Every religion has a concept of repentance and expiation of past sins. Oscar Wilde spoke of the penitent sinner as having a power which Aristotle, quoting Agathon, would not concede to God himself- viz. changing the Past. The Kabbalah has a rich mystical conception of 'teshuvah' which, it may be, Wilde knew about from some friends of his in literary circles in London when he was first making his way as a writer.
It must be said that claiming to be penitent- e.g. my profound sorrow that I did not find the cure to cancer as a teenager because I was too busy making love to super-models- may be vainglorious or otherwise deceptive. Is such the case with Oded Na'aman? Is he trying to leverage service in the Israeli Army- where he spent three years as the equivalent of a Homeland Security guard patting people down at airports- into some terrible trauma of the sort suffered by Prince Harry when William revealed to him that he was actually an African American crack baby from the ghetto rather than a posh Ginger git with a penchant for dressing up as an SS officer. This sent Harry into a shame spiral or a remorse regression or mise en abyme of misery or something of that sort. However, since Prince Harry actually killed Muslims during his military service, it follows that, if Oded is a philosopher, then Harry is the Philosopher King.
Raven magazine, as a way of commemorating Hamas's recent successes, has republished an essay Oded wrote for them 6 years ago.
It is usually thought that there are procedures for moral repair and reconciliation.
This is certainly the case for the various orthodox religions of which we have knowledge. It may be that a Taoist ceremony of public repentance was repurposed by the Chinese Communist Party as part of their 're-education' and 'self-criticism' model of brain washing.
The rough idea is that, having done wrong, a person should recognize the wrong as such, regret it, experience guilt, apologize, suffer punishment, change her ways, make amends, and at the end of the process, if all is done well and goes well, she is permitted to move on with her life, relieved of the burden of her wrongdoing.
None of these elements are necessary or sufficient conditions for repentance and expiation. One is welcome to repent and expiate sins we don't know we committed or, indeed, were incapable of committing. I couldn't have betrayed Christ or Hazrat Hussain, yet, in an exalted state, may accuse myself of these crimes along with the murder of Ghalib and Gandhi and his Holy Goat. I also claimed to have killed the real Salman Rushdie but, sadly, the Iranis wouldn't pay me a penny- probably because they weren't really Iranians but Smriti Irani and her husband.
Alternatively, what a person did might be so horrid that she is beyond the pale, unforgivable, and has no available path to atonement.
Oded is conflating something which is between Man and his Maker- or if there is no Maker, his own conscience- and some system of protocols binding upon a particular community or else some complicated ranking system for public 'face'.
She must then languish in moral exile. These are the two options: either the past is lifted from our shoulders or it consumes us.
No. Either a particular memory or nagging doubt becomes less painful or else it hyper-trophies- unless, obviously, you just fart loudly and say 'sod this as a game for soldiers. I'm off to the boozer'.
This dichotomy doesn’t capture my own predicament, and I suspect it fails to do justice to our experience of wrongdoing.
People who simply aren't very good at writing can't capture shite or do justice to it.
Not every wrong thing we do stays with us, but some of our wrongdoings become essential to the individuals we are.
Very true. I will always remain, in my own eyes, the teenager who refused to find the cure for cancer because he was too busy bringing Stars of the Stage and Screen to intense multiple orgasms. To be clear, all these Stars were of the female persuasion and I was using my dick, not my tongue or my fingers.
Their burden is not merely the burden of undergoing repentance and repair but the burden of having a history and carrying it with us—a history that may also include having lost people whose absence was once unimaginable to us, having past experiences of relief and horror imprinted on our soul, and having lived in places that, years after we left them, continue to be part our internal landscape.
This is the burden of a shite poet or self-dramatizing shithead. Shed the burden by getting a proper job doing something useful.
To be relieved of the burden of the history that makes us the persons we are is to lose our sense of the significance of our past and thereby lose our sense of who we are.
These guys are always burdened by something and at risk of losing their senses more especially their sense of smell which is lucky because they also lose control of their bowels.
Our notion of moral repair should not require such self-denial.
Nor should it require us to fist ourselves vigorously. I often point this out to strangers I meet on the bus. That way I get the whole seat to myself.
Furthermore, as long as we assume that we either leave our wrongdoings behind or languish in despair and remorse, we face two, opposing temptations.
Yes, yes. I know. You are tempted to fist yourself vigorously. The opposing temptation- viz to stop fisting yourself so very vigorously- should also be mentioned.
One is to deny the severity and depth of our wrongdoing in order to save ourselves from the claws of the past;
Why not just put the blame on the boy sitting next to you? Alternatively, you can make snide remarks about Neo-Liberalism.
the other is to wallow in lamentations and renounce the possibilities of the future and our commitment to it.
Woe unto me that I fist myself vigorously yet remain chockful of Sinful Vanity and Satanic Pride!
Both are forms of bad faith.
They are a fucking nuisance. Get a proper job and do something useful for once in your life.
We either take ourselves to be completely free of our past, thereby failing to acknowledge the ways we’re defined by it, or we take ourselves to be fully determined by our past, thereby failing to acknowledge the ways we can determine its meaning and significance going forward.
We don't know the ways we are defined by our past. Doctors tell us that habits we picked up in our thoughtless youth have drastically reduced our chances of living into a healthy old age.
There must be another possibility. We must envisage a picture of moral repair that vindicates and even requires permanent ambivalence, doubt, internal conflict, and anguish but still offers guidance, truthfulness, and a measure of reconciliation and relief.
Why stop there? Why not envisage a picture of moral repair which gives us the strength and agility of a black panther? Also, it should increase the size of our dicks.
In the early 2000s, I was a conscript soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. I spent a considerable amount of time patrolling roads, hills, neighborhoods, and villages; inspecting vehicles; riding armed vehicles and Humvees, often sleeping in them; raiding houses in search of weapons; managing permanent checkpoints and setting up temporary ones; guarding and living in outposts made of assemblages of trailers and concrete blocks; standing in tall guard towers, hours on end, overlooking dirt roads that sprawl over yellowish, green fields; counting the days, weeks, and months to the day which, after three years of service, I’d be a civilian once again. It was a normal military service of an Israeli combat soldier in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Oded risked his life to serve his country. Good for him. Sadly, he then trained as a philosopher and became a pompous bore.
In order to properly assess my reactions to having served in the Occupation, it might seem necessary to
speak truthfully, not indulge in hyperbole and bogus breast beating designed to convince your readers that you are a deep thinker as well as a very sensitive little snowflake.
distinguish this convoluted system of oppression, injustice, and wrongdoing from my specific actions.
His specific actions involve not going to jail as a 'refusenik' and staying on in an Israel where he is protected by the IDF and a 'convoluted system' which he considers oppressive and unjust.
But this thought is misguided. It is essential to the nature of my wrongdoing that its boundaries were murky.
As were mine in not curing cancer because I was too busy making love to supermodels. The murkiness in this case has to do with what actually cures cancer. I could easily have written a poem which kills cancer cells in the body of its readers. Sadly, my habit of masturbating- which after all in some murky sense may be termed having sex with the women pictured in the swim-wear catalogue- prevented me from writing poetry till I got a job and a g.f and took to picturing myself as a TS Eliot type doomed to work in the City when, by temperament, I belonged upon the summit of Parnassus.
I cannot point to specific actions and separate them from my daily complicity in the Occupation. Of course, some incidents were more extreme and more disturbing than others, but focusing on them would be to misconstrue the Occupation as a regime that leads to wrongdoing rather than a regime that wrongs those who live under it at every moment of its existence. The terror and volatility by which order is maintained pervade every moment of daily life.
But occupying those territories kept Israelis safe- or safer- than they would otherwise have been. So long as this dude lives in Israel, he is complicit in all the actions of the State which are necessary to preserve his life.
There are incidents and moments that I carry with me and that, although seemingly innocuous, convey the nature and depth of my wrongdoings. I remember clearly a father who approached me at the checkpoint, his two young sons and his wife standing a few meters behind him. The father was ten or fifteen years my elder. He and his family wanted to pass through to visit relatives in another part of the West Bank. There was some celebration, a birthday, I think. He was clearly afraid. I could see his upper lip trembling. His fear put me at ease. I spoke kindly, respectfully. A naïve onlooker would have thought this is a perfectly decent encounter, all smiles and niceties. But had I felt vulnerable for even one instant, this pleasant façade would crumble. My gun was loaded, there were other soldiers around me, we had the power to do almost anything we wanted if we deemed this man a threat to us. Violence was underneath the surface. The man and his family knew this, so the pretense was upheld. The children looked at me from a distance, their mother’s hands on their shoulders. Their gaze is what I remember best. They saw their father’s fear of me. The younger child seemed to look at me with admiration, the older child with hate. This encounter was nothing special to me, and it was certainly not an unusual experience for this family. In fact, this was the best encounter possible between occupiers and those they occupy. It included no outward eruption of violence, no explicit threats, nothing but cordial language, yet it was an attack on this family, on its structure and foundation, on the children’s childhood, on the dignity of their parents.
No it wasn't. You might as well claim that a little kid who gives you the stink-eye has attacked your family and raped your grandmother. This is the case even if the kid is A-rab. On the other hand, if the kid is an Iyengar, you should report the matter to the police.
The same thing was repeated in endless variations numerous times each day.
Which is why this nutter now thinks he personally attacked thousands of A-rabs. Did he also rape their grandmothers? I suppose so. The dignity of a family is destroyed when this dude rapes granny before their very eyes even if he omits to shit on her tits.
Some wished to pass through my checkpoint to go to another village or to a city further away; some were on their way to work, to school, or to the university; some asked to be let through to see a doctor; sometimes a group of people were on their way to a funeral or a wedding. Once, I remember, there was a couple, a day after their wedding, on their way to their honeymoon. I was stationed as a guard at the Civil Administration office, a military body tasked with managing civilian life in the Occupied Territories. The couple came to pick up a special permit that had been approved for them and that would allow them to exit the region and go on vacation. They were almost turned away because a soldier misplaced the document. Just as they were about to leave, heartbroken, another soldier noticed the permit on the floor, underneath the desk. They were let through just as casually as they had been turned away a moment earlier. They were entirely at our mercy; I remember being struck by our indifference to their fate. Throughout all these encounters, I was somehow both tense and completely numb, nervous and exhausted, longing for sleep.
He was exhausted because he was raping the grannies of thousands of A-rabs. No wonder he needed a bit of kip.
My complicity in the Occupation goes beyond my daily actions. My identification with the institutions of the Occupation, and with the society in the name of which it is carried out, make it impossible to disentangle my guilt from its social and political context. I was part of this rule of terror and I should not have been.
Sadly, the Israeli Bench decided that though conscientious objectors need not serve in the military, there could be no exemption for people who didn't want to be deployed in the Territories.
I participated in a fundamentally corrupt regime, a regime that cannot be justified as a form of self-defense and which in any case undermines the moral and physical existence of my fellow citizens, my society, and my country.
But I was not merely a part of this regime in the sense that every Israeli citizen and, to some degree, every American taxpayer, is part of this regime.
So why not emigrate to Iran or North Korea?
More than anything, I wanted to run away. I would listen to Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” and fantasize about dropping my gun to the ground and running from the checkpoint, through the fields, beyond the hills, toward the sea.
Working security is boring. So is being an auditor. Lots of young men find themselves wanting to quit their boring job so as to run away to Phuket where they might meet a woman who won't immediately get pregnant and thus force them to spend the next 40 years turning into the most boring person they could possibly have been.
Every few weeks I’d get a weekend leave and spend it wandering around Tel Aviv, in bars and cafes, pretending to be someone else. I was a 20-year-old soldier but introduced myself as a 25-year-old university student majoring in philosophy and literature, the subjects I was hoping to study. I used a fake Tel Aviv address instead of my parents’ suburban one. The fantasy of a different life sustained me throughout the weekend until the dawn of a new week came by and I had to put on my uniform. I’d get on the bus, my gun in my lap, and slip back into the tiredness and apathy that characterized my military existence.
We get it. Oded was a sensitive little snowflake. It was cruel of the State to force him to carry a gun and pretend to be a mensch. In his imagination, he was attacking and raping thousands of grannies every day. This caused him great fatigue.
I completed my military service, moved to Jerusalem, started taking philosophy courses in the university,
but philosophy courses decapitate and bugger the brains out of all those involved! This is just as literal a statement of fact as the notion that this guy attacked thousands of Palestinian families during his military service.
wrote stories and columns for the newspaper,
but newspaper poke out the eyes and sodomize the eye sockets of their readers! Writing for newspapers is the most perverted type of sadistic sex crime! I suppose that having raped and shat on the tits of thousands of A-rab grannies, it was only natural that this horrible young man would take to such wicked ways.
waited tables,
Did you know that restaurants are actually a cunning Neo-Liberal ploy to generate excess profits by causing diners to become cannibals? You think you are eating a nice beef steak. Actually you are feasting on your fellow diner's limbs! They, meanwhile, are biting off your toes and fingers! Then the waiter brings you a hefty bill despite the fact that restaurants don't actually serve any food! The diners are actually eating each other!
and got drunk with friends.
What were you drinking? Blood, Sweat and Tears. Beer, it is true, is piss but everything else has been extracted from dark skinned disabled homosexuals in Third World Countries.
I wanted to move on, as they say, to turn my back on my military years. I soon realized that I couldn’t.
Because you were now buggering brains, sodomizing eye sockets and turning a profit on cannibalistic banquets of the most diabolical type.
Things were no longer as they used to be. It was as if the world from which I came and to which I was trying to return was contaminated, tarnished, and any appearance of human decency was a mere pretense, a lie.
Did you know that human decency is actually manufactured from the pelts of endangered species?
I was no longer a soldier but I was still the person who did those things. I lent my face to the Occupation and now I didn’t recognize it anymore.
I lent my face to Shahrukh Khan. I want it back. There's no way the ugly cunt I see in the shaving mirror is actually me.
I hung my hopes on the passage of time,
but the passage of time was only invented by evil Capitalists so that 'compound interest' would be a thing. Get woke, bruv!
thinking that the insistent presence of what I did would gradually wear off. But why should it matter if I did it today, yesterday, last month, two years ago, or two decades ago?
Please Sir, is the answer 'Because Neo-Liberalism is totes evil?'
... I felt that to truly know and understand the significance of what I did, and continues to be done in my name, is to be unwilling to live with myself.
I sympathize. There are times when my farts are so pungent I don't want to live with myself. Oded's self-dramatization is similar to my farts in this respect. Essentially, this silly man has worked himself into a lather over precious little. Still, because he is shit at writing, and wholly unable to reason, posing as this tortured and traumatized soul may get him noticed.
To exist in this way is to experience one’s life as a life that has not yet ended but can no longer be lost: a life without significance that will perish in moral silence.
But, because this dude has neither talent nor any interesting experiences he could write about, his life- at least in the republic of letters- is wholly without significance. Silence, from him, would be moral. Shrillness however is all we can expect of him.
To be sure, only occasionally did I feel the full weight of this state of brokenness, and rarely did I fully believe in the obligation to sustain it. Nevertheless, I thought then and think still that familiarity with this state, and with the sense of duty that binds one to it, is necessary for any proper appreciation of certain kinds of wrongdoing.
Imaginary ones regarding which you can virtue signal.
It is the truth, though not the whole truth, that the weight of such wrongdoing is comparable to the weight of one’s whole life.
I now weigh more than all the supermodels put together with whom I used to have group sex with back in my teens. Sad. Still, thanks to diabetes, the Doctors will have to cut my legs off sooner or later. Then I'll have one of those cool mobility scooters.
This is the fact that finds recognition in brokenness, the living refusal to accept life as it actually is.
as opposed to a life devoted to sexually gratifying super models though, in my case, this meant missing out on the Nobel Prize for curing cancer.
Something similar occurs in grief. An appreciation of the loss of someone we love requires familiarity with the thought that life cannot go on without this person and that the person’s passing is unbearable in the specific sense that it should not be borne.
Nonsense! Grief doesn't require anything of this sort. Some grief may seem unbearable and some grief actually is so. People have died of broken hearts.
Even if proper grief doesn’t require languishing in this state of total resistance, no grief is proper if it is ignorant of this state of mind.
Improper Grief wears a very short skirt and bright red lipstick.
“Dolphins,” Joan Didion writes, “had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate.” The same refusal is found in our poems of grief: we “rage against the dying of the light”, we “stop the clocks, cut off the telephone” .To know grief is to know this defiance and the sense of obligation that binds us to it.
No. Poets may pretend to grieve deeply or to be defiant or to give a toss about the fate of the planet. But, if you take away their whiskey, they reveal a sharp tongue and a very vulgar vocabulary.
To be a wrongdoer and recognize oneself as such involves a similar yearning, or call, that life and existence should come to a halt.
Also quarks should lose their charm and the Mathematics should become more like Porn.
But it all goes on, of course. Thus, notwithstanding important differences between their predicaments, mourners and wrongdoers must face a similar problem: How to refuse to live with this loss, remain unwilling to accept it, committed to not bearing it, and yet live with it, accept it, and bear it? Having lost or having done wrong, we ask, again and again, how we live on without denying our own experience of life and love and duty. How, or to what extent, can we go on truthfully in light of what happened?
We can also ask such questions if- as occasionally happens- we shart when we only intended to fart. My advise is change your underwear. Also, you may want to throw away your trousers.
Carrying It
I don’t know if I forgive myself, nor whether I should; I don’t know whether I’m doing what I ought to do in order to repent or at least to account for my actions. I don’t know how to live truthfully and what exactly that requires.
Not knowing shit is what philosophy is about.
But I have come to believe that the weight and force of these questions must be a permanent part of my life,
Soros will fund a chair for me at Ivy League. Forty years from now, I'll still be whining about having been an underpaid security guard for a couple of years in my youth. The problem here is that even Prince Harry actually killed Muslims. Also Harry is a Ginger. Oded simply can't compete save in terms of having an even lower IQ.
even if I will eventually come closer to having some answers. Good answers would not relieve us of questions. The questions will have to be addressed again, and again.
Because Professors of shite subjects repeat themselves endlessly. In this context, it is useful to have a back story. If you are from Bengal, you can claim to be emotionally scarred by the great Bengal famine. If you are from Britain, you can claim to be emotionally scarred by racial abuse directed at you by fellow members of the Royal Family. If you are Israeli maybe you can pretend that you raped lots of grannies and shat on their tits while working as a glorified security guard.
There should be no release from the past and there should be no pardon from its weight. Though I’m no longer broken—my life is full and good—I should not expect to be entirely whole. I will remain restless with questions.
To advance your career.
To be truthful about the wrongs that I committed, wrongs that are still being committed by others like me as I’m writing these words, is to be
a fatuous bore. Everybody can be truthful about the wrongs they committed when they did boring jobs back when they were 20. The guy who delivered Pizzas on a push-bike can gas on about his crushing sense of guilt at having to acknowledge he contributed to a global diabetes pandemic cunningly plotted by Globalized Neoliberalism. The problem here is that the Trustafarian kid- think Justin Trudeau- who never had to do a boring job can get to gas on about the terrible guilt they feel because they are White, Straight, and as rich as fuck. Sadly, Prince Harry who actually killed Muslim peeps and who married a 'one drop' Black woman, will always win this game. Any Ivy League Campus which offers Oded a Chair will have to acknowledge that Harry is their Philosopher King.
irreconcilable. These wrongs should not have happened, they must cease to happen, and the world in which they have happened and continue to happen is both actual and unacceptable.
Also this Universe is totes politically incorrect. It discriminates against 'dark matter'. We are all complicit in this ghastly atrocity.
Even as, over the years, I’ve come to accept my past as mine,
I've come to accept that Shahrukh Khan stole my face. His own is actually very ugly.
I haven’t lost touch with the sense of shock and horror at my own actions.
He keeps in touch with it on Facebook.
Every once in a while, this horror washes over me, there is nothing except horror, and I’m paralyzed; usually, it is a silent presence in the back of my mind. I accept this self-revulsion as integral to who I am.
Because gassing on about it advances this fucktard's career.
Even the best moral answers, answers that tell me what I must do and how I must live as a person who is directly and indirectly implicated in the oppression of a whole people, would not rid me of the problems they address.
Which is why I should just keep repeating myself for the next four decades- preferably as a tenured Professor on an Ivy League campus. Soros should fund a special chair or hammock for me.
It is one thing to appoint a Palestinian a Professor of Grievance Studies. It is another to promote some Israeli dude whose grievance is that he had to do military service at a time when a lot of people, including Prince Harry, where actually killing Muslim dudes.
We need morality to find our way out of this spiral of corruption.
Philosophy is now a wholly corrupt Ponzi scheme
A guide to horror, morality can teach us how to live with what we’ve done.
Or live with what we haven't done- e.g. fail to cure cancer because of all the super-models we kept sexually gratifying.
It can help us acknowledge our revulsion at our own actions
I am revolted by the fact that I didn't cure cancer while causing multiple orgasms for supermodels with my needle dick.
without immediately denying that we feel it and without being entirely consumed by it.
This may involve eating a pizza while watching Netflix.
This is something we should ask of morality:
while giving it a reach-around- right?
neither absolution from guilt and blame and attainment of moral purity, nor a vision of an ideal society and an ideal agent, but a way to live with the moral horror of this world, a way to live with the horror we inspire in ourselves.
By writing shite like this and bucking for promotion in a bankrupt discipline. The plain fact is, Israel's policing of the Occupied Territories has kept both Israelis and Arabs safer and more prosperous than would have been the case if, as in Gaza, Israel abdicated its policing obligations. True, Gaza was previously under Egyptian control and, the hope was, it could have been autonomous and relatively opulent if it had got on with its two neighbours. Sadly, Iran had other plans for that strip of land. By its fiat, Gaza was condemned to sup on rage alone. Will the IDF, like blind Samson, bring down the Temple of Grievance Studies erected there? No. But it may help Oded escape from Israel to some nice Ivy League campus as a tenured Professor. The guy may be as stupid as shit, but that is no bar to rising in his profession. Why? Because it turned to shit before he was born.
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