I just want to talk about a piece of writing that really was important to me. This is the two stories of Hillel the scribe. In the first episodes, he and his friend Phaedrus The apothecary would gather in the apothecary’s tent to smoke over the days events. Neither of them was pleased with how the world was being ruled. Both believed they knew the truth and both believed it was important to let people know what they were getting themselves into. The second was literally that he had the position of writing the words down that Moses told him to write. That he was a vegan soul, that he wanted no part of war or blood, made him at least a tiny voice in the leaders ear and, hope against hope, there are tidbits that show that love is in there.
I think what I liked most about writing these was simply having myself juxtaposed into the Sinai desert with the original Israelites. It was a point of view that I don’t know too many people give you. What’s it like to be one of the tent dwellers?
I think my original model was a teenager maybe. If not a teenager, certainly a young university student. He had to have all of that spark of life that said that what he was doing meant something. He had to have that fire every day saying I am going somewhere and you’re not going to stop me from getting there. He would have to be at least a diligent young man to be this angry or aware. Sometimes people don’t even know they live in miserable conditions unless someone points it out to them. Or, they see it for themselves and allow the shock to mean something to them.
He was an activist. This is what I had in mind. He was not an anarchist per se if that word has negative connotations. If anarchism simply means without leadership, this doesn’t automatically mean that people start running around like lunatics. Some people, untethered, learn to make their decisions for themselves pretty quickly and unless it comes along with stress, they probably enjoy the agency of making their own decisions. But what are people going to do? Right now, we’re going to do something like we do so we would do that. And like all young people, I really think he admired that the world could be done by hand. A young man’s bravado perhaps but a true belief in the heart of mankind if allowed to do the right thing. He just wanted his people to have a chance so that they could see what they could do working it out together as a team. A team of individuals but a team.
And then suddenly he needed to be a journalist. It was all he could think of. Writing it down. He would make a journal and he would pass it out so people would know the truth. He had the power to write and therefore he had the power to spread his thoughts.
It depends on the level of freedom a society genuinely has when you start talking about a free press. If you’re talking about people hanging around asking you about your business and being nosy enough to cut through your lies and then call you on a publicly, I don’t think they are very popular amongst people who make money through corruption. I would think guys like this would be the least popular people in the world.
And here we ask ourselves how masochistic this is. It seems the man is hell bent on killing himself. He’s trying to do the right thing. In his mind, he can see something that others do not seem to see. In fact, he’s quite clear on the fact that he understands what he’s looking at, and gets outrageous confirmation from his friend, and between the two of them they have come to these decisions themselves. Without education, people cannot decide for themselves. But what was happening to the children of Israel was that they were being suppressed and oppressed and beaten into stupidity. They were corralled. They were hurted like sheep and the bad ones beaten with the cane. The dominance of the master became absolute and these people were now suppressed out of their own minds. They were not humans, they were animals.
It is an argument. Usually the people who really like having power, like having power because they prefer living one or two layers above the general population. We might think that some serious smashburger bar action and legal weed might mean everybody in the world is dance and under the stars together. But please, there is no way anyone running for major office these days has anything but a private chef making something particular to their tastes. The information and images from bloggers nice enough to show it it looks like in the mosh pit is enough. I’m sure somewhere Kamala is smiling.
Listen, I don’t know what you don’t understand. I cannot be me unless you are lower than me. You might think you are equal to me. You might try to be my equal. And maybe you are in certain respects intellectually morally and ethically just perfect. Well that’s just fine. But you shall never be one micrometer higher than me nor shall I allow you to aspire to such power. And if you are only doing this because my ass needs a good kissing, this my friend is not respect, it’s physical pleasure. There’s a difference between respect and physical pleasure. You are human or you are an animal.
And there’s really not that many human beings anymore. I remember when I learned this lesson. It was in Europe. Traveling around. Being annoying. And I started to get the feeling like nobody mattered but just one or two people. Suddenly you would meet someone and the charisma was just blinding. This person was making their own decisions. It was like a step up. It was a different class. But noticeable because of exactly how destroyed everyone else was. Because nobody really thinks or does anything or has any responsibility and it doesn’t make anybody happy. Nobody enjoys being a play thing but that’s only anybody gets and alcohol cuts through the burden and this is the life etc etc. Explain it and smile because welcome to the club and you can etc etc all night long. You are not a human being. You are an animal.
How do you break this mold? We talk about going back and killing Hitler. Could you go back and convince Moses not to write a book detailing how he put together a potential army and then had that army stolen by a psychopath stonemason. This is where we were for the second part. It was simply his job to push the feather. That’s all there was to it. He had good penmanship. But it was more than that because there was also an amazing backstory.
Young Moses was a simply a dog to the royal family. But he was a young man and so he was getting a royal education. But he was isolated and a little lazy and our hero and his female friend Eva found him in the garden. And so here there was another relationship right from the beginning. They all knew each other and probably, this is how he got the job of writing the Torah. It was also how Moses got taught his first lesson about women and who he was and what was really going on in the world.
Anyway, all I wanted to say is that I really enjoyed being in these places. You have to do a little bit of a self-transportation. You can physically go somewhere and get a feel for the place. Or you can take a reading from all of the places you’ve been to and you can come pretty close to guessing what it might be like. But I just asked myself to be there and to say what I saw. What if you were right there in the tent city. Another ghetto. You know what it smells like of course. Everybody’s always huddling together. Nobody is ever taking a piece of land for themselves.
And that’s what made it so great. It was all of my fire for making the activist voice louder. It was everything I want in the world. I want people to know what I believe is the absolute truth. We live in an ecological and logical and reasonable fashion or this is absolutely a sewer. It is so unreasonably horrible. I don’t think anyone can understand this. Nature is an amazing thing but you can only pollute so much before the systems start getting jammed. You don’t need an ivy League education and all of the crap on the walls. You just need to look with your own eyes because you can see it. If it’s poison, if it’s toxic, it’s no good. If it’s poison and it’s toxic, don’t do it. If it makes you feel powerful to feel steal in your hand, why? Why do you need this? Can’t you just feel pride in something you did well today? Can’t you just take pleasure in being good at your job? Can’t you just light one up and watch the sunset instead?
So anyway, I think that was one of the coolest things I ever put together. I think I should definitely collect all of them and see what they look like in a single volume. It was sometimes the most fun I had all week. It was the best piece of imagination I came up with because it took everything I felt about being jewelers or even following this bloody yearly weekly Torah reading, and it was a perfect way to get it all out.
