Hello Harriet and Chevra Shalom,

Your community's reading of parashat Vayikra from the holy Torah was appreciated, thanks, and so is the opportunity for communal confession and repentance. Maybe we can do this again on Yom Kippur!

Your drash, Harriet, started with a good and comprehensive summary of the parasha, before we began to offer words of solidarity and support for Palestinians as guilt and sin offerings to atone for Israel's alleged sins against them.

In my public confession before the congregation, I admitted having grown up in a milieu which was anti-Jewish and anti-zionist, much like that you now inhabit, in which we were taught the anachronism and textual misinterpretation that “Jesus was a palestinian who was persecuted by the Jews”. Since this canard is again being spread by the christian clergy among your anti-zionist comrades, in their public communications to the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners demanding a unilateral ceasefire - and like some of your own letters or teachings - neglecting to condemn the “Al aqsa flood” massacres and neglecting to call for release of hostages - I thought it necessary to refute.

May this confession begin atone for your sins of American christian dominionism and progressive liberalism, which I also practiced once upon a time and now abhor. You might also consider confessing your own sins before confessing someone else's, since you and I are complicit in these sins whence we get American privelege to dwell in comfort and safety. How did we get that privelege - through just or unjust? We should do a cheshbon nefesh, an accounting of our American souls, before staging one-sided criticisms of foreign Jews who are relatively poor, frequently under heavily armed attack, and constantly threatened by the idolatrous religions and atheistic political theologies that have conspired for centuries to demonize and dispossess them, and mis-appropriate their culture and texts, an agenda which you now appear to endorse. America is not the promised land. Neither WASPS, nor Roman catholics, nor progressive liberals are the chosen people - but they all wanted and still want to believe that they are, which is why the Palestine issue is so near and dear to their hearts. An admission of the true historical facts would be an act of tiqqun olam. And “Modeh al ha Emet” is one of the seven attributes of the wise; may it atone for the follies of my youth and complicity with the idolatries of my parents' and teachers' culture.

Yes, Pontius Pilate was a pro-Palestinian activist, but not the first. Julius Caesar basically innovated the Palestinian national movement, continuing the work of the Greek seleucids who had first brought that name and political identity to the region they occupied and colonized. Although Titus Vespasian generally gets the credit for first making “Palestine free”, it was emperor Hadrian who made it free, “from the river to the sea”. Although never fully “independent”, Palestine was “freed of the Jews” or at least freed of Jewish sovereignty, after the imperial Roman anti-zionist movement succeeded, and Palestine at last became the totalitarian Roman imperial colony that you and your comrades in JVP and PLFP/Samidoun crave so dearly. Therefore let's be honest about who and what you're really supporting, with all this talk of “settler colonialism” and Palestinian liberation. I know alot of you can't stop fixating on the elders of Zion and their mysterious protocols, but the Jews do not actually control the world - and this conspiracy is used to prevent you from learning critical thinking.

Today's Palestine is also very much a colony of modern Rome in the form of the U.N., the E.U., and the American C.I.A., which financed the P.L.O. during its early years and protected it from the Israelis, and have never given up their hope of Jerusalem as an “international city” administered by a collaboration between NATO, Brussels, Washington, the Islamic waqf, the Roman catholic church, the Ivy league universities, and the universal religion of secular humanitarian NGOs and mainstream media. That is not tiqqun olam; that is merely maintaining the status quo of actual “settler colonialism” while denying guilt and projecting falsely onto a people who are innocent of that particular sin - the Israelis, who unlike the Europeans in America who simply stole the land they settled on, bought all the land they settled on prior to 1947. Unlike the Europeans in America, the early zionists didn't defraud the locals under false pretenses. Unlike the new world, Israel-Palestine-Canaan really is the “promised land”, the “holy land”. And unlike the Europeans in America, the Jews really are the “chosen people” of the bible. Please stop perpetuating the fraudulent claims that gave you your white American privelege, and stop falsely accusing the Jews so that you can scapegoat them and deny American and European guilt.

The truly “progressive” movement is Torah Judaism and religious zionism. Secular zionism was somewhat progressive 100 years ago, back when Marxist-Leninism and fascism were also somewhat progressive, albeit in the wrong directions. What you are promoting, justifying, or enabling - is regressive in the extreme. It is also going in at least three or four mutually exclusive wrong directions at the same time. Therefore it will not succeed, as a simple geometric fact. You don't even have to have any spiritual convictions at all to discern this: just do the math. And if you can't do the geometric ratios, just count the dead bodies. Their bloodguilt is on their own heads, Israel and the Jews are not to blame for their stubborn prejudice and murderous ignorance, but you might be partially to blame for it. Therefore stop justifying war against Israel on false pretences, and give up the false hope. By the way, the Arabs are indigenous to the Arabian peninsula, not to Palestine, nor either for that matter to Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq/Mesopotamia or the many other regions that imperial Arab armies conquered, occupied, and colonized after the retreat of Rome and the failure of orthodox catholic christianity to give an existentially valid and morally responsible alternative to the Judaism of the Jews they dispossessed and displaced.

Herod was probably the most authentic Palestinian of his generation, being an Edomite, unlawful king, and a good friend of Rome. The Sadducees who held an unlawful assembly to arraign Joschka before the Roman procurator, were Jewish heretics who were politically aligned with the pro-Palestinian cause, and financially supported by its international donors. The Romans gave entitlements and maintained an affirmative action program for their local collaborators, much like the UNRWA or the Ivy league admissions and faculty promotion committees do today, and those so-called Jews who actively promoted assimilation to Roman supremacism could accurately be called “Palestinian”, at least in their political affiliation. Joschka himself disdained all this and spent his entire career preaching hasidic Judaism as against it. A hasidic galilean, he was at most a haredi non-zionist, but unlike the Sadducees and the JVP, he was also actively although non-violently anti-Palestinian: for he conspired to deprecate Palestinian currency and promote the exchange of untaxable qorbanot, and considered their religion so absurd that it wasn't even worth his time to refute, except through direct action and propaganda of the deed. In private, he was a revisionist zionist more in the tradition of Rav Kook and Rav Akiva's followers - the respectful ones - than in the tradition of Ben Gurion. He was planning a military conquest and Torah government after his resurrection, and this is what his disciples all expected. However, he ascended to heaven shortly before Shavuot and gave his disciples the Holy Torah instead. He did so on the feast of Pentecost, like Moses had done before him, and he hasn't been heard from since except in apparition.

John the revelator received a vision in which the “Son of Man” confirmed this plan to come with armies of heaven to bring the “kingdom of heaven” down to earth, to rebuild Jerusalem. According to church historian Eusebius, Constantine the Great more or less is the “second coming of Christ”. Although the churches don't openly say this, this is what they actually believe and this is who they in practical fact obey. Ipso facto, they worship the antichrist. They don't obey Jesus, they don't even pretend to, and they will anathematize or demonize you if you try. I finally figured this out only after it happened to me personally, which was a blessing in disguise because it brought me here instead to learn the holy Torah and prophets. The arbitrary decree of the emperor or the ecumenical councils have more authority for them than the law, the prophets, the gospels, the “antilegomena” Jewish epistles of James, Jude, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, and Revelation, and even more authority than the mature letters of Paul to the Romans and his pastoral epistles to his Jewish disciple Timothy. The best evidence against christianity is the New testament itself - which is why, like the Torah and the Jewish people, it has always been suppressed and still is today. Although the theologians know how to cleverly draw proof-texts, leading you into hermeneutic perversions that make the text mean precisely the opposite of what it plainly says, and then get you stuck in mysticism, devotion, and gnostic self-realization, when reason fails: that is the whole point. Baffling and deceptive is their cult of mind control - the “maddening wine of Jezebel's harlotries” - it is absurd, dishonest, exploitative, and deserves no respect. The mysticism is hypnotic, addictive, and ultimately empty. But that is why people all over the world are so enthusiastic for Palestinian liberation, and why the movement has such a seemingly religious character.

Not all Palestinians were so anti-Jewish as Herod and the Sadducees - moving back to the 1st century. The centurion whose servant Joschka healed was praised by the locals for having built their synagogue; he was possibly a secret convert or a Noahide like me. Possibly even a covert zionist with an aspiration to become ger toshav - an opportunity that Jewish apostates, athiests, anti-zionists, and idolaters should not deny to their gentile and palestinian neighbors.

The apocalyptic revisionist zionism of the apostle Paul had him setting his eyes not only on Cis-Jordan Palestine and Syrian Antioch, but also on Galatia, Thessaly, Macedonia, Corinth, and beyond. In this respect he was even more extreme than Jabotinsky or Menachem Begin. Paul plotted and undertook a conquest of the entire Roman empire, and I suspect he saw himself in the tradition of Jonah. His mature teaching affirmed the Noahide covenant for pious gentiles and the Torah for Jews. But his followers repudiated this affirmation, and they became gnostics, neo-platonists, or “christian” idolaters instead. Nevertheless, their cult got lucky and took over the empire - but this was probably in his merit rather than in theirs.

The Christian quarter of Jerusalem, built by saint Augustine's mother Helena, is where the Palestinian cause has its headquarters, up to the present day. And if you truly care about Palestinians, you ought to follow my example, and go there and do the research. Instead of inciting Arab men to die in vain, and Arab boys to throw rocks in futility and false hope, teach them to open up the book and live. Megulah ha Hester.

Here is the apocalypse of the “new Jerusalem” which Helena and the catholics got disastrously wrong: it starts with the releasing the seven seals and opening the scroll containing the full counsel of God regarding the gentile nations. The seven trumpets of his judgements sound, the seven bowls of his wrath be poured out. The false prophet who made an image of the Roman antichrist, and caused the nations to worship it, is condemned - for the false prophet is the church itself. The Roman antichrist will be defeated, and the “harlot of Babylon” will be thrown off her saddle on the beast with seven-heads, which is the “city with seven hills, which rules over the affairs of men”. The mystery has already been revealed and has been on public record for almost 1900 years. Although heavily suppressed and dogmatically misinterpreted, it is no secret, which is why jew-hater Martin Luther tried to have the Apocalypse removed from the bible. Go figure.

May we live to see these prophecies fulfilled, if they haven't already been. And if they have, let them be fulfilled again and again until we thoroughly learn the lesson. “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!”

“Come out of her, my people, lest ye be defiled by her sins. For her sins have reached up to heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.”