AvivaStef

John: Can you?

You know, when Theodore Herzl held the Zionist Convention in the late 1800s he was expecting a lot of like-minded people to join. Those who wanted a culture, some sort of state where Jews can be model citizens (like they are) and not get persecuted like the whole Dreyfus Affair of 1894-1904. But what he got instead was a bunch of Eastern European Rabbis. Why? Because in Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus) they Jews didn’t have any fear of assimilation like in the West because everyone in the East was dirt poor. No. The rabbis came to show their support for the Zionist movement so that their people wouldn’t literally be cowering in their houses. Antisemitism in the East wasn’t about defamation or newspaper articles, it was pogroms. Murder sprees and real violence.

The worst pogrom being the Kishinev Massacre in 1903. The Zionist movement was never about colonizing it was “oh! Having our own land might be good so then our neighbors won’t fucking kill us when they feel bored!” In the beginning it wasn’t even about the area of Palestine! They were going to take a part of Uganda! (Now some part of Kenya)

The British offered Uganda to Herzl after the Pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 because they felt slightly “bad” about the horror of the situation. When Herzl proposed it at the Zionist Congress, a lot of people (mostly rabbanim from Eastern Europe who had just underwent this tragedy) agreed to take Uganda as a temporary solution. They wanted somewhere to act as a sanction so something like what happened in Kishinev wouldn’t happen again. BUT a man named Asher Ginsberg an anti-religious Jew, was very into “Judaism as a culture should be in their land” thus prompting the whole Palestinian region. But there were many people who were all for Uganda to act as a temporary haven for Jews so they won’t be slaughtered. They didn’t take it, obviously, and forty years later two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was murdered.

Happens to be, Jews were migrating to the Middle East in the later 1880s after the pogroms of 1881-1883 in Russia under the “organization” (C)Hovivei Tzion and there were plenty of Jews in the Old Yishuv but the whole “Jewish State” thing that Herzl wanted was for the protection of the Jews. And at the time that Uganda was offered, many people were willing to take it if it weren’t for the more secular, cultural, anti-religious view that took over causing many rabbis to leave the movement.

So all those people saying “ZiOniSm wAs FoRmEd To gET rID of tHe PaleStIniAns” is wrong and bigoted. It was never about the Palestinians, it was always about the safety of the Jewish people because we were never safe. No matter how integrated into society we are. No matter how well off. No matter how well behaved citizens we are, if we are Jewish, we deserve to die. Hitler taught us that. He taught us that every Jew is a Jew no matter if his family converted to Christianity four generations before. Jews will always be hated and persecuted and punished.

But you know? Rav Naftli Zvi Yehuda Berlin (נצי״ב) says something really interesting on the words of the Haggadah ״והיא שעמדה״ the question goes what’s the “והיא” what is the “this”

The Netziv brings down the words God promised Avraham ״כי גר יהיה זרעך בארץ לא להם…וגם את הגוי אשר יעבידו דן אנוכי״ the Netziv says that the promise that we will always be strangers and never be completely able to assimilate into whatever land we are in is the promise that stood for us. Because, when we realize how much we can’t rely on the goyim or the country around us we are reminded that only God can help, and we call out and He does help. (This whole thing got away from me but I learned this in class recently and it really stuck with me anyway back to my point)

THE STATE OF ISRAEL WAS ESTABLISHED TO BE A SAFETY NET FOR JEWS AFTER THE HORRORS AND ATROCITIES OF NAZI OCCUPIED EUROPE BUT THE IDEA OF A JEWISH STATE STARTED WAY BEFORE THEN BUT FOR THE SAME REASON—SAFETY. IT WAS NEVER ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS. THERE WAS NEVER AN INTENTION TO KICK OUT THE PALESTINIANS! WE JUST WANTED A PLACE WHERE WE CAN LIVE LIFE WITHOUT THE FEAR OF SOMEONE SHOOTING US JUST BECAUSE WE EXIST.

I got all this love in me and no one to tell

God, just fuckin' kiss me, I don't want no one else

Both novels are primarily survival stories centered on extreme isolation. A man is stranded in an environment that is inherently hostile to human life and is forced to reconstruct civilization from scraps through creativity, effort, and persistent routines. Crusoe recovers tools from a shipwreck; Mark Watney takes stock of NASA equipment. Crusoe domesticates an island; Watney grows potatoes on Mars, one at a time. In both stories, survival becomes less an adventure than a prolonged exercise in systems: keeping track of supplies, solving practical issues, recording procedures, and turning disorder into order.

What makes the comparison interesting is how clearly the ideological differences reveal the values of the societies that produced them.

Robinson Crusoe is deeply shaped by Protestant individualism, early capitalism, and colonial ideology. Crusoe’s first instinct upon isolation is ownership. He catalogs, measures, organizes, and transforms the island into property. Nature exists to be subdued, categorized, and made productive. The novel treats labor as spiritually meaningful; Crusoe’s survival is repeatedly tied to providence, repentance, and divine order. Isolation becomes almost a moral condition through which he rebuilds both himself and a miniature version of European civilization. His practical intelligence is framed as evidence of moral worth, but that intelligence is inseparable from imperial logic.

The Martian, meanwhile, largely secularizes that framework. Watney survives not through fate but through scientific knowledge, institutional expertise, and collaborative systems. Even when he is physically alone, he is never conceptually isolated in the way Crusoe is. His survival depends on centuries of accumulated science and eventually on global cooperation. Where Crusoe embodies the fantasy of the self-made man, Watney represents the idea that humanity’s technological systems are collectively resilient enough to overcome disaster. Modernity itself accompanies him onto Mars.

The two novels also differ in how they portray “frontiers.” Crusoe’s island becomes colonial territory almost immediately; the narrative assumes his right to possess, organize, rename, and rule it. Mars in The Martian functions less as conquered land than as an engineering problem. The language of exploration remains, but the emphasis shifts from control to adaptation.

There’s also a major tonal contrast. Crusoe views isolation spiritually; the island becomes a place of repentance and a sign of divine intervention. Watney sees isolation scientifically. Problems exist to be solved through chemistry, botany, math, and engineering. Crusoe survives through faith reinforced by work; Watney survives through work that effectively replaces faith.

And yet, both novels are ultimately focused on the same fantasy: that human rationality can bring order to chaos. Both protagonists deal with isolation through routine, measurement, documentation, and labor. Survival becomes a process. Heroism turns bureaucratic. Keep track of supplies. Solve the next problem. Maintain the system. Survive one more day.

Which is probably why both books are strangely comforting despite being about extreme isolation. They turn survival into something orderly and easy to understand. The stranded man becomes a model of humanity boiled down to its basic tools: thought, work, adaptation, persistence.

Both texts center on a murderer who tries to rationalize violence before being overwhelmed by the impossibility of escaping moral conscience. In Crime and Punishment, this is clearly linked to utilitarianism and the “extraordinary man” theory: Raskolnikov convinces himself that the pawnbroker’s death is justified because she is socially parasitic, insignificant in terms of material worth, and that her removal might ultimately lead to a greater good. The murder becomes a test of whether reason can surpass ethics.

Poe’s narrator adopts a disturbingly similar logic, even though he never states it explicitly in philosophical terms. He repeatedly insists that he loved the old man and had no material motive, which paradoxically strips the victim's social significance. The old man is depicted as isolated, passive, and narratively reduced to the “vulture eye”; his humanity is replaced by abstraction. The suggestion is that his death isn't a true loss to the world beyond the narrator’s personal obsession. In this way, the old man becomes disposable just like Alyona Ivanovna does for Raskolnikov. In both stories, the victim is turned into an ideological issue rather than being seen as a person.

What most strongly links the two texts is that both ultimately reject the idea that murder can be justified through detached logic. Each protagonist tries to turn killing into an act of reason rather than passion, but both are psychologically destroyed by guilt that shows itself as sensory torment: the heartbeat beneath the floorboards, the feverish paranoia and delirium haunting Raskolnikov.

There is also the striking parallel that both protagonists come to believe that everyone around them already knows the truth, despite little concrete evidence against them. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the police remain calm and unsuspecting, but the narrator becomes psychologically unable to interpret their composure as innocence; he projects his own guilt onto them until the imagined heartbeat becomes unbearable. Similarly, Porfiry Petrovich has no definitive proof against Raskolnikov for much of the novel, yet Raskolnikov interprets every conversation, pause, and implication as evidence that he has already been discovered. Their paranoia turns ordinary social interactions into imagined accusations. The police in Poe's story and Porfiry in Dostoevsky thus act less as purely legal figures and more as externalizations of the murderer’s own conscience.

And importantly, both men ultimately confess not because they are definitively caught, but because the psychological pressure becomes intolerable. The punishment in both works manifests internally before it appears externally. Conscience becomes inescapably embodied. The mind itself becomes the site of punishment.

The difference mainly lies in scale. Poe condenses the psychological breakdown into a single intense Gothic monologue, while Dostoevsky expands it into a full philosophical and existential examination of nihilism, utilitarianism, and moral alienation in modern society.

Oikawa talks Hajime into one terrible idea, and Hajime realizes far too late that he’d probably follow him anywhere.

Or: five stages of grief, but all of them are just Hajime being in love with Oikawa.

[Excerpt]

Hajime glances sideways. Oikawa isn’t looking at the turbines anymore. He’s staring upward through the glass, eyes reflecting silver moonlight, mouth slightly parted in quiet awe. And suddenly Hajime understands why people write poetry.

It’s unbearable.

He looks back at the road before Oikawa notices him staring.

They park near the edge of the field, just beyond the obnoxiously large NO TRESPASSING sign Hajime pointed out several times on the drive over.

“Criminal,” Hajime mutters while cutting the engine.

“Adventurer,” Oikawa corrects.

“Future inmate.”

Oikawa laughs as he climbs out of the truck, blanket bundled under one arm. The wind immediately whips through his hair and sends him stumbling sideways with a shriek.

“It’s freezing!”

“You insisted on coming.”

“And you agreed!”

Hajime circles around the truck and drops the tailgate with a metallic clang. “Yeah, yeah.”

They settle into the truck bed shoulder-to-shoulder beneath the blanket. Oikawa kicks his shoes off almost immediately and stretches out dramatically across the blankets like he owns the entire night sky.

For a while, they just sit there.

The world feels strangely distant this far from the city. No traffic. No buzzing lights. Just the rhythmic turning of turbines and the endless stretch of stars overhead.

Oikawa tips his head back. “Told you we’d be able to see some stars.”

Hajime follows his gaze upward despite himself.

Damn.

Maybe Oikawa had been right.