The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She’s watching you kiss it. She knows what’s written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?
Not to play apologist, but as long as I’m going to play apologist I might as well point out that pretty much every well-documented culture I’ve ever heard of has some comparably horrible things in its backstory. Memorializing them is less common; usually they get swept under the rug, like some of the nastier consequences of the Philippine insurrection (1899 – 1902) in American textbooks or (so I’m told) the Armenian genocide (1915 − 1923) in Turkish ones. But if you take the veneration of the (semi-) historical sections of the Torah as evoking some kind of national sentiment, which from my outside view certainly seems like it’s got something to do with what’s going on, then you’re only a hop or two away from a blanket condemnation of nationalism.
Which I think I’d actually be rather comfortable with—I’m no great fan of massive involuntary identity groups given what they do to people’s sanity—but it does seem rather broader than what I took you to be going for.
Not to play apologist, but as long as I’m going to play apologist I might as well point out that pretty much every well-documented culture I’ve ever heard of has some comparably horrible things in its backstory. Memorializing them is less common; usually they get swept under the rug, like some of the nastier consequences of the Philippine insurrection (1899 – 1902) in American textbooks or (so I’m told) the Armenian genocide (1915 − 1923) in Turkish ones. But if you take the veneration of the (semi-) historical sections of the Torah as evoking some kind of national sentiment, which from my outside view certainly seems like it’s got something to do with what’s going on, then you’re only a hop or two away from a blanket condemnation of nationalism.
Which I think I’d actually be rather comfortable with—I’m no great fan of massive involuntary identity groups given what they do to people’s sanity—but it does seem rather broader than what I took you to be going for.