Resisting the Call

When the Stoics counsel removal from radical investment it is is easy to feel the intimate bonds of family and love being dissolved by the rational.

There are, however, moments when claims made for the sake of the Other rekindle that the Stoic call for the chilling of the passions: the charioteer harnessing a horse gone wild with circumstance.

From last month's Haaretz:

"Just weeks after the arrest of alleged Jewish terrorist, Yaakov Teitel, a West Bank rabbi on Monday released a book giving Jews permission to kill Gentiles who threaten Israel.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, wrote in his book "The King's Torah" that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation.

Shapiro based the majority of his teachings on passages quoted from the Bible, to which he adds his opinions and beliefs.

"It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote, adding: "If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments - because we care about the commandments - there is nothing wrong with the murder."

Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers."

That is not what New York Times columnist David Brooks had in mind when he also wrote last month, with his signature style of accusation and peculiar sense of measure ("most" and "fringe"):

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics.

Stories enter the imagination and shape perceptions of the world, some selected and cultivated others not. There are some used as shield and others that invade like festering cancers. Both kinds can shape the readings of representations, are shared, repeated and repeated and repeated, whether in extractions from ancient texts or the rancid circulations of the myth of The Protocols, each distilled into a "blood-dimmed tide" where the "worst / Are full of passionate intensity." The only call that makes sense is the calming lure of reflection unburdened, thought apart from the Righteous.