Drawn on April 14, 2024 |
Published from Miami |
What sounds like the set up to a morbid punchline is, in actuality, the chief obstacle of a lingering cataclysmic problem equally as real as it is ignored.
There is a catastrophe unfolding under the blazing beams of the Oriental desert sun. One where a densely tangled religious web chokes the immortal souls of every sinner to have ever graced the surface of planet Earth.
Superseding issues of colony, armament, resources and the likes, the debate over Israel’s place in the Middle East is fundamentally built on a fragmented tale about an orphan who, after having spoken to a hot plant 3500 years ago, was told to meander his way through a desert and pitch his tent on the only patch of land in the region virtually devoid of oil — a condition the Maccabees were all too familiar with. I speak of course of Moses, his burning bush, and the twoscore-year-long journey that could have lasted a lot less time had God thrown in a compass along with the almighty tablets.
Today, a yet borderless state is longitudinally split at the nexus called Qubbat as-Sakhrah (The Dome of the Rock) — an extant Byzantine-Islamic Synamorch (Synagogue-Mosque-Church) that sits like a monolithic three-layered pastry on the line “between” Israel and Palestine. The octagonal shrine’s 7th Century stone base, ceramic blue belt, and gold leaf dome is a tricolor vertical axis mundus that symbolically telegraphs the connection between the underworld, the land of the living, and God. Sounds nice. This trinity, however, immaculately incarnates a more macabre horizontal division between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well; with each of them chasing a revelation.
Like a good joke that writes itself, sometimes a simple cartoon is all you need.
A rabbi, a priest, and an imam walk into a bar…