I’ll try to keep this relatively short. Clif High has made a name for himself recently by claiming that the Jewish religion of today is a blood cult based upon the experience of an ancient people who had enormous difficulty getting along with truly evil extraterrestrials called “El’s” who abused them millennia ago. Judaism in Clif’s eyes is simply a manifestation of Stockholm syndrome. According to the Cleveland Clinic, “Stockholm syndrome is a coping mechanism to a captive or abusive situation. People develop positive feelings toward their captors or abusers over time.” The way the ancient Jews supposedly came to cope with the “fact” of their ancient abusive relationship with these “El’s” (who Clif calls the “Elohim,” a seeming Hebrew pluralization of “El”) was by engaging in “sacred” rituals that required the blood of children (who were sacrificed for the purpose) to be performed so as to please the one particular El that they ultimately considered their unitary god.
Clif seems to have made it his primary purpose in life to expose Judaism as this satanic blood cult that in his mind has been rightfully persecuted down through the ages by countless societies. Now Judaism is supposed to be the core of the evil that is currently engaged in a titanic struggle with the forces of good for the soul of humanity, which struggle Clif claims to be chronicling.
Just a note here…the word “Elohim” that Clif thinks is meant in the Torah as the plural of “El” is actually the Hebrew word “Eilokim” as used in the Torah to mean “the forces of nature.”
Clif High is repeating the infamous “blood libel” of the Jews as the heart of his nefarious argument. The term “blood libel” refers to the false allegation that has been made down through history that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children for ritual purposes. The Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews, with Julius Steicher's newspaper Der Stürmer making frequent use of ritual murder imagery in its anti-Jewish propaganda.
This blood libel is now been combined by Clif (and his buddies) with the propaganda piece “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (an entirely fictional tractate written around 1900 under the direction of the tzarist secret police to whip up hatred for the Jews among the Russian Orthodox population) to seal the perception in the minds of his readers and listeners that the Jews are indeed at the root of all evil in the world…and, I suppose, in his mind deserve to be the subject of extermination once again. Of course, Clif would never say such a thing, but Jewish people know his type. Clif is that very well spoken, apparently well-informed, and ultimately sophisticated intellectual who down through history has provided the seemingly incontrovertible reasoning that various societies have used to justify genocide of the Jewish people.
In Judaism God is indeed an extraterrestrial…as in He is not of this world. On this point Clif and Judaism are in perfect agreement. The funny thing is that Clif and Jewish thought are in further agreement to the extent that the God of the Abrahamic religions is very much like the “consciousness” that Clif proposes as the source of what he calls the “Matterium.” In other words, Clif’s consciousness is analogous to the Abrahamic God and the Matterium is analogous to God’s creation. So that’s a pretty good start but things really go off the tracks from there. Clif essentially goes on to claim to be the ultimate interpreter of all time of the Torah and the Talmud … greater than Rashi and Maimonides combined! The hubris is incredible and of course the interpretation is beyond wrong. Virtually nothing that Clif purports to be Judaic thought, belief, faith, philosophy, law, ritual, or theology has anything to do with the reality of Judaism. His conclusions about the religion are beyond ridiculous...actually bizarre...and ultimately as dangerous as any that have been used down through history to bring persecution and death to the Jewish people.
One last point…there is a seminal event in Genesis, the first book of the Torah, called the Akedah or the “binding of Isaac” in which Abraham is seemingly commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac as a demonstration of his (Abraham’s) absolute devotion to God. In the story Abraham binds Isaac on an altar and is ready to perform the sacrifice of his son when an angel of God stops him and provides a ram to be sacrificed in Isaac’s stead. The Akedah is interpreted as God’s declaration that human sacrifice shall not and shall never be done and indeed no Abrahamic religion… Judaism, Christianity, or Islam… has ever had anything to do with human sacrifice. The Akedah definitively makes a lie of the blood libel. Do you hear me Clif?
Shabbat Shalom.
MAX
