Some Thoughts on Pontius Pilate by Aaron Hecht

(Mosaic of Christ before Pilate at the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy)

I am writing this blog in my Jerusalem apartment on the afternoon of what is known as "Good Friday". It is the day on the traditional Church calendar when we remember the crucifixion of Jesus, and this coming Sunday we will mark "Resurrection Sunday" for reasons that I hope the readers of this blog will be familiar with.

Of course, two days ago, on Wednesday, we celebrated the Passover, and like many other fathers, I told my children the story about "why is this night different from all other nights."

MANY, any blogs, vlogs, sermons, essays, and even entire textbooks have been written about all that stuff, and if you're expecting me to write another one, I'm afraid that's not the case. Candidly, I don't think I have anything to say about Palm Sunday, Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday (also known as "Easter" in some circles) that hasn't already been said by many others. Even if I DID have something original to add to the commentary, I don't have a lot of energy to write something like that because Israel is at war and like all the other Israelis, I've been running myself ragged these last few weeks dealing with everything that's associated with being in a country at war.

So, I'm just gonna give you a rather short piece on one of the most important people in the Bible, and that's Pontius Pilate.

Pontius Pilate plays a small, almost accidental and yet vitally important role in the events we're commemorating this week. He is viewed as the villain in the story by Western Christianity, although there is a tradition in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church that this man eventually came to faith in Jesus, repented of crucifying Him and was himself crucified by the Roman authorities as part of their efforts to stamp out the early Church. This is possible, but unlikely.

In any case, there are other historical records about Pontius Pilate outside the New Testament and they don't tell us much, but there's one thing I think these records make very clear. Pontius Pilate was a man who wanted to be remembered after he died. He didn't want to be just another person who is born, lives a rather unremarkable life and then dies, and his own grandchildren barely even know his name, while everyone else has completely forgotten he ever existed at all. That's what happened to the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever been born on this planet, and that's not what Pontius Pilate wanted for himself.

The fact is, though, for better or for worse, when Pilate died a few years after the events described in the Gospels, he probably thought he'd failed to achieve anything in his life that would be long remembered.

I wonder what he would have thought if he could have known that his name would be spoken thousands of years later all over the world, by citizens of countries that didn't even exist in his time, speaking in languages that didn't even exist in his time. His name would be printed in millions of copies of a Book that had not yet been completely written on the day he died, and it would be all because of an incident that he probably thought at the time was literally "just another day at the office."

You see, brothers and sisters, Pontius Pilate probably ordered hundreds of crucifixions during his career. As he spent many years in the Roman Army he probably killed people with his own hands, in face-to-face combat. He also did things that were of some benefit to the people of Judea and Jerusalem, including supervising the construction of public works that improved the quality of life for everyone. He did many things in his life. Some were good, others were bad, but most were neither.

In this, Pontius Pilate was a great deal like you and me.

The few hours Pontius Pilate spent crossing paths with Jesus Christ were the most important few hours of Pontius Pilate's life. They are the reason people are still talking about him 2,000 years later.

But as they were occurring, he probably had no idea anything unusual was going on. It was, as I said before, "just another day at the office" for a Roman procurator, not much different than the day before or the day after or a thousand days on either side of it going back into the past or stretching into the future.

In fact, as Pontius Pilate was on his deathbed, with the last few minutes of his life ticking away, I doubt he even remembered those few hours he'd crossed paths with Jesus Christ, and I'm sure he would have been very surprised to hear that anyone else remembered it.

There's a couple of different takeaways from this.

First, there are several other people mentioned in the Bible that played a very small, almost accidental but vitally important role in the plans and purposes of God. They are mentioned briefly in the Bible, usually because of their interactions with people who play a much larger role in the story. These include Potiphar, Eli, Nathan, and many others. I have always had a particular fascination with Eli, because he was a man who probably thought the work he was doing for God was really important, but the fact is that the only reason we ever even hear about Eli is that he was a mentor to Samuel, whose role in God's plans and purposes was much more significant. Whenever I see a person who thinks themselves to be really important, I always remember Eli, and that includes any time I catch myself thinking that I'm kind of important. Like Eli, or Potiphar, I might be just a small player in a much bigger drama in which I'm definitely not the big star. My only reason for even being included in God's plans and purposes is just to teach someone else something important that they'll need to do their part.

Getting back to Pontius Pilate, the other takeaway I want to leave you with is that there are no unimportant encounters with Jesus Christ, and there are also no unimportant encounters with the Body of Christ, which is His Church.

As I often have occasion to remind people, every single one of us is either part of the reason things are getting better or we're part of the reason things are getting worse. Cultivating the awareness that Jesus Christ cares DEEPLY for His Church has helped me in my own efforts to be part of the reason things are getting better instead of being part of the reason things are getting worse.

That's something to keep in mind on Resurrection Sunday, during Passover, and all throughout the year.

That's what I've got for you this week, brothers and sisters. I hope it blessed someone.

Some Thoughts after two weeks of war with Iran by Aaron Hecht

An Iranian missile intercepted in the sky over Jerusalem (Photo taken by the author)

Author's note: The first segment of this blog will include my personal story about what I've been experiencing in the last two weeks. The second segment will include more general thoughts about the situation while the third segment includes my thoughts on what is likely to happen next. Readers should feel free to read the segments they're interested in and skip what they're not interested in.

Segment 1, my personal story.

As I'm sitting here writing this in my Jerusalem apartment, it's been almost 16 hours since we had an alert for incoming missiles. Over the last two weeks, we've had an average of 2 per day, and they've come at all hours of the day and night. Our friends in Tel Aviv are getting many more alerts then we are, and we see reports on the news that in some communities, people have basically moved into neighborhood shelters and even the subway system in Tel Aviv, setting up cots and tents, organizing makeshift schools for children, trying to work remotely if they can and otherwise doing their best to cope.

I'm very grateful that my life has not been disrupted to anything even remotely close to this degree. I've been working remotely from home for almost three years now, so that part of my life has barely changed at all. My wife is also able to work from home, but she goes into her office, which is a short walk away, frequently.

My children are home, doing "distance learning" just like in the bad old days of COVID. For my older son, it kind of makes sense, and he's making the most of it. But my younger son is in a stage of his education when most of what he's supposed to be learning is about how to be with other people in a social setting, how to communicate, how to work together in a group, etc. It's almost impossible to learn that kind of stuff through Zoom. I'm giving both of my sons extra reading to do and trying to find other ways to help them learn useful things, but the undeniable fact is that none of this is a substitute (no pun intended) for being in their regular schools with their teachers and all their little friends. I can only hope that this will not set them back too much.

Needless to say, our wonderful little dog also works from home, and as Snoopy once said, "being a dog is a full-time job."

It's literally true in our dog's case. Her presence in our home, and in the bomb shelter when we need to go down there, has the effect of cheering everyone up, which is badly needed. Some of the other dads who live in our building told me that they are grateful because their children love to pet our dog when we're down in the shelter and it makes them forget to be scared or upset. My hope is that this will help them emerge from this unhappy season without being traumatized. So far, no one is having nightmares or any other tell-tale signs of anxiety, so that's a good start.

It also helps that, as far as I know, there have not been any direct missile impacts here in Jerusalem, but debris from intercepted missiles has fallen here. A few days ago, some shrapnel fell in the parking lot of an apartment building just around the corner from us, causing some superficial damage to the car of someone I know who lives there. That's as close as I've come to being personally impacted, but of course, there are many indirect and less personal impacts on my life because of this war.

Our apartment building is old, and there's some graffiti someone scribbled on the door to the shelter, which includes a date from the summer of 1972. Little, if any, maintenance has been done on the shelter since then. There are old light fixtures but they don't work, so every time we go down there we have to bring flashlights. It's also quite cold down there, especially if the alert comes in the middle of the night, so I put a couple of blankets down there for my wife and children to wrap themselves up in. Other people saw me do that and started doing the same. 

I also put other stuff down there, including the 10-liter water cooler I used to take on camping trips in happier times. Fear has a way of drying out one's mouth, and we've gone through three tubes' worth of disposable paper cups in the past two weeks and I've refilled the cooler twice.

My landlord, who owns three apartments in our building, bought a really good first aid kit to put down there, but so far, there's only been a few people who sprained their ankle or had a minor cut on their hands as they rushed to get down into the shelter.

There are grocery and hardware stores within walking distance of our apartment, so we are able to keep ourselves supplied without too much risk. The farthest I've been away from our apartment in the last two weeks is a nearby park, where I take the dog so she can run around a little bit. There is a public shelter near the park, so if there's an alert while we're there, we'll have a safe place to go. Our kehillah has been providing zoom meetings for the regular shabbat service as well as during the week for prayer meetings and children's activities. Once again, this reminds us of the bad old days of COVID, but unlike then, we can look forward to the likelihood of a return to our normal routine in the near-term future.

All in all, for my family and me, it's been an unpleasant but not terrible couple of weeks. If the war ends before the end of March, we'll probably be able to put this behind us and forge ahead without too much trouble and very little damage to our lives overall. But I think there are good reasons to believe that this war won't end before the end of March, and none of us will emerge from it unscathed. I'll talk about why in the second segment.

A US Air Force B-52 Strategic bomber prepares to take off in support of Operation Epic Fury (Photo credit US Department of War) 

Segment 2, my thoughts on the general situation regarding Israel and the war with Iran's Ayatollah regime

One of the things that this war has highlighted, which we kind of already knew, is that there are many people in the United States whose hatred and contempt for President Trump is more important to them than every other consideration and every other issue. Many others hate Israel so much that it overrides every other consideration and every other issue. These people WANT this war to be a strategic debacle, which they can blame President Trump and Israel for. So even if it's a strategic success, they'll insist on talking about the ways it was less than fully successful, the mistakes, setbacks, casualties, and problems that have been encountered, as if that's all that anyone should be paying any attention to.

Many other people don't necessarily have any strong feelings one way or the other about the success of failure of this war. They are simply suffering from catastrophic levels of what my British friends would call "bloody-mindedness." They're confused, anxious, frustrated, and angry, and they're looking for someone to blame or even someone to lash out at.

The massive rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the US, Europe, and elsewhere is a symptom of this phenomenon, and I am quite certain it will only increase and accelerate going forward.

There are no rational reasons for this. It is a manifestation in the natural realm of a battle in the spiritual realm. This is a good place to remember something that my favorite Bible teacher, Derek Prince, once said, that "the kingdom of Satan is a kingdom of darkness, and many of the people who are in it, or who serve it, are unaware of it."

Another observation I'd like to add to what Derek Prince said is that in the Book of Daniel, we're given a peak into the spiritual realm, specifically in chapter 10, verses 12-14; Then he said to me, “Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I have come because of your words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days; and behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I had been left alone there with the kings of Persia. Now I have come to make you understand what will happen to your people in the latter days, for the vision refers to many days yet to come.”

So, we should always remember that the demonic "Prince of the kingdom of Persia" is a supernatural being who REALLY has his act together, so much so that he can actually slow down and delay an angel sent by God Himself to carry out an assignment in this world. If he can do that, imagine what else he can do. Imagine the power he has to warp the minds of human beings, sow confusion among them and deceive them.

With all this in mind, it can be observed that many people in the community of geostrategic thinkers, analysts, and commentators are professionally, emotionally, and in many cases even financially invested in the idea that Israel is illegitimate. These people take it as an article of faith that any time something is happening which is good for Israel, it's coming at the expense of others. Any time something happens that is bad for Israel, it's because Israel did something to deserve it and/or Israel is engaging in a "false flag" operation in order to gain sympathy so they can do something even worse to someone else.

Additionally, many clergy and scholars in various religious streams are also heavily invested in false doctrines that can be placed under the general heading of "Replacement Theology," which causes them to regard Israel as inherently illegitimate, so no matter what it does or doesn't do, it's always wrong.

Do I even need to mention the legions of social media influencers who have no idea what they're talking about but have massive numbers of followers who have outsourced their thinking to them? Tucker Carlson is the most visible member of this group, and the things he's been saying lately are so bizarre that even President Trump finally appears to have run out of patience with him. But that is unlikely to convince his long-time followers that Tucker isn't telling them the real truth while everyone else is lying to them.

When watching these proceedings, I am often reminded of the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, specifically the detail provided in Mark 14:56; "For many bore false witness against Him, but their testimonies did not agree."

However, in the current situation, there is general agreement among critics of this war against Iran, that Israel convinced President Trump to launch the war against the advice of his own advisors and (obviously) against the best interests of the United States.

There is no direct evidence that this is how it happened. There's not even any particularly good reason to think this is how it happened. 

But because President Trump hasn't given a clear narrative of his own about what happened, and because there have been some confusing and contradictory statements made by some members of his cabinet, many who are predisposed to blame Israel for anything that happens that they don't like, and many others who hate President Trump and want to see him fail even more then they want to see their own country succeed, feel free to make the assumption that this is how it happened.

This has fueled what was already a toxic brew of anti-Semitism on both the political Left and Right, as well as among various religious and philosophical streams, "know-nothing" isolationist sentiment in the United States, economic chaos and uncertainty (which is also being fueled by the advance of AI and many other developments) and a general breakdown of the circumstances that made life for Jewish people safe and fairly comfortable in Western countries for the last couple of generations.

All of that leads into the next segment.

Jewish people making Aliyah to Israel (Photo credit Karen Hayesod)

Segment 3, my thoughts about what is likely to happen next

As the great American baseball player, coach and philosopher Yogi Berra once said, "predictions are hard, especially about the future."

With that important caveat having been put into the record, I need to add another one: I've never claimed to be a prophet.

However, I'm going to make some predictions about what's coming next.

To start off with, this war against Iran has already caused tremendous damage to the flow of hydrocarbons to the global economy. This was inevitable, and it's been cited by many of the war's critics as a reason why President Trump should not have launched this war in the first place. These critics ignore the fact that this day would have come sooner or later, one way or another, and that it was never going to be an easy problem to solve. It would have been even more difficult to solve it if Iran played this card in some future conflict that started on their terms instead of ours. 

Critics and "Monday Morning Quarterbacks" always craft a deceptive narrative, emphasizing the things that support the points they're trying to make while ignoring the points that refute it. It's lame, stupid, and absurd, and so it is easy to dismiss them.

But in this case, we really can't dismiss them, because the difficult economic situation that hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Canada, Western Europe and elsewhere in the world were already feeling even before this war started is about to get much worse. Most of these people don't really have the time, patience or inclination to do a deep dive into all the reasons why this war was necessary; they're just going to look at the fact that their situation is getting more difficult as a result of it, and they're going to be looking for someone to blame. The false narrative that "Israel dragged President Trump into this war" is going to give these people the scapegoat they're looking for, and that's going to lead to a terrible wave of violence against Jewish and Israeli people all over the world. It's already happening, and it's going to get much worse.

I predict that Christian people who are outspoken in their support of Israel are also going to be targeted.

This is going to fuel a massive rise in Aliyah of Jewish people to Israel, and that's going to create an economic boom in Israel, and that's going to prompt all kinds of resentment and anger against Israel and Jewish people because the people who love to hate Israel and the Jews want Israel and the Jews to fail and be miserable. When we're not, it's going to make them even angrier and more resentful. This will cause them to lash out more, which will prompt even more Jewish people to make Aliyah.

Once again, these are manifestations in the natural realm of things going on in the spiritual realm.

If you're still reading at this point, I would urge you to very seriously and diligently pray into the issues I've tried to raise in this blog and if you can do more than pray, please don't waste any more time but get to it, because there's not much time left.

That's what I've got for you this week brothers and sisters. I hope it blessed someone.

Some Thoughts on Purim during a war with Iran by Aaron Hecht

 

If you've followed me for a while, you might remember that I have had a rough time on Purim over the years because I've been caught up in unpleasant events around this time of year. So although I'm not superstitious, every year as the Purim holiday approaches, I always get a little nervous.

This year it turned out that I wasn't nervous enough.

Although we've been watching events develop over the last couple of months, which made the likelihood of this war breaking out more and more likely, there were a few things that made me go to sleep just before midnight on Friday, February 27th, thinking it was unlikely to start in the next few days. This included the news about another round of talks being scheduled on Monday, the docking of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier in Haifa (why start a war when one of the carriers is in port, essentially helpless to do anything but be a target?) and the fact that the IDF Home Front Command hadn't changed the guidelines, which I always figured they'd do at least 18 hours before the balloon going up.

But maybe that was all one of the biggest fake-outs in military history. Or, maybe what has been reported is true, that intelligence picked up on the fact that a meeting was going to be held at the residence of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, involving dozens of regime big shots, and so it was decided that this was an opportunity to decapitate the regime which would be unlikely to be repeated, so it had to be taken. Attacking in the morning, in broad daylight, on Shabbat, is something that the Ayatollahs (and the rest of us) would never see coming, which is exactly why it would work.

Maybe that really is how it went down. I'm quite sure there's more to it than that, but we'll probably never know the whole story.

In any case, the next morning, I was still half asleep when I heard a large number of jets flying. Even in my sleep, I knew this was very unusual, because it was Saturday morning. Part of my half-asleep brain told me to leap out of bed, get dressed, and prepare for possible action. But another part was really enjoying being in bed, under the nice warm covers, and there was no rush. So I took a middle path, slowly waking up, opening my eyes, beginning to swing my legs over the side of the bed, and just then, the sirens wailed, and I knew, in that moment, that the war had begun.

A war against Iran, on Purim.

It's impossible to ignore the symbolism here, and my Facebook feed has been flooded with memes about it. Some of these memes are clever, while others are silly and childish, but nonetheless on point.

There certainly are many candidates for the role of "Haman" in this modern-day Purim story.

The Ayatollah Khamenei himself, who was taken down in the strike on his compound, along with many other senior regime officials, certainly fits the bill. He has been breathing fire for years, declaring over and over again that he was going to lead an effort to destroy Israel. Now he's gone, and Israel is not only still here, it's in much better shape than Iran in every possible way. If there was ever someone who got hanged on the gallows they built for someone else, it was Ayatollah Khamenei.

Tucker Carlson, who has declared this strike on the Ayatollah regime to be "disgusting and evil" for no other reason than because it benefits Israel and he has become obsessed with hatred and contempt for Israel, is another candidate for the role of Haman. No matter how absurd the lies, deceit and gaslighting that guy produces get, he seems to find ways to keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible (in a bad way.) Sooner or later, he's gonna get a taste of his own medicine, and I'm sure he won't like it.

But to be fair to Tucker, he's just doing what almost everyone else is doing these days, driving up his social media profile and feeding the algorithms by being outrageous and inflammatory. If Tucker Carlson stopped caring about the truth a long time ago, and now just wants people to watch his videos, click on his links, etc. so that he can make money off it, then he's just doing what everyone else would like to do if they could.

But on the other hand, maybe he actually believes his own rhetoric. In some ways, that would be much worse, but in the end, it won't make any difference. 

Even if he never gets a taste of his own medicine in this life, the way Khamenei did, someday he'll have to stand before the Throne and give an account for his life, for every word that ever came out of his mouth. I wouldn't trade places with him even if someone offered me ten times the amount of money he's making from his various revenue streams, probably including the money he's being paid by the Moslem Brotherhood fueled regime that rules in Qatar.

On that subject, I can't not comment on the astonishing tsunami of high-octane silly, stupid, ridiculous, idiotic nonsense I hear and see coming out of the so-called "experts" on international relations, geopolitics, and related topics. Almost all of them agree on what a bad idea it was to launch this war, how it's just making a bad situation worse, won't solve anything, etc. They also seem to be almost universally convinced that Iran is ten feet tall and bulletproof, can do enormous damage to Israel, America's position in the Middle East, etc.

The reasons and the reasoning they present to support these galactically absurd arguments would be hilarious if it wasn't for the fact that so many very serious people, who have very important decisions to make, are known to take these "experts" seriously. So, they're likely to make some very bad decisions, which will negatively affect the lives of millions of people, including me.

In any case, as I'm writing this blog on the second evening of this war against Iran, it is astonishing to see some of the things that are happening. It's similar in many ways to the 12 Day War last June, in that my family and I have had to run down to the bomb shelter several times, meeting our neighbors from upstairs. The drowsiness this has caused me to feel because the siren often comes in the middle of the night, sending a jolt of adrenaline into my system and making it hard to get back to sleep even after the all-clear signal comes, is also familiar.

But there's other things that are different, principally the fact that this time it feels like it'll be over more quickly, and this time, it'll end with the regime in Iran being utterly defeated and more than likely removed. I don't think President Trump will impose a ceasefire this time, until the regime has been defeated, not just degraded.

That'll be good, for all kinds of reasons, starting with the fact that it'll make it much easier for Israel to finish the job against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Many other issues will likely get sorted out as well, and once again that will all be to the good.

But the removal of the Ayatollah regime in Iran will also leave the way clear for Israel's other great enemy in this region, the Moslem Brotherhood, to finally come out of the shadows and become our next big problem. As I said before, the Brotherhood has already more or less taken over Qatar, and Turkey is also far down that road. Other countries in the region are also somewhat up for grabs, including Egypt, where the Brotherhood briefly took over in the wake of the Arab Spring and could do so again in the future.

One thing is for sure, my life, and the lives of the other 10 million Israelis, is unlikely to get boring again any time soon.

Happy Purim everyone!