We think we have it bad, all ‘sheltered in place’ (who makes up these clumsy phrases anyway?). When the Jewish revolution against the Romans reached its peak, the Romans did what Romans did best – exterminate. The Jews who survived either ran to the hills, or grouped at Masada, a mountain redoubt equipped with an underground water supply. The Romans knew this, but had plenty of time and goods on hand. They dug in for a siege, to starve the Jews out. It was, as the writer said, the worst of times for the Jews.
We know the siege worked, not only from the outside reports of the Romans, but from the inside reports of Josephus, a trained Jewish historian who was freed from Roman hands to go with his fellow Jews into Masada. The Romans, oozing hubris, guaranteed his safety after the assumed fall of the fortress if he would write about what went on behind the walls for the Emperor or any other Roman to read later at his leisure. He did, and the tale was one of misery. In the final throws, he told of how the Jews violated one of their greatest Mosaic laws by sacrificing their children, not to Baal or Murdoch or to a golden calf this time, but to their own bellies. The women, he wrote, would stoke the ovens and roast their own with whatever was left from the grain supplies. The Roman readers feasted on the horrors, which were even beyond common Roman sensibilities. Even Josephus was revolted with his own people.
We do strange things in crisis, but often times we do not recognize the crises. Right now we do have one, an adversary that is very well recognized: the ‘Wu Flu’ or corona virus, and with that, we can formulate an attack plan, however mishandled or overblown that it might be. But Masada warns us that we have another crises that has fallen beneath our collective radar, and as it was at Masada, it is best realized through our children. At Masada they sacrificed their children for the fighting men to retain strength, because they understood that a lost battle would mean all of their deaths; in the Western world and elsewhere, we are now sacrificing our children because of a spiritual starvation that cannot be measured in decreasing waste size. Rather, it can only be measured in the degree to which we sacrifice our children.
The most obvious way is with abortion, in quantities that would shock even Ancient Rome, over one million a year in America alone. Most are done not for hardship but for convenience, causing some people to scoff at the shallowness of our younger citizenry. However, just as the Jews did not kill their own in normal times, neither do our own young women. Rather, they sacrifice because they are starving for something else that they believe is just as necessary for the continuation of life. “Convenience” here really means some sort of self-actualization that people feel cannot be achieved with the burden of children. That it is as pointless as the sacrifice of children at Masada is borne out by studies that show that women, as well as men, do not report being happier or more fulfilled than people from pre-abortion America. They are, as many might intuitively guess, less fulfilled. They have, that is, mistakenly concluded that their need lies in freedom of movement, when it is really based on something else entirely.
We have passed on our anxious needs for personal self-gratification to our children, our cultural mavens extolling a vast expansion of a child’s freedom of choice. This self-appointed aristocracy tells us that we should no longer define the rolls our children should have in our society, including such fundamentals as sexual preference and even, irrationally, gender. We are told that this frees each child to actualize ‘it’-self as its inner spirit calls. And yet such freedom seems to have created more chaos, not more happiness, as suicide rates among the young have hit record highs and dating, marriage, and birth rates have hit record lows. The aimlessness and lack of initiative among Millennials is so well known that it has become cliche.
We can add many other things to the list, but also make exceptions, knowing that not everything always goes one way. For instance, I’m sure that the people at Masada had a firmer grasp of their mission in life while under siege, but at such a cost as to make that statement worse than dark humor. But the trend is fairly clear – we are sacrificing our children for some kind of survival, for that is the only time a people collectively sacrifice their own - but from what do we fear our “genocide”? Who or what exactly is our enemy?
The answer is fairly obvious to anyone familiar with spiritual realization through any of the traditional religions. As G.K. Chesterton put it (more or less), ‘every man who opens the door to a brothel is looking for God.’ Of course, he is looking for God in exactly the wrong place, but that is the problem. The opposite of paradise is disguised to look like paradise, reflecting the lies of Satan or, as they would see it in the East, of material reality. Sex or drugs, along with rock ‘n roll, seem like paradise until they are taken in the quantities or ways that the paradise- seeker needs. It is then that the doors to paradise are seen for what they are – the doors to the House of the Rising Sun of ‘ol New Orleans fame. Bummer. Mothers tell your children/ not to do as I have done/…
We know the rest of the lyrics and the hackneyed moral. And while the hackneyed moral is none-the-less true, so is the refrain, “Tell your children/ not to do as I have done…” This we are failing to do. Instead we kill them in the womb before they can understand a word, or push them forward so that they might continue our futile search in exactly the wrong place, the house of the rising self-gratification. We – that is, those who follow our rarified culture leaders – reap the same despair as Gautama Buddha’s contemporaries who believed in self-realization through the world. Both the best and the brightest and the worst and the most despised seem to have made this same mistake throughout the eons, following the siren song of the forbidden fruit. As God said to Adam and Eve, “To eat of this fruit means death.” And that is what we are running from, even as we are running to it. It is the same old foe, death, which had the Jews eat their children, a remedy that proved worse for its moral travesty. As our children are killed, or “trans-ed,” or kill themselves, we are only conjuring the ghosts of the parents at Masada blocking out the screams of the innocent.
It is not so easy to turn around. Grant me fame and fortune and see if I don’t accept it and fall into the same trap. The turn towards unlimited moral freedom is easy to do and hard to escape once taken. After all, we are posing objective success against subjective – or invisible – well- being. The fate of our children, however, can be measure and weighed, and although it is not all doom and gloom – many of us ignore the pundits of culture – it is clear that the general trend is towards the negative, even as (until the Virus) we have never experience so much success and so much behavioral freedom in our national lives. Clearly, the reason for this anomaly lies in the fate of all flesh. Death can never be vanquished through the personal experiences of earthly life. As history tells us, not even the sacrifice of our children to the gods, or to our own fears or fantasies of greatness, can deliver us from the great equalizer.
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