The Holy War Delusion

Is it time to retire our religions?

Photo by JR Ross on Unsplash

Link to TeamHuman monologue on YouTube

Another rabbi called me in tears this week. It was the third time this has happened in the past couple of years, since October 7, really. It’s the war, the killing, the killing of children, done in the name of a religion or a people to whom this rabbi had dedicated his life.

“I don’t even wear a kippah anymore,” he said, between sobs. “I know what it means to the people who see me on the street. Whatever it might have meant to me, they see a yarmulke and they think Zionist. Murderer.”

The one who called last summer, at the height of the starvation crisis in Gaza, took it further: “I think Israel may have made Judaism untenable for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever.”

It was stunning, coming from a rabbi. I just sat on the phone with her and listened. It was weird, very regrettable confirmation of some of the ideas I wrote about in a book called Nothing Sacred, back in 2003, which is part of why the rabbis were calling me now.

To be clear, up front: neither these rabbis nor I, nor any Jew for that matter, is any more responsible for what Israel is doing than any white person is for what Donald Trump is doing in their name. Or any Christian is for the officially Holy War America has waged on Iran in the name of bringing on armageddon.

But these rabbis are concerned that the way in which Israel conducts itself — in the very best light, defends itself against atrocity — by committing atrocity of its own. That these atrocities have so undermined the Jewish project, tarnished the Jewish “brand,” and compromised Jewish institutions, that it’s hard to embrace one’s own Jewishness, much less do so in public. Or even harder to offer one of Judaism’s intellectual or spiritual gifts to the world, now that they come with the baggage of Israel and Zionism.

It’s really the same feeling as being an American under Trump. I know I didn’t vote for him, and I know I may not be directly responsible for him. But he calls the entire American project into question, and reveals some of the genocidal colonialism, slavery, racism, and extraction required for this country to get where it did and stay this way.

That’s why I’m not sure how we could have prevented any of this. I was trying when I wrote Nothing Sacred twenty years ago. (I’m gifting the new 2026 edition to Patreon and Substack subscribers.) What I argued is that Judaism was meant less as a religion with sacred things to worship than the process by which we get over religion. God evolves from idols to big scary monster to angry daddy to ethereal presence to “which way did he go?” God recedes, leaving people to find the sacred in one another. Not in place, not a name, and certainly not in some nation state.

The point I was trying to make back then — the thing that got me in a lot of trouble — was that Israel is not the realization of Jewish ideals. Rather, it was at best a necessary compromise of Jewish ideals in order to save Jewish lives. They were living in a world where first Europeans and then Arab peoples really did want them eradicated. So while it would have been nice to find a way to get those peoples to welcome some Jewish residents, it made a certain sense to get a place of one’s own. But UK-mandated partition or a modern political boundary in the post-colonial Middle East has nothing to do with God’s plan for humanity. You think God gives a shit about the treaty of Westphalia?

Taking a transcendental mythical narrative like Torah and using it as a real estate deed, kills the whole project. Once you take the text literally, or as a historical record of events that actually happened in the past, you lose access to the timeless, multidimensional experience it describes. If it has to say this one thing, you lose the ability to argue about what it means. To the extent that Torah is true or valid, it’s not because it happened at some moment in history, but because it’s happening all the time, in every moment.

Man, that got me in a lot of trouble. Famous Jewish intellectuals wrote articles saying I was the latest incarnation of self-hating Jew. The head of America’s biggest Jewish federation actually blacklisted me. For years later, any synagogue that hired me to speak was told to cancel the appearance, or risk their funding. I’d get a call from the rabbi saying “we’re really sorry to do this, but…” It was always a call. Never in writing.

So I got my first taste of the vindictiveness and pervasiveness of this other supposedly Jewish project. One for which the defense of Israel was more important than Judaism itself. Those of us who saw Judaism as an ongoing, never-ending discussion and collaboration, were pushed aside for those who helped the politicians set in stone Judaism’s national identity. Israel became the God, or at least the new Temple. This thing we’re not supposed to even think about until the messiah comes? It’s now right there, right now—with a chair in the United Nations and a nuclear bomb to defend itself. Holy holy holy.

This literalism kills the interpretative dimensionality of a spiritual tradition as surely as scientism and materialism kills the humanities. When we set things in stone, lock down their ownership, assign them monetary value, make them material and absolute truths to defend, we lose the liminal, creative, living, human layers. To hold anything with absolute and permanent certainty, we have to kill it.

And then we start killing other people, too.

I was originally going to make this piece about the latest rise in antisemitism, particularly around the War in Iran. See, there’s two main kinds of antisemitism. Two justifications for hate. The traditional one, the one that I always knew about, was the hatred of foreigners. Jews had no country, so they were always immigrants. And their religion was so abstract that they never respected the local gods of the peoples they visited. In Judaism God is unknowable, so the local idols and gods people worshipped didn’t mean much. Jews were hated because they were universalists, globalists, non-local, and the face of immigration.

But Israel and its behaviors led to another kind of antisemitism: anger from the Left that Jews were colonialists. England couldn’t control its colonies after WWII and gave part of Palestine to the Jews, and part to the Palestinians. No one else wanted the Jews there at all, so war broke out and Israel has been….aggressively defending its right to be there ever since. Maybe unwittingly, in addition to reclaiming its homeland, Israel continued the violent colonial project of its predecessors.

So now, Jews get it from both sides. The Right generally sees us as immigrant, slightly-brown people who undermine local gods and maybe killed Jesus. Yes, the Bible study class for the US Cabinet teaches that the Jews killed Jesus. And the Left sees us as the white zionist colonizers of an indigenous people’s territory. Go back to Poland.

But this also corresponds to two extreme kinds of Christianity in the United States, vying for dominance. There are the Christian Zionists, who are the people in Trump’s cabinet and military right now. People like Hegseth, Huckabee, or White House faith officer Paula White-Cain. They believe they are in a Holy War against Satan that will bring back Jesus. And they’re telling this to each other and the troops. In just one of many official allegations, a commander briefed his troops by saying, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” Or from the free thought caucus in Congress, military commanders are being instructed to tell their troops “that the American and Israeli attacks will hasten the return of Jesus Christ, and have cited passages from the Book of Revelation and instructed officers to tell their troops that current combat operations are all part of God’s divine plan.”

So these folks believe that bringing on Armageddon in a Biblically ordained alliance with Israel will summon the second coming of Jesus, after which the Jews are unnecessary but the Christians all go to heaven. That’s American Taliban. And like some of the Jews of Spain in 1491, most zionist lobbies think that siding with the great Empire against the Arabs will work out. As if they don’t remember that back in Spain, the expulsion of Muslims through 1491 was followed the Inquisition against Jews in 1492.

But opposed to the Christian Zionists are the Christian Nationalists, like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, who believe the United States and Trump are just hapless puppets being guided by a global uber wealthy cabal of Rothschilds and other Jews. The idea here is that Israel has wanted to attack Iran all along, and is using its money and influence to force America’s hand. When he announced the war, Marco Rubio said something (later denied by Trump) about how Israel was going to attack and so America had to follow along. Further reinforcement came from counterterrorism chief Joe Kent, who resigned citing how the Israeli lobby forced American into the war. The more extreme version of the story is that Jeffrey Epstein (Jew) and Ghislaine Maxwell (Jewish father) were working with Mossad, and using the real Epstein Files to blackmail Trump into doing Israel’s bidding. (One that never made sense to me because I have a hard time believing Trump is really scared of being outed as a sexual predator. There’s already ample testimony in the record. I think his followers would shrug off a video as a deep fake, or not care.)

But the theory of Israeli blackmail gets amplified and further distorted by MAGA influencers like Tyler Oliveira — the guy who took video of closed Somalian-owned daycare centers in Minnesota to launch the conspiracy theory now touted by Trump that Somalians are stealing billions and billions of dollars from taxpayers? That guy is now making videos about The Great Noticing, to help people recognize signs of Jewish control of…everything. He says the word “goyim,” the Jewish word for people, actually means that non-jewish people are “cows.” It doesn’t. (And no, I’m not providing links. He doesn’t deserve your clicks.)

So on the one hand, Christianity is being used to justify initiating World War Three against Iran in the hopes that the fire will summon Jesus. And on the other, it is being used to expose Jews as the killers of Christ who are secretly responsible for the entire sweep of western civilization, colonialism, and capitalism making America possible in the first place but now standing in the way of white Christianity’s divine right to dominate this continent and impose its white supremacist religious values on all Americans.

I expect some calls from priests and ministers just as upset as my rabbis, wondering if America’s holy war makes Christianity untenable. To which I’d say, don’t worry — the Crusades already took care of that a thousand years ago.

So is it time we retire these religions before they kill us all? In a certain sense, yes.

All kidding aside, I have always loved the idea of graduating from a religion. They may begin as great mythical or spiritual insights, but the institutional containers we create for them are anchored in a particular moment in our evolution as a species. The spiritual truths are living, changing things—just like we are—and eventually outgrow even the best and most well-thought-out containers.

This is where my experience as a media theorist may be useful.

The spiritual impulses informing Judaism are not bad or destined for violence and self-destructive behavior. But they are not of our era and may be obsolete. Judaism is an Axial Age development. Christianity and Islam came later, but continued that same impulse. What was the Axial Age? It was a media environment characterized by the invention of scripture. Writing.

Writing changed everything. Like social media, but times 100. Once people could write instead of just speak, they had the ability to record history. They could write down their story, and say what happened. They also gained the ability to create contracts into the future. The Bible itself was called a Covenant. That’s an agreement. A Holy Covenant between Abraham and God. God says “you do this stuff for me, and I will do that stuff for you.” It’s linear. Cause and effect. Past, present, and future. You do something now for the reward in the future. Save now, get interest and growth later. Follow these rules now, and the Messiah will come someday in the future.

Before this, everything was circular and present-based. We had seasons, but we didn’t have a concept of progress or a future or linearity. This development wasn’t all bad. The great beauty of the Axial Age religions was that they took on the mission of social justice. Once you have a future, you can think about making the world a better place tomorrow than it was yesterday. We can heal, improve, advance. But this focus on advancement was also the impetus for colonialism. And the justification for capitalism.

The downside of all this future focus was to lose track of the present. You gotta break a few eggs today to get a cake tomorrow. If we’re bringing everything closer to the messianic moment, then the ends justify the means. We are marching toward the inevitable finale. We have a goal of righteousness and purity. We can get there once we kill the last enemy, redeem the last sinner, clean the last dirty spot. The telos the goal the end of the story is worth whatever pain and suffering we need to endure, or create, along the way. So say we all.

In case you haven’t noticed, we have migrated to a new media environment. The age of the book—and I say this as someone who has made my career as an author—the age of the book is ending. Text and books no longer define the media environment in which human beings grow up and operate.

As one of the original “people of the book” I understand why Jews are getting some heat in the difficult transition away from messianic stories to whatever is next - and religious extremists launch into a suicidal mission to end the story before we find a way through it or past it. They’d rather the world end than face life beyond the confines of this Axial Age construction.

While I’m not yet convinced of AI’s enduring value to humanity or the planet, at the very least it suggests we are at the dawn of a new media age. One defined less by the linearity of the book, than the all-at-onceness of perfect recall. The retrieval of obscure ideas that would have remained on inaccessibly forgotten stacks in the library annex. The cut-and-paste mashup of practices and insights from anywhere on the globe at anytime in history.

And these AI iterations are not set down as if they were etched in stone, inked on papyrus or printed in a book. They’re arising through inquiry, through call and response, as part of an iterative process. You don’t use a thinking, interactive technology for answers, or at least you shouldn’t. You engage with these new media for better questions, in a generative practice much more like the music of Brian Eno than the 19th century ballad with beginning, middle, and end.

The spiritual questions of the Axial Age prophets can be retrieved and re-asked in this new media and cultural environment. We don’t need to end the story, but rather to liberate from it. That’s what my comic book Testament was about, and I really should re-issue that thing, too, because it’s coming true.

Honestly, this moment was easier to foresee than it looked. Even the prophets and apostles could see it, and gave fair warning: When this era ends, there’s gonna be some fucked up people trying to end the world. You will know them because they will be really into possessing land and building towers and making gold stuff and fighting big wars. Don’t follow them.

The beauty of these moments of extreme clarity is that we have the opportunity to transcend the story. Not transcend physical reality, community, people, love, connection, the earth, the cycles of nature. But to transcend the linear story of progress, conquest and telos that flattens our experience, motivates our violence, and destroys everything truly sacred about life.

To the extent that Judaism contributed to this mayhem, I’m sorry. Just as I’m sorry for how Enlightenment values within their period “container” ended up inadvertently justifying slavery, capitalism, and a society based on individuality. Just like I’m sorry for America. These all seemed like good ideas at the time.

But you know what they all have in common? They’re ideas. They’re abstracted from ground. They’re based in goals, not experience. They have the power of the strategist, and the weapons of the scientist, but lack the wisdom of the lived, social and circular experience.

That’s going to require learning how to be still. How to breathe. And how to metabolize what’s going on right here, and right now.

So what do you think? Should we retire our religions? Should Judaism be the first one on the block to say “we’re done?” Or, as my grandma used to say when I suggested such things, “you may say you’re not Jewish, yet they will come after you all the same!” But seriously, can we rescue ourselves and our planet from our own faiths? Or is “holy war” just a way of motivating soldiers and cabinet members to drop bombs, while other politicians and businesspeople loot the coffers and pile up riches in Qatari bank accounts?

Can we bring forward the best of our faiths into a new context? Rescue them from the war-mongers and conquistadors, or even use them to recognize and liberate ourselves from the sociopaths bombing children in our name?

I think so. I think that’s what Team Human is for. And I’m glad you’re here to work through some of this together.

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