A Toddler with a Hammer

Now if there's one thing we do worse than any other nation,

it is try and manage someone else's affairs.

-Will Rogers

Jerusalem.  Everybody knows it's the capitol of Israel, except for the fact that it probably shouldn't be, for an awful heap of reasons.  The Trump today took another one of his signature dumps in the middle of our collective living room carpet by declaring that we would recognize Jerusalem, instead of Tel Aviv (a perfectly good capitol city city) as the capitol of the nation state of Israel.  I do not doubt that this is the sort of thing that the Donald does to appease a lot of those "evangelicals" who mysteriously support his serial fornication, outright mendacity and shameful braggadocio. See there's this sort of nut-job fringe among the fundamentalist types that subscribes to Zionism, not because they really love the Jewish people or the State of Israel, but because they believe that, somehow someway, the on-going catastrophe that is happening in the Middle East is going to lead to an apocalyptic final struggle between God and the Devil and Jesus is going to come back.

Historically speaking there is a plain in northern Israel near the town of Meggido that, if you look at the lay of the land, is kind of a good spot to stage an all out slobberknocker of a battle for all the marbles, I mean at least if you're fighting with chariots and ranks of spear wielding Philistines.  The place is called Har Meggido, which you can see might be rather conveniently morphed into Armageddon.  If we had only had the good sense to follow the advice of several early church fathers and left the Apocalypse of John out of the canon of the Bible, we might never have noticed that the decisive battle between good and evil is "supposed" to take place in that fragile little finger of land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants.  But because we left all that stuff in there, because we just love riders of the apocalypse and great whores and seven headed dragons (generally dragons improve just about any story), we now have a bunch of people who want to take it literally.  That happens when you let any story sit around long enough.

So now we have a very real problem, the world's two biggest religions and one of the world's most determined ethnic groups now consider Jerusalem to be sacred.  Christians consider Jerusalem sacred because of the Jewishness of Jesus and the fact that he was killed (and resurrected) there.  Muslims have the Dome of the Rock there, which while it's not exactly Mecca is still pretty important to them.  And the Jews, well it is after all David's city, since he kicked out the Jebusites fair and square.  But the thing is, the Jewish claim is only partly about religion, sure they have the temple mount and the western wall and all that, but to conflate political Zionism with religious Judaism does a disservice to Judaism as a faith and I think also to Jewish people as a whole.

Anyway Jerusalem is more complicated than any of us really comprehend, least of all Donald J. Trump, but he gets his advice from sinister types like Mike Pence who is definitely the kind of millennialist nut-job who wants it all to go boom so Jesus can finally take the wheel.  As you probably can guess I do not subscribe to that point of view, but today I'm going to pray for Jerusalem particularly, because we may have just thrown a match on a some gunpowder.