“It is upon us to praise the Master of all, to give greatness to the Former of creation, who did not make us like the goyim (nations) of the lands, and did not place us like the families of the earth, who did not make our portion like theirs, nor our fate like all their multitudes, for they bow to vanity and emptiness, and pray to a god that cannot save.”
This prayer is called Aleinu. It concludes every single Jewish prayer service, three times a day. Religious children will repeat it thousands of times before turning eighteen, and anyone who has walked into a synagogue has heard it.
Though goy technically means nation, ask any Jew what a goy is and they will likely say “non-Jew.” That interpretation is why the prayer demands apologetics.
As a child, I intuitively knew that something didn’t feel right with this prayer, and rabbis and teachers had explanations ready before the question was even asked. The apologetics are prepared, because the plain reading speaks for itself. When my body knew something was off, I was taught to override it.
The original intent was not relevant to me. Thousands of repetitions had already ingrained themselves into my nervous system. The concept of goy lived in my body as a category, an other that is less than us.
Once the category was installed, it did not stay in the prayer book. It determined who I could see as fully human and who I could not. It shaped who I could love, who I could grieve for, and whose suffering I could watch without feeling. It created the prerequisite for everything that followed, because dehumanization requires a category beneath us.
The prayer does not command harm, it builds the infrastructure that makes harm possible.
This is not unique to this prayer or this system. We all have our own Aleinu. This is how these programs are installed. Not through hate speech, not through propaganda, but through thousands of repetitions mumbled by heart until no one even realizes it’s there. That is what makes it so effective, and that is what makes it so difficult to see.
I couldn’t uninstall the program until I was honest about how it’s read, and what that does.
I was the one praying to a wall.
אחד
واحد
As I remember it, I think it was John Denver who said thank God I’m a country goy!
As you say,
- “When our bodies know something is off, we are taught to override it.” and then I read in the comments how we have a lack of discernment.
Religion teaches us to ignore the body, often to see it as sin, and it never teaches us to think independently.
The root of the word religion is leig, which is to unite. Therefore, religion is a way to re-unite, implying a separation is already here. This is a false belief and there is no evidence for it.
Religion is based on the idea of separation from god, (the wholeness, the one, the universe, the eternal, awareness, pure consciousness.) I use all these words that point to the same, but are just words.
How can we be separate from all there is?
If god, as all religions say, is all there is, then we are in essence, also god, not a part or apart. We are nothing but god’s being. For most religions, if not all, this is blasphemy. I would, however, suggest it is the other way around and that the former idea is exactly what leads us to the belief, not the evidence, that we are all separated. When we think like this and believe it, it puts us in a state of competition and, of course is the number one reason and can easily be traced back as the root of every single conflict there is.
Religion makes us ‘believe’ we are separated and scripture is thus interpreted as such. That is what I read in your text, but that is not what I read in the prayer. I do see how it can be read, and as it was read and conditioned into you through repetitive ignorance. So it was like this to so many others.
Goy perhaps is then, the belief in being a separate-self. Does this resonate with you in that prayer? So the scripture, because the Judaic tradition adopts it and takes possession of it as its own, out of arrogance and belief, brings it down to the superficial level of ignorance and misunderstanding of what ‘god’ truly is, what truth is. It then makes all others, non-them, the enemy.
There is only one truth however.
The body, for example, is truth, for the body is our direct and most intimate experience, and no one can deny us that. We experience through the body, but all experience is believed to be separated when, in fact, life as we know it, is one single underlying continuous experience. The oneness. That said, as you say, we are taught to ignore the body, and that is a way that religious elders, who often live in ignorance of the body, control.
Instinct is never taught to be heard. Instinct is our inherent natural right. Instinct is what no one else knows, but we are taught to ignore it because we are not taught to listen. The only way to learn from your instinct is to follow it without fear. To hear and do what your gut says. The gut feels first and then sends a signal to the brain. In fact the neurological connection of the brain and the gut are created at the same time and look molecularly speaking, exactly the same. No one knows however, which one becomes which. The important this is that in thought, we get lost and create doubt, which is based on fear, the fear of separation. We can only follow our gut feeling and then see what happens; that is true evidence that the body speaks, and we must learn its language to recall and know we are the wholeness.