I Cry, therefore, I am Human: An Ode to The Collective Jewish Consciousness Wrestling with Existence
Existential feelings of a Palestinian who just watched Netflix’s The Devil Next Door — mini-series about Ivan the Terrible & the Holocaust
I just finished watching Ivan the Terrible on Netflix. I was divinely high on the fumes of the sacred Bush — I mean kush — so I felt every minute of it, existentially. That is to say, deeply to the core of my being. I cried my eyes out, stopped watching & here I am writing trying to stop the tears.
You cannot be pro-Palestine without first being pro-Israel. I don’t mean “pro” as the shallow result of mindless political fervor or inherited attitudes, but I mean “pro” as the result of a pro-foundly humanistic understanding of the nature of both struggles.
The Palestinian struggle is the Jewish struggle for self-determination, for taking control over one’s destiny. It’s a struggle against the feeling of alienation innate to being in the diaspora; of never truly cultivating a sense of belonging (think lower-eastside Manhattan in the 1920s and 30s). More importantly, it’s a struggle against the psychopathic chaotic winds of life that blow with them unimaginable human-animalistic catastrophes (what is in Arabic called Nakbas) — never again.
The word Israel means “to wrestle with God” and in 1948, God was put into a submission headlock by the livid Jewish collective consciousness, who had witnessed ungodly suffering…On May 14th, 1948, God finally tapped out.
I heard the following philosophical joke on Seinfeld’s comedians in cars getting coffee and it has been reverberating with me ever since, due to how succinctly it captures the idea of ungodly suffering:
A holocaust survivor lives a happy life, marries, has children, grandchildren, and eventually dies peacefully of old age. When he dies he goes to heaven and meets God. The first thing he says to God is “let me tell you a holocaust joke”. He then proceeds to tell it to God. God then furrows his eyebrows and solemnly says “that’s not funny”. The holocaust survivor then says “well I guess you had to be there to get it…”
So, if you have any doubts about Israel’s existential right, then you haven’t fully internalized the suffering. Once you do, the question then becomes a matter of equity not of existence.
To repair the world, you need to understand yourself so deeply! That you end up understanding what it means to be human. How hard it is to exist in the condition called human. Always aware of your own inevitable demise.
To ensure this never again happens to any human, we need to understand what being a human being means.
Logically, how can you be something you can’t understand? and if you haven’t been able to cry for a while now, how can you be so certain that when you get angry, for whatever reason, you will not turn into that fucking monster?
I’m sure monsters always justify it to themselves: “oh they’re wrong so they deserve to suffer!”
Don’t believe that you can be a monster?
Monster=Human
Human=You.
If you don’t understand the process of being a human being then you’re pretending to be nice, and overcompensating with niceness like God in that joke who has the audacity to tell a fucking holocaust survivor that he’s not funny despite him not even being there or understanding…
Are you prepared to make a human being suffer if you’re fighting for climate change? how about 2 humans? how about 3? how about 6 fucking million? what’s your limit?
0 is the limit for any human being.
No one human being deserves any suffering. And the test of humanness is when you have to respect the humanness in monsters. Israel didn’t kill the monster they confronted him with the naked judgment of his own actions.
An ode to humanness.
The tragedy of life that we try to numb ourselves to with the autopilot of our mechanical routine is already existentially hard enough & confusing.
To repair the world you need to understand what it means to be human and break yourself in the process.
If you can manage to repair yourself then try repairing someone else first — validate your humanness by smoking weed with a homeless man and trying to feel. Don’t buy yourself out of feeling by donating.
Fucking feel. Here’s a poem I wrote to help you get it:
Ask Strangers How Do You Feel?
It’s not hard,
Just needs heart.
After that you need to still pry
with the existential why.
And never ever lie.
Human Animals can be monsters,
and animals can’t ask why.
Netflix should rename The Devil Next Door to The Potential Devil Within. And while we’re at it. Let’s add an addendum to the Descartes’s “I think therefore I am”. I say:
“I cry, therefore, I am human”.
