In Judaism, there is a concept of "sparks of holiness" and "shells": a positive, divine seed, which is concealed in almost every phenomenon under the external - often evil - manifestations. Dissecting the spark of holiness allows to free it from the shell and prevent this good intention from paving a road to hell.
Let’s take the most extreme examples of evil - communism and Nazism.
The spark of communism's holiness is the desire to end competition and exploitation, and reach universal abundance: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Nikolai Berdyaev, great Russian philosopher exiled after the 1917 revolution, wrote a book "The Origins and Meaning of Russian Communism," proving that the Bolsheviks so easily managed to seduce the Russian people, because the ideals of communism met the messianic aspirations of Russian Orthodox Christians for the Kingdom of God.
Coincidentally, Iskra (The Spark) was the name of the first Bolshevik newspaper. When Russian people realized the deception - that the communists, promising them to build the Kingdom of God without God, can only offer misery and despotism - it was too late: they were already enslaved.
However, this spark of holiness in communism is so attractive that to this day entire nations fly into its fire and get incinerated.
A spark of holiness, no matter how repulsive it sounds, can be found even in Nazism.
Every nation has a potential to perform a great, heroic, holy mission. This spark of holiness was fanned by Beethoven, Schiller, Nietzsche and Wagner into the esthetic and intellectual excitement. The Nazi ideology fanned this spark into the fire of crematorium ovens.
The communists called their Kingdom of Heaven the Third International. The Nazis called it the Third Reich. The woke call it the Third Digital Millennium (or the Global Reset). The parallels are not random and the spark of holiness in wokeism is exactly the same as in communism and Nazism - the impatience to get into the Kingdom of God by ungodly means - changing matter without changing the spirit.
TURNING SHACKLES INTO WINGS
Any person deep down strives for freedom from his egotism, from the “clothes” of personality - to the spiritual nakedness of Adam: where his spiritual essence cannot be hidden under garments - man or woman, black or white, rich or poor – and the essence is visible to all: is it a good person – selfless, honest, loving – or not?
However, these garments - all what Christians call “our cross” and Jews call our vessels, the kli – were lovingly created as the only way for us to grow: to learn filling them with goodness, turning the cross into wings, and victoriously flying on them to the Kingdom of God.
Our evil inclination urges us to drop the cross, break the vessels, calling them “the shackles of matter,” knowing that we will just jump off the cliff - and crash.
Communism offered the Russians to remove the shackles of money and private property and fly straight to brotherhood and the Red Paradise, where money is not needed. This only led to a fall into despotism and poverty.
Nazism offered the Germans to remove the shackles of biblical morality and diligent work, of the need to humble themselves to the military defeat while being content with their comfortable yet boring lives and soar to exploits and heroism! This sturm und drang led to the fall into the hell of the concentration camps.
Wokeism-neo-Marxism-minorities’-racism proposes to remove not only all previous "shackles" - money, culture, history, biblical morality – but the final basic "shackles" of gender.
This new shortcut into paradise will be even more catastrophic.
FEAR AS THE ENGINE OF WOKEISM
A religious person knows that the soul has entered the physical body to work - to overcome its evil inclination. And the more we understand this, the more we rejoice in this work - noticing how the soul is growing through overcoming the hardships. Yet the chance to fail in spiritual growth is very big. And the fear of failure is enormous. It accompanies humans all the way from the Garden of Eden. Wokeism, in the footsteps of communists and Nazis, tries to overcome this fear through legislation.
At the heart of wokeism is the fear of failure not only and not so much in capitalism's competition for material success, but of failure in the spiritual competition of each person with his own evil inclination.
Will you be able to overcome your selfishness, deceitfulness, depravity - will you become the best version of yourself or not - depends only on you. It is terrifying because the outcome is a lost life or a fulfilled life. Nothing less. And the fear of losing in this main competition of your life cannot be silenced, because it is the voice of God, the voice of consciousness.
In order to get rid of this fear, the poor woke are trying to enlist the help of the State. Why? To prove to themselves that the criteria for success or failure in this spiritual competition simply does not exist; that this inner voice that deprives them of guilt-free indulgence in vice was imposed on them by “oppressive theologies”; that God and his commandments are simply inventions of the evil white men; that everything pointing to God and his commandments is a micro or a macro aggression by “racists and religious fanatics”; that theft and violence are justice (if they do it); refusal to study and work is not laziness but virtue; and sodomy is not a sin but freedom. Actually, nothing at all is a sin, except accusing them of sin, that is, reminding them that the voice of God within them is right - that without an effort to correct their souls they will lose in the main competition of their lives.
TRANSGENDERISM AS EXCHANGING GOD’S TICKET
This fear of the conditions of the Game, which God offered us and to which we agreed (for the prize of the Game is great and achievable – unity with God), this Dostoevsky-described desire to “return the ticket to the Creator,” to quit this Game out of pride, fear and mistrust of God’s merciful reward for even a failed (but a sincerely made) attempt – this fear is the deeply hidden root of the woke obsession to deconstruct and cancel everything that reminds them of the rules of the Game: the Bible, Western history, capitalism, the gender functions of men and women.
Actually, it’s not an attempt to return the ticket and cease existence but a naïve attempt to exchange the ticket for another game.
Transgenderism is one of the most radical and lunatic attempts to change the unchangeable rules of the Game of Existence. Let's say a soul before birth chose to be born in a male body. In God's realm nothing is accidental, including the gender we are born with. Now, having grown up, a man discovers that in addition to the joys of living in the male body, it is accompanied by a large number of responsibilities: one must become a defender - of the homeland and family, a husband, a father, a breadwinner - a whole bunch of boring and heavy burdens. This cross must be carried all his life... but it turns out that there is a modern woke theory according to which this cross can be proudly thrown off!
'I will change the rules of the Game,' says the woke guy to himself: I chose a wrong ticket but I will exchange it now - I am no longer a man, but a woman! Moreover, a woman who is free from the duties of childbearing.
All terrifying threats to fail in this life as a man will be instantly cut off by surgery!
The same with the opposite sex: say, the soul chose to be born as a woman, but it turned out that in addition to beauty and joy of being a woman, there is a lot of suffering, self-sacrifice and responsibility - to bear and give birth to children in agony, nourish them, build relationship with a husband ... No, I will have surgery and I will become a man - and without his responsibilities!
But the more aggressively the woke try to prove to themselves and society that the Main Game of Existence – correcting one’s soul – does not exist and they have nothing to correct in their souls - the more their souls are corroded by fear that they are losing this Game.
The woke are deeply unhappy people.
RENEW THE HOLY AND SANCTIFY THE NEW
The hysterical screams of the woke, blaming everyone for everything, is actually a cry of a little child in the darkness for help.
This cry is a challenge for believers to reach out to the woke with wisdom and love. Only in a church, in a synagogue, in a mosque, in a Buddhist or Hindu temple, the woke can find loving and wise people who will help them win in the competition with themselves.
In order for the woke to come to faith, we must offer essence, not only rituals; meaning, not rites; help, not condemnation.
The woke phenomenon forces all religions to “renew the holy and sanctify the new,” according to the formula of Rav Kook. In this sense, woke challenge is a blessing: it is the spurs of the Almighty that make us move forward.
Dr. Dmitry Radyshevsky is an Israeli-American theologian, author of “The Universal Zionism”
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