Karl Marx wrote a book the Jewish question. JP Sartre: Reflections on the Jewish Question. D. Goldstein: Dostoevsky and Jews. Before giving my opinion on a topic that has already been covered by famous people, I prudently decide to quote the Canadian singer and poet, the Jew Leonard Cohen: Judaism is the secret with which the eastern tribe surrounded the divine irritation; direct confrontation with the absolute (Isra El = one who fights with God), even though we are separated from those concepts. We long for the pearl, but are unwilling to endure the irritation, the fiery core. Our spiritual life today has the consistency of an unclean oyster and stinks to heaven. We lost our genius for the vertical, turned to ourselves, knocked on our own doors and wondered why no one answered.

There is a terrifying truth that no Jewish writer today explores, that synagogues and the cultural establishment cannot erase, and that truth is that we no longer believe we are holy. The absence of God in our midst has killed people’s nerves. We are ready to accept psychiatric solutions to our suffering, to accept ethics over holiness.

Let us deny the title “Jew” to anyone who is not possessed by God, that must be the only qualification of Jewish identity. Jews without God are lilies that rot. The world remains idolatrous as it was 4,000 years ago, which is why the Jews have a special calling: a special duty to save God in the world.

They wandered for 20 centuries and now rest in the unstable balance of war for a physical homeland. There is no doubt that the Jews have conquered world academia and finance. But its banner is no longer to be “a people chosen by God”, which L. Cohen seems to agree with.

As a child I was told: “Don’t spit like the Jews” (who spit on Jesus Christ). As an adult, I read in the Bible: “Salvation comes from the Jews” (Jn 4, 22); I read that later the branch of Israel was cut off while the Gentiles were grafted into the tree and that the salvation of the world would come when the Jews were grafted back into their own olive tree (St. Paul to the Romans).

I admire the ability of the Jews and am inspired by their pragmatism. Spiritually, I believe that, by not recognizing Christ as the messiah, they displaced him (Cohen himself fell for this), taking themselves as the subjects of an action of which they were only the predicate, namely the divine initiative of salvation. This deficiency, also present in certain Catholic spiritualities, leads us to “appropriate” God and salvation, which is like “knocking on our own door without an answer”. It happened to the Great Council, when they behaved as lords of God, but also to the Catholics who accused the Jews of being murderers, not realizing that they too fall into the same disqualification and self-righteousness.

If they have already conquered everything, where are the Jews going? Only God knows. (OR)