Beyond Belligerent Nationalism

Special to Jewish Website

7 September 2023

Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971)

Emeritus Professor of International Law
Purdue University
lberes@purdue.edu

“The dust from which the first man was created was gathered in all four corners of the earth.”

Talmud

Despite persistent failure, belligerent nationalism continues to drive decision-making in world politics.[1] From the standpoint of Israel, a country smaller than America’s Lake Michigan, there seems to be little realistic choice about “staying strong” militarily.[2] Prima facie, we would hear from Jerusalem (and Washington) that only the “powerful” states are suited to survive in a bewildering world of international anarchy and derivative chaos..

But words matter. What does it really mean to be “powerful” in our decentralized global setting? There are pertinent answers and contradictory details. For Israel, in all changing circumstances, core national security expectations remain straightforward and unchallengeable.

The reasons are plain. Assorted enemies, state and sub-state, are always “at the gate.” It follows that any tangible or conceptual retreat from reliance on military force, however well-intentioned, must be ill-advised. When such a retreat would concern an existential threat, (e.g., nuclear or biological war), it could also prove “suicidal.”

The Talmud instructs that “Scholars build the structure of peace in the world,”[3] but today we would best regard this extravagant claim as wishful thinking (Sigmund Freud would label it a matter of “wish fulfillment”). What is more sincerely clarifying about the planet-wide background of world politics, that is, the underlying geo-strategic context of international relations? Isn’t this “Westphalian” self-help system a “vigilante” structure injurious to all nation-states, to the “powerful” as well as the “powerless”? Aren’t there elements of coherent and systematic thought that could sometime prove helpful or perhaps even indispensable to needed world system transformations? Most intriguing here, could elements of such refined thought be drawn purposefully from Jewish philosophy?

Though already complex, there are antecedent questions. Why does a belligerent and persistently failed “balance of power” remain the dominant fixture of international relations and credible deterrence?[4] Is it because the planet’s geostrategic “wisdom” remains mired in simplification, clichés and empty witticisms?” Isn’t it (finally) high time for developing more coherent and comprehensive theories of global power management?[5]

Before there are promising answers, there must be promising questions.[6] One such query would be universal and overriding: Why have there been no significant moves by “great states” to build upon what Rabbi Avraham Kook calls “the unity that there in us all?”[7] And why has there been so little decipherable dissatisfaction with global anarchy[8] and its attendant chaos.[9] Why so little willingness in both Israel and the United States to look more deeply and meaningfully behind the news?[10]

Few in Israel or America could ever reasonably expect their politicians to resemble Plato’s “philosopher king”[11] or Nietzsche’s “higher man,”[12] but they ought at least be able to anticipate national leaders who could reasonably value the intersectional benefits of philosophy, culture, literature, science and international law.[13] These benefits are a sine qua non for world peace and world order reform. More specific to the issues here at hand, what happens in Washington impacts what happens in Jerusalem, and vice versa.[14]

Recent history is telling. Donald Trump’s “America First” was reprehensible on intellectual and moral grounds. This second but by no means secondary indictment (immorality) was conspicuously odious in Jewish-philosophical terms. Inter alia, the ethical derelictions of Donald Trump’s foreign policy violated certain timeless and peremptory Jewish principles concerning correct leadership behavior, most notably human cooperation, human “oneness”[15] and human community.[16]

Under Donald Trump, some policies that had once been “merely wrong” became openly murderous and potentially genocidal. Among other things, this was because Trump’s hardening of an “everyone for himself” orientation to world politics was implemented at an inauspicious historical moment. This “Covid-19 moment” mandated not a more bitterly-corrosive world politics, but rather a far-reaching pattern of expanded global cooperation. By rejecting this indispensable mandate, Israelis and Americans had ignored the obvious: No foreign policy prescriptions founded upon systematic cynicism and purposeless rancor (i.e., belligerent nationalism”) have ever succeeded.[17]

While it may have sounded like exaggeration or hyperbole, Donald Trump’s existential policy inclinations were never merely benign rhetoric. Instead, they came to reflect probable outcomes in an interdependent and asymmetrical (rich versus poor; democratic versus authoritarian) world. The flagrantly irrational and indecent Trump vision of “America First” led the United States in various grievously mistaken directions. For the most part, these contrived visions pointed not toward any national or international peace advantage, but to endlessly Darwinian or “zero-sum” struggles for global hegemony. In such all-against-all struggles there could never be any rational notions of “victory.” In these struggles, all states (even the most “powerful”) must inevitably suffer prompt or incremental defeat.

Amid the fiercely crude competitions between states that would prove injurious to all of them, Americans and Israelis could reasonably expect only more and more recalcitrant geo-political conflicts. In such difficult circumstances, the futile standards of “everyone for himself” could only have produced more and more expansive arenas of human suffering. But what else ought we to have expected from an American president who prided himself on a carefully cultivated personal illiteracy?[18]

“Intellect rots the brain” said Joseph Goebbels at a Nuremberg Germany rally in 1935.

“I love the poorly educated” said American presidential candidate Donald Trump at a 2016 rally in the United States.

Where should we go now in world politics? As a question directed toward ally Israel as well as to Americans thinkers, it is high time to distance pertinent polices from any residual or prospective Trump policy precipices. More positively, only a suitable expansion of human cooperation could realistically save these two countries and their imperiled planetary context. This suggests, among other things, that any such expansion would represent not some inherently unworthy or unreciprocated act of charity – that is, a mistakenly one-sided species of characteristic American and Israeli benevolence – but a properly self-serving expression of rational national security policy.

There is a conceptual bottom line. US national interests can no longer be served at the deliberate expense of other nation-states. Instead, these national interests and those of Israel must be served together with those of others, sometimes even where international relations have long been irremediably adversarial.

Even in world politics, every sham can have a patina. Still, in the end, science-based insight will prove exculpatory. In the end, and at every crucial level – military, economic and biological – American and Israeli security will remain linked with the wider “human condition.” For the most part, what we witnessed during the Trump era was the ignoble dismantling of a once enviable, capable and empathic world power. In the shadow of this dismantling there took place a more-or-less parallel diminution of Israeli power. To cite the “Abraham Accords” as in any way contrary to this mutual declension would be to mistake public relations contrivance for viable security policy.

There is more relevant detail and nuance. In candor, during the relentless Trump-era decline, Americans could no longer cling convincingly to any mythical promises of resurrected national “greatness.” At best, the MAGA hats revealed a hideous self-parody. At worst, they pointed approvingly toward a glaringly absurd world of perpetual war and dishonor. For the foreseeable future, America’s national policy expectations will need to be more coherently based on reason[19] and serious thought.[20] The same conclusion pertains to Israel.

All this candor is hardly reassuring. Nonetheless, truth is always the final arbiter, not just in matters of law[21] and policy, but also in ethics. Today’s post-Trump national and geopolitical truth is grimly horrifying..[22] Worse still, a “Trump II” presidency is not out of the question.

What about empathy? For any necessary expansions of empathy to become sufficiently serious would require an American president and citizenry at least minimally versed in world history.[23] During the Trump years, America had neither. Israel, despite its impressive intellectual accomplishments, generally remained at a similarly low level.

There is more. “Never Again” ought never be applied only to the Jewish people. Recalling Rabbi Avraham Kook, it is time that all Jews feel “the unity that is in us all.” Without such feeling, “Never Again” must miss the most overriding point of all. From Talmud: “The dust from which the first man was made was gathered in all four corners of the earth.”

There exist other and still-deeper roots to the interrelated problems of empathy, cooperation and survival. Divided into thousands of hostile tribes, almost two hundred of which are called “nation-states,” too many human beings still find it easy or pleasing to slay certain “others.” As for any remediating considerations of compassionate human feeling, that commendable sentiment is typically reserved only for those who would live within one’s own delineated “tribe.”

Any expansion of empathy to include “outsiders” remains a basic condition of authentic peace and global union. Without such an expansion, our entire species would remain inconveniently dedicated to its own continuous debasement and even (though unwittingly) to its own disappearance.

Understanding this particular bit of geopolitical wisdom ought already to have become a corrective to the debilitating nonsense of “America First.” Among other things, this shamefully reworded Nazi mantra was eerily reminiscent of America’s sordid “Know Nothing” history. To be sure, Jews everywhere become indignant when anything related to Israel’s foreign policy behavior is compared to Nazi-behavior in any form, but such indignation is not always rooted in penetrating logic or correct reasoning.

(The present author makes this distressing observation as a Holocaust-era refugee to the United States, one with all “usual” personal losses to the Nazi genocide).

What should Americans and Israelis do to encourage wider patterns of empathy, thereby fostering cooperative global strategies between as well as within “tribes”? How can a U.S. president and Israeli prime minister work together to improve the survival conditions of our world order structure to best exploit “the unity that there is in us all?”

There are some ironic caveats to this question. Americans and Israelis should acknowledge that the essential expansion of empathy for the many could become literally “dreadful,” improving human community, but only at the cumulative cost of private sanity. This prospectively insufferable consequence is actually rooted in the way we humans were “designed,” that is, as more-or-less “hard wired” beings, persons with distinctly recognizable and largely “impermeable” boundaries of feeling. Were it otherwise, an extended range of compassion directed toward too many others could bring about our own emotional collapse.

This argument should be easy to recognize and understand. As a ready example, consider how difficult it would be if all of us were to suddenly feel the same compelling pangs of sympathy and compassion for those outside our primary spheres of attachment as we do for the family and friends located “inside” this sphere?

A challenging intellectual paradox presents itself. Apropos of Jewish thought, it was examined in the ancient Jewish legend of the Lamed-Vov, a Talmudic tradition that scholars trace back to Isaiah. Here, the whole world is said to rest upon thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed-Vov. These always-suffering figures are otherwise indistinguishable from other ordinary mortals. Still, if just one of their number were ever absent, the resultant tribulations of humankind would become staggering, poisoning the souls of even the newly-born.[24]

Such a Talmud-elucidated paradox has potentially useful contemporary meaning for the United States and Israel. This modernized signification reveals a widening circle of human compassion that is indispensable to civilizational survival and also represents a distinctly Jewish source of private anguish.

Still more questions arise. How shall Israel and America begin to deal capably with a core requirement for global civilization that is simultaneously essential and unbearable? Newly informed that empathy for the many is a precondition of a decent and functioning world society, what can create such caring without also producing intolerable emotional pain? Recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, “high-thinkers” should duly inquire: How can we be released from the contaminating residuals of “America First,” a zero-sum posture that is still defiling the survival prospects of both Americans and Israelis?

Above all, the whole world is a system. “The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature,” says the Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “no matter whom…Each element of the Cosmos is positively woven from all the others….”

Americans and Israelis should finally understand that the state of any national union can never be better than the state of the wider and more deeply intersecting world. This key truth obtains not “only” in reference to the more usual issues of war, peace and international law,[25] but also to continuously critical matters of pandemic disease avoidance.

For the United States and Israel, the overarching objective should always be to best protect the dignity of each and every individual human being. This is exactly this high-minded and ancient Jewish goal that should now give specific policy direction to otherwise bewildered and self-bewildering populations.[26] Can it happen?

Among other serious falsifications, Trump’s “America First” represented a blemished presidential mantra or objective. If it should ever be resurrected during a second Trump presidency, this false mantra could produce new heights of strife, disharmony and despair. Left intact and unrevised, even after Trump, “America First” would point us all (Israelis as well as Americans) to some potentially irreversible vita minima, that is, toward badly corrupted personal and collective lives. This means lives emptied of themselves; meaningless, shattered, rancorous, unfeeling and radically unstable. Here, located among so many other corollary misfortunes, we Americans and Israelis would find it impossible to battle not only the usual and better-known social/political adversaries, but also the increasingly merciless biological ones.

Was “America First” in any way ever a properly Jewish orientation to public policy, one in accord with both Rabbi Kook’s and Talmud’s notions of human “oneness?”[27] Without a more suitable expansion of empathy, we will all remain at the mercy not just of other predatory human beings, but also of certain exceedingly virulent pathogens. In short order, the harmful synergies created by such unwelcome combinations could become too much to bear. What then?

The cumulative lesson is abundantly clear, especially to those with some refined appreciation of Jewish heritage, tradition or education. Only by placing “Humanity First” can an American president ever make “America First.” Only by placing “Humanity First” can a Jewish State ever rise above the suffocating vulgarities of a self-defiling geopolitics. The latter, which now includes a demonstrated capacity to combat disease pandemics as well as war, terrorism and genocide,[28] is not possible without the former.

But first there must appear a suitable and more widespread “conviction.”[29]

America and Israel can learn from Rabbi Avraham Kook,[30] Talmud, and various other Jewish sources that global unity is not something “outside.” Rather, it exists within us all. A first task, therefore, and a self-consciously ecumenical one, should be to acknowledge the potentially pragmatic benefits of Jewish philosophy. The second task should be to adopt such gainfully in-dwelling thought as a universally guiding source of world policy transformations.[31] In brief, unless we can finally move beyond the belligerent nationalism that has held such lethal and lurid sway over humankind for millennia, there will be no remaining sanctuaries anywhere.

Ultimately, whether or not we succeed will depend on our willingness to understand Talmudic metaphor: “The dust from which the first man was created was gathered in all four corners of the earth.”

[1]The historical origins of this belligerence lie in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a treaty which brought into being the still-extant state-system. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia.

[2] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Harvard Law School, Harvard National Security Journal: https://harvardnsj.org/2014/06/13/staying-strong-enhancing-israels-essential-strategic-options-2/

[3]See Babylonian Talmud, Order Zera’im, Tractate Berakoth, IX.

[4] The idea of a balance of power – an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror represents a current variant – has never been more than a facile metaphor. It has never had anything to do with ascertaining or maintaining any purposeful equilibrium. In essence, as any such balance must always be a matter of individual subjective perceptions, adversarial states can never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances of the moment are suitably “balanced” in their favor. Because each side fears perpetually that it will be “left behind,” the corresponding search for balance can produce only ever-widening patterns of insecurity and disequilibrium.

[5] The present author’s Ph.D. thesis at Princeton in 1971 was titled The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis. It was subsequently published at the University of Denver’s Monograph Series in World Affairs (1973).

[6] Says Paul Tillich, “Man cannot receive an answer to a question he has not asked.” See: The Courage to Be (1952).

[7] Says Rabbi Kook: “The loftier the soul, the more it feels the unity that there is in us all.” Twentieth century writer/philosopher Hermann Hesse would likely add: “The world as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish and it will.” (See Steppenwolf, 1927).

[8] This anarchy stands in stark contrast to the legal assumption of solidarity between states. This idealized assumption concerns a presumptively common struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known formally in law as a jus cogens assumption, was already mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey., tr, Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); and Emmerich de Vattel, 1 Le Droit des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).

[9] Though composed in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan may still offer us a permanent vision of chaos in world politics. During such chaos, which is a “time of War,” says the English philosopher in Chapter XIII (“Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery.”):     “… every man is Enemy to every man… and where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Still, at the actual time of writing Leviathan, Hobbes believed that the condition of “nature” in world politics was less chaotic than that same condition extant among individual human beings. This was because of what he had called the “dreadful equality” of individual men in nature concerning the ability to kill others. Significantly, however, this once-relevant differentiation has effectively disappeared with the continuing manufacture and spread of nuclear weapons, a spread soon apt to be exacerbated by an already-nuclear North Korea and by a not-yet-nuclear Iran.

[10] This news now often includes open threats by North Korea to use nuclear weapons in response to presumed threats from the United States, including alleged American attempts against the life of Kim Jung Un. In principle, such North Korean nuclear behaviors could impact other regions of the world, including the Middle East. In this connection, Pyongyang has previously had significant nuclear dealings with Syria. North Korea helped Syria build a nuclear reactor, the same facility that was later destroyed by Israel in its Operation Orchard, on September 6, 2007. Although, unlike earlier Operation Opera (June 7, 1981) this preemptive attack, in the Deir ez-Zor region, was presumptively a second expression of the so-called “Begin Doctrine,” it also illustrated, because of the North Korea-Syria connection, a wider global threat to US ally, Israel. See also: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/world-report/articles/2017-09-06/10-years-later-israels-operation-orchard-offers-lessons-on-north-korea

[11]See, by this author, at Oxford University Press, Louis René Beres: https://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/

[12] In Zarathustra, Nietzsche instructs: “Do not seek the higher man at the marketplace.”

[13] The Law of Nations or international law is a part of every individual state’s domestic legal system. At most basic levels, this is because international law is founded upon an unchanging and universally binding system of Natural Law. See, by this writer, Louis René Beres, at JURIST: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2021/12/louis-rene-beres-natural-law-us-constitution/ See also article by Professor Beres in JURIST on reconciling international law enforcement with the absence of centralized global authority: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2022/01/louis-beres-international-law-state-of-nature.

[14] See by Professor Beres (with special post-script by General (USA/ret.) Barry McCaffrey), Israel: https://sectech.tau.ac.il/sites/sectech.tau.ac.il/files/PalmBeachBook.pdf

[15] About such “oneness,” we may augment pertinent Jewish thought with insights from the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, “You are a citizen of the universe.” A broader idea of “oneness” followed the death of Alexander in 322 BCE, and with it came a coinciding doctrine of “universality” or interconnectedness. By the Middle Ages, this political and social doctrine had fused with the notion of a Respublica Christiana, a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and Thomas, John of Salisbury and Dante were looking upon Europe as a single and unified Christian community. Below the level of God and his heavenly host, all the realm of humanity was to be considered as one. This is because all the world had been created for the same single and incontestable purpose; that is, to provide background for the necessary drama of human salvation. Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world correctly considered as a part rather than a whole. Says Dante in De Monarchia: “The whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, which is evident without argument.” Today, of course, the idea of human oneness, drawn most originally from Jewish sources, should be justified/explained in more expressly secular terms of understanding.

[16]   Martin Buber identifies the essence of every living community as “meeting.” True community, says Buber, is an authentic “binding,” not merely a “bundling together.” Furthermore, in true community, each one commits his whole being in “God’s dialogue with the world,” and each stands firm and resolute throughout this dialogue.

[17] “What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another,” warns playwright Samuel Beckett in Endgame, “of seeking justification always on the same plane?”

[18] Still the best treatments of America’s long-term disinterest in anything intellectual are Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); and Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).

[19] As we may learn from Karl Jaspers’ Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time: (1952): “Reason is confronted again and again with the fact of a mass of believers who have lost all ability to listen, who can absorb no argument and who hold unshakably fast to the Absurd as an unassailable presupposition – and really do appear to believe.”

[20] In the 17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century Jewish contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.

[21] These matters include expectations of Natural Law, which represent the original and core legal foundations of the United States. Natural Law is based upon the acceptance of certain principles of right and justice that prevail because of their own intrinsic merit. Eternal and immutable, they are external to all acts of human will and interpenetrate all human reason.     This dynamic idea and its attendant tradition of human civility runs continuously from Mosaic Law and the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present day.     For a comprehensive and far-reaching assessment of the natural law origins of international law, see Louis René Beres, “Justice and Realpolitik:    International Law and the Prevention of Genocide,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 33, 1988, pp. 123-159.     This article was adapted from Professor Beres’ earlier presentation at the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 1982.

[22] “Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight,” asks Honore de Balzac, “withered hearts, or empty skulls?”

[23] In the 17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically, in his justly celebrated Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge. Much of this effort was founded upon familiar (to Spinoza) certain Jewish sources.

[24] Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of “soul” (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to “soul.” Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true “consciousness” (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and material accomplishment would occasion sweeping psychological misery.

[25] International law is part of US domestic law. In the precise words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, Concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.'”).

[26] In Jewish tradition, empathy, justice and individual human dignity can together bring forth a vast and indispensable healing. Such key traits, commented Rabbi Avraham Kook, a thinker who was not a part of the classical stream of Jewish philosophy, must “flow directly from the holy depth of the wisdom of the Divine soul.” Rabbi Kook’s thinking does not stand in any stark or self-conscious opposition to rational and scientific investigation, nor does it intend to oppose pure feelings to raw intellect. It identifies instead a potentially useful creative tension, one between a too-abstract and too-formal intellectualism and a promisingly practical form of reason. Influenced and informed by Buddhism, Rabbi Kook envisioned humankind as possessing a natural evolutionary inclination toward collective advancement and self-perfection. Moreover, he surmised, the course of this expansive human evolution must be directed toward a progressively increased spirituality. In the final analysis, he understood Torah as a tangible and utterly incontrovertible manifestation of the Divine Will here on earth.

[27]“The dust from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world (Talmud).

[28]Professor Beres is the author of several major books and many law journal articles on genocide-like crimes. See, for example, Louis René Beres, “Genocide and Genocide-Like Crimes,” in M. Cherif Bassiouni., ed., International Criminal Law: Crimes (New York, Transnational Publishers, 1986), pp. 271-279.

[29]“The best lack all conviction,” reminds Irish poet William Butler Yeats in The Second Coming, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

[30] According to Rabbi Kook, a final Divine redemption must be undertaken by and through the Jewish People. A core part of any such redemption must be a palpably greater awareness of human unity, or human oneness. In turn, proceeds this difficult dialectic, awareness will ultimately give rise to the spreading light of loving kindness and forgiveness, even amid the bitter acrimonies of world politics. At first, argues Kook, a “lofty” soul will be needed to generate the indispensable awareness: “The loftier the soul,” he concludes, “the more it feels the unity that there is in us all.”

[31]We may learn from 20th century German philosopher Karl Jaspers (Man in the Modern Age, 1951): “Everyone knows that the world situation in which we live is not a final one.”