How Do You Free a Hostage Who Doesn’t Know They’re a Captive?
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Parshat Noach, and the Western mind three years after October 7
How do you free a hostage who doesn't know they're a captive?
Three years after October 7th, the surviving Israeli hostages are home. But hundreds of thousands of duped university students, and now whole swaths of society across the globe, remain trapped in an elaborate mental tunnel, unwitting captives of a gleeful Hamas.
The goal was always the delegitimization of Israel. That isn't new. What's new is the brazenness. Once you had to peel away layers of innuendo. Today it's blatant, crazed, zombie hatred.
Take societies at the tail end of economic failure and collapsing social policy, led by spineless, cartoonish politicians parroting the inane slogans of the European gutters and the academic slop of Ivy League halls that have become lower education. Toss in the Molotov cocktail of venomous terminology, pseudo-humanitarianism, and a desperate need to advocate for murderers while STILL feeling righteous. The result is a France teetering on the brink and a once Great Britain that is today anything but great.
The open celebrations of Hamas on October 7th were the coup de grâce in the disemboweling of sanity and decency across much of the West.
Thomas Pynchon fans, it might be time to reread Gravity's Rainbow. Its darkest image is the TUNNELS of the Mittelwerk, where slave laborers from the Dora concentration camp built Hitler's V-2 rockets and thousands died. A hidden machine of death kept running underground while everyone above went about their lives, absorbed into a system they didn't understand.
The Pulitzer board, based at Columbia University, refused that book the prize. This is the same board that in 1932 honored Walter Duranty of the New York Times for reporting that denied Stalin's famine, which killed millions in Ukraine.
The Nobel Peace Prize committee has a similar record. It honored the butcher Arafat and passed over Gandhi. This week it gave the prize to Navi Pillay, who led the U.N. panel that libeled Israel with the word "genocide" for its just war against Hamas, after 1,200 people were butchered and raped in cold blood. If anything, she deserves the Nobel Hatred Award.
This movement of narcissistic rage and hatred masked as resistance proves the crusty old adage: the masses have indeed become asses.
So how do you free a hostage who doesn't know they're a captive?
Not my problem.
But I will say this: Noah's Ark is pulling into port just in the nick of time.
All aboard!
Sending much love, and Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Yossi