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To fight God, and to win.

One day, God said to Moses:

“I’ll give you a land of milk and honey, with snowy mountains on top, a shiny desert in the south, olive trees everywhere, and a perfect beach all around it.”

Moses asked: “What’s the catch?”

To which God replied: “Wait ’till you see the neighbours”.

When my Israeli friend Michael told me this joke, I laughed, because apart from being funny, it is true. Living in the Promised Land, in a way, is a daily psychological struggle. Terrorists can strike at any time, shooting you when you are enjoying a stroll on the Tel Avivian tayelet, or sipping an espresso on a terrace.

On the 6th of April 2023, the Iron Dome intercepted 100 missiles fired from Lebanon within 10 minutes. But the technology is not infallible. The missiles it fails to destroy can fall on your house and kill your entire family in the blink of an eye.

The country you call home is being vilified by most media-outlets worldwide, and so are you. You’re the evil Jewish coloniser killing the poor oppressed Arabs. Nearly the entire globe hates you, or at least frowns upon you. One country publicly announces it wants to ‘wipe you off the map’. A genocidal threat not taken seriously by the international community, signing a deal allowing it to enrich expand their uranium capacity to weapen-grade levels, for ‘scientifical research’.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one, right? Well, everyone definitely has an opinion about Israel – the only nation in the world whose right to exist is debated. It is also the only Jewish country in the world, which is precisely the reason its right to exist is so fiercely debated. If it was a Zoroastrian country, nobody would really care. People only care when Jews are involved. This is why the word ‘antizionism’ exists, and the word ‘antinigerianism’ doesn’t, even though humans rights in Nigeria are violated in a manner incomparable to what’s happening in Zion.

In Nigeria (and many other countries in the world, like France) little muslim girls are being cliterectomised. Radical islamists burn down Christian churches and homes, and slaughter the churchgoers and inhabitants. The women and girls are being raped and sold as sex slaves. People barely discuss these horrors, and if they do, the butchers are not being judged loud enough. But when a Palestinian gets killed in a defensive raid from the IDF, people become livid.

People are very selective in their condamnation of violence. They don’t love Palestinians – they envy Jews. If their outrage would truly be aimed at injustice in the world, they would riot at the doors of the embassies of Nigeria. Or Yemen, where pedophilia is legal, and 70-year-old grandfathers marry 10-year-old girls, and do not refrain from consuming the marriage. Or Saudi Arabia, where women are hanged in foorball stadiums because they wore nail polish.

And yet people discuss whether Israel, the only country in the Middle East that is not a dictatorship, where every religion is allowed to be practiced, where Jews and Arabs fight alongside in the Israeli army, where social security, health care and education is available to every citizen, regardsless of their ethnicity or belief, where members of the LGBTQ-community are not thrown off roofs but party with penis-shaped balloons in gay parades, should be allowed to exist.

This article will, however, not elaborate on Israel’s right to exist, but rather on the signification of its name, and how that name is reflective of its fate. As someone who is obsessed with dissecting words, I just had to know the etymological explanation, and why Israel has been named Israel.

The answer is quite surprising. One would think it means something positive, something hopeful, something that reflects the safety Jews feel in the only place on Earth where they are the majority, and are the least likely to be persecuted or discriminated against.

But that is not the case. The word Israel means, ‘he who struggled with God’.

As the story in Genesis, the first book of the Torah, tells us, a man called Yaacov had a dream, or according to Luther, a vision, in which he fought with an angel, who was the personifaction, or materialisation, of God.

Yaacov was also the son of Abraham, and because his twelve sons were the patriarchs of the twelve tribes that would form the people and the nation of Israel, he is also the symbolic father of the nation. It is surprising that this man, who did certainly not embody moral perfection, was chosen by God for such an important destiny. It is even more surprising that God chose to fight him first. But the most surprising is, that Yaacov actually won the fight, and received God’s blessing!

After the fight, God changed his name to Israel, reflecting Yaacov’s past (the fact he fought God) and his future (the founding of the nation of Israel).

If there is one opponent you are likely to lose against, it’s probably an almighty God. The story thus implies that you can engage in a fight with God, and that you even have a chance of defeating Him. What does this all mean?

This strange story, by the way, was depicted by many great painters, like Leloir and Gauguin. Regardless of the question if it really happened or not, it has, like all other stories in the Bible, a metaphorical value, aimed at making the reader understand a certain spiritual Truth. It reflects something that is profoundly true in all of our lives.

Yaacov struggles, and don’t we all? We struggle with a plethora of things: with our friends, our family, our own children, our collegues, our mind, our thoughts. We struggle with ourselves. Struggle is ubiquitous and inevitable, in each human life.

(Humans are not the only creatures to suffer, though. Animals and plants do, as well.)

We struggle because we are trying to cope with life. We are attempting to contend, as the world-reknowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson put so eloquently, with the existential structure of reality. ‘To fight God’ is a metaphorical way of saying life is a battle – sometimes, a really harsh one – and, just like Yaacov suffered when the angel dislocated his hip, life will make you suffer. It’s a guarantee.

It sounds really pessimistic, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, because we struggle with a purpose, and that purpose is growth. ‘No pain, no gain’ is as valid in the material as in the immaterial realm. We suffer, but the good news is, we can rebel against the suffering, and overcome it, even if we are wounded. By taking responsibility, and understanding that we might be the cause of our own suffering.

We can be the victor of our own struggle, like a little plant that struggles its way through the dark Earth, but that keeps on growing until it finally breaks through the surface and reaches the sunlight.

The pain of lifting weights makes our muscles grow. The pain of life makes our soul grow.

The Jewish people have always suffered immensely: from the medieval inquisition, the pogroms in North Africa, the Shoah, the gulags of Stalin, to the current terror attacks in Israel, and the omnipresent anti-Semitism that stubbornly persists until today. They were not the only ones to suffer – all humans did, and still do. But it cannot be denied that the Jew has often been the first scapegoat, the first to blame for collective misfortunes of humanity.

The name Israel thus reflects the Jewish fate, but also the human condition – to struggle. But despite the tragedy the name contains, it also implies that, just like the outcome of Yaacov’s story, we can prevail. Israel, in that sense, means spiritual fulfillment – a state we are all able to attain, just like Yaacov. If only we are courageous enough to fight.

1,160 replies on “To fight God, and to win.”

Excellent article. Israel will continue to suffer but it is only a matter of time when they realize who their true Messiah is. When they as a Nation will look upon him whom they have pierced and say Blessed is he that comes in the Name of the Lord, only then all Israel will be saved. These days are not far off, it nearing. Israel as a Nation needs to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ their true Messiah. If you declare with your mouth “Jesus (Yeshua) is Lord” and believe in your Heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. Romans. 10: 9

Thank you for your reply. Let’s not forget that the first Christians were Jews, that it was Jews who wrote the entire New Testimony and spread Christianity all over the world, starting with Paul, and that it was Jews who initially died as martyrs for believing in Christ.

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“I’ll give you a land of milk and honey, with snowy mountains on top, a shiny desert in the south, olive trees everywhere, and a perfect beach all around it.” Moses asked: “What’s the catch?”

To which God replied: “Wait ’till you see the people who are living there”.

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Time is often called the soul of motion, the great measure of change, but what if it is merely an illusion? What if we are not moving forward but simply circling the same points, like the smoke from a burning fire, curling back onto itself, repeating patterns we fail to recognize? Maybe the past and future are just two sides of the same moment, and all we ever have is now.

The potential within all things is a mystery that fascinates me endlessly. A tiny seed already contains within it the entire blueprint of a towering tree, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Does the seed know what it will become? Do we? Or are we all simply waiting for the right conditions to awaken into what we have always been destined to be?

If everything in this universe has a cause, then surely the cause of my hunger must be the divine order of things aligning to guide me toward the ultimate pleasure of a well-timed meal. Could it be that desire itself is a cosmic signal, a way for nature to communicate with us, pushing us toward the fulfillment of our potential? Perhaps the true philosopher is not the one who ignores his desires, but the one who understands their deeper meaning.

Even the gods, if they exist, must laugh from time to time. Perhaps what we call tragedy is merely comedy from a higher perspective, a joke we are too caught up in to understand. Maybe the wisest among us are not the ones who take life the most seriously, but those who can laugh at its absurdity and find joy even in the darkest moments.

Time is often called the soul of motion, the great measure of change, but what if it is merely an illusion? What if we are not moving forward but simply circling the same points, like the smoke from a burning fire, curling back onto itself, repeating patterns we fail to recognize? Maybe the past and future are just two sides of the same moment, and all we ever have is now.

The cosmos is said to be an ordered place, ruled by laws and principles, yet within that order exists chaos, unpredictability, and the unexpected. Perhaps true balance is not about eliminating chaos but embracing it, learning to see the beauty in disorder, the harmony within the unpredictable. Maybe to truly understand the universe, we must stop trying to control it and simply become one with its rhythm.

Friendship, some say, is a single soul residing in two bodies, but why limit it to two? What if friendship is more like a great, endless web, where each connection strengthens the whole? Maybe we are not separate beings at all, but parts of one vast consciousness, reaching out through the illusion of individuality to recognize itself in another.

The essence of existence is like smoke, always shifting, always changing, yet somehow always present. It moves with the wind of thought, expanding and contracting, never quite settling but never truly disappearing. Perhaps to exist is simply to flow, to let oneself be carried by the great current of being without resistance.

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