Radical Reflections of an American Jew
Peace/Shalom: Part 4 of a 4 Part Series
by Howard Richard Debs
Aliens
“Get away from her, you bitch” — Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), alien queen fight scene from the movie Aliens
Let’s face it we’re all somebody’s aliens.
We hate being hated, but we all hate.
How about if we take another shot at it?
Kepler-1649c awaits, newly
discovered exoplanet,
only 1.06 times larger than
planet Earth, with fully three-fourths
the light, temperature about the same,
water almost certainly on its surface.
Sounds about right for a do-over,
we’d be in stasis for a pretty long
time though. I know about these
things. I started with Flash Gordon
Ming the Merciless, Doctor Zarkov,
I’ve seen them all, E.T., Close Encounters,
Star Wars prequels, it’s all imaginable.
Imagine in 1944 the fascist Arrow Cross
Party militiamen who were murdering Jews
along the Danube river bank, the
shoes were considered of value, the
shoes alone, the victims in their panic
hastily demanded to remove them
as shots rang out and writhing bodies
spilling blood flooded the water the dead
and dying carried by the current downstream.
All those killed, ancestors to someone.
There are evolutionary paleobiologists
who think human-like beings exist
out there in some galaxy somewhere.
It’s all about what they call “convergence”
adapting Darwin’s theories to the entire universe.
Maybe the James Webb Space Telescope
will help earthlings find these others.
Aliens, welcome.
Afterword: Just a few recent examples of incidents related to alterity: Whoopie Goldberg’s comment about the Holocaust, the Ted Cruz comment about Black female supreme court nominees, the hostage-taking incident in Texas, the Beijing Winter Olympics with comparisons to Berlin in 1936; an article about aliens lends a perspective about the realities of what being human-like means here on Earth or probably anywhere else. For further reading: NASA official James Webb Space Telescope website
Postscript: In Judaism the world begins with the word, from which arise a cluster of core ideas within the context of the Bible, (Tanakh) and the Talmud, each embodied in a Hebrew word which by its very nature encompasses and conveys nuanced meaning, these are “Jewish concept-words.”
References: For further exploration related to each “concept-word” addressed in this series, the following reference is given as a starting point, taken from Sefaria* the nonprofit platform of open access to Torah texts online. While there may be any number of articles associated with a particular topic, the material cited is felt to be particularly pertinent to the perspective here considered:
Regarding Justice, Tzedek [Go to Part 1]
Regarding Remembrance, Zachor [Go to Part 2]
Regarding Compassion, Rachamim [Go to Part 3]
*Sefaria ensures that it is open to all to “join the conversation” allowing the combining of sources from its library with one’s own comments, questions, images, and videos.
Acknowledgments: “Aliens” first published in Impspired
