In 2015, a new beginning for both Israel and China

There is some concern today in Israel as the fourth of the blood moons arrives on a Jewish holiday toward the end of this month. When the constellation of the four blood moons arrive on Jewish holidays, it is prophesied, terrible times are ahead. But there is perhaps greater consternation that serious people still pay heed to these ancient myths.

{mosads}There is indeed danger in reading the stars as portents, or moons. History tries to hide itself, but an ambitious grad student might do well to find the old recordings of the free church mountain preachers who claimed in the 1990s that the hour was at hand and the Great Satan had come to the Middle East. As prophesied in Revelations, the end was sure to come in the great conflagration of Armageddon. Surely thereafter the second Christ would appear, to bring us, the elect, to salvation. While everybody else would be cast asunder, we, the few, would be saved.

We are now 15 years into the millennium and the visions of Armageddon have nearly subsided. But I was fascinated by the free preachers when I lived in the South. Some of them were visionaries and folk artists of the most acute, unconscious sensibilities, and often in the past these shamans of the hills would see things I was blind to.

And I do find it endlessly interesting that one of the last major blood moon constellations came in 1492, a year that did bring permanent change to the world. But don’t look to a stock market crash, fire bolts obliterating us from space or giant spiders mutated by radiation coming at you. Look, instead, to a shift in human sensibilities. Two things happened in 1492 or thereabouts of major significance: The first and most obvious was that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. And Columbus begins his diary with the observation that in the same month that he was given the order to undertake his journey, Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued the order that all Jews be driven from their kingdom and its territories.

In the first, it might be said, the Christians of Europe were no longer content to stay at home. In short time, Protestantism would awaken across the continent and with it came, in Max Weber’s famous title, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Christianity would find an aggressive new personality. It would change everything in the world, and what better symbol of this restless “unsatisfied Soul” — using Walt Whitman’s phrase — to conquest and expansion could there be than Columbus’s journey? America would follow as if compelled, Whitman would write, to India, to Jupiter and beyond.

And the Sephardic Jews of Spain were forced to find a new future. They journeyed to Venice, and across the Mediterranean. In time, a new era of anti-Semitism would arise throughout Europe and particularly in Germany, Austria and France where Jews had entered the highest ranks, coming to crescendo in the Dreyfus Affair in 1894. From there, Theodor Herzl began a consideration of returning to Israel and a new vision of Zionism would awaken. The expulsion of Jews from Spain would begin a long, historic journey that would end in aliyah, or “return” to the Holy Land.

Several years ago, Moshe Feiglin, an Israeli folk figure and former Knesset member, made the observation that today, there are more Jews living in Israel than there are outside of Israel. He made this fateful claim: “The exile is over.”

And if the blood moons today have any long-term meaning as they did in 1492, may I apologetically suggest as a non-Jew this: Israel is today a state and always will be for as long as the rest of us are here in time and it will not yield in an apocalypse. It will prosper. That historic and perhaps cosmic transformation is being marked this year by dangerous, nervous, but determined interest in Temple Mount, and the celebration of Temple Mount will mark journey’s end and a new beginning.

But what about us, here in America? Possibly we have met journey’s end as well. It may be sensed in an article by Joseph Stiglitz in January this year in Vanity Fair titled “The Chinese Century,” cleverly illustrated with a fat, contented panda eating bamboo and sitting on an eagle:

When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever.

Forever: That is what the visit of the president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, to Washington is about. If Stiglitz is right and many think he is, China’s rise to dominance will change us as much as Columbus’s journey did: change us forever.

We have been to India and Africa as Whitman predicted, to the stars and beyond. Coming home will be a very good thing, he writes in his great vision, for then “The true Son of God shall come, singing his songs.”

Which is not all that far from what the mountain radio preachers in Appalachia were saying back there before the turn of the millennium.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.