and is sure that Sanders would be a catastrophe for his stock portfolio, for America and of course for Israel. But as Jews, the considerations we should apply in relation to the world are not realpolitik considerations, but phantasmatic ones. Sanders is not good for the Jews, but he is good for Judaism.
In the current world dominated by media, Judaism is no longer a productive enterprise with a competitive advantage, but a brand. And the most important thing in any brand is the story. In his self-perception, views and goals, Bernie Sanders is certainly not part of the Jewish story. But the story is bigger than him too. If the most important and influential person in the world will be Jewish (as a per mille and a bit of the world's population) - and regardless of his success - it will excite the Semitic and anti-Semitic imagination worldwide, and strengthen the Jewish story around the world, just as Trump strengthened the psychotic story around the globe. Since Disraeli, there has been nothing like this, that a Jew would stand at the head of the world (and Sanders is far from being Disraeli). The goal of the Jewish story is not to find favor in the eyes of the world, or to benefit it (these are of course unacceptable extra-artistic goals and the takeover of politics over literature). The purpose of the story will always be within itself (as a purposeful form without purpose), namely to interest the world (which is easily bored in the narrative inflation of our days). Not to be a better story for the world - but to be a better story.
Therefore, our goal in world politics is not to benefit Israel (or the people of Israel) - on the contrary: the goal of Israel itself is to captivate the world (and if possible - to drive it crazy). The purpose of Israel is aesthetic: to go back to the land of the fathers as a symmetrical literary closure element, which allows the opening of a new chapter after the Jewish-European story reached an appropriate literary exhaustion and stunning in its narrative power (the Holocaust). The Holocaust is an unprecedented historical defeat for the Jewish people - but from a narrative point of view it is almost expected, and there is no doubt that precisely extermination by gas had a power that no atomic bomb has. God is a terrible father - but a genius writer. And his literary and metaphorical audacity knows no bounds.
If Nazism was the subjugation of politics to aesthetics in its German artistic sense (i.e., visual and operatic aesthetics), and therefore tried to sweep the Jewish visual ugliness off the face of the earth, then Judaism is also the subjugation of the political to the aesthetic and fantastic, except that its medium is different - the book (including the theoretical), and especially: literature. Our goal is to create a fascinating, deep, beautiful historical story that transcends all reality and amazes the world. Not the "good", as a moral category, should be at the forefront of a people created as a treasure (i.e., as an example, for good and bad), but the divine - that is, the transcendent. The fantastic. Therefore, the Jewish eros is not currently expressed in the world - and was never meant to be expressed - as an example and role model in the secular-moral sense, that is, as a model for imitation, but precisely as an exceptional example, which deviates from imitation - and escapes the ability to imitate it, just like a literary masterpiece. This is a creative eros that contains within it also the demonic side of creativity, which in our time has earned names that seem to be taken from the oxymoronic Zoharic world, that is, aspiring to maximum tension, such as "disruptive innovation" or "creative destruction".
The tension created by the Jewish story (and not only on the time axis but also in expanding the axis of the space of possibilities) is the only reason to live it and be interested in it - and it is the only reason for its continued existence as the longest story in the world, for thousands of years, which continues to surprise and be an important story like no other. It is not the Nazis who are the great threat to the story - but boredom and real banality. A Jew as the head of the world superpower is too interesting a story addition to give up for rationalistic considerations. The tensions (Jewish!) that will create a socialist at the head of capitalism, or a Jewish American president against Israel, or an old man of the young against his own generation, or a Jew at the head of the Christian world (which likes to call itself "the free world") - are excellent and promising literary tensions. One thing is certain - it won't be boring.
In contrast to the narrative success of American Jewry (which is of course also expressed in literary success), the literary-historical crisis of Israeli Jewry stems from its narrative weakness. The right insists on seeing kitsch beauty in a plot structure lacking originality and worn out of repetition and copying (the deeds of the fathers are a sign for the sons, the fulfillment of prophecy), while the left has become addicted to petty satisfaction from an equally banal structure of ironic reversal (and the oppressed became oppressors - and the victims became executioners). Both structures do not hold water, being shallow, clichéd (not a typo), and with a simplistic (i.e., ugly) symmetry axis suitable for inferior didactic literature (sin and punishment, Holocaust and revival, trauma reenactment, and it is that which stood). Those who do not understand that the gradual narrative deterioration of the Book of Kings towards a simplistic and boring structure, compared to its rich and interesting predecessors, is responsible for the exile - have not understood the Jewish thread connecting literature to history, which is the narrative. Because with a simplistic and fossilized narrative and primitive literary tools, a simplistic, fossilized and non-adaptive perception of reality is obtained, which will eventually reap exile and destruction (and see the destructive Palestinian adherence to a fossilized narrative, or how Europe is degenerating because it fell in love with its enlightened narcissistic story). A writer who falls in love with his own story - that's his end. He is destined to recreate the same story in every new novel - and history will not read him (she is a particularly unforgiving reader).
Therefore, it is recommended for Israeli Judaism to adopt a more up-to-date and futuristic narrative, suitable for the world of technology, the network and the rise of the Far East. Unlike the past-present symmetries in which it is stuck, which have reached literary exhaustion, it should deal with past-future and present-future symmetries (as we try to do on this site). The rise of the non-narrative prophecy genre stemmed from the crisis of the historical narrative of the books of the kings of Judah and Israel, and from a literary attempt to escape from the strait of the boring and circular structure in the present, and to find a way to deal with history in an arrow towards the future (that is: in combining realistic and fantastic elements). If Israeli Judaism wants to survive as a historical period, and as a period of literary value (this is the same thing!), it must stop looking all the time towards the glorious and comparative past and deriving the present from it - and start looking at the future and projecting from it towards the past and present (and vice versa). Only a literary dialogue with the future will save Judaism from living in the past - and will make its story interesting again for the world.
To donate to Bernie Sanders - requires an address of an uncle in America
(And yes, Bloomberg is also Jewish, and probably preferable to Sanders, but he doesn't need donations from nephews. Let's keep our fingers crossed for both of them)