One of the truly strange phenomena about Jewish conventions has to do with people chasing down the symbols without understanding the substance. This is not an unprecedented predicament. In New Testament times there were people who wanted to be teachers of the law without having a clue as to what they were talking about, and such people were in the church. We are noticing the rise of a number of programs and articles about the ark of the covenant for example. People are interested in finding out where the arc is and there is huge speculation about what the ark was meant to do. In addition, there are some researchers who think that every people has an ark of some kind, and that these arks authenticate the culture of the people who claim to have had a version of the ark of the covenant. That is a patent and latent jab at the unique endowment of the Jewish people.

Ark is not a hot topic

I suppose we should all be expecting the discovery of the “lost” ark, because like the finding of the remains of a ship wrecked in one of the many wars, the outcome is reverence for the graveyard. We inadvertently justify war and violence. Without faith, much of what people treasure as their spiritual distinction is laughable foolishness. The elephant in the room is the treatment of migrants, foreigners, and servants. Spirituality is that simple.

Who is laughing?

• American exceptionalism in the face of the treatment of First Nations and Black people. Yeah! Right.
• Christians and Jews as people in perfect compliance with God’s laws. Yeah! Right.
• Russians fighting Nazism in Ukraine. Yeah! Right.
• The government can legislate acceptance of LGBTQ people. Yeah! Right.
• Adorable extreme right wing governments in Italy and Israel. Yeah! Right.

The most destructive manifestation of Antisemitism is the adoption of Judaism’s historic and exclusive markers. It is right there in plain sight: Americans, Australians and Europeans and Africans (1) talking about their countries as “promised lands”, (2) people believing that they have the equivalent of the ark of the covenant, (3) anyone believing that they are in possession of promises of being higher than other nations, and (4) especially people refusing to learn biblical Hebrew or treating the language component of Bible study as an attempt to learn to speak the language. You cannot be so jealous of the Jewish people that you idolize them and try to submerge their contribution to the world’s spiritual environmentals. Can you?