The Devil and Donald Trump

His Easter Heresy

Lest We Forget: Here is the Easter Message—the Easter Message!—from our very stable genius:

Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords,Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and LawEnforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing -- But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection,a very Happy Easter!!!

This is a sick and evil man, defined by anger. His desperate, putrescent ugliness of spirit—it almost seems a divine joke—made stark by the death of Pope Francis, who was quite the opposite, who spent his life engaged in the struggle between kindness and orthodoxy. My old friend E.J. Dionne, whose faith I’ve always admired, celebrates the Pope’s life here. But EJ’s celebration is primarily political and elides the simple, humble spirituality of the man, the first Pope to name himself after Francis of Assisi.

What is it about the Roman Catholic Church? To me, it represents the heights of—divine?—aesthetic glory but also the depths of depravity, history’s most beautiful message defiled by several thousand years of murderous crusading—and also by a constricted male psychosis about sex.

I am a Jew, but so—probably—was Jesus. He was a new kind of Jew, who preferred the quiet meditation and study of the synagogue to the butcher-shop transactions—if you give us a sheep or a goat for slaughter, we’ll pray for you—of the Priestly Temple. Contemporary reports describe a magnificent mess of a building, skidding with animal blood.

It took the Jews 2000 years to build a foundation myth, Moses descending from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, the liberation from slavery, the 40 years of wandering confused in the desert. It took the followers of Jesus a single generation to create the most powerful and disturbing story and symbol—the cross, a God sacrificed, a God who died for our sins—in human history. What on earth was going on in the First Century? Two new religions: Temple Judaism supplanted by the synagogue. The Jesus faction transformed into Christianity. It was a rare time: thoughtful people had a choice of plausible Gods.

In the past few weeks The New Yorker has published two lovely pieces about early Christianity. One, by Adam Gopnick, explored the latest attempts by contemporary authors—especially the great Elaine Pagels—to figure out who Jesus was. The other, by Eliza Griswold, explores the latest attempts by contemporary authors to figure out who Mary Magdalene was. Ah, Jesus and Mary Magdalene—the two compelling mysteries of the early church. Two who suffered. Jesus, we know; Mary—sister of Lazarus? most devoted follower of Jesus? his wife?—was transformed and perhaps diminished into a red-haired harlot by the Medieval church fathers.

I’ve always been fascinated by the story, The Greatest, as they say, Ever Told. In 2000, I thought I retired as a full time journalist. (I hadn’t; I can’t seem to quit this dodge; I’ve retired several more times since.) What to do next? Well, I went to study first century Christianity and Judaism with the late, stunning Alan Segal at Barnard College. Segal was a Saul/Paul scholar, which came very close to the heart of first century things. Saul was a Pharisee who wrote, a window into that era’s Jewish sensibility; Paul wrote the earliest church documents, the epistles. But he never met Jesus…and he fought over the nature of the early church with James, who was Jesus’ brother and leader of the Jewish followers of the Nazarene. Those followers remained faithful even unto to death by the Romans; they never abandoned Jesus. (Now, James is a figure the church fathers have buried over the centuries: it was inconvenient for the Son of God to have a brother. Who was his father? Better still, as many surmise, was Jesus a mamzer, the product of an illicit relationship?)

But an interesting theory stole my attention during the time with Segal. The notion that there was a form of hallucinogenic Jewish meditation called Merkaba:

The concept of the Merkaba has its roots in Jewish mysticism, particularly within the Kabbalah. The earliest references to the Merkaba can be traced back to the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the Book of Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 1:1-28, the prophet describes a vision of a divine chariot comprised of chimeric beings and wheels within wheels, which many scholars interpret as an early representation of the Merkaba. [Emphasis mine.]

The Merkaba became a significant focus of early Jewish mysticism during the time of the Second Temple (circa 516 BCE – 70 CE). Mystical traditions that involved ascension through layers of heaven to experience divine presence developed, with practitioners known as “Merkabah mystics.” These mystics sought spiritual enlightenment through meditation, prayer, and ascetic practices aimed at experiencing God’s presence.

The theory is that merkaba was practiced by the Essenes, and taught individually, from rabbi to student. John the Baptist was an Essene, who may have taught it to Jesus. And Jesus, an otherworldly spiritual force, taught it to his followers. They were “merkaba mystics” who shared ecstatic visions. (There are those who believe that Saul struck blind on the road to Damascus was the result of a Merkaba session with his rabbi.)

Years later, I had several conversations with an Israeli archeologist at Hebrew University. She directed me to visit a site they were in the process of unearthing, a synagogue on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, in a town called Migdal. There are who those who believe Jesus preached there; there are those who believe that Jesus met Mary of Migdal there. So I went. It was a fierce day, heat blistering in diaphanous shimmers as I walked down the hillside. The site was protected by a temporary wooden sructure. I don’t remember if there was a guide. There must have been because I was given a tour and was pointed to the bima, the raised platform from which the Torah was read. There was a fresco, half eroded by time and difficult to discern, on the front of the bima. It was, I was told, Ezekiel’s fiery wheels of the chariot of the Lord.

The Migdal Bima

Wow. Merkaba made manifest. I stood there stunned…and bereft. If only I was a spiritual sort! I might have had an epiphany. But…nothing. Perhaps a slight aha!, a self-satisfied emanation of intellectual awe. I consider my faithlessness a profound personal failing. I once asked a Rabbi who practices Merkaba meditation if I could learn it. She asked, “Are you good at meditation?” Nope, I replied. Hopeless. “Then it’ll be hard. It took me two years to get close…”

Over time, I’ve come to believe this: that there are things just beyond our fingertips, things we do not know. That there is a spiritual bond we have, sort of like Teilhard De Chardin’s supernatural sense of “collective consciousness” (thank you again, Jerry Brown, for turning me on to that). Faith happens when we drill drown into ourselves and find peace—meditate—and also when we perform acts of charity:

For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in, 36I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you visited Me.’

37Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You something to drink? 38When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? 39When did we see You sick or in prison and visit You?’

40And the King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’

—Matthew 25

Faith is as simple, and as impossibly aspirational, as that. I am too much of this world for it, perhaps just not good enough; but then, faith is not a guarantee of goodness. Indeed, there are at least two types of religious people: The “Thou Shalt Not…” sorts and the Matthew 25ers. The former are common—far too many Evangelicals, the well-known telecharlatans; too many Fathers of the Catholic Church; the Irish “laundry” nuns. The second type are rare and beautiful. I’ve been privileged to know a few. It seems Pope Francis may have been one of them.

And Donald Trump? His Easter message tells us who he is—and who he thinks we are. He is loath to show kindness or grace. His jokes are demeaning acts of cruelty. Poor, pathetic soul, singed by brimstone. He lives in a fiery realm of personal pain, far from Ezekiel’s chariot.

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