“Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim
That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him
‘Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac
He’s the neighborhood bully.”
Ever since the Sabbath terror attack on October 7th, I’ve had some friends ask why there is so much hate directed at Israel and the Jewish people. While I think it would be fair to say I don’t fully understand why, I also know there are some things that can help explain that hate. I’m going to do my best to outline a few things I believe might shed some light on the issue.
Last night I read an essay penned by a man named Jacob Siegel about Bob Dylan’s 1983 song “Neighborhood Bully.” I think Siegel’s a pretty good writer, but like a lot of good writers he occasionally makes mistakes. In his 2020 essay titled “Bob Dylan’s “Neighborhood Bully” gets memory holed” he made at least two, possibly more. His first mistake was in claiming that YouTube won’t allow people to hear that song. The claim is simply not true as you can plainly see by clicking on the following link – Bob Dylan – Neighborhood Bully (Official Audio) His second mistake was in assuming that Bob Dylan somehow claimed that the song wasn’t about Israel. Trust me. The song is about Israel. It’s not about Ireland or Afghanistan, nor is it about Afghanistan or Tora Bora. I suppose it might be within the realm of possibility that Dylan claimed that the song wasn’t written as a political statement. That might be within the realm of possibility, but that doesn’t change the fact that the song is about Israel. It’s that simple.
The truth of what’s going on in the Middle East is, and has been, tragic. There really is a “license to kill him (Israel) given to every maniac.”
But why? Dylan framed the same question this way – “What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?” No! In fact, the Jewish people, who comprise two tenths of one percent of the world’s population have won two hundred twelve (twenty two percent) of the nine hundred and fifty-four Nobel prizes awarded since 1901. Jews have won the Nobel prize in chemistry, economics, peace, physics, physiology/medicine, and literature. Among the honorees you’ll find names like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Milton Friedman, Joseph Stiglitz, Elie Wiesel, Henry Kissinger, Boris Pasternak, and Saul Bellow. . Bob Dylan, the author of “Neighborhood Bully,” also has Jewish roots. In 2016 he won the Nobel Prize in literature.
Far from polluting the moon and stars, the world’s Jews have contributed more than their fair share to the human family since the dawn of human history.
These facts once again beg the question. Why?
I believe we need to dig down to the roots of the crisis to find the answers to that question and that’s what I intend to do. Those of you reading this essay may disagree with my point of view. I understand, but all I can do is offer my perspective and that point of view is Christian.
The Bible describes the roots of humanity’s fall from grace in the Old Testament book of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, with the earth we now inhabit being His focal point. In a final flourish of creativity, God created Adam, the first man, from the dust of the earth. Next, God planted a garden in Eden, with “all kinds of trees growing from the ground. It was beautiful, with a “tree of life” and another “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the middle of the garden. Next, Eve, the “mother of all humanity,” was created from Adam’s rib. There, they were to live together in peace and harmony, dressing, tilling, and keeping the good earth that God had created for them. There was only one prohibition. They were instructed they could not eat from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” They were further told that if they did eat from that tree they would “surely die.”
Tragically, it was all too good to be true. First Eve, tempted by the serpent, ate the forbidden fruit and gave some to Adam. With that one act of disobedience sin and death were introduced into the world. In the very next chapter, we read about history’s first murder. Cain killed his brother Abel and when God confronted him with the evil deed, he copped an arrogant plea. “I don’t know where he is. Am I my brother’s keeper.” Two chapters later (chapter 6), a corrupt world is revealed. Further, the world was now filled with violence. Interestingly, the Hebrew word for violence used in the passage (Genesis 6:11) is “hamas.” A harbinger of things to come, perhaps?
The sequence of events followed at a brisk pace for the next few chapters. There was Noah’s flood, the formation of various people groups like the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Philistines, the Canaanites, etc.
This is where the narrative introduces us to a man who was critical to those times and is also critical to the Middle East narrative of today. His name was Abram. He lived about 2,000 years before the birth of Jesus and he lived in Ur, which was part of the ancient Chaldean kingdom. The Chaldeans were an advanced civilization. They were highly educated. Some scholars have termed them the “librarians of the ancient world.” Religiously, they were, like most ancient cultures, polytheistic.
We are given our first glimpse of Abram in the twelfth chapter of Genesis with these words:
“The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.
“I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”
Genesis 12:1-3 (New International Version)
It’s astounding. We are presented with a story of a man who actually heard the voice of God. He was instructed to leave his home, “his people, and his father’s household.” How many of us would be willing to leave a life of wealth and privilege and chart a course into the wilderness? Very few, I think. But Abram did go. He was looking for a “city whose builder and make was God.” (Hebrews 11:10)
Abram was 75 years old when his incredible pilgrimage of faith began. It continued for many years, with many challenges. When he’s about 86 years old he begins to have doubts about the promise. His wife, Sarai, is barren, and he has no heir. God reassures him. “Your own flesh and blood will be your heir,” (Genesis 15:4) then takes him outside and tells him to count the stars in the sky, once again reassuring him that “So shall your offspring be,”
When Sarai still fails to bear Abram a son, she concocts a scheme to have her Egyptian slave, Hagar, bear that child. For her. The scheme succeeds and Hagar bears a son and Abram, who is now 86 years old, names him Ishmael. But he is not to be the heir.
By the time Abrham is a hundred years old, God’s promised heir, Isaac, is born. He is to be the heir, but not until Abrham is tested one more time. The test ends with God declaring, “I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore, and through you all nations on earth will be blessed.” (Genesis 22:17-18).
Ishmael, who was born years before Isaac, has also been given a promise by God – “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.” (Genesis 15:10). Along with the promise comes prophetic insight about Ishmael and his descendants – “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” (Genesis 15:12)
Abraham’s family name moved on through history from that point, from Isaac to Jacob, who after an encounter with God in the wilderness, is given a new name – Israel.
That’s how it all began. Israel, the nation that is today constantly under threat of annihilation. It is the name of the nation born out of a promised covenant between God and Abraham.
As author Thomas Cahill put it several years ago in his masterwork “The Gifts of the Jews”:
“The Jews started it all-and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and Gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings … we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experience differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.”
I, for one, am glad Abraham heard the voice of God when he left the Chaldean kingdom. That pilgrimage not only marked the starting point for monotheism and Judaism in the world, but also paved the way for Jesus to come and bring the possibility of redemption and forgiveness to a fallen world. For that I owe Abrham and the Jewish people a great debt of gratitude and love. The man who saved me an eternity of separation from God was/is Jewish. He wasn’t Irish, Polish, Russian, French, British, American, or Palestinian. He was/is Jewish. That man is Jesus. Thanks to his sacrifice I have been grafted into Israel and the family of God (see Romans 9 through 11). Further, there is a day coming when the crucified and risen Jesus will return to the Mount of Olives. When that day comes, He will settle all international disputes and He will separate the “sheep from the goats.”
This is where we come to the crux of the issue. You would think that the world would be longing for such a day, but that’s not the case. Four thousand years ago Abram left a pagan culture. Our modern world is every bit as pagan as the world Abraham left. In fact, some scholars now consider the world to be neo-pagan. Belief in God is fast becoming the world’s minority report. There was a time, for example, when America was, at least in principle, a “Christian” nation. There have been warnings about what might happen to America if she were to abandon those principles. French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a two-volume study of what he observed when he visited nineteenth century America. The following words, from his classic work “Democracy in America” should serve as a warning to us today:
“I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers—and it was not there. . . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests—and it was not there. . . . .in her rich mines and her vast world commerce—and it was not there. . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution—and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”
“That’s America,” you say, “But America isn’t the world.” If you believe that I need to burst your bubble. As America goes, so goes the world. We gave the world blue jeans and the rest of the world wanted blue jeans. We gave them rock and roll and the world followed suit. America is now neo-pagan and the world is following suit.
And, worst of all, while America is becoming increasingly violent, the rest of the world is following suit. For example, the United Nations’ 2019 “Global study on homicide” revealed that there were 464,000 murders committed in the world during the 2017 calendar year. The statistics varied by region, but however one divides it all up, the fact remains – the world is a violent place and it’s been that way for thousands of years. The words of Genesis 6:11, written about 2,500 years ago, speak to that tragic point.
The root of the problem is even deeper. Alexsander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian dissident, once said that the day would come when the people of Russia would ask how something like the terror of Lenin and Stalin could have happened. His answer was short and to the point. “Men have forgotten God,” The existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre also drove home the same point in his “Being and Nothingness:”
“Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn.”
While violence is, and has been, humanity’s order of the day, the Jewish people and the nation of Israel are like no other target of hate who have walked upon the hearth. From Haman’s hate of Mordecai, the Jew, in the Old Testament book of Esther to the Jewish diaspora of 70 A.D., from massacres of Jews in fifteenth century Spain to the pogroms of seventeenth century Russia, from Kristallnacht of twentieth century Germany to twenty-first century Gaza, the story is tragically consistent. Jews are the most hated people on the planet. And it’s even more tragic when we realize that the hatred of the Jewish people is being harbored by some of the most literate people on the planet. In his autobiographic masterpiece “All Rivers Run to the Sea.” made the following observation when the Nazis invaded Sighet, the small Romanian village he lived in:
“No one in Sighet suspected that our fate was already sealed. In Berlin we had been condemned, but we didn’t know it> We didn’t know that a man named Adolph Eichmann was already in Budapest weaving his black web, at the head of an elite, efficient detachment of thirty-five SS men, planning the operation that would crown his career.”
The Jews of Sighet couldn’t see it coming. They had reasoned that the German people couldn’t do things so monstrous. After all, they were literate. “They were the people who had given the world the great works of poetry of Goethe and the plays of Schiller.”
And so it is even today. Gaza is white hot with hate and rage. The battle cry has gone forth. “Kill the Jews.” Sadly, many so called enlightened people are joining those ranks of hate. In a recent essay, for example, author Jonah Goldberg made the following observation:
“For instance, there’s a self-described “tranarchist” named Jemma Decristo who purports to teach at UC-Davis who thinks it would be just dandy to have a domestic campaign of violent terror against “Zionist journalists” here in America. “They have houses [with] addresses, kids in school. They can fear their bosses but they should fear us more.”
I look at this world and I see the hatred directed at the Jewish people and the nation of Israel and I finding myself concluding that the only solution to this intractable problem is the return of Jesus to this world. We Christians call that hope/event the Parousia. It’s the day when Jesus will come to set everything right. It’s the day when all the hate and rage will finally end. It’s the day that I believe will dawn one day. It’s the day I find myself praying for. While I can’t make that day dawn, I can watch, pray, and hope that it comes in my lifetime.
I hope and pray that you do too.