My Father’s Resurrection

This is not a theological reflection on what happens after death. Though I know if my dad’s somewhat confused understanding of bodily versus soul resurrection is true, he is in a good place right now.

But this is not that.

To be truthful, this is really about the resurrection of some of my father’s cherished beliefs.

Like the locusts that emerged in the Mauritanian desert after a period of dormancy, his beliefs never really went away. And like those locusts, once they return, they quickly spread—decimating everything in their path.

A great, moving and devouring, cloud of beliefs.

And these beliefs were not just his.

It turns out that dad’s views were held by many more people than I dared imagine. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, dad was part of Nixon’s “silent majority.” A group of aggrieved “victims” who dredged up their victimhood from the scummy ponds of racism and the brackish creeks of xenophobia.

Mom was declining fast and we needed to find a place for her to go. All she had was Social Security and whatever passed as government support for end-of-life nursing care. It wasn’t much, but we needed it—Dad needed it.

We were in the car somewhere between Akron and Lititz, PA and I waxed oh-so-eloquent about how the tattered safety net that was giving mom a room in a subpar nursing facility was a god-send.

I was digging at dad because I knew he hated “entitlements.” Yes, I was acting like an ass.

Dad came back at me like a caged beast telling me how government aid was a horrible blemish on our history and how he wished he could go back and make sure Roosevelt had never lived. He hated it.

But he needed it.

Things got hot and I asked dad whether he was pulling down any social security benefits (I knew he was and I relished the opportunity to reveal his hypocrisy).

He said

“You bet I am, but at least I earned it.”

And there it was.

The deserving poor.

Dad knew he was. He also knew that “those people” who, in his view, most ardently sucked at the teat of the federal government most definitely were not. They were mostly urban. They were mostly black. And he knew without any nuance at all that the failure of our country was because of “them.”

Dad’s views were not spoken in polite circles in those quainter times. Now, they are espoused by a vice presidential candidate who has a Yale badge to go along with his apparent Appalachian bona fides.

Dad has gone mainstream, except today “black” is “Haitian” or, more generally “immigrant.” And while it’s not polite, it is, by now somewhat of a yawner in the mainstream media precincts.

And then there is the matter of Israel.

What I need to write, I am afraid to write. And what you are going to read in the following has likely been carefully edited—out of fear.

These days to criticize the Israeli state is to run the risk of being tagged with a moniker that no self-respecting person desires.

I will have to take that risk.

Dad was Anti-Semitic.

He was so in the most casual ways and in the most conspiratorial.

Dad would regret getting “Jewed”—cheated in some financial way in a transaction (usually involving an automobile).

And, dad, in his more ardent John Bircher moments, would also bitterly decry the ways Jews ran a worldwide shadow banking system that kept people like him down (always the victim).

These were both banal and dead serious.

But Israel—what even he referred to as the “Jewish State”—was untouchable. It was unassailable. It was not to be questioned or critiqued.

The reasons, to the non-initiated, are laughable.

But to the initiated—to those steeped in the arcane ramblings of Darby and his theological spawn—they are dead serious. They are existential.

To them, and I must oversimplify here, the establishment of the State of Israel was the final piece of God’s cosmic puzzle. It would, within a “generation” usher in the rapture of the saints (a kind of UFOesque snatching away of the chosen), seven years of earth-shattering “tribulation,” Armageddon, and then, the arriaval of Christ’s kingdom on earth.

Israel was a necessity—even if Jews were NOT among the “new” chosen (that particular view has changed in recent times).

But it was not just a necessity.

Because it was a precursor to everything that must come

AND

Because Jews were/are the historically blessed people of God…

Any nation that did not support Israel would incur the wrath of God. And that would not be good.

In the end, support for Israel, was a kind of insurance plan for the United States (or any nation). During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s disdain for the state was the cause of its decline. Conversely, the US support for Israel is why we “won.”

Dad believed all this and our bitterest arguments—especially after Sabra and Shatilla in 1982—were about Israel. Dad feared for my mortal soul.

(Years later, after I returned from the “Middle East”—southwest Asia, perhaps—and I talked to dad about my Palestinian friends, our relationship almost ended. I begged him to consider his brothers and sisters in Christ who had been wronged by Israel, but he wanted nothing of it. And then later still, when I told him of standing in a Beirut mosque where the victims of the 1982 massacre were buried, he held firm.)

Dad’s beliefs were definitely not mainstream in those days.

But like the locusts, they have now swarmed the land. Who could have imagined that they would become the dominant doctrine of a Democratic administration.

Having grown up in that world, I could never have imagined that we would give Israel a pass on a massacre that is many orders of magnitude beyond Sabra and Shatilla.

But here we are.

Beliefs resurrected—or beliefs spreading like long dormant locusts, scouring the landscape of our time.

There was a time, no too many years ago, when I believed these beliefs were gone for good.

But just as I saw the reemergence of the long-dormant locusts, so too, have I seen the resurrection of his ideas. The resiliency of these beliefs is astounding and remind me that I must steel myself against that others that might come.

And, yes, there are others…