"Modern Jewish history, having started with court Jews and continuing with Jewish millionaires and philanthropists, is apt to forget about this other trend of Jewish tradition—the tradition of Heine, Rahel Varnhagen, Sholom Aleichem, of Bernard Lazare, Franz Kafka or even Charlie Chaplin. It is the tradition of a minority of Jews who have not wanted to become upstarts, who preferred the status of “conscious pariah.”
– Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” in The Jew As Pariah

What is a pariah? Aside from being Tamil for “drummer”, a pariah is generally understood as an outcast. A pariah is one who walks to their own beat.

Hannah Arendt touched on something essential and sacred in speaking of the Jew as pariah. Had Abraham responded to God’s command to “leave his people” by walking alone into the desert, he would have left his tribe, been literally without caste: a pariah. When Abraham responded instead by going forth with a princely retinue, God’s response was to make of him a great nation (Hebrew: goy), and make his descendants kings and servants of kings. Given the subsequent history of Israel, there is every reason to question whether this should be considered a blessing.

Abraham’s son Ishmael is the mythic patriarch of the Arabs. Through this firstborn son the promise of being the father of many goyim, in the sense of non-Hebrew nations, was fulfilled. Ishmael was himself a pariah, cast out into the desert with his mother, by his father Abraham. The margins of Jewish history throng with those who opted out or were left, sold or cast out: Cain; Esau; assorted Samaritans, women and lepers; even Sabbatai Zvi, the seventeenth century self-proclaimed Messiah. Certainly the thousands who lost faith in or because of Zvi and were left “worldless” are amongst those on the margins of Jewish history.

Is not the state of “worldlessness” Arendt describes the natural environment of the outcast? What is this nomadic culture, this worldlessness? Zionism, like Israel in Samuel’s time, flees from it. Will Israel learn once again that there is at best no greater security in militant nationalism than as a nomad; and that at worst there is the blasphemy of blood sacrifice to the land?

The desert experience at the heart of the prophetic traditions represents, and is, the absence of culture and language. Alone in the desert there is no one to talk to but God. In the absence of the outward forms of culture the mind becomes less inclined, or able, to interpret God’s response in the language and mythos of one’s birth, and more able to hear.

Arendt talks about “worldlessness” as a state in which one’s weltanschauung, worldview or mythos, is stripped away: “for when man is robbed of all means of interpreting events he is left with no sense whatsoever of reality.” There is in her voice a note almost of desperation: the sound of a young mystic contemplating the loss of everything. As a modern European thrust unwillingly into the “worldlessness” of a post World War II displaced Jew, Arendt was like one of the Hebrews led into the wilderness by Moses. Both were assimilated to a settled urban culture, and unlike Moses had not crossed the desert before. Arendt, like the Hebrews in the wilderness, had not been initiated into the meta-culture of the nomad.

It is true that not being possessed by a worldview means that one lives in one way or another as a pariah lost between cultures; and it is true it happens that some never emerge from the desert, and some lose their sanity. Still there has long existed a loose, informal community of such pariahs across cultures and centuries; nomads of the spirit. Such individuals feel not that they have lost everything—unless in the way of a Zen master—but that they have gained everything. It is not that they are homeless, but at home everywhere. The nomadic culture is the culture of the multi-lingual, the cosmopolitan; of those who are not locked into a single symbolic language or worldview, but move between them at will. Moses’ time in the desert herding sheep with the semi-nomadic Midianite tribe into which he married had taught him more than how to live as a nomad in the desert. Moses learned to cross the cultural boundaries between Egyptian nobility, Hebrew slaves and nomadic herders. He learned the culture of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The ability to change worldviews and thus consciousness at will has been defined as magic (Dion Fortune, quoted by William Butler, Apprenticed to Magic, 1962, p. 12). The line between mysticism—theurgy—and magic—thaumaturgy—is a fine one, as Moses perhaps had reason to reflect. According to the text, Moses did not enter the Promised Land because of what he had done at Meribah Kadesh:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go up this mountain in the Abarim range and see the land I have given the Israelites. After you have seen it, you too will be gathered to your people, as your brother Aaron was, for when the community rebelled at the waters in the Desert of Zin, both of you disobeyed my command to honor me as holy before their eyes.” (These were the waters of Meribah Kadesh, in the Desert of Zin.) (Numbers 20.)

The story is told in five places, with variations (Exodus 17, Numbers 20, Deuteronomy 32, Psalms 95 and 106). In all versions Moses finds water at Meribah Kadesh when the Hebrews were dying of thirst; likewise in all versions the Hebrews questioned Moses’ and God’s leadership; and the subsequent transition in leadership is associated with this incident. These aspects of the story are consistent.

The fact that the story is repeated five times suggests that it was of great significance to the Hebrews at the time the text was being assembled from oral history. One key inconsistency between versions of the story is whether Moses and Aaron also, along with the Hebrew people collectively, were at fault at Meribah Kadesh. Exactly what action of Moses’ “disobeyed my [God’s] command to honor me as holy before their eyes” is obscure. In Exodus 17 the story is told with no blame attached to Moses: it is the Israelites who “tested the LORD.” This is no small matter. Moses’ failure to enter the Promised Land is undisputed, but whether it is attributed to punishment from God or Moses’ choice of a nomadic lifestyle casts doubt on the whole enterprise of the kingdom of Israel. With so much at stake in this passage, the absence of a “smoking gun”—a clear and convincing crime committed by Moses—is remarkable.

One undisputed aspect of the story of Meribah Kadesh is that water came from the desert. Practically speaking, it makes no difference whether one attributes finding water to pure faith in God or to the skills and knowledge Moses learned from the nomadic Midianites. The bottom line is that Moses, unlike the Hebrews he led, had faith in his ability to survive in the desert. The significance of Meribah Kadesh to the Hebrews was that despite God’s passing the Hebrews’ “test” by showing them water in the desert, as soon as their prophetic leadership had passed on the Hebrews headed for the nearest urban center, ready to fight and kill to resume their settled lifestyle as slaves to a king. The Prophet Samuel warned the people that in their desire for a king like other nations, “you yourselves will become his slaves” (1 Samuel 8:17).

The transition in leadership to Joshua and the tribe of Levi after the deaths of Miriam, Aaron and Moses is painstakingly documented, which suggests that it required defense. The inclusion in the text of versions of the story which hold Moses blameless for what happened at Meribah Kadesh is further evidence that the Hebrew tribe was divided in their interpretation of the incident.

It is very odd that versions of the story assert that Moses and Aaron shared responsibility for the incident at Meribah Kadesh, yet remain vague as to exactly what they did that was so wrong that they were in consequence barred from the Promised Land. Without regard to its historical accuracy, it can safely be said that the story of God banning Moses’ from entering the Promised Land met three needs of the Hebrew monarchy. First, the versions of the story that quote God speaking to Moses of the “Promised Land” demonstrate that the authority of the Hebrew monarchy flowed from the same source as Moses’ authority. Second, the blame and punishment attributed to Moses explain why the Hebrews’ greatest leader had not led them to their current disputed real estate and settled (though more violent) lifestyle. Third, the term “Promised Land” implicitly justified the horrific bloodshed associated with gaining and keeping control of fertile real estate.

From a political perspective removed by several thousand years, we may reasonably ask whether God’s keeping Moses from the Promised Land may have been a blessing rather than a punishment. One undeniable result is that Moses’ name is for all time cleared of association with the subsequent massacres and atrocities committed by the Hebrews under Joshua’s leadership in claiming the Promised Land. Not surprisingly, this perspective is conspicuously absent from the text: any hint that the invasion of Palestine and establishment of a Hebrew monarchy represented the rejection of Moses’ divinely inspired return to a nomadic lifestyle would have directly threatened the perceived legitimacy of the monarchy. The prophet Samuel had done considerably more than hint at this, so the monarchy had a clear need to establish its legitimacy in traditional Hebrew terms.

The nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle is defined by the ability to cross borders at will; to move across the wild places between cultures and languages. The hallmark of this meta-culture is the pun; the ability to manipulate symbols to create multiple levels of meaning. It is also the culture of those who redacted the stories of the Old Testament. Flying under the radar of the politicians of the day, the redactors left us clues. God’s preventing Moses from entering the Promised Land is presented to us as a punishment, which served the political needs of the day. But the story has been redacted so that rather than explaining, the reader is drawn in to consider the actual events at Meribah Kadesh, which on closer examination don’t seem particularly heinous.

Being banned from the bloody invasion of the Promised Land, a curse that is also a blessing, is an example of multi-level rabbinic discourse. Essentially a sustained pun, the point of the double-meanings is not humor but the communication of truths which for either political reasons should not, or for logical reasons cannot, be stated outright. This meta-culture is the natural habitat of those who are more concerned with discerning the nature of God by whatever name than about politics, aside from avoiding them. The luminaries of this meta-culture weave cultural threads like the threads of a magical flying carpet. Typically preferring to remain on the margins of history, only a few names of this “hidden tradition” of have graced the pages of history: Moses de Leon; Isaac Luria; Pico Della Mirandola; Ibn Sinna; Omar Khayyam; Jalaluddin Rumi; G. I. Gurdjieff; Aleister Crowley; Israel Regardie; the Baal Shem Tov; Leibnitz; Gödel; Einstein; Ghandi; Hannah Arendt.

As a rational European Jew, Arendt writes wistfully of the empirical nature of mysticism. The crowning glory of the mystical meta-culture has been the development of a systematic process for the practical evaluation of myth: the scientific method. It is the culture of those who have both been shaped by many cultures and participate in the shaping of those cultures, as distinct from traditional inward-looking tribal and national cults of blood sacrifice such as Zionism. The result of this community having delivered the power of science into the hands of cults of militant patriotism has been the development of systematic methods of blood sacrifice. Against such miscalculations the nomadic meta-culture can level nothing more powerful than puns. “To your tents, O Israel! Look after your own house, O David!” 2 Chronicles 10:16 anonymously skewers the powerful house of David upon the dual meaning of “house” as both a dynasty and an architectural structure more Philistine than Hebrew: the heritage of Israel is tents, not houses.

The tale of the Golem of Prague is a more modern example of a story with meaning on multiple levels. The Golem of Prague is a Jewish folk tale of a man-made protector of the Jewish community, endowed with superhuman strength and directed by the community’s wisest elder, the historic Rabbi Loew of Prague. Wolf Pascheles’ collection of Jewish tales entitled Galerie der Sippurim, published in 1847 included the first published story of the Golem of Prague. While this publication followed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by twenty nine years, Jewish folk tales of golems date to early Judaism.

In 1915 Gustav Meyrink re-wrote and published the story in novel form as Der Golem; it was Meyrink’s most popular book. Published during World War I, for Jews and gentiles alike the story of a man-made, superhuman being with the potential to run amok resonated with the horrors of mechanized warfare conducted by nation states. Like the golem a nation state is a living being with superhuman powers, designed by the nation’s wisest elders to protect its citizens. There is no evidence that Meyrink or anyone else intended this level of meaning consciously; nonetheless it is there.

In pre-World War II Europe the story of the Golem foreshadowed the potentials of Zionism as much as it did those of German National Socialism. If the analogy of the golem to the nation state was not conscious on Meyrink’s part, its resonance is all the more striking for emanating directly from the collective consciousness of the European Jewish community. Understood as an analogy for nationalism, the story of the Golem of Prague reflects the potential of the cult of national patriotism to go out of control and bring harm to that which it was designed to protect.

The hubris theme—that man’s proudest works tend go awry—is a “standard feature of golems in popular culture”. In one version of the story Rabbi Loew’s daughter Miriam and the golem fall in love and run away together. The Rabbi’s beloved Miriam is the heart and soul of the Jewish community, captivated by her superhuman protector. Again whether intended by its author or not, the golem is the modern state of Israel.

The declaration of the state of Israel in 1947 may be considered the climax of a complex political ritual begun by Theodor Herzl in the previous century. Within the Jewish/Hebrew tradition the ritual of animating a state has been passed down since the time of Joshua, Saul and David. It is however a pagan, not Hebrew, ritual, and one which the Jewish community has been warned against using at least since the time of the Prophet Samuel. In Jewish legend a golem is brought to life by ritually invoking the Name of God, generally in the context of a kiss, a breath, a dance, or a slip of paper. The historic tradition attested to by the Torah is considerably darker.

Like kingdoms, nation states generally are born out of blood. A nation state is the crystallization of the collective consciousness of a nation in a living institution, the state. Patriotism is the name we give to the worship of such a collective consciousness. On a scale far greater in modern times than in ancient pagan tradition, patriotism generally requires ritual human sacrifice.

The kingdom established by Joshua, Saul and David was grafted with the blood of Abraham’s descendents onto God’s promise to Abraham of eternal fruitfulness. The result is a golem-state which cannot die, but rises zombie-like from its tomb: Israel. Like nation states generally, it requires blood sacrifice to thrive. The descendants of Abraham’s descendants in all nations inherit his blessing; but the great goy which has since Samuel’s time risen again and again to enslave Abraham’s people and spill their blood upon the alter of patriotism has inherited the curse: “I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse.”

Like Prometheus, Israel the great goy cannot die, but suffers endlessly. After Syria, Babylon and Rome it does not require a prophet to predict the shoot from the rod of Abraham will endure like a twisted timberline pine blasted by storms of unspeakable violence; endure and persist in blessing all the nations with fruit of undeniable sweetness.