Truth Over Tyranny: Biblical wisdom for defeating the Technocrats.
These are my insights for defeating the Transhumanist Technocracy movement, based on the teachings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, on the weekly Bible portion.
Every day we are faced with a new crisis caused by the technocrats. Here is but a brief rundown:
World War III underway
A new “pandemic”
Supply line disruptions
Cyber attacks
Border invasions
No one could be blamed for thinking that these are cursed times; and that we — all of humanity — are cursed. But here is the question: so what?
So what if we are cursed? So what if we are faced with days of pain, and suffering, and misery? It’s certainly not what anyone would prefer — or deserve. But do times of hardship and heartache mean that the world is ending; that we are fated to live our lives in fear and depravation, under the cruel whip of transhumanist taskmasters?
No. That fate is absolutely not set in stone. How do we know this? Because of all the evidence presented by the Jewish people. This nation has 4000 years of perseverance in the face of continuous crisis. In era after era, it has shown the human family what it takes to snatch triumph from the clutches of disaster.
It comes down to turning curses into blessings, which is the aptly titled commentary of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parashat Shemot:
https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/shemot/turning-curses-into-blessings/
The Jewish people first demonstrated this tenacity in the face of persecution by the Egyptian Pharoah:
“Genesis ends on an almost serene note. Jacob has found his long lost son. The family has been reunited. Joseph has forgiven his brothers. Under his protection and influence the family has settled in Goshen, one of the most prosperous regions of Egypt. They now have homes, property, food, the protection of Joseph and the favour of Pharaoh. It must have seemed one of the golden moments of Abraham’s family’s history.
“Then, as has happened so often since, ‘There arose a new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph.’ There was a political climate change. The family fell out of favour. Pharaoh told his advisers: ‘Look, the Israelite people are becoming too numerous and strong for us’ – the first time the word ‘people’ is used in the Torah with reference to the children of Israel. ‘Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase.’ And so the whole mechanism of oppression moves into operation: forced labour that turns into slavery that becomes attempted genocide.
“The story is engraved in our memory. We tell it every year, and in summary-form in our prayers, every day. It is part of what it is to be a Jew. Yet there is one phrase that shines out from the narrative: ‘But the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and the more they spread.’ That, no less than oppression itself, is part of what it means to be a Jew.
“The worse things get, the stronger we become. Jews are the people who not only survive but thrive in adversity.”
The ability of the Jews to not only survive, but thrive in the face of adversity, continued through the ages into modern times:
“Jewish history is not merely a story of Jews enduring catastrophes that might have spelled the end to less tenacious groups. It is that after every disaster, Jews renewed themselves. They discovered some hitherto hidden reservoir of spirit that fuelled new forms of collective self-expression as the carriers of God’s message to the world.
“Every tragedy begat new creativity. After the division of the kingdom following the death of Solomon came the great literary prophets, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Out of the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile came the renewal of Torah in the life of the nation, beginning with Ezekiel and culminating in the vast educational programme brought back to Israel by Ezra and Nehemiah.
“From the destruction of the Second Temple came the immense literature of rabbinic Judaism, until then preserved mostly in the form of an oral tradition: Mishnah, Midrash and Gemara.
“From the Crusades came the Hassidei Ashkenaz, the North European school of piety and spirituality. Following the Spanish expulsion came the mystic circle of Tzefat: Lurianic Kabbalah and all it inspired by way of poetry and prayer. From East European persecution and poverty came the Hassidic movement and its revival of grass-roots Judaism through a seemingly endless flow of story and song. And from the worst tragedy of all in human terms, the Holocaust, came the rebirth of the state of Israel, the greatest collective Jewish affirmation of life in more than two thousand years.”
This ancient wisdom is the key to any civilization enduring through times of oppression:
“It is well known that the Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ also means ‘opportunity’. Any civilisation that can see the blessing within the curse, the fragment of light within the heart of darkness, has within it the capacity to endure. Hebrew goes one better. The word for crisis, mashber, also means ‘a child-birth chair.’ Written into the semantics of Jewish consciousness is the idea that the pain of hard times is a collective form of the contractions of a woman giving birth. Something new is being born. That is the mindset of a people of whom it can be said that ‘the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and the more they spread.'”
It is the source of the spiritual power needed to redeem the world:
“There is something profoundly spiritual as well as robustly practical about this ability to transform the bad moments of life into a spur to creativity. It is as if, deep within us were a voice saying, ‘You are in this situation, bad though it is, because there is a task to perform, a skill to acquire, a strength to develop, a lesson to learn, an evil to redeem, a shard of light to be rescued, a blessing to be uncovered, for I have chosen you to give testimony to humankind that out of suffering can come great blessings if you wrestle with it for long enough and with unshakeable faith.’
“In an age in which people of violence are committing acts of brutality in the name of the God of compassion, the people of Israel are proving daily that this is not the way of the God of Abraham, the God of life and the sanctity of life. And whenever we who are a part of that people lose heart, and wonder when it will ever end, we should recall the words: ‘The more they were oppressed, the more they increased and the more they spread.’ A people of whom that can be said can be injured, but can never be defeated. God’s way is the way of life.”
I would add this:
The last point by Rabbi Sacks sums it up for me: “God’s way is the way of life.” The history of the Jewish people is the evidence that this is true. This nation is living testimony that God is real, and that He runs His world in a certain way: a way that calls us to embrace and celebrate life. And He continuously gives us an abundance of blessings in life to embrace and celebrate. We just have to look for them.