Jerusalem (If I forget you...)

the perils and promise of our End Times End Games

Just had lunch with a Jewish friend whose kids go to the same high school here in Austin our kids did.

He recounted his son’s choice to wear a Star of David necklace to school, and his wife wondering if it was still safe to do so in conservative Texas.

As I thought about their situation as a family–how to balance pride of identity with prudent conflict avoidance–I was struck by the weird Upside Down of our culture wars these days.

After all, in the not too distant past, the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of those good ol’ Texas boys who might have given their son grief could well have been members of the Klan itself (Dallas and East Texas, in particular were KKK strongholds).

Blacks, Jews, and Catholics were equally on notice from the Men in White.

But cut to today, and many of their descendants have gone full MAGA, evangelical Christian. Weirdly, they now embrace Jews and Israel far more warmly than their families ever did (for reasons we’ll get into in a minute).

We have alt-right communities, quite often founded on the backbone of White Christian Identity and generally hostile to other creeds and ethnicities, displaying active support for the Jews whom they used to vilify.

Examine the other side of the political spectrum on the Far Left and we see stranger bedfellows still. A bunch of liberal leaning Ivy League institutions (including Harvard and Penn) have had professors and student groups come out strongly in defense of Palestinian rights and against Israeli aggression (with some unfortunate anti-Semitic undertones).

This is strange, because back in the 60’s Jewish Americans were a stalwart part of the New Left, running the Students for a Democratic Society, busing to the South to join MLKs marches, putting their bodies and lives on the line to support their Black compatriots.

But today, we have progressive communities, whose entire reason for being was the extension of universal human rights, drawing lines in the sand of who does and doesn’t deserve their compassion. Palestinians do. Jews do not.

It’s baffling.

And tragic.

To be clear: I think that there has to be an unambiguous dividing line when discussing this current Mid-East conflict between politics and peoples.

On the one hand, we need to critically assess the historical record of the nation states of the US and Israel, and the organizations of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran (and the entire region’s overt and covert influences).

They all deserve clear-headed and impartial analysis in the long run.

But on the other hand from that unflinching assessment, there’s Israeli and Palestinian women, children and elders–the people caught in the crossfire.

I reckon there’s not a desert god worth his salt that doesn’t love them all.

Most people around the world are united in their desire to live in peace and give their children a shot at a better life than they had.

There’s always been a difference between politics and people. We get swept up in the former at the expense of the latter. Telling the difference is, and will always be crucial.

***

With no idea of what was to come this summer at our camp in Aspen, we played Matisyahu’s One Day concert in Haifa. We wanted to showcase and celebrate what might be possible when people come together, even in one of the most war-torn places on the planet.

There are ten levels of prayer. Above them all is song!

–Hasidic saying

In a single afternoon, Matisyahu took a bunch of Palestinians and Israelis–children and elders, women and men–and taught them a three part harmony chorus to his song of unbroken Hope.

We learned it, and with the help of our awesome chorale director Kate, turned it into a community prayer of our own. It was super powerful and inspiring.

(you can check the Haifa recording here. It’s worth turning up and getting a little misty if it moves you)

But in another bit of unintended foreshadowing, I wrote in my last book about Jerusalem and its curious role in some overlapping and conflicting End Times narratives.

While it doesn’t speak directly to this month’s tragedies, it does speak to the tinderbox of tensions underlying the current conflict and sheds fresh light on the contesting stories.

That’s because as we approach the End of History, it seems like we’re not going to get a neat and tidy Singularity like Ray Kurzweil keeps promising us. Instead, all of our End Times End Games are getting intertwined, tangled together.

We might even call it the Intertwingularity.

So read this if you’d like, and ponder the humbling impossibility of sorting things out right now as our orienting stories all point in opposing directions.

And while the pull towards tribalism is stronger than ever and likely going to increase, at the end of The End, it might not matter which side we thought we were one after all.

It will only come down to Fear or Love.

***

A Lion in Zion

(excerpted from Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind)

Given the stakes and the increasing likelihood of Intertwingular crossed wires these days, it’s only going to get more intense. After all, the worst that happens when movie fans differ on interpretations of Star Wars and the Matrix are flame wars on Rotten Tomatoes and Reddit.

But for other, older, even more sacred stories? Some people are willing to die for them.

When it comes to holy scripture—there’s text, there’s subtext, and then there’s context. “Both read the bible day and night,” William Blake once wrote, “but where you see black, I see white!”

***

On May 14, 2018, something momentous but also kind of strange happened in Israel. After years of talking about it, the United States moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to the historical capital of Jerusalem.

That’s the momentous part. The strange part will take a bit of explaining.

For decades, campaigning U.S. presidential candidates had promised to make that switch official, but once in office none had ever followed through. Bill Clinton made it a part of his 1992 run against George H. W. Bush, calling out the elder Bush for “repeatedly challenging Israel’s sovereignty over a united Jerusalem.” On the 2008 trail, Barack Obama went further: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” On this much, at least, Republicans and Democrats seemed to agree.

But once in office, they balked. It was too tricky to navigate. Too much at stake. Move the embassy from Tel Aviv and you’d send a clear signal to Israel, one of the United States’ strongest and longest-serving allies that you were committed to both its past and its future. But take away Palestinian claim to at least part of that holy city, and you’d lose the United States’ role as a good-faith meditator of Arab-Israeli peace. It was a lot for anyone to navigate.

So when a U.S. delegation showed up at the Jerusalem consulate in the middle of that May it really was momentous. Decades of positioning, posturing, and equivocating had finally been resolved. The move was happening.

But those years of hesitation proved well-founded too. In the twenty-four hours leading up to the ceremony, riots broke out involving tens of thousands of protestors and military along the Gaza-Israel border. Twenty-seven hundred people were injured. Fifty-six died.18 Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority president Abbas weighed in, as did the secretary- general of the United Nations.

This is where things got strange. As tear gas and tires burned in Gaza, an unassuming sixty- something Baptist minister from Dallas, Texas, took the stage in Old Jerusalem. He positioned himself behind the embassy podium, adjusted the microphone, and led the assembled dignitaries in prayer.

“We come before you, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thanking you for bringing us to this momentous occasion in the life of your people and in the history of our world.” He praised the leadership of both governments, adding that the embassy move “boldly stands on the right side of history but more importantly stands on the right side of you, O God, when it comes to Israel.”19

From a typical minister, those words might have seemed innocuous. But Jeffress is not your typical minister. Pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, he oversees a multimillion- dollar radio, media, education, and worship ministry (including a $130 million megachurch built in 2013). Jeffress has emerged as one of the more culturally and politically influential evangelical preachers of the past decade. And he’s drawn as much controversy as praise.

In the week leading up to the embassy ceremony, former Republican governor, presidential nominee, and senator Mitt Romney flatly challenged Jeffress’s attendance, tweeting, “Such a religious bigot should not be giving the prayer that opens the United States embassy in Jerusalem. . . . Jeffress says ‘you can’t be saved by being a Jew,’ and ‘Mormonism is a heresy from the pit of hell.’”

Those weren’t awkward sound bites taken out of context, either. Jeffress doubled down on his position, tweeting back to Romney, “Historic Christianity has taught for 2,000 years that salvation is through faith in Christ alone. The fact that I, along with tens of millions of evangelical Christians around the world, continue to espouse that belief, is neither bigoted nor newsworthy.”

But that day in Jerusalem it was newsworthy. If Jeffress believes that Jews, Mormons, and Muslims too are all going to hell, why was he the one offering the opening prayers at the embassy? What part could all those nonbelievers gathered in Jerusalem play in Jeffress’s larger ambitions?

In two words, Christian Zionism: the idea that Jesus Christ will return to earth once Israel is a sovereign state again. That’s why Jeffress was so fired up to mark the occasion. Moving the embassy was bringing us all one step closer to the fulfillment of scripture and the End of Days.

Christian Zionism has roots that stretch back centuries, with supporters ranging from U.S. presidents to Martin Luther King Jr. But it reached a tipping point in the last half-century, due in large part to Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind Christian novels. This blockbuster series describes the aftermath of the Rapture—where all faithful Christians are brought straight up to heaven and the Leftovers have to figure out what to do next. With well over one hundred million combined copies in print, Televangelist Jerry Falwell acknowledged that Left Behind “in terms of its impact on Christianity, is probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside the Bible.”

According to Christian Zionism, God restored the nation of Israel to the Jews in 1948 (not coincidentally, seventy years to the day of the recent embassy ceremony). This reestablished the kingdom of Israel and set up a clear path to the End Times foretold in the books of Revelation, Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. According to those accounts, after a cataclysmic battle with the Antichrist, Jesus will return and usher in a thousand-year reign of peace. And the Jews? They will realize what Jeffress has been talking about and all convert to Christianity.

But before that essential fulfillment of Christian theology, Israel has to rule an undivided Jerusalem and the entire Middle East has to descend into the “war to end all wars.” Which, when you think back to the tinderbox of tensions surrounding the embassy announcement in May 2018, makes it a deeply puzzling diplomatic decision to put a Christian Zionist preacher onstage at all.

Almost everyone else gathered there was invested in avoiding a regional meltdown. But for Jeffress that unraveling can’t come soon enough.

Jeffress is in no way alone in his thinking. According to the Pew Research Foundation, 58 percent of American evangelicals believe that the Second Coming is going to occur before

Consider that for a minute. Saving for retirement? No point. Transitioning off fossil fuels? Why bother? Saving endangered species or solving world hunger? That would just be playing God when He’s coming again, soon enough.

To be clear, United States’ citizens have always enjoyed remarkable freedom to worship who, what, when, and how they have wanted. That long and principled tradition separating church and state has always been one of this country’s greatest strengths.

But when church and state come under the sway of powerful religious beliefs based upon outlier interpretations of texts written thousands of years ago, in times and places that bear little resemblance to our current world, we should pay attention. In the great conversations of our time, we’re not only not on the same page, we’re not even in the same books.

And Christian Zionists aren’t the only ones betting on a final showdown in Jerusalem. As it turns out, the historic city is double-booked for the End of Days.

***

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the most recent and grisly face of Islamic extremism, has an End Times tale too, based on one of the hadiths, or holy sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. According to their reading, ISIS is expecting a series of major battles against the “Armies of Rome” (loosely interpreted to mean Turkey, Israel, or the United States) where they will get massacred down to their last five thousand fighters. “On this theory, even setbacks dealt to the Islamic State mean nothing,” the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood writes, “since God has preordained the near-destruction of his people anyway. The Islamic State has its best and worst days ahead of it.”

Which is kind of weird to wrap your head around. Our usual military reference points rest on twentieth-century notions like realpolitik, détente, and mutually assured destruction. But that logic of incentives and deterrents break down when your adversaries think in such topsy-turvy ways.

Kill ISIS’s soldiers and they’re energized, because you’re bringing them closer to their predicted decimation (and ultimate victory). Target their leaders with drone strikes and they inch one step closer to celebrating the arrival of the Mahdi—the twelfth (final and triumphant) caliph. No matter how nerve-racking the Cold War might have been, at least it operated on a game- theory rationale of self-preservation shared by the major players.

And the final part of ISIS’s end game? You couldn’t make it up. According to their script, their own near annihilation will usher in two saviors—the Mahdi—that divinely anointed caliph who will reunite the nations of Islam, and a second prophet who will defeat the Antichrist.

But it’s not the Prophet Muhammad as you might think—it’s Jumping Jesus himself, praised in the Koran as the Messiah and the living “word of God.” At morning prayer on the appointed day, Jesus will kill the Anti-Messiah with a spear. He will then “break the cross,” a symbolic action that lets Christians know that the death and resurrection taught in their faith is mistaken, and that in reality He never actually died. In a perfect mirror of the Christian Zionists predicting that all Jews would convert at the last minute, ISIS believes that all Christians will then see the error of their faith and convert to Islam on the spot.

Which leaves us in as much of a bind as the other version. Because as polar opposite as the game plans for Christian Zionists and ISIS are, as strangely overlapping as their Jerusalem setting and cast of characters may be, they both share an underlying structure or rapture ideology.

And it’s this overlapping format that is proving so troubling to anyone interested in happy days on the road ahead, regardless of where you live or what you believe.

***

The Intertwingularity has become a giant muddy Meme Soup, unmoored from any kind of narrative continuity whatsoever. We might even look at the same things, agree that what we’re looking at is both real and important, but come to completely opposite conclusions about what it means and what we should all do next.

Whether it’s billionaire philanthropists saving the world or secretly scheming to take it over, or Deep State conspiracies plotting to hijack democracy or preserve it, or Antichrists masquerading as messiahs—it’s getting nearly impossible to sort through it all and come to trustworthy conclusions.

As the Intertwingularity sucks us down the drainpipe of time and space, it’s not likely to play out exactly like anyone’s stories predict. It’s entirely possible that the Great Sorting Hat at the End of Time won’t give a damn which side we thought we were on—Rebel or Stormtrooper, Red Pill or Blue—but only on our intentions.

Which flag we flew, which uniform we wore will yield to something much simpler. Were we coming from fear or love? Were we standing for all of us or only some of us? Were we playing for Team Finite, or Team Infinite?

Cheers,

J

p.s., here’s one more beautiful acapella cover of another Matisyahu song Jerusalem as an ideal beyond politics, as a Promised Land of redemption for everyone (“It's not about the land or the sea. Not the country, but the dwelling of his Majesty”)