7a) Biology, the State, and Vocation

7a1) Father Curtis: And this offends you as a Jewish person. 

Jerry: No. It offends me as a comedian!

7a2) The tension between accepting and transcending one’s givens is best captured through the difference between one’s family of origin and one’s family of choice. The tribes represent the idea that genealogy is destiny, or at least, that one has a responsibility (if not simply an involuntary compulsion) to pass on a lineage, to tell one’s family story, to carry on its values, temperaments, genetics and epigenetics. But, the reality of “conversion,” especially as expanded and illuminated by rabbinic Judaism, means that inclusion in the people is not determined exclusively (or even ideally) by biology or history, but by choice.

Unfamiliar Territory @Etz Hasadeh

7a3) “The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another, the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.”

Addenda to Orders in Council – The Emperor Paul Muad’Dib, 

Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert

7a4) ...While avoiding the noble savage ideas of Rousseau, we can still hypothesize a sort of communal hierarchy in which the tribe rose or fell by the intent of the group, not the individual. But with the rise of a bureaucratic hierarchy that needed to collect taxes, build public works, and generally keep the members of the state repressed long enough to develop social cohesion, there was also a rise in specialization. It both created and suppressed the idea of the individual experience. 

I would posit that at this time the idea of the individual outside the group was a psychological anathema. Certainly individuals had their own experience. And it would have been enhanced in smaller group settings such as families, gender separation, skill sets, etc. but it was within the service of the group. The repression mechanism was survival. It was the noumena.

The state (phenomena) brought the complexity of anonymity. The state was gathered under a ruler charismatic or powerful enough to attract or capture people from tribal living to a more “civilized” way of life. What they didn’t realize is that they traded the relative freedom of small groups for the hierarchical repression of the bureaucratic state. It was not the they were subject to the ruler–which they were, it was that they were subject to being cogs within a bureaucratic machine. No longer able to recognize their family, their neighbors, their shamans or chiefs, they were nameless, faceless, automatons driving the ship of state. (See Lang’s Metropolis. And Herbert's God Emperor of Dune.)

It is possible that Moses and the Jewish law was a synthesis–in a Hegelian sense–to this problem. From one perspective, the law was a repressive mechanism meant to confound all but the most knowledgeable. This enforces the power of the priests over the people such that the people are essentially forced to follow the rules. Otherwise, disobedience produces consequences. But as a theocracy, the whole Jewish community was subject to the one God. The community rose and/or fell by the adherence of the community to the law that the God had given them. 

Prophets were instruments of the God, meant to keep the community from the consequences of disobedience–exiles and enslavements. Flawed as everyone else, these individuals often sought to subvert the burden the God had placed on them. But in the end, the God always wins and they fulfill his intent to keep the community together by being subject to his law. 

“Whom has ears to hear, let them hear...” We could also posit to the ones who cannot or will not hear the words of God in the mouths of prophets, these  words become “convoluted wording of legalisms.” The mistranslation and obfuscation of intent is not the fault or responsibility of the God or the prophet, but on the part of the people who have made the choice–out of ignorance or rebellion–to follow their own desires. 

In the end, the mechanism may be just as suppressive as the authoritarian king or emperor, but the intent is completely different. The people are both treated as a community, but as individuals capable of working together to decide their fate. The synthesis of thesis (tribe) and antithesis (state) has been accomplished through the God.