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© 2016 John D. Brey.
johndbrey@gmail.com
© 2016 John D. Brey.
Jewish
identity and Jewish monotheism are caught up in the same meontological essence:
God is the entity that's not essentially defined or delimited by anything
in the created world, and the Jew is the person who is not essentially defined
or delimited within identifications associated with non-Jews. Nothing in the
non-Jewish world is like Jewish identity, as nothing in the known world is like
the unknown God.
When
you have two wholly other things, God and man, Jew and Gentile, male and
female, they need a mediator in order to establish any kind of union. . . And
for the mediation to be fair and unbiased, the mediator must share an essence
with the two poles it brings together in union.
The
phallus is the fleshly mediator between fleshly man and woman. It's the
connector that puts the poles (male and female) into a singular union.
Therefore, since a mediator must share the essence of the two poles it brings
into union, the phallus must be both male and female flesh. And in fact we know
the phallus is both male and female flesh since the ovum begins neutral. A
transformation is required for what otherwise becomes labial flesh, the vagina,
to become a penis. In this sense the penis begins as the same flesh as female
genitalia and is transformed into male genitalia. The penis thus mediates
between two things it essentially knows and is, since it’s female flesh as much
as male. It’s ironic therefore that at least in this case the mediator creates
the very distinction between the two things its presence as a mediator unifies.
As
Jacques Lacan points out, the penis disappears when it's uniting the two poles
(male and female) it is. When the penis is doing the thing it was designed to
do, it isn't visible. When the union is being established, the penis disappears
into the female from whence it came:
[the phallus] can play its role only
when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency with which any
signifiable is struck, when it is raised to the function of signifier.
Lacan, Ecrits, p. 288.
In
fetal development (which recapitulates the most fundamental Genesis) the male
flesh is initially invisible, hidden. It's only at a given point that what’s
hidden reveals itself through the transformation whereby flesh is made into the
mediatorial organ that is the penis. When the penis does what it was designed
to do, unite the male and the female flesh, which it is, it disappears into the
flesh it was inside before it made its appearance: Israel and Messiah. . . And
when the flesh of this mediator is interned as a stiff in the soil from whence
it came the story isn't over. It's only just begun: Christ and the Church.
The
flesh that mediates between God and man is Jewish flesh. Jewish identity
parallels God's identity as expressed in Jewish theology (incomplete though
that theology may be). The identity passed on through the Jewish mother is
identical, essentially, to God's identity, except that it's passed on through a
Jewish mother. In other words, the identity that a Jew receives from their
mother is exactly like the identity of God in Jewish monotheism: purely
meontological. It's an identity that has no temporal essence such that that
ironic fact is the closest thing to an essence we can speak about in temporal
terms.
This
is exactly like God's deity in Jewish monotheism.
What
this implies is that Jews are quintessentially the incarnate temple of God, his
wife, home (Yoma 2a) and the mother of his Son. In a nutshell, Jews who know
anything about the nature of their identity know, though they're often less
than forthcoming about it, that there's no essential temporality involved in the
nature of their essence. And yet nothing would be more unnatural to a Jew than
to examine the nature of this lack of essential temporality since that would
land the Jew right in the spirit of Saul of Tarsus . . . since an essential
lack of temporality can only be defined as deity.
If
the Jew comes to terms with the lack of temporality associated with Jewish
identity, they can be forced to acknowledge that their identity is a
combination of flesh (mother) and deity (the lack of temporality) such that all
that's needed to bridge the gap between traditional Judaism and Paul's theology
is to realize that when a first born Jew really, rather than ritually, comes
out of a closed womb, such that this first born Jew must "open the
womb" himself, then, for the first time in creation, God and man have
become united in a knowable manner such that Jesus of Nazareth is the first Jew
who knew what a Jew is, God in the flesh.
There's
an essential temporal nature to every identity other than God, and Jew. The
real thing associated with Jewish identity is non-temporal deity, God, since
only deity, and God, are meontological without that fact annihilating them
(since deity and God don't require temporality or physical essence). The
essence of Jewish identity is eternal, everlasting. It can't be destroyed like
this universe, or any other physical temporal thing, since it doesn't gain its
essence from temporality or physicality. That's why the Torah is clear that the
Jew is forever: everlasting. Which is the anti-Semite's primary dilemma: he's
opposed to, and wants to destroy, something that can't be destroyed. There will
always be a Jew since the identity itself is non-temporal and non-physical (it
transcends this world, it’s deity).
Jesus
was 100% human being, 100% God, and 100% Jew. . . But so is every other Jew.
So
what's the difference between Jesus and the typical Jew? . . . Just one thing.
Deity and humanity were united in Jesus while they're in disunity in any Jew
committed (literally) to traditional monotheism, which places a barrier, orlah,
between deity and humanity, God and man. Jesus knew the identity he gained from
his mother since the orlah between divine mankind (Jew), and animal mankind
(Gentile), i.e., the orlah ritually removed for most Jews, but literally
eliminated from Jesus' conception (to include his conception of himself),
allowed Jesus to be fully unified with his divine essence (the essence of what
a Jew is essentially), and fully cognizant of that essence.
Jews
reject all this since they reject the Jew who unified the deity and humanity which
existed in all Israel (and thus every individual Jew) from Abraham to the
mother of Jesus of Nazareth in an un-unified way.
If they accept circumcision they
accept My divinity. If not they do not accept My divinity.
Midrash Rabbah, Genesis,
XLVI, 8-9.
Category A: Laws containing explicit
statements to the effect that objects or acts entailed in them are symbolic. .
. Category A: מילה (circumcision), the performance of which is called ברית
"covenant," is in itself intended as אות ברית, a sign of the
covenant. . . It is clear, therefore, that the commandment of circumcision . .
. is a symbolic expression of the observance and maintenance of this covenant
by Abraham and his descendants. . . Thus the object of our study can be solely
to establish the relationship between this sign and this act with all the
pertinent legal stipulations, on the one hand, and the covenant with its
content, its essence and continuity, on the other, that is to be expressed
through this sign and this act. The symbolic character of this law
[circumcision] as such is no longer subject to question.
Jewish Symbolism, Volume
III, Rabbi Samson R. Hirsch, Intro (emphasis mine).
The combination of ברית and נתן
almost never occurs elsewhere . . . As a rule, the formula is הקים ברית ,כרת
ברית, not נתן ברית. It is possible, then, that ואתנה בריתי does not mean
"I will establish with you a new covenant," but rather, "I will
establish with you an existing covenant."
Hirsch Chumash, Genesis
17: 2.
The Holy One, Blessed Is He, said to
Adam, "Accursed is the ground because of you: through suffering will you
eat from it all the days of your life." Then Adam said, "Master of
the world! Until when?" He said to him, "Until a man will be born
circumcised."
Midrash Tanchuma Bereishis 11.
A
man was born circumcised, i.e., conceived through a circumspect pregnancy. He
was thus the Son of God conceived in the beginning, in the first Jewish mother,
the first Jew. His birth is the reestablishment of the covenant Rabbi Hirsch
discusses in Genesis 17:2. Ritual circumcision is a "sign" (a symbol)
of the reality that is the birth of a Jew after the organ whose creation made
the Fall into Gentile space/time a possibility, and then a reality, was bled.
The bleeding of this particular organ is the "symbolic" expression of
the genuine result of the symbol: virgin birth.
In
a biblical senses, a "human" (adam) is flesh and blood indwelt by
deity since God impregnated the first human (adam) when he was created. The
first human was created pregnant. That's the essence of the Jew: a human born
pregnant, such that bris milah, on the eighth day, is fancied,
and by no less that Rabbi Samson Hirsch, a birthing ritual. The first born Jew
is born as the first human (adam) was created: pregnant. Eight days after he’s
born the first time, the firstborn Jew gives birth (since he was conceived as
the first human was created: pregnant).
If
Sanhedrin 38b is taken seriously, that the first human was the original Jew,
then part and parcel of being the first Jew, and thus the first Jewish mother,
is the fact of the first human having been created already pregnant with Jewish
identity within. If we say that God breathed Jewish identity into the first
human when he created the physical body, the question remains as to how that
Jewish identity is in fact born from the first human (if the first human
doesn't possess a gendered body)?
A
simple solution is that the first human body was actually what we now know as
the female form. But that's not the case. The first human body was not female,
nor male, nor a concatenation of the two. It was not androgynous, it was merely
human. This leaves us without a means for the first-born human to be born prior
to the desecration of the original body in Genesis 2:21 (where gender is
"made")? ----If the original human had no penis, and no vagina, then
where was the firstborn? Where was the place where the firstborn would exit the
original human body?
If
the first human was Messiah, was the God/man, was indwelt by God's breath, it
would naturally be possible that that human might not have actual knowledge of
who and what was pregnant in his flesh until that knowledge is born out of him.
He would have to give birth to himself, to his real self, which would merely be
the birth of a new man whose essence was caught up in something formerly hidden
in the flesh of the original man.
The
sages say this world was created by the heh
ה while the real world, the World-to-come, is created by the yod. As anyone who’s read the majority
of the Hirsch Chumash can confirm, at no time does Rabbi Hirsch get as passionate
and excited as when he speaks of the relationship between the two letters dalet-yod as revealed in ritual-circumcision. Rabbi Hirsch claims that
ritual circumcision unveils the dalet-yod
through which the World-to-come will come. . . But since the yod is veiled by the dalet prior to the unveiling of the yod beneath the dalet (in the letter heh)
ritual circumcision literally removes the veil, the dalet, that covers up the yod,
which is the source, the essence, of the World-to-come.
Fancy
the fact that the sages, to a man, claim the yod is not merely a symbol of God's actions in the world, but a
symbol of God himself. The yod
represents God, such that the heh,
through which this world is created, contains, veiled no doubt, the deity (the
Holy One of God) through whom the World-to-come will come.
Rabbi
Hirsch intuited on some level that dalet-yod represents the heh after what's hidden in the beginning is revealed at the
quintessential unveiling: bris milah.
The
Jew who sees through the rituals of bris
milah gives birth to his true self,
the true essence of Jewish identity. As Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan and Rabbi Hirsch
both point out, it's not enough to be physically circumcised. A true
circumcision requires that the person born-again be spiritually reborn, which
is tantamount to giving birth to the essential nature of Jewish identity,
knowing what's signified in the symbolism of the ritual.
A
Jew who is merely a Jew in the flesh, is still pregnant with his true identity.
He’s not yet given birth to the new man whose birth is symbolized in the birth
associated with bris milah on the eighth day. . . Consequently,
if what's born on the eighth day is self-knowledge of what was hidden in the
first human being, from the start, God, then a Jew who has not yet been
spiritually circumcised is being true to his religious instinct to deny the
very incarnation of God that cannot be true or real until the birth of that
knowledge comes out of him when he understands the nature and essence of bris milah.
Sanhedrin
38b takes it for granted that anyone reading the tractate is already aware of
the theological idea that the Abrahamic covenant returns the "Jew" to
the status of Adam prior to Adam's sin. The Abrahamic covenant marks the time
when God said "enough" to postlapsarian Gentile civilization and
determined to finish what he started when he created Adam. You find the idea
throughout Jewish thought that not only is the "Jew" a new Adam, but
the "first Adam" was a Jew:
Schneerson makes this point:
"Therefore Rosh ha-Shanah is precisely the day that he created the first
Adam for this power (to draw the disclosure of the essence of the light of the
Infinite that is above the worlds, so that this expansion will be in the world)
is in Israel especially, `you are called adam,' in the name of the first Adam.
. . . Since the root of the soul of Israel is in his essence, blessed be he,
their capability is to draw into the world the disclosure of the essence of the
light of the infinite." Note that the biblical account of the creation of
Adam is translated ethnocentrically --- the text is interpreted as a reference
to the Jew, who is the exemplary human being.
Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, Open
Secret, p. 234-235.
This
theological idea that the "Jew" is the new Adam is found throughout
Jewish thought. If a person hasn't digested the theology behind that concept,
how can they make heads or tails of Sanhedrin 38b, since the theological
foundation of the text of Sanhedrin 38b takes it for granted that the reader is
perfectly aware that Adam is Jewish, and the Jew is a second Adam?
Pretend
everyone is theologically prepared to read Sanhedrin 38b. Everyone knows the
Jew is adamic, and the first Adam is a Jew. . . With that theological premise
in place, what's being implied by the portion of the tractate that implies Adam
is a min, a Jewish heretic, and that he comes to this state through epispasm? He
broke the covenant of circumcision by covering up the circumscript nature of
his body as it was created?
But
what was the circumscript nature of Adam's body? ----- What signified that he
was created circumcised? That's the theological question moving the sages in
the portion of the tractate dealing with Adam as a min. If Adam is the first
human being, the original human body, and if it's created circumcised, then
it's not created circumcised, since there's no preexisting thing called an
uncircumcised body to compare and contrast with a circumcised body. You need to
have an uncircumcised body to make sense of a circumcised body.
Ergo,
how did Adam perform epispasm? What was he covering up? And in his case what
would be signified by the cover up? ----- The sages are on to a very important
idea. The second adam, the Abrahamic Jew, is born uncircumcised. He must remove
the cover-up. But the first adam, who was created before the Abrahamic-adam
(the Jew), was created without the cover-up. He in fact becomes a min in
association with the cover-up. It's one thing to see the cover-up and to be
told to remove it. It's another thing to create the cover-up yourself? No
Abrahamic Jew starts out by practicing epispasm. He must first remove the
cover-up before he can then, knowing what it is, stretch skin to return to the
cover-up. . . How did the first Adam know what the cover-up was when he was
created without it?
The
implication is that by symbolically removing the organ created in Genesis 2:21
(which led to the birth of Gentiles, i.e., the first genitile organ), Abraham
made himself, and his progeny --- symbolically ----- what Cain would have been
if Adam hadn't allowed gendered flesh (which is symbolically removed in brit milah)
to be added to his body covering up the circumspect nature of his body prior to
the cover-up (Gen. 2:21). He became a heretic by transforming himself into a
Jewish "male" (which is a min, a Jewish heretic, an epispasmic Jew,
Sanhedrin 38b), rather than merely a "Jew" which is a non-gendered
human being.
By
symbolically emasculating himself, Abraham becomes a non-heretical Jew, which,
a non-heretical Jew, is a non-gendered (non-genital, non-Gentile) human being.
In this way Abraham symbolically becomes like Adam prior to Genesis 2:21, a
human without gender, which in every case is what a Jew is essentially. This suggests
in a Jewish spirit that the Jewish law that Jewish identity is passed through
the mother doesn't mean that a Jewish "female" passes on Jewish
identity. Quite the contrary. It means that the Jewish mother is actually an
emasculate man: the Jewish father is the true mother of Jewish offspring since
he can remove the mark of gender on his body (ritually or really).
He
becomes the mother, and makes a Jewish birth possible, by removing the mark of
the original sin, the phallus, the beginning of gendered birth, the possibility
of the existence of a Gentile. By removing the mark of gender, the Jewish male
becomes neither male nor female but merely human. He becomes a human mother,
not a male mother, or a female mother.
What
tends to make Token-Jews wiggle (those symbolically
conceived without gender), is the truth that it can be stated factually that
there have only been two human beings in the history of the world who were
actually, rather than symbolically, or ritually, conceived apart from gender:
The first human, the first adam, the first Jew . . . and the last human, the
last adam, the last Jew. Both were conceived without the mark of gender, the
phallus, which didn't exist until Genesis 2:21, and was ritually removed by
Abraham, and then genuinely eliminated in the first virgin birth in human
history.
This
overarching premise states that a "Jew" is a non-gendered human, such
that Adam was the first Jew, the first non-gendered human, until Genesis 2:21,
where not just female gender (Eve) was created, but where the first human,
Adam, who was not male or female, became gendered (simultaneous to the creation
of Eve). This is to point out that orthodox Judaism is misogynist to the extent
that it teaches that the first human was male, such that the female was an after-thought.
Adamic androgyny is misogynist since it suggests that the male was around
before the female, and the female was, again, an after-thought, pretty much
like the foreskin, which Sanhedrin 38b (with other Jewish scripture) literally
parallels with the creation of Eve (Adam's flesh is covered, something is
hidden beneath flesh, -- sagar --
precisely when Eve is created).
This
suggests that when scripture is properly interpreted it’s not misogynist. There
was no original male. There was no male-privileged androgyny. What there was,
was a human being, who Fell into heresy and who became the Jewish father of the
Gentile horde (Jewish males father Gentiles without a Jewish mother) when he
agreed to enter the realm of animals, i.e., gender.
Adam
was created to be the Great Mother, neither male nor female, but merely human.
But he never gave birth to a thing. Eve was not born. She was manufactured. The
penis was not created or born. It was manufactured precisely as Eve was
manufactured (banah).
Gentiles
are conceived through manufactured flesh. They're not created, or conceived,
from Jewish flesh; they're manufactured from Jewish flesh.
Only
two human beings are conceived, and were conceived, not manufactured, as Jewish
flesh. Both were conceived in the mind of God before they were conceived in
flesh and blood. Both were conceived without the emblem of Gentile flesh, the
phallus. Which is a tool created simultaneous to the first Gentile mother, who
birthed the first Gentile, Cain, whose father was Jewish. The phallus is a
manufacturing tool. It manufactures flesh and blood. It doesn't conceive
anything. It's mindless. It just does what it's told. It just manufactures
Gentiles. That's its soul purpose. But it has no soul. It can't deliver a soul.
So manufacturing flesh is its sole purpose.