Ben-Hur

By 2026, the world hardly needed any convincing regarding the strident zeal for endless vengeance in the Middle East, given the genocide still occurring in Gaza against the Palestinian people. In 1945, the world had needed no convincing on just how severe, and at what tremendous scale, state-sponsored (and engineered) hatred against a people deemed “subhuman” could be. The 1959 film-version of Ben-Hur is saturated with the desire for vengeance, with the antipodal motive of forgiveness only being shown as  a more powerful, and thus stronger, phenomenon at the end of the film when Judah Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are spontaneously cured of leprosy at the very moment in which Jesus dies on the Cross. Only in aiding Jesus with water on his arduous way to the Cross does the Jewish man, Judah, realize the value of the suffering man’s righteous, unmerited suffering, especially relative to the value of even satisfied vengeance. At the moment of his death, Jesus, freed of a mortal body, cures the two women as a result of Judah’s change of heart. The message is that forgiveness wins over resentment and vengeance from a spiritual standpoint.

The full essay is at "Ben-Hur."

Nuremberg

It is said that history is written by the victors. The film, Nuremberg (2025), bears that out. Even though Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi trial, compromises its integrity and thus breaches due process by pressuring Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist assigned to the Nazi prisoners (most notably Goring), to obtain and pass on the defense’s strategy to Jackson, which Kelley does, the trial is presented nonetheless as legitimate and the Nazi prisoners as even deserving an unfair trial. Nevertheless, nations governed by the rule of law are never justified in putting on corrupt trials, or skewing them to push a particular ideology. The film itself is skewed to highlight the Nazi crimes against the Jews at the expense of delving more into the distinctly war crimes even though those crimes were just as important in the charges in the actual trial.

The full essay is at "Nuremberg."

The Aryan Couple

The matter of group-identity is salient in the film, The Aryan Couple (2004), which actually centers around two couples: Joseph and Rachel Krauzenberg, and Hans and Ingrid Vassman. The Krauzenbergs contract with Himmler, the man whom in Nazi Germany was tasked with riding the Reich of its Jewish population, to exchange the Krauzenbergs’ asset-rich and sprawling conglomerate for safe passage of the entire Krauzenberg family out of Germany to Palestine instead of being sent to a concentration camp. Joseph and Rachel are Germans, and yet, quite artificially, they refer to Germans in the third person, and to themselves as Jews. It is precisely this error that I submit may have contributed historically to the ostracism of the Jews in Germany even before Hitler’s rise to power, hence contributing to setting the stage for a final, horrific solution. Film can thus be used to widen people’s thinking on historical and political events, and thus play a deeper role than merely to entertain.

The full essay is at "The Aryan Couple."

Maimonides on Netanyahu

On August 5, 2025, Israel’s prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he “hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly 22-month war.”[1] Roughly thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of 2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity, whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.

The full essay is at "Maimonides on Netanyahu."

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1. Julia Frankel and Wafaa Shurafa, “Netanyahu Hints at Expanded War in Gaza but Former Israeli Military and Spy Chiefs Object,” The Associated Press, August 5, 2025.

Passive Aggression on Campus: Redefining Hate-Speech

Besides using social pressure and anger to purge words that a student or faculty member deems unacceptable, the word police have found that they can get objectionable opinions criminalized. This runs 180 degrees from the sort of openness to different, even objectionable ideas that makes a college campus thrive with an academic rather than passive-aggressive atmosphere. Sometimes, getting the law to go against a pollical opinion that a fallible person deems to be intolerable can show just how dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary the criminalizing of ideas can be. Here I have in mind the case of Marianne Hirsh, a genocide scholar at Columbia University. It is a sign of going too far that political corrective would be weaponized with criminal punishments that such a scholar, whose parents had died in the Nazi Holocaust, would think that she would have to teach at another university to be able to continue teaching material from the notable twentieth-century scholar, Hannah Arendt, who wrote on the banality of evil in that Holocaust (and, were she still alive in the next century, would probably also write of the Gaza Holocaust in such terms). Behind political correctness is the arrogance and related intolerance that stem from the sin of self-idolatry: taking oneself to be omniscient and omnipotent (but not omnibenevolent).

The full essay is at "Passive Aggression on Campus."

A Fortunate Man

Religion plays a prominent role in the film, Lykke-Per, or A Fortunate Man (2018). On the surface, Peter Sidenius, a young engineer, must navigate around an old, entrenched government bureaucrat to secure approval for his ambitious renewable-energy project. The two men clash, which reflects more general tension that exists everywhere between progressives and conservatives regarding economic, social, religious, and political change. Although pride may be the ruin of Peter and his project, the role played by religion is much greater than pride manifesting as arrogance, if indeed it is arrogant to stand up to abuse of power, whether by a government bureaucrat or one’s own father.

The full essay is at "A Fortunate Man."

Worse than Hell on Earth: Gaza

Each of us is so close to human nature that our perception of it may be blurry or partial. One of Freud’s contributions is the insight that we don’t even know ourselves completely, given the existence of the subconscious. This is also true of trying to comprehend human nature at a distance, as whether humanity is or is not by nature compassionate to people who are suffering greatly at a distance. The sheer duration of the extreme suffering of civilians in Ukraine and Gaza in the midst of ongoing military attacks by Russia and Israel, respectively, beginning in the early 2020s, and the sheer impunity absent any interventionist coalitions of countries from around the world combine to give a negative verdict on human nature concerning compassion from a distance. It can even be said that the ongoing passive complicity around the world impugns not only us, but human nature itself. While less explicit than in furnishing weapons to Russia or Israel, the complicity of human nature is more serious, for even as geopolitics change, human nature is static, at least in a non-evolutionary timespan. Given the extreme suffering in Gaza in particular, the lack of political will around the world to step in militarily and assume control of Gaza may mean that human nature itself is worse than hell on earth.

The full essay is at "Worse than Hell on Earth."

Political religion: Hitler Youth

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

The full essay is at "Political Religion."

Comparative Devotionalism: Hinduism and Christianity

I suspect that many people would feel very uncomfortable watching a religious person express devotional love to that person’s chosen deity in a very emotional and effusive manner. The sheer emotional intensity amid the dancing and chanting in a Hare Krishna temple can be daunting to a visitor. The phenomenon of what in Hinduism is called bhukti is hardly rare, and this begs the question of whether there is a human instinctual urge to feel and express even lifelong loving devotion to an entity that is not based in the created realm and thus cannot be realized and instantiated as another human being can be and is. Whether there is a phenomenon that is human, thus beyond the manifestations in various religions can go a long way in answering the question of whether an innate instinctual urge exists, even if it is more pressing in some people than in others. Some people, for instance, work their whole life in business, while other business practitioners reach a certain point in years when they “check out,” and head to a divinity school or seminary. Still other people assume religious vocations as young adults and spend the rest of their life ministering to people and officiating at religious rituals. Some people spend their entire life without feeling devotional love directed to a deity, while other people, such as the Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna, are utterly consumed by the inward fire of religious devotion. Was Ramakrishna’s devotion different in kind from a Christian’s intense love of Jesus, or is there what can be termed a human bhakti phenomenon, and if so, is it capable of breaking down religious barriers that can excite animosity and even hatred?

The full essay is at "Comparative Devotionalism."

Farha

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, being in the wake of the Nazi atrocities, was arguably viewed generally then as something that the world owed to the Jewish people. Perhaps for this reason, the UN did not take adequate measures on the ground to safeguard the Palestinian residents. In retrospect, the possibility, even likelihood, that people who group-identify with (or even as) victims consciously decide to become victimizers should have been better considered. The film, Farha, made in 2021, illustrates the sheer indeterminacy, and thus arbitrariness, of human volition when it issues orders to the body to be violent against other rational beings. Channeling Kant, it can be argued that the decision to shoot a family that poses absolutely no threat impurely out of hatred based on group-identity fails even to treat other rational beings as means—to say nothing of as ends in themselves. The deplorability in being unwilling even to use another person as a means to some selfish goal, preferring instead to kill rather than respect the otherness of the other, grounds the verdict on the culprit as a being that is less than nothing. In another film, The Brutalist (2024), Laszio, the Jewish protagonist, erroneously concludes that Jews must surely be less than nothing, given how they were treated in Nazi Germany, but also how he and other Jews are regarded in Pennsylvania, especially considering that news of the Holocaust has reached America. Whether raw brutality or silent, passive-aggressive prejudice is suffered, turning one’s own victimhood, or, even worse, that of one's abstract group, into victimizing is ethically wrong. Such lashing out in retribution, or, even worse, in disproportionate vengeance, fails to treat other rational beings as ends in themselves, and even as means for one's own future use. Such cycles have a beginning, one of which  Farha captures very well at an interpersonal level. At that level, group-identity seems especially artificial, even as it explains the visible hatred to casual observers such as film-viewers.

The full essay is at "Farha." 

The Brutalist

It is easy to conclude that Adrien Brody “steals the show” in his depiction of Laszio Toth in The Brutalist (2024), a film about a Jewish architect (and his wife and niece) who emigrates to Pennsylvania from Hungary after World War II. As I was stretching my legs after watching the very long yet captivating film in a theater, a woman doing the same declared to me that Adrien Brody had definitively stolen the show. I wasn’t quite sure, though I perceived Guy Pearce’s acting out Harrison Van Buren to be emotionally fake, even forced. In understanding the film, it is vital to go beyond the obvious characters (and actors) to acknowledge the roles of two silent yet very present characters as definitive for the meaning of the film. Before revealing those characters, the proverbial elephant in the room must be discussed: Being Jewish even in the modern, “progress”-oriented world.

The full essay is at "The Brutalist."

On God’s Holiness and Mystery in Judaism

In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e., anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories). Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of eternity.

The full essay is at "Holiness and  Mystery of God in Judaism."

Hinduism and Judaism on Deities and Transcendence

A basic tenet of the Advaita (non-dualist) Hindu philosophy of Shankara holds, “If saguna points to brahman’s immanence, nirguna points to brahman’s transcendence. . . . superiority should not be accorded to the nirguna mode of discourse.”[1] Being a non-dualist, Shankara held that brahman is one, since reality or existence is unitary, and thus brahman as existence and reality of all is indivisible ontologically. Applying David Hume’s separability thesis from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the distinction between nirguna and saguna can be understood as one made only by human reason, which does not mean that nirguna and saguna are separate entities. In short, we make the distinction; it does not belong to brahman itself. Lest it be thought that nirguna brahman has no analogue in Western philosophy of religion, we need only bring in Spinoza, whose nirguna-like God is so different from the saguna-comparable Abrahamic personal deity that both Judaism and Christianity banished his texts; Judaism excommunicated him. The tremendous qualitative difference between saguna and nirguna brahman can be useful to anyone trying to understand why Judaism excommunicated Spinoza, which is not my task here. Rather, taking nirguna brahman as reality or existence of everything, which, like Spinoza’s notion of God, itself has awareness, I want to stress both how much this differs in kind (i.e., qualitatively) from both Hindu deities and the Abrahamic deity, and the more fundamental point that brahman is One. In spite of the qualitative difference, keeping the Hindu concept of nirguna brahman in mind while thinking about the personal deities that are consistent with saguna brahman is useful.

The full essay is at "Hinduism and Judaism on Deities."

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1. Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 90.

Religion, Ethics, and Psychology: Three Distinct Domains

Compassion is so salient in so many religions that it is natural to assume that religious conduct is moral, which is to say that it issues in ethical conduct. Yet, as Kierkegaard emphasizes in Fear and Trembling, the divine decree that Abraham receives in the Book of Genesis translates into murder on the (universally accessible) level of ethics. In being almost going through with sacrificing his only son, Isaac, Abraham is guilty of attempted murder, which is unethical. Abraham’s faith in the validity of the divine decree can thus be distinguished from morality. Unlike ethics, religion is sourced beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotions, and is the domain is thus transcendent even as it is also immanent in the world. Even though ethical principles and faith can dovetail, as in five of the Ten Commandments, it is important that the two domains—morality and religion—are regarded as distinct, and thus with their own distinctive bases and criteria owing to the respective natures of each domain. In his book, A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber attempts a mega-synthesis of many fields of knowledge. Such a broad project carries with it the pitfall of making conjectures that draw on or involve domains of knowledge outside of one’s own. I think the risk of such over-stepping is significant coming from both vantage-points in morality and religion (i.e., ethics and theology) when the two domains are mingled or intertwined without due recognition of how they are sui generis, of their own genus (type). Wilber even conflates a third domain, that of psychology, with those of ethics and religion. I begin by looking at morals and religion in general, holding off psychology until I address Wilber’s theory specifically.

The full essay is at "Religion, Ethics, and Psychology."

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) can be classified superficially as a coming-of-age film, for Hanna, the protagonist, starts out being immaturely contemptuous of her family’s ethnic and religious heritage and current practice. She tries to skip the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. That her aunt Eva had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp makes no difference to Hanna—that is, until she is transported back as her aunt’s cousin (for whom Hanna was named) and experiences the camp herself. Whether she is really transported back in time (and if so, how?) or is merely dreaming is answered in the end but not so blatantly as would insult the viewers’ intelligence. Then again, it’s not every film that has allusions both to theology and The Wizard of Oz. The different ways in which that movie is incorporated and alluded to in this film are actually quite sophisticated in extending the viewers’ sense of synchronicity beyond the film’s narrative.

The full essay is at "The Devil's Arithmetic."

Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren plays Golda Meir in the film." Strange. Normally, a presenter of a film would say, "Helen Mirren plays Golda." I contend that a squalid ideology accounts for the difference. Rather than evincing gratitude that such an excellent actress would play an ugly character (in the film, even Golda herself refers to her feet in a derogatory way), the implication obvious to everyone in the room was that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. How dare an actor play a character of a different background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting (i.e., playing characters who are not like oneself) belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. Did the screenings only include films whose actors were Israelis? Golda herself was Ukrainian. Goren also taught Israeli Identity and Culture, which explains why her knowledge of acting was eclipsed. To Goren, a group-identity that monopolizes a person's self-image trumps the craft of acting. I contend that underlying her false-belief or delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) lies a much larger problem: namely, that of the artificial monopolization of one of several group-identities that apply to a given person and can precipitate an exclusivist ideology alone one axis. Each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is artificial and thus problematic. Resulting ideologies tend to be monopolistic and thus too extreme too. 

The full essay is at "Golda."

Valley of Peace

In Valley of Peace (1956), a Black American pilot and two Slovenian children head towards a valley in which the boy’s uncle lives—a valley of peace. In military terms, the valley has been designated as a “no-man’s” land, which means it is off limits to both the Nazi army and that of the Slovenian partisans.  As such, the peace of the valley is something more down to earth than the Biblical Garden of Eden. Even so, this ideal is a leitmotif in the film. For one thing, the two children repeatedly characterize that valley as not just where the boy’s uncle lives, but also as a utopia. I contend that the film makes a theological statement regarding the fallen world and the Garden of Eden. While only implicit, this statement is still more central to the film than is the significance of the race of the American pilot. I turn first to the fact that the American pilot who survives parachuting from a shot-up plane is Black. 

The full essay is at "Valley of Peace."

The Hebrew Bible on Wealth

The early Hebrews considered wealth to be an integral part of human perfection and, moreover, what ought to be.[1] The ideal man was wealthy and leisured, and yet occupied with honorable work.[2] In the Torah, as long as the Hebrews as a people obey God, including dutifully acting as stewards rather than as selfish exploiters of the land that God has provided, poverty should be nonexistent in Israel. “There need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God.”[3] Blessed wealth is a reward for fidelity to Yahweh, whereas poverty here is indicative of, or even punishment for, disobedience, which will evidently always be the case in Israel, for, “There will always be poor people in the land.”[4] The conditionality leaps off the page, as does the notion of collective justice, and yet wealthy individuals, including business practitioners, are held to account. The ethic of work is upheld even though labor in Genesis is due to original sin, and poverty is eschewed as sin. 

The full essay is at "The Hebrew Bible on Wealth."

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[1]. Charles R. Smith, The Bible Doctrine of Wealth and Work (London: Epworth Press, 1924), 21.

[2]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 22, 33-34.

[3]. Deut. 15:4-5.

[4]. Deut. 15:11.

Film in Biblical Storytelling

For anyone interested in filmmaking, a film that features the internal operations of a film studio—especially one during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood—is likely to be captivating. After all, as Eddie Mannix, the studio executive in Hail, Caesar! (2016), says, the “vast masses of humanity look to pictures for information and uplift and, yes, entertainment.” This film provides all three for its audience on what film-making was like in the studio system. With regards to the Christian theology, however, the result is mixed.  The film makes the point that theological information best comes out indirectly from dramatic dialogue rather than discussion on theology itself. In other words, inserting a theological lecture into a film’s narrative is less effective than an impassioned speech by which entertainment and uplift can carry the information.

The full essay is at "Hail, Caesar!"

Religious Violence as Hypocritical

In the movie, Boy Erased (2018), the director of a church’s conversion therapy program invites the immediate family members of one gay boy to hit him with a bible to drive out the underlying demon. The boy subsequently commits suicide. Lest this notion of using violence to remove a sin in the twenty-first century is assumed to lie in the realm of fiction, John Smyth, an Anglican, was accused in 2017 “of subjecting at least 22 teenage boys to savage beatings in his garden shed” at “an elite Christian camp for boys. His intent was “purging them of perceived sins such as masturbation and pride”[1] A Christian charity group oversaw the camp, yet I contend that the camp was not Christian.

The full essay is at "The Anti-Christian."

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[1] Ceylon Yoginsu, “Doubt Cast on When the Archbishop Knew of Abuse,” The New York Times, October 15, 2017.