ARMAGEDDON

(In the past several decades many American Evangelical Christians have believed in the End of History and identified it with an Armageddon attack on the modern State of Israel. My response to it: this is blasphemy! I am placing this entry in the Tikkun Olam section, as its relevance to Res Judaica is far greater than to any other major theme, including Twilight, where its initial placement was nearly made a while ago.

It is also proper to group this entry with the two preceding ones, already grouped together, on what I can best describe as the emergence of a neo-Judaism, which has virtually eliminated the seemingly everlasting conflict between religious Judaism and Zionist secularism, by trivializing and effectively moving out of the way the traditional Jewish principle of the Mashiach.)

The intense apocalyptical concept of Armageddon and the End of History in an epic battle over Jerusalem is a purely Christian concept, so controversial that early on it had produced a feisty debate over the canonicity of the Biblical Book of Revelation. I have absolutely no problem with the allegorical Book of Revelation, of course, but its wild modern Christian literal interpretation as a necessity, implying an actual doomsday over the fate of the State Israel, worries me a lot, as it goes far beyond the readiness of American Christian Fundamentalists to go to war in defending Israel from any outside aggression, but it actually invites such a war, and suggests a willingness, on the part of these fanatics, to provoke such a war, in their effort to facilitate the fulfillment of the Biblical prophecy.

For this reason, I am yet further worried about the recent trend of desecularization of the traditionally secular Zionist Jewish nationalism (see my earlier entry Apostles Of A False Messiah), creating a new brand of religiously motivated Zionism masquerading as Biblical Judaism, seeing that, as these two forces-- American Christian Zionism and Israeli neo-religious Zionism, are finding each other, the resulting tinderbox may well explode with the biggest bang this Earth has ever experienced, signifying, as a frighteningly feasible hypothesis, the real end of human history.

I guess that there is little else for us to do than wait and see, and hopefully perhaps this scary all-destructive pseudo-Armageddon scenario will not play itself out in our lifetime. But, even at my fairly advanced age of sixty-plus I would not bet on it, and the probability that, given our current trends and circumstances, it shall occur one day, sooner or later, is far greater than any of us would like to think of.

What is then to be done to at least make a feeble effort to prevent such an Armageddon? The answer is there and ready, but I am afraid that those who can work on it are either unaware of the potential Armageddon, or recklessly dismissive of it while the two perilously converging forces (the American Evangelical and Israeli Religious Zionism) are about to merge in a lethal combination.

The nation of Iran’s nuclear program has now emerged as that potential spark to start the incineration of the planet. The Israeli government is visibly determined to go to war over it, despite all the protestations of the Israeli people, whereas the American Armageddon-inviters are presently zealously anxious to interpret any major military conflict involving Israel as their long-awaited cue to expand such a war into the apocalyptic end-of-days struggle, which their twisted interpretation of the Bible reads as an absolute necessity sine qua non for the rapture of the born-again righteous (that is, themselves), and, of course, for the Second Coming of Jesus, whose righteous helpers they would consider themselves to be, in such a case.