TJS S5 Interlude: Empires come, empires go

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Look back over the past, said Marcus Aurelius, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too. To be quite honest with you, I like to try to look in both directions at once. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Interlude. Empires come, empires go. Now, is it just me, or does it seem, when you look at the news, that the world as we know it has been shaking at the foundations for some time? I mean, we could talk about the state of the environment, the return of might makes right as a principle of international diplomacy, and, of course, everyone's current thing, the pandemic. But what really worries me the most has not been on most people's radar until quite recently.

Now, my good friends can testify. Personally, I've been preaching to them, at least since high school, that no empire lasts forever. And that even back in the early 90s, it looked to me that America was approaching the top of its arc. At this point, we're already seeing memes about how it might honestly be over the hill. Now, I happen to be a believer that the American empire has done much good in the world. And I certainly have real gratitude for the safe and prosperous environment which the American state offered my family when they fled Europe. But I'm a Jew, which means that on some level, I am the enemy of empire by definition. And while I may not work actively toward its overthrow, I recognize the smell when it started to approach the sell-by date.

Now, some may find the thought of the end of the American empire more than a little frightening. And for good reason. I mean, the chaos sown already by the collapse of coherent foreign policy in the last three presidencies as a drop in the bucket to what might come on the international stage with America's full-scale retreat from the world, kind of a defund the police policy on a global scale, if you will. Not to mention what would come next, because no matter how bitter you may be about the truth you believe lies behind the myth of the American dream, it beats the stuffing out of the Chinification of the world. As a student of history, it's noteworthy to me that Am Yisrael returned to our role as a sovereign people together with America's definitive rise as a world power post-World War II.

And through all the changes of the last 70 plus years, we've ridden the coattails of that empire and sometimes served as its vanguard. And now here we are, arguably at the height of our own power as a state, just as it looks like our longtime patron might be edging toward the exit on the world stage. Now I've heard more than one American Jew voice, and certainly many Israelis, some concern looking at this grim forecast, not just in general, but specifically for the state of Israel. There's even a bit of panic out there, depending on where you look for it. After all, if the American tide recedes, won't Israel be swept away as well? When I hear this, it brings to my mind the words of an American labor Zionist leader spoken actually at the 23rd Zionist Congress in 49.

In the midst of the debate over whether American Jews should accept the fact that the United States is exiled as well. and as such, need to be headed for Israel. His name was Chaim Greenberg, and he said that if America were to fall, creating, quote, a universal Sodom and Gemara, what then would be the chances of Israel in such a vortex, sweeping all mankind into an abyss of wickedness and evil? Now, my prognosis isn't so grim, and when I speak to people, they don't tend to be that dramatic. Nonetheless, it needs to be considered. And perhaps I'm indulging in a little bit of wishful thinking, or maybe it's simply because I've been in Israel now for 20 years, and I've absorbed what is part of the essential wisdom of our national knack for survival, and that is, Avarno et Paro, Navo, Gam et Zeh.

Loosely translated means, we made it through Pharaoh, we'll make it through this as well. And perhaps it's because of the perspective, which the Jewish story itself offers me on the question. and what will become of the Jews of Israel in a post-American empire age is hardly a new question. I mean, after all, it's Hanukkah right now. And a proper look at the historical context of these holy days can offer many insights, not the least of which is that we managed to transition between empires many, many times before. I mean, after all, if you sing all the stanzas of Maotzer, that classic pew, you know, liturgical poem that we say after lighting candles, you may have noticed that it's pretty much a litany of fallen empires.

I mean, in the Hanukkah story alone, we can go from the Persian to the Greek and touch base, at least, in the Roman Empire, depending on how you feel about Judah Maccabee's embassy to Rome, if you're familiar with it or not. But what I think is a good use of time here on this Hanukkah day, as I'm drinking far too much coffee, is instead of stressing about the future, or, frankly, pontificating on my thoughts on the present, I want to take a moment to reflect a little bit on the past and consider what wisdom our story offers for the imperial transition to come. Darwin said that the essential rule of life is adapt or die. And as far as I can tell, it's a bit of wisdom that can take you very far. I mean, think back to the dinosaurs.

I hope I'm not offending anyone's religious sensibilities. right, mucking away in the swamp there, chewing on whole trees or chasing each other down in the savannah and tearing open chunks of live flesh. Suddenly they look up and they see this bright light in the sky, having no idea that the game is already up. Meanwhile, the gerbils hiding in the rocks when that chunk of meteor smashed into the Yucatan and destroyed the world would, within in a matter of, I don't know, a few tens of millions of years, be putting a man on the moon. They were able to adapt. Now, in the Jewish story, the adaptive side of our personality is quite fit to the Hanukkah story in its own subtle way because it's represented by Joseph, that younger brother who did eminently well wherever you put him down because he was able to be He always found favor in the eyes of those who saw him.

And I'm not going to chase down the whole Yosef Yehuda thing if you're familiar with it. If you're not, don't worry. I just want you to know that there is an archetype in our story from whom we inherit this quality of adapt or die. Now, in Jewish history, that sign finds its highest form, of course, in exile, because one of the keys of survival in exile is to never be too at home. And that's more than just having one foot out the door. It means you're always ready to pivot. And there's a certain skill set of adaptability which is required for such a motion. Another part of the wisdom of exile, by the way, is always learn from your neighbors. Not just because in order to survive, you need to know what fruits are poisonous and which ones are plentiful, but because there's much wisdom in the world.

And when you've wandered as long and far as the Jews, that means we've gathered quite a bit of it, hopefully holding on through the generations. But, you know, there's more to life than survival. At least I hope you think so. There's also becoming what it is we desire to be beyond whatever works, or perhaps what we feel we're called to become. And that visionary piece really has its greatest potential when Am Yisrael is at home, as a people in our land. Hence, the world-shaping contributions of our first and second commonwealths. I mean, we may have pioneered bills of exchange during the early Middle Ages while we were in exile, but it doesn't really compare to the Hebrew Bible that was crafted by our first and beginning of second.

So, don't be nervous, by the way, if when you think about the contributions made in our sovereign past, you begin to look at the struggles we face today, because in my eyes, this third time will pay for all. It's going to be the biggest you've ever imagined. We're just at the tail end, I hope, of the re-entry phase. The work, the creative work of what it is to be a people in our land has not yet begun. And on that note, perhaps it's necessary for our patron empire to pass from the stage before we can do so. But focusing, because my stated objective is to learn from our past imperial experiences, how best to manage the coming transition of the American empire. And I therefore want to start with a focus on these empires, not on us.

Let's call it wisdom from passing empires, or really back to the basics. Because with the exception of the current and long-lasting empire, these are things we've known as a people for quite some time. Now first, I think if we're going to learn from the past, the best thing to do is to identify what is it that each empire brought. to the world. It may not have been the sole source of its power, but it's what that empire brought, either as an innovation or managing to raise a known aspect to an imperial quality and therefore source of power. Because in terms of survival of what comes ahead, once an empire fades, that realm or quality which it elevated is still a source of very important power, though likely less so than when it drove the now fading imperial wave.

Nonetheless, It means that there a position of leader in that realm or an embodiment of that quality which will be up for grabs or at least open for negotiation when the current empire falls That why just as an example of what I speaking about something as simple as the ability to organize taxation the sort of quintessentially Roman quality was going to be carried by the Jews into Europe throughout Middle Ages and gave us a real source of power, although problematics as well. That's its own story. But we're talking about a little bit further in the past. I want to start, if you're going to have in the Jewish story a conversation about empires, you can't do wrong, starting with Bavel, Babylon. And the essential quality that I'll say that Babylon really elevated, at least again in our story, is reshut.

This idea of authority, but not just general authority, but rather how to use specifically courts, laws, and military power to establish sovereignty. If you open up the book of Ezra, who of course was the spiritual leader of the return from the Babylonian exile, it describes Ezra as Ezra came up from Babel. He is a ready scribe in the Torah of Moshe. Which the Lord God of Israel had given us. And the king gave him, according to the goodness of the Lord his God, everything he asked for. What was it that Ezra was after? Of course, he was after reestablishing sovereignty and fulfilling the vision of the Torah. But what did he ask the king for that he felt would be specifically effective in working a way out of Babylonian exile into Persian, right?

So this is a definite imperial transition. Well, his letter of authority from the king reads, Artaxerxes, king of kings, says to Ezra the priest, scholar of the law of God in heaven, notice the emphasis, you are commissioned by the king and his seven advisors to regulate Yudah and Yerushalayim according to the law of your God, which is in your care. Law, law, law. He goes on, speaks about the temple, all kinds of good stuff there, and the king's contribution, and then we really get to meet law and politics. He says, And you, Ezra, by the divine wisdom you possess, appoint magistrates and judges to judge all the people in the province of beyond the river who know the laws of your God and to teach those who do not know them.

Notice the power. It's not just your team. Expand. And furthermore, it says, Let anyone who does not obey the law of your God and the law of the king be punished with dispatch, whether by death, corporal punishment, etc. Meaning, Ezra has been empowered not just as a religious, spiritual leader, and not even simply to reconstitute his community around the temple, but to be the source of law and order on behalf of the king. Our sages saw Ezra's return to Yahud, as it was called in the Persian Empire, as constituting a more permanent bond in many ways that even Joshua's previous conquest. That's not a small thing. Because with the notable exception of Jerusalem, Yahushua's conquest was held by them to be largely nullified once Bavel came and kicked us out.

You can write me for the details of the argument in the Rambam, but for present purposes, suffice it to say that whatever the divine injunction that had stood behind the tribes, when Joshua and his army claimed the land, it was through might makes right. Destroy the former inhabitants, and therefore, who's really there to argue with you, not only about what you did, but about its legitimacy. I mean, in their world, might was proof of right. But so goes one, so goes the other. And Babel kicked us out through their might, or the might of the Lord, depending on how you read it. But the evolution from the Babylonian into the Median and Persian empires, which involved the description that we see there in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, of the returning of peoples, rebuilding of all kinds of temples, reordering of local societies along lines of law, like you just heard, that created a whole new level of what I might call sovereign right.

Not just might makes right and who's going to argue with me, but it's a publicly recognized right, so to speak. And the public that matters most is still the one in the imperial court because they have power. But they, in turn, have a capacity to create a reality which everyone will recognize because they serve as an authority behind law. And this is really wisdom number one. looking back on our imperial relationships, make sure you enforce the law. Because if you don't, you cease to be sovereign. Now that's got a lot of implications if you're reading the news. And I'm not even going to enter into a discourse around questions of justice, which certainly, in our story, are critical for not only the moral underpinnings, but the practical aspects of sovereignty.

But I'm talking brass tacks wisdom right now. Even an unjust law, which is clearly enforced, represents sovereignty and therefore survivability. So there is number one, reshut. We know what it means to actually be an authority, whether within our land or the four cubits that the good Lord gives us. And if we neglect that wisdom, we do it at our peril. Now, following on the heels of the Persian Empire, we get the Greeks. And they'll add tarbut to reshut. They will add culture to this notion of authority. Now, Greece was the quintessential cultural hegemon. That's a fun phrase, isn't it? And the transformation of classic Hellenic culture into the Hellenism that spread through the East was a great measure of their power.

It's not to say that Alexander didn't conquer in the old school sense amongst the best of them, or that the empire that he left behind was somehow deficient in the power of Reshoot, as I just defined it. It's to say that the deepest impression made by the Greek Empire was through cultural hegemony. That's why the story we tell as Jews about that time really is summed up in that famous declaration of Antiochus you can find in the first chapter of the first book of Maccabees. Then the king wrote to his whole kingdom that all should be one people and abandon their particular custom. From what history can tell us, this wasn't the way in which the Hellenistic kingdoms generally operated. Their cultural hegemony was classic soft power.

They assumed the peoples of the East, whom they had conquered, would want to be like them. And they were more or less universally correct, without, of course, the notable exception of the Jews, who will always prove to be the fly in the ointment if you want everyone to join the same team, if you have an imperial outlook in almost any context, including, by the way, when the Jews try to get each other to agree with one another. But the way we tell the story of Hanukkah, it was love at first sight between the sages and the philosophers, between the heights of Greek and Jewish culture and wisdom. There was a whole generation of priests that named their children Alexander, for goodness sake. That's Kohanim, right?

I'm talking about Jewish priests. And it's considered to be a Jewish name to this day. It was only when we felt the danger of being swallowed up by the hegemon that our cultural safeguards kicked in, and we started to insist, no, we are not like you. Of course, that took the form of religious civil war amongst the Judeans first, then only afterwards spilled over into an actual struggle with the Seleucid Greek Empire. I mean, after all, well before that call by Antiochus for everyone to get along, the first chapter of Maccabees records the following, In those days, there appeared in Israel transgressors of the law, who seduced many, saying, Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles all around us.

Since we separated from them, many evils have come upon us. That's a very different reading of Jewish history, if you ask me, that our problems lie in being separate from the world, as opposed to the classic Jewish perspective, that our problems mostly flow when we want to be just like it. Now, now's not the time to tell the tale of the Greek encounter and the Hanukkah awakening or the descent of the Hasmonean kingdom into a petty Hellenistic state. Go back to season one for that, by the way. I've put quite a bit of effort into it. If you can't find it, robmikefoyer at gmail.com or, you know, on Facebook. I'm happy to help you with a link. For present purposes, it's enough to note that just as Persia brought forward this notion of reshoot, classic political territorial sovereignty, if you will, law over a piece of ground, Greece brought forward this notion of talbut, cultural sovereignty.

And of course, the two are in no way exclusive. On the contrary, well done, one enhances and supplements the other. it's far easier to rule an empire when you do so facing people who wish they were more like you now Am Yisrael took this notion of cultural sovereignty quite deeply to heart I mean after all we fought a war over it and from the beginning of the Greek encounter it was clear that even if we managed to maintain reshut we were able to enforce the law within our physical boundaries without sovereignty over our culture we would be lost as a people We would have failed in that transition. Hence, the sort of defined identity posture, if you will, of the Jews was built at the time around maintaining the fences, boundaries, pure and impure, permitted and forbidden, us and them, lies at the heart of what we now know as the rabbinic perspective on identity.

And when the bottom dropped out of our territorial sovereignty with the destruction of the Second Temple, and the terrible hundred years that followed, and we were left as homeless wanderers, our cultural homeland remained intact and eminently portable. Not only did we reign supreme in our inner space after a ten fight with Christianity granted it we actually expanded this portable homeland with new aspects of culture religion spirit for the next 2,000 years. We expanded our cultural sovereignty, even as our reshoot seemed to have disappeared from the world. Now, that's not to say that we ever became leaders of world culture in place of the Greeks. Just like we didn't run the world in terms of territorial sovereignty after Persia fell.

Don't make the mistake. Our goal is not to be the new empire. It never is. Maybe we'll touch on that at the end. Our goal is to be able to take the wisdom as each empire elevates an element and perfects it and move forward as the story unfolds. And we have been able to leverage this concept of cultural sovereignty to maintain some sense of internal rule in all of the vicissitudes of millennia in which we lacked any control over a territory that made reshut, political sovereignty, even relevant. And for survival's sake, in the coming phase, it behooves us not to lose sight of the essential nature of cultural sovereignty. Now, I'm all for extending our reshut over all of Eretz Yisrael, but let's not let the intoxication of our encounter with the land blind us to the essential nature, the critical importance that there should be a thriving Torah and Jewish social culture at the heart of it.

We've got to not just survive. We want to thrive. So, Persia brought reshut. Call it political sovereignty. So Greece brings Tarbut, this cultural sovereignty, and that takes us to the unending empire of Rome. Right? Straight up into America, right? It's essentially the same structure, which brings us to money. Now, not in the sense of coinage, or even in the idea of natural economy. I'm speaking about a world built on commerce. And to add it, let's call it economic sovereignty. Have you ever seen that scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian? What have the Romans ever done for us? And they have this whole argument about how bad the Empire is until they realize everything that they've contributed to their material existence.

And what have they ever given us in return? The aqueduct? Oh, yeah, yeah, they did give us that. That's true, yeah. And the sanitation. Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like? Yeah, I'll grant you the aqueduct and sanitation are two things the Romans have done. And the roads. Well, yeah, obviously not roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads, irrigation, medicine, education. Yeah, yeah, all right, fair enough. And the wine. All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

If you've seen it, then you know that there is proof that John Cleese studied Gemara at some point. And if you haven't, well then listen to this conversation from the Gemara in Shabbat 33b. Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yossi and Rabbi Shimon were sitting. Rabbi Yehuda opened and he said, How pleasant are the actions of this nation, the Romans, as they establish marketplaces, establish bridges, establish bathhouses. It's a good life in a Roman city, says Rabbi Yehuda. Rabbi Yehuda stayed silent. Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, Rashbi, responded and he said, Everything that they established, they established only for their own purposes. What do the Romans ever do for us? They establish marketplaces to place prostitutes in them, bathhouses to pamper themselves, and bridges to collect taxes from those who pass over them.

Not the most idealistic picture, and perhaps not even so pretty, but apt. Because not only does this discussion predate Monty Python by nearly two millennia, it teaches us about Adam Smith's oh-so-important invisible hand a good 1600 years before the Scottish philosopher elevated self-interest to a guiding virtue. And beyond my cynicism, there's a critical point here. Rome didn't lack reshoot. They knew the power and authority of law and order. Their cultural sovereignty was honestly quite weak, and in the eyes of many, a source of their downfall. Nonetheless, bread and circuses served their purposes quite well then, as they still do now. But the real power of Rome was in the public pursuit of growth, driven by self-interest, and benefiting everyone, regardless of its original intent.

I mean, after all, who wants to live in a town without a market, a bath, or a bridge? Rome opened out a new realm. We're going to call it the realm of economic sovereignty. And in doing so, they began to shift the world of power, say, from tribute to taxation. No longer would states or citizens just be soaked for their wealth because the empire had the power to do so. There was going to be a bit of an exchange and some tangible results for that loss of wealth, if indirect ones. Infrastructure, government, stability, in which people, private people, and even individual states could prosper. Now, some other time, we can discuss the depth of economic sovereignty. How it opens the door to a revolution in the relationship between the individual and large structures of power, between states and empires and all kinds of interesting dimensions.

I mean, just think of your credit card. It's a piece of plastic. But it is a tool which allows you to wield incredible power almost anywhere on the planet, as an individual, regardless of what your government may be, whether it knows you're there or cares that you are. There's a reason that the American Express Company chose the Legionnaire of Rome as their symbol. Note the fact that a credit card company is a private endeavor, transnational in its nature and voluntary in its membership. Understanding how commerce and wealth create a world of power is an essential wisdom, which the current startup nation certainly hasn't missed. But we would do well to think a little further. We need to recognize that building structures of economic sovereignty, parallel to and perhaps sometimes divergent from, political sovereignty and even cultural sovereignty can be a critical tool to survive and thrive well beyond the realm of making money.

So that's a bit of a review of the past wisdom, reshut, tarbut, and commerce, physical, political sovereignty, cultural sovereignty, and economic sovereignty. If we're going to derive wisdom from past experience, in order to survive the face of a present transition, there are some essential questions that we need to consider. And you know, when I sat down to write this up, I said, nah, I think we should touch this in freestyle. The overarching issue is, how are we presently structured in response to the current empire? We're built in. If you think that an empire is really an infrastructure for the world, then we aren't freestanding, at least in some sense. Number one, we have to ask, where are we dependent?

Now, in the current state of Israel, the answer is quite obvious, right? power in the classic sense. Weapons, political backing, you fill in the blank. It's one of the reasons that you'll notice there's a consistent interest in Israel's government to keep the arms industry alive, thriving, and let's say somewhat amoral. I'm not going to go into the whole story. You can contact my holy wife if you want to take a look at the fact that it might also be a bit immoral. But my point is this. We have fought even against America's wrath to remain somewhat independent when it comes to the place where we're actually most dependent, raw power. It's worth also considering, by the way, where are we propping this empire up?

I mean, it's not just a give, give, give, take, take, take relationship between American and Israel. We deliver quite a bit of value in the world. And where is it that we're actually maintaining American power, be it through its ability to project power in the region, be it lending cultural legitimacy, you fill in the blank. These are questions that I want you to consider rather than just hear me analyze. Where we're holding this situation up relates quite closely to the next question worthy of consideration, is that how will we then be viewed when it falls? If you take a look at what's happening in America, the cultural discourse that characterizes what I would really say is one of the strongest signs of a transition away from empire, which is the undermining of the narrative there.

always the greatest source of cultural sovereignty. And you see how the Jews have somehow maneuvered our way into this unenviable position of being the one piece of American culture that everybody hates, the far left and the far right. Then you can understand why I say that we need to think about where we're at least perceived to be holding up the power of empire and how we'll be viewed when it falls. And the last question for you to consider again, where are we dependent? Where are we holding the situation up in the sense of propping it up, not in the sense of preventing it? And how will we be viewed when it falls? And last but not least, what has our residence within this imperial reality, our, call it, relationship to empire, brought out within us?

You know, as you travel through time, you can claim that every people we meet is simply an accident. And if we picked up a love of poetry from the Arabs in Al-Andalus, or a yearning for philosophy from the Greeks and even its rebirth in the Islamic Empire. You could say those were accidents or you could say they were opportunities that brought out essential elements within us And therefore we have to say are these accidents we want to discard We have to go native and look for our indigenous Judean nature Or is this the evolution which each situation has allowed a new aspect of truth to emerge? In which case, we want to polish our relationship that we gained through empire and not discard it. the last question that I want to consider I mean, at least if we're facing the end of an imperial era is what's our mission facing this?

what's the opportunity being offered here for making God's name great in the world through our actions and of course through how we tell the story of that empire's rise and fall this is always the touchstone for Am Yisrael Our goal in the world is to make God's name great. If we can't figure out how to do so facing this transition, then we run the risk of getting pulled under with it. Now, this idea that we have a responsibility to tell the story of rise and fall of empire begins back with the book of Daniel, if you're familiar with it. And this idea that God revealed to Daniel this progression of four kingdoms, be it in the idol that Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream at the beginning of the book, you can go back to the first episode of the Jewish story, an episode that I long to remake now that I understand so much more the power there, but nonetheless, it's still there.

That first episode, and you can examine the Four Kingdoms there, or if you're familiar with the book it repeats itself throughout. And that idea that we have a responsibility to sort of see the archetypes which these empires resent and perhaps which underlie them and to understand their evolution through time continues in the hands of our sages in my eyes. It actually reaches a whole new peak with the expulsion from Spain. If you look closely there, and that's back at the end of season one, beginning of season two, you'll see that there's an emergence of Jewish history and it almost bifurcates from Jewish memory and the two enter into a rich and complex relationship. You can look at Professor Yerushalmi's book, Zahor.

If you've never read it, anyway, you need to read it. And that's where you'll get a better grasp of what it is I'm referring to. But we're in the present right now. And a thought on the present day I'd actually like to take from a slightly different angle of how this story is told. You know, if you haven't seen it, it's worth looking into Oswald Spengler's work, The Decline of the West. The title, of course, says it all in terms of our present conversation. Spengler was a German historian and philosopher of history also in the late 19th, early 20th century. He dies in 1936. He was a fierce critic of the Nazis for various reasons. he was also, in general, a mighty cultural critic. Spengler saw bourgeois European culture as hopelessly degenerate, eroded from within by what he called an excess of liberalism and individualism.

This may strike a chord if you've been paying attention to recent events. He also, by the way, saw the socialism and communism, which were striving to replace European bourgeois culture in the early 20th century, as over-civilized ideologies. They were too refined and therefore doomed to failure, in which apparently he was right. Most provocative, actually, was Spengler's prediction that round about the year 2000, Western civilization would enter the period of what he called a pre-death emergency, a phase of crisis, which would evoke 200 years of what he called Caesarism in order to survive it. It was an extra-constitutional sort of swelling and almost omnipotent to what we call the executive branch of government.

And that power, even though it allowed Western civilization to overcome the initial crisis, would end with its final collapse. Now Spengler's ideals were wildly popular in Europe at the end of his life. And in our story, you may recall from back in season two, Abba Ahimeir, ideologue of the radical vision of what became the revisionist Zionist, was a big believer in Spengler's ideas. In particular, Ahimeir was deeply attracted to that age of Caesarism, soon to come, which would, in his own words, at last allow the power of command to order the world. Again, these things may sound familiar in terms of how the Israeli state has developed in response to the American empire. Because whatever you think of Trump, whether you see the bad orange man, I mean, how much more of an Aesobian figure could you get there, or the new Cyrus, he is the embodiment of Spengler's vision.

And it's not for naught that President Trump was more popular in Israel than he was even in America. Food for thought in terms of how we want to tell this story in centuries to come. and who we are within it. But here's my real final thought, because at this point, I kind of feel like I'm rambling, and that's in terms of what action might possibly lie ahead. Like I said right at the beginning, a Jew is the enemy of empire. And ultimately, our mission isn't just to make God's name great in the world in some theoretical sense, it's to be a seed for a new vision of global unity, one which isn't the homogenizing power of empire, but rather a harmonizing ability, which is something entirely different. I'll call it Netzach Yisrael.

Netzach is a beautiful word, because Netzach means eternal. It's that which lasts. Empires come and go. But what makes us think that humanity, that human consciousness in concert, isn't capable of more, of something which will actually last? And I say in concert deliberately, because La Menatzeach, A minatzeach is an orchestrator, a conductor of an orchestra. And how beautiful is it, in this sense, that the very idea that there's a diversity in harmony, which can serve as a source of strength for a nation or for the world, was first articulated in the academic world by the American Zionist Horace Callen. Once again, you can go back to the beginning of season three and check that out. As he says in his 1915 essay, Democracy vs.

the Melting Pot, extremely important read. There he's speaking about the as yet indistinct nature of the American spirit, and he says, our spirit is inarticulate, not a voice, but a chorus of many voices, each singing a rather different tune. Now notice, many would want to then smooth that out into one note. He doesn't say that. He says, how to get order out of this cacophony is the question for all those who are concerned about those things which alone justify wealth and power. Concerned about justice, the arts, literature, philosophy, science, in our words, all the things that make life worth living. He says, what must, what shall this cacophony become? And in that essay, he puts forward what we know today as a theory of cultural diversity or the tossed salad.

This notion that rather than trying to make the world all the same, let's get the world to work together, in which case the diversity, the rich nature of nations, and even human individuals allows for an almost endless possibility of how the world could be. Not bowing to empire, but dancing together in concert. And when I look around for where this model might be popping up in our story today, what might actually lie beyond empire, instead of just survival and the wisdom which I hope that I've offered in the last half hour or so, but a bit of vision of what we can work for in our actions, my eye actually comes to rest on a very specific thing. It's the Abraham Accords. This is a concert of interests with tremendous possibility in the realms of political, cultural, and economic sovereignty as I've defined them.

And the implications of something as simple like we see in the news today as a water for energy deal are vast and unexplored. I mean, by the way, write me if you want to hear my vision for how the Jordan Valley could be the economic and cultural driver of a Middle East, if not the world, that you haven't imagined. But for right now, I just want to leave you with that thought that there's something possible there. I want to leave you with a little bit of vision, a call to imagination, and a call not to fear what lies ahead in the transition, but to approach it with the hope born of the potential that always lies in uncertainty. Remember, at heart, hope means believing that what is does not define what might be.

And together with that hope, I want to call you to faith. to a faith that we as a people, we as a planet, as a species, already have what it takes from our history, not only to survive, but to thrive in the transition between empires. After all, we went through Egypt, we'll get through this as well. I want to thank a few folks. I want to thank all the folks that give their hard-earned money to make this show possible, to keep it free and widely available. I want to call for you to join them. You can go right now to my website, jewishstory.co. In the upper right-hand corner, you'll see a button there that says Be a Patron. Click on it, and you can give a little bit of per-podcast support. Or if you want to give some Hanukkah gail, a one-time gift, you can write me at robmikefoyer at gmail.com, or you can send a gift to PayPal with that associated email, or write me on Facebook, robmikefoyer, and I'm happy to share with you the details of how you can dedicate a show.

I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network. That's thelandofisrael.com, building a center for global transcendence in the heart of the Judea Mountains. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, pardes.org.il, for throwing the doors of the Beit Midrash open as wide as possible. And I want to thank you for joining me. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.