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[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict — for those who wish to catch up, our game thus far consists of an intro to the game and game board, followed by moves 1-5, 6-9, then moves 10-11 which together constitute a meditation, moves 12, 13-15, 16-17, and most recently before this, move 18 with cadenza ]

Move 19: The view from above

Move content:

Discussing strategy, the very canny LTG (USMC, Ret’d.) Paul Van Riper had this to say:

What we tend to do is look toward the enemy. We’re only looking one way: from us to them. But the good commanders take two other views. They mentally move forward and look back to themselves. They look from the enemy back to the friendly, and they try to imagine how the enemy might attack them. The third is to get a bird’s-eye view, a top-down view, where you take the whole scene in. The amateur looks one way; the professional looks at least three different ways.

A bird’s-eye view, a hawk’s eye view, a top-down view, an overview, a view from 30,000 feet, a God’s eye view, a view from above, a zoom…

If move 18 and its cadenza gave us a view of the depth of vision or insight that is necessary for a full and rich understanding of the world we live in — its qualitative or spiritual scope, if you like — this next move, with its picnic and drone-sight, addresses its breadth in space and time — materially and quantitatively speaking.

The classic expression of the sheer material scope of the universe was put together by Charles and Ray Eames in their justly celebrated film, Powers of Ten, from which the lower of these two images is drawn:

Here are some other relevant scans of the scope of things, in terms of time and space:

The Scale of the Universe 2
A Brief History of The Universe
The Known Universe
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945

These are impressive videos to be sure, but as an aside I’ll invite you to ask yourselves how well they compare with this zoom in words, a poem by the zennist, ecologist, essayist and poet Gary Snyder, from his book, Axe Handles: Poems:

Such breadth of vision, such craft.

*

If this “material scope of things” too has a cadenza, it would be that all of this is shot through with some primary oppositions, dappled as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have it, with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim — as indicated in the drone-sight and picnic double image at the head of this move.

This dappling, this constant flux of opposites, takes many forms — day and night lead to the more abstract light and dark, which can then be interpreted morally as good and evil, to which we respond with repulsion and attraction as the case may be, building our worldviews from love or fear…

At different scales the opposites that matter most to us may have different names and shadings, but here I’d just like to draw attention to the dappling of our world with:

competition and cooperation
Darwin‘s natural selection and Kropotkin‘s mutual aid
duel and duet (ah! — a favorite phrasing of mine)
war and peace

Provocatively, we find this dappling in scriptures, too, wherein the ripples of such verses as “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name” (Exodus 15.3) dropped like a stone into the pond of the human mind, meet with the ripples of other verses such as “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (I John 4.16).

There are times when we take such oppositions literally, perhaps too literally, and times when we begin to see oppositions as abstract and theoretical end-points to what is in fact a yin-yang process continually unfolding…

Which brings me by a commodius vicus of recirculation to this image of the great opposition between war and peace, its dappling, its unfolding:

Links claimed:

To the Lamb, move 18: this move presents the material scope of the universe in counterpoint to its visionary scope as laid out in move 18 with its cadenza.

To Revelation, move 17 — the word revelation means unveiling, as we have seen, and our sciences and technologies, with their spectra of telescopes, microscopes, cameras and zooms, are unveiling and revealing to us much about the physicality of the world we live in — much that was accounted for in other times and places through intuition, vision and poetry.

This scientific and technical revelation of material existence, for many of us moderns, has largely eclipsed the mode of visionary revelation of move 17 — yet it cannot eradicate it. Implicit in this move, then, is the sense that we carry with us both subjective and objective, inner and outer, qualitative and quantitative understandings — though the data that “sight” and “insight” provide us with may be different in kind, and resolving them may be something of a koan to us, the deep problem in consciousness as philosophers of science have named it — and that we can discount neither one if we are to have and maintain a rich sense of our situation.

Comment:

If the two previous moves have shown us the scope of the universe we co-inhabit, perhaps we should now make our own zoom in, much as James Joyce did when he had the schoolboy Stephen inscribe his name and address in his geography book as Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, Universe – an address that Stephen then read both forwards and backwards, finding himself in one direction, and finding in the other that he had no means of knowing what might lie beyond the universe…

Imagine then, skipping rapidly from (unimaginable) cosmos via such things as the intriguingly named End of Greatness to galaxy or nebula…

…solar system and planet — whence we can slow down and zero gently in on the Middle (or as my friend Ralph Birnbaum would call it, the Muddle) East, Israel / Palestine, Jerusalem / Al Quds / the Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary – and to such matters of contemplative vision and tribal passion as the first, second and projected third Temples, the al-Aqsa mosque.

Our increasing focus will bring us, then, to that the rock which Jews believe marks the place where Abraham bound his son Isaac (the Akedah), and which Muslims believe to be the place of ascent of the Prophet to the celestial realms (the Mi’raj) on his Night Journey (Qur’an, Al-Isra).

Here again myth and history collide, and both visionary and material considerations merge in the heart of the what my friend the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg has justly called “the most contested piece of real estate on earth”.

[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict — continuing ]

Move 18: The Lamb of God

Move content:

If you want it in short form, the move content here is: “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) — note in particular the curious involvement of time in this formulation…

*

The Lamb of God is a superposition, a simultaneous envisioning of multiple meanings with their inherent values – it’s a thought (concetto) in a style of thinking that once was and should properly be known by the name of Poetry – a style of thinking in which a rich cluster of meanings is concentrated, potentiated, distilled as wine is distilled into brandy.

It is not, therefore, simply a decorative motif for churches, hymnals and religious pamphlets, not is it that brilliant but weak thing, a metaphor. Layered after the manner of Blake‘s fourfold vision (move 4), it is at once:

the radiance of Godhead;

focused in the person, life and death of the window, Christ, through which that radiance streams;

in his act of permitting his own slaughter, nailed and bleeding, on the tree that echoes the tree in an eternal garden;

prefigured in his breaking of bread and offering of wine, wheat ground by millstone and grape trodden in winepress, the fruits of the earth, the seasons and human labor;

offered in substitution as a Passover sacrifice;

repeated wherever and whenever Eucharist is celebrated;

portending the great union to which we are invited, the Marriage Supper;

seen in the image of a lamb, a child of sheep…

through all of which the divine radiance takes form, is colored, may be glimpsed, may be made ours… by means of which — “take, eat, this is given for you” — we may be made his.

This sounds like religion, and no doubt it is – but the mode of perception required to apprehend it is not material, not literal, not within reach of camera or microscope or x-ray, of fact, but symbolic, transcendent, within the reach of insight, of poetry, of love.

Likewise, the relation of time with the timeless in sacrifice is expressed as poetic truth in the words “slain from the foundation of the world “.

*

You may know these things from experience, you may see them as I write this, or this may all be as dust to you, the merest dull preachment, so many wasted pixels, so much spilled ink.

Perhaps I can convey some of the life of this matter through the works of great artists… for that is what they are great for.

Visually, the appropriate illustration would be the Adoration of the Lamb from van Eyck‘s Ghent Altarpiece, sonically the Agnus Dei from Bach‘s B Minor Mass – which I can happily present together in this video of John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists:

Here too, from Handel‘s Messiah, is the final chorus Worthy is the Lamb that was Slain and concluding Amen, sung by the Ichud Choir with the Herzliya Chamber Orchestra under Harvey Bordowitz:

I am particularly delighted to feature a choir and orchestra from Hertzliya here, because I generally associate Hertzliya with Dr Reuven Paz of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, a noted counter-terrorism (CT) analyst — and besides, a Jewish choir and orchestra singing Messiah is interesting in its own way. More on that later…

Links claimed:

To pigs, move 16: it is indeed a pleasure to move from the use of animals such as the pig in an imagery of hatred to that of the lamb in an imagery of love, and it may be noted that this shift accompanies the motif of sacrifice…

To Revelation, since “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” is a quotation from Revelation 13:8.

To Netanyahu’s leopard, via this lovely quote from Isaiah 11.6:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

Comment:

Different moves can be seen as the “heart” of the game from different perspectives: this one presents the heart of the game’s (and my) metaphysics.

Specifically, there’s a great deal more I want to say in terms of the move content, laying out in more detail the relationship of “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” to the Wedding Supper of Revelation, the Eucharist, the Seder, ritual in general, time and eternity. For the sake of clarity, I’ll lay this out in a cadenza, an excursus — please read it as part of the move content for purposes of play.
____________________________________________________________________________________________

Cadenza

Time lies at the heart of this move – or more precisely, time with eternity.

The thing being, that “time” contains “eternity” in the hidden heart of every moment, while “eternity” simultaneously contains every moment of “time”. Christ seems to be thinking along these lines in mind when he says “Before Abraham was, I am” – and the Zen Master Hui Neng‘s koan, “What is your face before your mother and father were born” carries a similar implication.

Indeed, this whole business of time, space and the Lamb is highly paradoxical, when viewed from a linear, secular perspective.

I am aware that this perception of the symbolic superposition of one time on another — like washes of watercolor on a painting and with “eternity” like the white canvas beneath them all — is an unfamiliar one in our clock-driven world. But it is an essential mode of perception if we are to understand the long memories of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, and the eschatological hope that each of the three Abrahamic religions perceives in the spiritual topography of the Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem.

In playing this move, I wish to give the reader a background awareness of this style of perception: for it is this manner of thinking which allows centuries-ancient scriptures to map to the disputed terrain of these contested times.

It may thus serve us well as, moving further into the game, we encounter the more urgent and immediate voices of our contemporaries, friend and foe, skeptic and believer, warrior and peacemaker alike:

*

Within Judaism:

It was ever thus with prayer and sacrifice, as Martin Buber observes:

… prayer is not in time but time in prayer, sacrifice not in space but space in sacrifice, and to reverse the relation is to abolish the reality …

We find this sensibility spelled out explicitly in Jacob Neusner‘s account of the Passover seder, in his Introduction to Judaism:

Through the natural eye, one sees ordinary folk, not much different from their neighbors in dress, language, or aspirations. The words they speak do not describe reality and are not meant to. When Jewish people say of themselves, “We were the slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt,” they know they never felt the lash; but through the eye of faith that is just what they have done. It is their liberation, not merely that of long-dead forebears, they now celebrate.

Here lies the power of the Passover banquet rite to transform ordinary existence into an account of something beyond. … Now, in the transformation at hand, to be a Jew means to be a slave who has been liberated by God. To be Israel means to give eternal thanks for God’s deliverance. And that deliverance is not at a single moment in historical time. It comes in every generation and is always celebrated. Here again, events of natural, ordinary life are transformed through myth into paradigmatic, eternal, and ever-recurrent sacred moments.

Indeed the Haggadah, the liturgical text of the seder, itself expresses the need for this folding of time upon time:

In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt, as it is said: “You shall tell your child on that day, it is because of this that the L-rd did for me when I left Egypt.”

*

Within Christianity:

Christ, who is simultaneously the sacrificing Priest and the sacrificial Lamb, is understood in the theology of the Eucharist as extending throughout and beyond all times and spaces – he is “slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13.8 as quoted above), he re-enacts the original Passover in the Last Supper (Mark 14.14) and at his Crucifixion (his body broken and blood spilled), and is present at every Eucharist…

Dom Gregory Dix, after 700 pages of exceedingly detailed scholarship on the early formation of the Eucharistic rite in his seminal book, The Shape of the Liturgy — suddenly bursts out with this stunning paragraph:

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of human greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner-of-war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc — one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei — the holy common people of God.

And every Eucharist, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council tells us, offers us “a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle.”

*

Within Islam:

We find the same in the profound reaches of Islam, where as Gerhard Böwering notes in The Concept of Time in Islam:

Through a distinct meditational technique, known as dikr, recollection of God, the mystics return to their primeval origin on the Day of Covenant, when all of humanity (symbolically enshrined in their prophetical ancestors as light particles or seeds) swore an oath of allegiance and witness to Allah as the one and only Lord. Breaking through to eternity, the mystics relive their waqt, their primeval moment with God, here and now, in the instant of ecstasy, even as they anticipate their ultimate destiny. Sufi meditation captures time by drawing eternity from its edges in pre- and post-existence into the moment of mystical experience.

*

I’ll leave off with the celebrated words of St. Augustine on time:

For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.

— Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones lib xi, cap xiv, sec 17 (ca. 400 CE)

[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict — continuing ]

Move 16: Pigs

Move content:

Dehumanizing by bestializing.

Here is a cartoon – I believe from al-Watan – it is about the mildest image I could find that is reflective of the theme of this move: the association of the Jews, Israelis, Zionists, and/or the State of Israel with pigs aka swine in some Arab and/or Muslim sources… and more generally, the practice of dehumanizing one’s enemies by portraying them as animals, beasts…

The Hilali-Khan translation of the Qur’an, 5:60 reads:

Those (Jews) who incurred the curse of Allah and his Wrath, and those of whom (some) He transformed into apes and swine.

This is a translation which was sponsored by the Saudi government and made freely available by them. It is also interspersed with paranthetical notes expanding on the original text. Thus of the 8 parallel English versions of this ayah found in the Leeds Qurany Tool site, only the Hilali-Khan translation quoted above includes the word “Jews” – an addition that derives from the interpreters’ desire to clarify the meaning as they see it, a desire found also in the same translation at 8.60, where “And make ready against them all you can of power, including steeds of war” is followed “(tanks, planes, missiles, artillery)” – tanks, planes, missiles and so forth being a little too modern for the original Arabic to have specified them.

The word “Jews” is also lacking in the original Arabic — but the context makes it clear that “People of the Book” (both Jews and Christians included) are being addressed, and that it is when they turn away from the One God and, as the Old Testament prophets would say, “go whoring after false gods” that the wrath and curse falls upon them.

What it means – whether it should be applied to a sub-group of Christians and Jews at the time of the Prophet or to the entire Jewish race today, and whether it is to be read in a literal or metaphorical sense – it is certainly widely taken in a literal sense as applying specifically and literally, today, to the Jews, in Israel.

Jerusalem is exposed to every vagabond, and its parts belong to every nomadic traveler – and this since the settlers, the rabble descendants of apes and pigs began defiling the parts of Jerusalem … Allah, we have entrusted you with the throats of the Jews; Allah, count them and kill them one by one, do not leave even one of them upon the land of Palestine.

The Quranic quote with which I opened this move, the Al-Aqsa (Hamas) TV quote above, and many other similar jibes and curses against the Israelis / Jews can be found in this PalWatch study of the Demonization of Jews/Israelis.

And one report in the official PA daily newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida describes Palestinian Christians also participating in this kind of dehumanization:

The spring carnival has retained its [Palestinian] flavor in towns such as Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Ramallah… with the demonstrations of the Scouts, songs, dances, and popular Palestinian hymns about Christian-Islamic unity and internal Christian unity. These hymns carry meaningful messages, in response to the Israeli prohibition [to enter Jerusalem], as seen in the calls of the youth who lead the procession of light, waving swords and not caring if anyone accuses them of Antisemitism: … ‘Our master, Jesus, the Messiah, the Messiah redeemed us, with his blood he bought us, and today we are joyous while the Jews are sad,’ and, ‘Jews, Jews! Your holiday is the Holiday of the Apes, while our holiday is the Holiday of the Messiah.’

*

A furious anti-Semitism, backed by claims of scriptural sanction, is one of the drivers of the Middle East impasse…

It is not the only option. Thus Muhammad Asad, in his Message of the Qur’an, notes:

Contrary to many of the commentators who take this reference to “apes and swine” in a literal sense, the famous tabi’i Mujahid explains it as a metaphorical description (mathal) of the moral degradation which such sinners undergo: they become wildly unpredictable like apes, and as abandoned to the pursuit of lusts as swine (Manor VI, 448). This interpretation has also been quoted by Tabari in his commentary on 2:65.

Links:

Three links are claimed:

To Netanyahu’s leopard, in the sense that Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Islamic scorn and hatred form an echo chamber in which viewing the other, the opposite number, the enemy as an animal dehumanizes them – a necessary prerequisite for killing them, as Sebastian Junger recently noted with regard to the US military in the Washington Post:

of course they have dehumanized the enemy — otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings

To moral equivalence – because comparing and contrasting Netanyahu’s remark with the many Palestinian quotes describing Jews as “these pigs on the face of the earth” and so on raises the question of moral equivalence – with a vengeance – each side claiming the moral high ground, the right to speak of the other as if speaking of animals, of their others as less than human, and to kill…

For lighter reading, this time on the possible moral equivalence between pigs and other treif creatures — for example, eagles — see: Is Pig More Unkosher Than Other Animals? — a view from Chabad.

And to Bob Dylan, because after such verbal abuse the mouth needs washing out, and the original naming of animals by Adam is the source of poetry – and in his song Man Gave Names To All The Animals on the album Slow Train Coming, Dylan restores a lost innocence to the animals and their naming:

He saw an animal leavin’ a muddy trail
Real dirty face and a curly tail
He wasn’t too small and he wasn’t too big
“Ah, think I’ll call it a pig”

Comment:

The Said Symphony is a fugal work, and it is only natural that its themes will recur. This business of throwing animal names around has been with us for quite a while, and Jerusalem herself has been assailed in this way, by Muslim and Jew, across at least a millennium.

From Apocalypse City, Colin Thubron‘s review of Montefiore‘s Jerusalem: The Biography in the New York Review of Books, January 12th, 2012:

Moreover, the city itself—alternately desolate or bitter and divided—has outraged generations of believers. “A golden goblet full of scorpions,” wrote the tenth-century traveler Muqaddasi, who yet loved Jerusalem; while Amos Oz called it “a black widow who devours her mates while they are still penetrating her.”

Our games of language, war and peace are ages older than we ourselves, or our grandfathers, grandmothers…

And sometimes, just sometimes, the hatred backfires.

Omar bin Laden, son of Osama, turned against his father and his father’s ways in part because of his own childhood affection for a baby monkey which was run over and killed by one of his father’s workers:

We were furious, failing to understand how anyone could deliberately harm such a cute little creature who did nothing but bring much needed gaiety into our lives. Imagine our shock when we learned that the ex-warrior gleefully told everyone who would listen that the baby monkey was not a monkey at all, but was a Jewish person turned into a monkey by the hand of God. In his eyes, he had killed a Jew!My entire body shook when I heard such ridiculous talk. I was young and admittedly unsophisticated, but I was a rational thinker who knew that monkeys were not Jews and that Jews were not monkeys. One had nothing to do with the other.

Like many Arab children, I was aware of the enormous dislike, and even hatred in some cases, between Muslims and Jews and between Muslims and Christians. Children are not born with prejudice, however, so although I knew that many Muslims considered Jews their bitter enemies, my thoughts did not go in that direction.

I was even more astonished when I was later told that it was my father who had convinced the veteran of the ridiculous Jew/monkey theory.

Source: Omar and Najwa bin Laden with Jean Sasson, Growing Up bin Laden.

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Move 17: Revelation

Move content:

In general, revelation is the unknown becoming known, the hidden secret speaking / showing itself.

Thus Judaism is founded on revelation:

Judah ha-Levi, accordingly, is in full accord with the spirit of Judaism when he declares the revelation on Sinai to be the great historical fact upon which the Jewish faith, as far as it is a truth revealed, rests (“Cuzari,” i. 25, 87, 97; iv. 11); and this is also the rabbinical view. “The Lord appeared to the people of Israel on Sinai face to face in order to pledge them for all generations to come to remain true to Him and worship no other God.” The Lord spoke with every single Israelite on Sinai, so that each heard Him say, “I am the Lord thy God”; as it is said, “the Lord spoke with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of the fire” (Deut. v. 4). He appeared to them in differing aspects (“panim” = “countenance”)—now with a stern and now with a mild face, corresponding to the varying relations and attitudes of men and times (Pesi?. R. 20-21; Mek., Beshalla?, Shirah, 3).

Thus also ‘Ibn Arabi, the Islamic mystic and scholar commonly known as the Greatest Sheikh, quotes a hadith qudsi revealed to him:

I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known; so I created the creatures and made Myself known to them; so they knew Me.

It was revelation that gave him this insight, and revelation is the mode of knowing by which we gain theophanic knowledge of the divine.

More specifically, Revelation is the final book of the Christian Bible, Omega to the Alpha of Genesis, setting forth the revelation of things unseen which was given to John on the Greek isle of Patmos… and it is with that book chiefly in mind that I play this move.

See also Son House‘s John the Revelator. Depeche Mode‘s very different variant of the same song attacks apocalyptic fear and trembling, and can be seen on YouTube in what is described as an unofficial video, accompanied by some astonishing examples of contemporary apocalyptic imagery, see above.

Links claimed:

To Netanyahu’s leopard: because opposite Netanyahu’s comment about the Palestinian leopard that “has sunk its teeth in our flesh, in the flesh of our children, wives, our elderly” we may place this, from the Book of Revelation, 13.2:

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.

To the pause (fermata):

We are used in this modern era of shock and awe to the impact of the explosive, the raucous, the noisy, the very loud – but there are few things as impressive as silence, which is why one of the most extraordinary verses in the Book of Revelation is 8.1:

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

Comment:

In Greek, the Book of Revelation is known as the Apocalypse – “apocalypse” simply meaning “the revealing of what was hidden”.

Our modern use of the term “apocalyptic” to refer to terrible times of destruction, fictional or prophesied, stems from the fact that the vision of John of Patmos as described in the book of that name foresees times of terrible destruction (it’s hard to beat “every island fled away and the mountains were not found” for global catastrophe) before God’s kingdom is established and the “holy city, new Jerusalem” descends from heaven “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (2.12).

I am grateful to my friend Stephen O’Leary, author of Arguing the Apocalypse, Oxford, 1994, for pointing me to the leopard in Revelation 13.2 and thus suggesting this move to me.

[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict — continuing ]

.

It has been a while since I last played a move in the Said Symphony: our game has been quiet since July, and it is now December.  Meanwhile, the world has moved on, and many of the knowns of the Middle East have become unknowns – the Egyptian view of Israel among them.

My next move, then, will recognize this lapse of time — but for those who may be unacquainted with the game, and wish to follow it, here is a quick recap.

The Said Symphony Game, played in the spirit of Hermann Hesse‘s fictional Glass Bead Game, is an attempt to “concept-map” the various voices in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its wider context, both contemporary and historical/mythological, so that its many voices can be held in counterpoint in the mind, and parallelisms and oppositions discerned between them as in a great fugue of Bach or Beethoven — inspired by the Palestinian public intellectual and music critic’s suggestion:

When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.

The game thus far:

• Introduction
• Board and gameplay
• Moves 1 – 5
• Moves 6 – 9
• Moves 10 & 11
• Move 12

The game is a solo game, and you may wish to read it slowly.

I will now play moves 13 – 15.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 13: Pause

Move Content:

The rest [in this case a “long” rest] is the indication in the score of a musical silence: that is, a silence heard as musical, silence within the music. The rest extends over time, the music continues – so I’m adding a fermata or hold to the rest, which will extend it further, thus:

To my way of thinking, the pause is, above all else, a sabbath, a time of rest:

“Labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art”, writes Abraham Joshua Heschel in his great, short book, The Sabbath — “He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce … He must go away from the screech of dissonant days” and “How else express glory in the presence of eternity, if not by the silence of abstaining from noisy acts? These restrictions utter songs to those who know how to stay at a place with a queen…”

Links claimed:

There are other pauses, pauses of dissonance, pauses of rending.

To Auschwitz: The pause that Auschwitz enforces on us is a silent scream, atonal, ultra-modern in its sensibility, the attempt of a little, unmoored, desacralized western consciousness to get to moral grips with the factory extermination of one’s fellow beings by the millions, perpetrated by people who wear the same shoes and suits and ties, and carry the same briefcases as ourselves. It lacks all that has previously been called  musicality: it cannot cope.

I do not believe there is any escaping this scream: it is to be heard and held, embraced even. It is ugly, and it is an ugliness increaed by magnitude, by repetition, by number.

To Golgotha: The pause that Golgotha asks of us is of another order.  Christ, “when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.” The Word is silenced. Only after three days will it begin to speak again.

Comment:

Leading into the next move, I have suggested that the rest is a musical silence – whether it be the deathly silence we may sense in Golgotha, the hideous silence that Auschwitz draws from our exhausted lungs, or the encompasing silence of glory of which Rabbi Heschel speaks.

It is a musical silence, a silence in each case to be listened to – tolerable or intolerable – a John Cage zen silence if you will…

In that silence, sounds can be vaguely sensed, emerging as if a morning mist is lifting, and some bird or twig or trill takes form…

Our board thus far:

[ my appreciation and thanks to Cheryl Rofer, who corrected me with regard to the notation of rests ]

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Move 14: Jerusalem

 

And so a new movement in our Symphony begins.

I have been aching for this moment: as move 14, I play Jerusalem

Move 14: Jerusalem

Move content:

Jerusalem is at the heart of the Israeli / Palestinian and Israeli / Arab problem, and thus of much of the tension in the  Middle east and the world.

It is also the city of peace, Salem – and you might say the ultimate hope, not of this game, which cannot aspire so high, but of the heart, is expressed in the three words: shalom salem salaam… In fact, ubi shalom, ibi salaam might be the motto of this work: where there is peace, let there be peace.

In making the opening move of this second movement of my game Jerusalem, then, I am taking us into the heart of the conflict, and into the heart of the hope for peace.

Jerusalem is a contested city, and we shall explore that contest in the moves to come.

Links claimed:

First, to the rest in 13: because in the silence, three sounds can be heard.  I quote here the words of Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian Knesset Member — not for who he is but for their music:

The sound of the Muezzin, the church bells and the blowing of the shofar have always existed.

Those are the sounds “that can be vaguely sensed, emerging as if a morning mist is lifting”, in the silence of the musical rest.

Second, to Golgotha, the place outside Jerusalem where, according to the Christian telling, the body of the man who compared his body to the temple was so cruelly tortured that he “yielded up the ghost” – and at that moment, as if in sympathy, in the spiritual heart of Jerusalem and all Israel “behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent…”

Third, to the Glass Bead Game: because “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband” of Revelation 21.21 finds its intellectual avatar in “the hundred–gated cathedral of the mind” to which Hesse’s Game aspires.

Fourth, to William Blake, prophet, for whom Jerusalem was so urgent a matter that he must have it with him in England – as many Americans must have it with them in America — singing (as I myself have lustily sung):

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land

But Blake did better than to write these words – he illuminated them, and I shall place the text as he presented it at the bottom of this post.

Next: to Bob Dylan.  Well, there’s this:

— but it seems to be someone’s personal graphic for a compilation of Dylan songs, so this – Dylan at the Wailing Wall, 20 February 1983, attending his son’s Bar Mitzvah – will have to suffice:

And finally, I find there’s a peruasive link to Moral Equivalence — because Palestinians claim possession of the Noble Sanctuary and parts of the old city, while Israelis claim the same rights over the whole of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount – the Temple Mount and Noble Sanctuary being one and the same physical space — and there are wise and foolish, hardliners and diplomats, scholars and treatises on both sides, and in the interstices between them.

And the question is: are the claims and complaints of one side justified and the other baseless, or is there a moral equivalence between them.?

That is a question of balance on the scale of justice, to be tempered, one always hopes, with mercy.

Comment:

What are the claims and counter-claims, ancient and modern – and what do the peace-makers say?

Addendum:

A page from Blake’s Preface to Milton:

It would be a marvel to have purchased his book at the time, to have held it and read and savored it, each copy uniquely illuminated by his own hand…

 

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Move 15: Netanyahu’s Leopard

Move 15: Netanyahu’s Leopard

sforzando

Move content:

“A leopard has sunk its teeth in our flesh, in the flesh of our children, wives, our elderly, and we will not be tempted to believe that this leopard has now changed its spots. We will not ignore its voracious growls. We will strike it down.”

From the desk of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, speech at the Memorial Ceremony for Victims of Terror, October 5th, 2011.

Links claimed:

To rest or pause, I suppose, because the lull between intifadas may seem like a sort of temporary truce, but it’s really mostly an opportunity for the enemy to regroup and rearm; and then to Jerusalem, because Jerusalem is Irael and Israel Jerusalem; and finally to — what was it — moral equivalence because there is no moral equivalence, is there?

I’m sorry if that seems a bit abrupt, but the musical signature at the top of the move says sforzando, and we’ve got work to do.

Comment:

Getting into the thick of it, Netanyahu’s speech doesn’t leave much room for compromise.  And sforzando, a musical term, literally means “forcibly” — “with strong emphasis”.

Conflict is not pretty, in the way one might hope that symphonies and other works of art and beauty might be.  There’s death to be distributed and withheld, and wealth and power — and the urgency they bring to the fight.

 

[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict — continuing ]

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I am titling my next move “Moral Equivalence?” with the question mark as the crux of the title, and I am posting it separately since it (a) raises a central question with regards to the entire project and (b) plunges us directly into the twin narratives of Palestinian and Israeli… in parallel, in counterpoint… perhaps in…

Move 12: Moral Equivalence?

Move Content:

In President Obama‘s address at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, the President presents the two narratives, Israeli and Palestinian, side by side:

America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction — or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews — is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades then, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It’s easy to point fingers — for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: The only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.

Insult #3 in Nile Gardiner‘s piece, “Barack Obama’s top ten insults against Israel,” from the Telegraph blog of April, 2010, consists of the comment:

In his Cairo speech to the Muslim world, President Obama condemned Holocaust denial in the Middle East, but compared the murder of six million Jews during World War Two to the “occupation” of the Palestinian territories, in a disturbing example of moral equivalence:

followed directly by the third paragraph above from Obama’s speech.

The question raised by this move is that of “moral equivalence”. Specifically, I am raising the question of whether Obama’s four paragraphs do indeed contain “a disturbing example of moral equivalence”. More generally, I am asking whether juxtaposition — which is one of the central features of analogical thought, and thus of this game – implies equivalence.

Link claimed:

To Bob Dylan, “One too many mornings” and the lines “You’re right from your side / I’m right from mine” – juxtaposing them like that, is there a moral equivalence implied?

Dylan’s overview doesn’t sound too optimistic about the possibility of any kind of reconciliation of the opposites: “We’re both just one too many mornings / An’ a thousand miles behind…”

Accordingly, this may be an appropriate point at which to note that Edward Said thought the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was asymmetrical and irreconcilable.

In the interview from which I borrowed Said’s notion of a “symphonic” reading of the conflict, the question and answer immediately following that paragraph reads thus:

Q: Is this a symmetrical conflict between two peoples who have equal rights over the land they share?

A: There is no symmetry in this conflict. One would have to say that. I deeply believe that. There is a guilty side and there are victims. The Palestinians are the victims. I don’t want to say that everything that happened to the Palestinians is the direct result of Israel. But the original distortion in the lives of the Palestinians was introduced by Zionist intervention, which to us – in our narrative – begins with the Balfour Declaration and events thereafter that led to the replacement of one people by another. And it is continuing to this day. This is why Israel is not a state like any other. It is not like France, because there is continuing injustice. The laws of the State of Israel perpetuate injustice.

This is a dialectical conflict. But there is no possible synthesis. In this case, I don’t think it’s possible to ride out the dialectical contradictions. There is no way I know to reconcile the messianic-driven and Holocaust-driven impulse of the Zionists with the Palestinian impulse to stay on the land. These are fundamentally different impulses. This is why I think the essence of the conflict is its irreconcilability.

Comment:

Are the two narratives symmetrical? Is there a moral equivalence between them?

The great early Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein wrote that “the juxtaposition of two shots by splicing them together resembles not so much the simple sum of one shot plus another — as it does a creation.”

His colleague Vsevolod Pudovkin goes further:

Kuleshov and I made an interesting experiment. We took from some film or other several close-ups of the well-known Russian actor Mosjukhin. We chose closeups which were static, and which did not express any feeling at all-quiet close-ups. We joined these close-ups, which were all similar, with other bits of film in three different combinations. In the first combination the close-up of Mosjukhin was immediately followed by a shot of a plate of soup standing on a table. It was obvious and certain that Mosjukhin was looking at this soup. In the second combination the face of Mosjukhin was joined to shots showing a coffin in which lay a dead woman. In the third the close-up was followed by a shot of a little girl playing with a funny toy bear. When we showed the three combinations to an audience which had not been let into the secret the result was terrific. The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.

What I am getting at here is, first and foremost, that juxtaposition is a rhetorical and aesthetic device, and that how to “read” a given juxtaposition is not necessarily obvious.

In a subsequent move, I shall discuss the specific philosophical problem involved in weighing one body of suffering against another…