The conscience of the world

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, jews, israel, jewish american relations

At the suggestion of a friend I read The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead. I read the e-book, which contains 661 "pages", although the main text is 590 pages, and the Illustrations, listed as one page in the Table of Contents, spans 20 screens. Anyway, it's a big, big book, full of big ideas.

I made 21 bookmarked notes, about one per chapter. When I finished reading, I realized that my bookmarking was much too ambitious. I don't have the competence to provide a comprehensive review. I must pare down my intentions.

Let me state at the outset that I am a Christian who honors the Jews as elder brothers in the knowledge of God. I didn't start that way. Before coming to Christ I had the typical Midwestern background, complete with casual antisemitism. That has changed. I have come to realize that the continued existence of the Jewish people, in the face of more than three thousand years of determined efforts to either exclude them or exterminate them, and the very existence of global antisemitism, prove that God exists.

(Note: This image shows a Hanukah menorah. The menorah in the Tabernacle and Temple had seven lamps, not nine.)

Antisemitism is alive and well in the good old US of A, and it seems to be gaining ground. Who hasn't heard that "the Jews" own or control Congress, or are the "hidden hand" behind world banking system, and so forth and so on. The first major topic of the book is to expose and debunk what the author calls "planet Vulcan theory". He uses an analogy, the decades-long hunt for a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury, which was predicted because the orbit of Mercury has a small deviation from what would be predicted by the orbital calculations of Newtonian mechanics. Astronomers could calculate the orbit of an inner planet, which they named Vulcan, and on a few occasions reports were published that it had been observed. Alas, it was all wishful thinking. The real explanation for Mercury's orbit is found in the general theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. Since 1923 it has been known that there is no planet Vulcan. The "Jewish lobby" is an imaginary planet.

The continued support for Israel by the US, and the earlier welcoming of Jews to our shores (usually) has been taken as evidence of a "Jewish lobby" that bends both the domestic and foreign policy of America to "the Jewish will." The calculations seem to support the theory. However, it just isn't so. The first few chapters of the book prove that.

Quick question: Who supplied the weapons that enabled the infant nation of Israel to defeat a half dozen Arab nations in 1948? Most people (in America at least) would say, "The US!" True answer: The weapons were supplied by Czechoslovakia with the blessing of Joseph Stalin. Stalin's motive was not to help the Jews, whom he was dreadfully persecuting inside Russia. It was to bollix up American foreign policy, even to weaken America on the world stage. It worked. In fact, the US was at best a weak and neglectful ally of Israel until after the 1967 six-day war (after which Moshe Dayan joked that he'd obtained a special one week rate from Hertz Rent-a-Tank). That's two decades of America ignoring Israel.

The book is really a history of Jewish-American relations. If there were a "Jewish lobby" pulling our strings, the author makes it clear that many, many things which American Presidents and American Congresses did would have been quite different. I found it fascinating that the driving force behind American favor toward the Jews prior to 1948, and toward Israel its establishment, has been American Evangelical Christians. I happen to be one. (By the way, in case you're prone to getting offended, here is some mud in your eye: I consider the term "Evangelical Christian" to be a redundancy.)

I think it is likely that a large aim of Leftism in America today is to silence Evangelical Christians and to destroy Evangelical churches, and so reduce or eliminate support for Israel in the US Federal government. The root is antisemitism. "Wokeism" is a big part of it, but I'll take up that mess on another occasion; to be Woke is to be anti-Semite, among numerous unsavory attributes.

I half expected the author to offer policy advice. He does not. He is providing information, very valuable information. That alone will change attitudes. In my case, it increased my respect for serious, observant Jews (and my sorrow over the many Jews who have forsaken their God). God's purpose for the Jews is to teach Torah, to activate the conscience of the world. He doesn't want you to become a Jew. He wants you to be wise and good, and only in the Jewish Torah and the rest of the Bible that grew from it can wisdom worth having be found. People hate a "do-gooder", which is why a world full of godless people hates the Jews.

Whether you love Jews or hate them, this book is very well worth reading.