Job Chapter 12
Naked Priests! Happy Purim!!!!
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Percy Shelley
Job has become a laughingstock. Ask the birds and the fish about G-d's might. See what G-d does to the respected and the powerful. Job has stopped talking about his personal sorrows and talks about G-d as a force for destruction. G-d builds. G-d destroys. If G-d holds back the waters, everyone dies. If G-d releases the waters, everyone drowns. Priests go naked. Leaders go crazy. Officials lose their jobs. The powerful end up groping in darkness.
Does wisdom come with age? Does a long life bring understanding? It should. Like “Look on my Works, ye Mighty and Despair” there's a dual meaning. Had you lived in Ozymandias' kingdom you could despair at the great kingdom. Now despair at the desolation.
Sometimes age brings wisdom. I'm smarter than I was in my 20s. Yet so many grow old without growing wise. Have you seen an article praising the wisdom of age in regards to the Senate? Had Ruth Bader Ginsberg the wisdom to retire in 2015, we'd still have Roe v. Wade.
Let's talk about Purim.
Purim is the most Jewish of Jewish holidays. It's so Jewish that the goyim don't even wish us a happy Purim. No one culturally appropriates it. Christians frequently try to impose Jesus onto Hanukkah or Passover. No church holds a Purim celebration. Purim is a holiday full of ironic reversals, noise making and drinking.
Purim celebrates the prevention of mass murder.
On Purim, we eat and drink alcohol. We give gifts to the poor and to each other. We read the Book of Esther.
The Book of Esther is one of the strangest books in the Bible. It takes place after the destruction of the First Temple. Babylon is gone. Persia has taken its place. King Achashverosh throws a rager. He calls for Queen Vashti. She refuses. He executes her. The kingdom holds a pageant with the prize of joining Achashverosh's harem (with the possibility of becoming queen). Mordechai, Jewish merchant, tells Esther, his niece, to enter. She wins. She enters the king's palace without revealing her Jewish identity. Shortly thereafter, Mordechai angers Haman. Haman asks Achashverosh for a decree to kill all the Jews in Persia. Mordechai approaches Esther and after some back-and-forth Esther agrees to sway the king. Esther works on Achashverosh until he offers her half the kingdom. She asks him to reverse the Jew killing decree. He doesn't do that but he issues another decree to arm Jews. Haman dies on the same gallows that he made for Mordechai. Jews fight back and kill their enemies. Mordechai becomes a leader and most Jews like him.
So many Hamans in our history. So few Mordechais.
More than enough Achashveroshes.
Great literature feels contemporary. The great are destroyed. Nations rise and fall. Look upon my works, ye Mighty and despair. Persia helps to rebuild Israel and the Second Temple. Then it loses its territory to Alexander. Along comes Antiochus IV and then Rome. Job talks about the mighty falling. Esther is about the seemingly random events. Achashveros was ready to kill us on the words of an advisor. He saved us because of his wife. His wife was his wife because his queen refused him. Achashveros could kill us or save us. He's not G-d. He's an easily manipulated man with too much power.
If you want to know what it feels like to be Jewish at the moment, read the Book of Esther. We are months into a war started by Hamas, cheered on by people that we thought we could trust. The first victims were Israeli peace activists and kids at a dance party. Before I turned off my phone for Simchat Torah, Bluesky was a great app, an oasis from the drama of Facebook and Twitter. When I turned it back on, Bluesky had become a cheering section for mass murder and rape. Suddenly, most of my leftist and artist friends were eager to crow about the victims deserving rape and murder. After all, they were Israelis and Israel is supposedly a genocidal apartheid colonizing ethnostate.
Weeks later, the same assholes would stop justifying rape and decide unilaterally that it never happened. Like Holocaust deniers, they don't care about evidence. They only want to believe themselves virtuous as they parrot Nazi points.
Does it matter that almost everyone spouting buzz words like “genocide” or “Apartheid” directly benefits from genocide and white supremacy? Do they care that most Arab nations “ethnically cleansed” Jews from their lands in 1967 or that Israel's population is one sixth non-Jewish Arab? Of course not. Israel is a Socialist nation with universal health care, parliamentary elections and the kibbutz culture. Kibbutzes are like communes except they actually work. Yet, American socialists can't be socialists if they support Israel.
If these people really cared about genocide, they would have spoke out about Syria, Iran, Sudan, the Kurds, the Uyghurs. They didn't. They only want to spread blood libel while screaming genocide. Israel is at war. It's not committing genocide, but try telling that to your average leftist who suddenly discovered the word. Even the so-called Feminists got into the act. Mariam Barghouti (whose family profits from Palestinian misery) for many years wrote that no true feminist can support Zionism. Then she called the events of October 7 a heroic prison break and a great moment for the resistance.
In other words, Feminism is cool with rape and murder as long as it happens to Jews.
Then there were the few Jews who sucked up to their leftist friends by condemning Israel as a racist ethnostate. You've heard of them. The goyim loved to post their bullshit. They were the “good Jews” as opposed to the big bad Zionist Jews. How dare Jews buy land in an Ottomoan backwater in the 1880s? Didn't they know that Arab nationalism would want to claim the all the lands after the Ottoman empire imploded? How dare 1930s Zionists not just die when Arab mobs tried to murder them? When the Mufti of Jerusalem called upon the Arab world to join Hitler in his holy crusade, the John Glazers and Tony Kushners of the world would have apologized to the Mufti.
There are many Hamans in the world – Roger Waters, Yahya Sinwar, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – but then there is Achashverosh. We know Haman. We understand Haman. Achashverosh is complicated.
Achashverosh is the British Empire promising Zionists an Israel with the Balfour Declaration and then promising the Arabs a Palestine in the same place with the 1939 White Paper. Achashverosh is Turky, accusing Israel of genocide, all the while maintaining diplomatic relations. Achashverosh is the Evangelical Christians who support Israel as long as they can use us in their proxy war against Muslims. Achashveros is Qatar, funding Hamas and Al Jazeera to spread anti-Semitic propaganda, while staging ceasefire talks as if they actually want a ceasefire. Achashverosh is Saudi Arabia, eager to normalize relations with Israel while oppressing their own people. Achashverosh is the right-wing politician who loves neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes while aggressively supporting Israel. Achashverosh is the leftist college student, weirdly obsessed with a nation thousands of miles away, because he's rebelling against his Christian upbringing.
On Purim, we celebrate winning. We celebrate surviving in a world of silly kings and anti-Semites. We read Esther, give gifts to each other and the poor. We drink and we feast. The world keeps fucking with us. We keep surviving.
This chapter of Job and the holiday of Purim are both about reversals. This Purim, many of my leftwing friends are ex-friends. The Soros obsessed Trump voter is my ally. Job talks about kings falling into madness and advisors losing everything Purim celebrates these events. Sometimes a crazy king or a discredited advisor is the different between genocide and a party.
Next Week: Job is still talking.
If you’re feeling generous, please help me pay my rent.
For more Bible stuff, check out King David and the Spiders from Mars