Bomber Mezuzah?
Omigod.
If you happen to be Jewish, you may already have one, but just in case you need a translation, a mezuzah is an ornament for a Jewish front door. It fulfills the demand of the Book of Deuteronomy that we affix God’s word to the door post of our homes. The mezuzah is actually a two-part situation. It includes the case, which is usually decorative, which in turn protects the scroll inside it. The text in question is the very citation that requires the affixing of a mezuzah in the first place, namely short excerpts from Deuteronomy, chapters 5 and 11.
It’s a gorgeous custom, widely observed, so much so that when I pull up to a house and I’m not entirely sure of my destination, I always look for the mezuzah on the door. If it’s there, I’m probably at the home of a congregant who has publicly marked her home appropriately. I love the boldness of the move and the great variety of mezuzot (plural form). The handwritten scroll is always the same, but the cases are a case study in ritual art. The ones at our house are fairly traditional, fashioned from glass or silver or wood. But I’ve seen bronze mezuzot shaped like dolphins and bunny rabbit mezuzot made from clay. That, along with baseball bats and Pez dispensers. My favorites of all are metal casts, taken from doors all over Poland where Jews once lived before the Sho’ah.
What I’ve never seen before are weapons of war, that is cases shaped like knives or guns. It just wouldn’t be right. In fact, it would be all wrong, as if the owner of the home were to advertise his hostility, his willingness to bring harm to his neighbors and his community. It would be the equivalent of creating a Christmas wreath of grenades, or a door knocker make to look like an AK-47. You just wouldn’t want to be that kind of homeowner, the person who would shoot up a school or a hospital.
Unless, of course, you were Benjamin Netanyahu, the questionable Prime Minister of the State of Israel. As you may have heard, on his lrip to America to manipulate Donald Trump, the PM presented a bespoke gift. That, in itself, was not unusual. Neither was the choice of ritual art or sancta. In the Truman House Museum in Independence, MO, there is a Torah scroll presented to the president by David Ben Gurion, in gratitude to Truman for his support for the Jewish State. That’s way better than a mezuzah, which is only part of the Torah.
But Netanyahu’s mezuzah gift was differently special. He commissioned an artist named Yaron Bob to craft a mezuzah case in the form of a B-2 stealth bomber, the same aircraft that delivered bunker busters to Iran. They are now being sold to the masses online. Each one is crafted from shards of ballistic missiles hurled at Israel during the so-called Twelve Day War. And because the original was a gift to Sauron, each one is inset with a golden “Shin," the Hebrew letter that stands in for the name of God. If you were sitting in the cockpit of the B-2 bomber, the Shin would right above you, a blinding emblem of God’s power and care. Of course, it will look perfect mounted on a stand and set among the geegaws on the mantlepiece in the Oval Office.
But wherever it ends up, it will stand for much more. For Trump, the B-2s were an orgiastic pleasure, a projection of American power and dominance. Imagine that you are President Bone Spur and you’ve never held a rifle in your hand. But now, suddenly, you control a piece of hardware with the ability to pulverize everything below it. No matter that it did no such thing and that the Flight of the Bumble B was a bungled piece of business that apparently did little to set back the Iranians. Two months? A year? But it gave Trump and Netanyahu authoritarian bragging rights. That’s a whole lot of bang for a little mezuzah.
But for Netanyahu especially, it represents even more: the corruption of a symbol that has stood for something else: the quiet confidence of a Jewish household announcing its presence to the world at large and taking its place within the orbit of Torah. It is supposed to be one of the markers of shalom bayit, the traditional value of domestic peace. Commissioning Mr. Bob to turn it into the image of a bomber announces the character of the Prime Minister and his government. A half-million Israelis, demonstrating in the streets, know the disturbing nature of the man who leads them. The majority have decided that he has troubled their house.