Last
night I went to another to yet another Jewish event, this time one organised by Young Jami. It was a good party
and I met some people I hadn't seen in a fairly long time other and was talking to
various acquaintances as most of my mates live in Israel and or married. The
women look great and on the surface it should have been a pulling market, but if
you talked to most of them they already had boyfriends. There were a few of us who were single in
fact one of the girls I met there I had seen on Dating Direct, a very good non-Jewish dating website and
on Jdate; you would think looking at her
that she was perfect for some guy. For a
start she is a musician, she is witty and funny, unfortunately she isn't really
my type (but I would not say no to snogging). Even if you do manage to meet a Jewish girl fall in love and have
children. Very few people realise the Jewish community (non Orthodox
mainstream) in this country has the highest divorce rates of any Jewish
community in the World outside America or any community for that matter in
Britain.
The
disasters are easily seen in statistics most people agree that there is a problem
(but most seem to worry more about marrying out!). The problem seems to be its
so hard to marry in! I can give you five or six examples of couples who should
never have got together but only did as they had the same friends. At the same
time people like my friend who is very good looking and should not be single
cannot find anyone. I know four people who have married and within a year they
are signing the divorce papers. The only
one who had lasted more than a year had been was pregnant at the time and
wanted the child to be born in wedlock. It is not only me who is experienced this I talked to a cabbie who
is telling me that he had two friends who had got married a few months later
they had started getting divorced. The
result of all this divorce is that we now have a generation of kids with parents living
in more than one home.
What
if you do find the perfect Jewish girl? Any Jewish man will tell you if he has tried to marry into the Jewish
community you have to get past her friends. If the friends do not like you , you do not have a
hope in hell. I have had four girlfriends in the last two years. Three
non-Jewish and one of them was Jewish. Honestly have to say that the non-Jewish
ones are easier to date than the Jewish one. The only reason I ended the three non-Jewish relationships was that one
went back with her ex-boyfriend the other two moved back home and they lived in
North America. The Jewish ones friends
and family adviser not to carry on the relationship they believed trainee lawyer
was not the real lawyer and I was not financially viable. That's the crap the Jewish men now have to
put up with when trying to meet a Jewish girl. No wonder so many Jewish men are now trying to marry out rather than
stay within a community that they feel that they will never meet a partner.
I
walked around the dance floor I noticed the attractive women I chatted a few
more up and I had a good time but I couldn't help but think the music was not
what most of us were there for and the reality was we weren't getting any...
Here lies the body of Samuel May Who died defending his right of way. He was right, dead right, as he sped along, But he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong!
Recently I heard the news that a friend of mine has been receiving some unbelievably horrible e-mails from his former Rabbi, who I shall call Ben Shlomo. Since I consider myself to be quite close to both parties, it has made me think about what could be motivating Ben Shlomo. Specifically, what is it that people love more than life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, sex, football, and the Halachah, that they should send rude e-mails to each other? The answer is; being right. If it didn't matter to us whether we were right or wrong, we would not spend so much energy or make ourselves look so foolish justifying our own position.
My previous post dealt with the first step to peace. This is the second: you can choose to acknowledge that there is something you do not understand about God and about life, the understanding of which will change everything. To be in a position to make that acknowledgement, you have to agree that you are not always right. That takes great humility, as it involves overcoming the universally held belief that we are the ones with all the answers.
If one set of opinions were correct, we would be able to see clear evidence that those who follow those opinions lead happier, more productive, and more fulfilled lives than those that don't. There is no such evidence. Indeed, it is impossible for the world to exist without differences of opinion. If we all thought the same, there would be no inventions, no new ideas, and no progress. The challenge is to manage the differences. That is not achieved by trying to force us to conform.
Experience has taught me that you get much further in your relationships by dropping the expectations and allowing the other party to be what he/she will be, than by arguing. Truly fulfilled lives, as well as real peace, are enjoyed by those who have learned that lesson.
The other issue is to be prepared to change. If you want everything to stay the way it is, you simply carry on being whatever you have always been. Most if not all of us claim to be unhappy with how things are, and say they want them to improve. Unless we change ourselves, nothing will happen. If there is something going on that you don't like, the first thing you must ask is what are you doing to perpetuate it.
Take youth crime for example: there's a huge hue and cry going on at present about a boy who was stabbed to death. The facts appear to be that he was out drinking with his friends to celebrate the end of exams until 2 a.m., despite the fact that he was two years under the legal age to buy alcohol. Why wasn't he with his family, why did they let him out so late, and where did he get the money for the night out? As far as I can see, we have reneged on our responsibilities to care for our children, and we are letting the gangs care for them instead. Unless family members learn to love one another and take responsibility for one another's well-being instead of letting them roam the streets, tragedies of this kind will keep happening. It is a spiritual issue. Treating it as a matter of law enforcement misses the point.
If we want a situation where everybody is fighting everyone else, we will carry on fighting. If we decide that we will be peaceful people regardless of circumstances, we will do peaceful things, and eventually we will get peace. If we want to halt a vicious circle, we have to step out of the circle and rethink our behaviour patterns. Whatever we are doing to everyone else, we are doing to ourselves.
My opinions on anything are subject to change. My love for you will not change.
Simcha Handley London, 2nd July 2008 (Rosh Chodesh Tammuz 5758)
I've been
very busy since my first blog. The good news is I have found a rugby team at I
will be at the trials for the Maccabi GB rugby team in September. The bad news is they have already finalised
what the main team will be. It's not
really bad news as I know I would make a terrible rugby player but it means I
properly won't be selected even if I was an okay-ish sort of player.
I have
however found a team to go with - http://www.rfu.com/goplayrugby/ (just put in your
postcode and will tell your local teams to join). In my case it's the Borehamwood rugby team
who I will intend to do some training with next week (I'm not sure if it should
been this week but with my cold I have yet to do anything.).
At some point
in the next week or so I'll get the chance to play some rugby I hope. But in the
meantime I don't really have that much to report. So I will keep this blog short and sweet
expect a longer blog in roughly 2 weeks...
Sometime ago I started thinking
I wanted to write an article that would be unique and talked about how different sections of
the Jewish community work together. I
wanted it to be catchy and funny and I wanted the series to be non-political. Then an idea came into my head why not do
something that I would never usually do in my adult life? We could involve the community and which
would get more people to read these posts. One lonely day reading through Facebook I came across a group called
‘British
Zions Rugby Club’. At first I had no
idea who they could possibly be I then did a bit of research. It turns out they're part of Maccabi
GB.
So what is the plan? Well the plans is for the first time in 10
years for me to play rugby. So the first
thing you have to ask is why have I not played the game in 10 years? When I was at School at Mount Grace I was in
the school rugby team. However I decided
it was more important to concentrate on my studies so I left. After I left school I was run over by a car
and ended up with a quadruple fracture in my right leg so I couldn't do any
running for over three years. By the
time I'd finished my degree I'd totally forgotten I'd ever played rugby in fact
I may very well forgotten even how to play!
The good news is I actually have
the body to play rugby - my grandfather on my mother's side was a keen rugby
player himself. He was 5.9 tall (I am
5.10) but we both have in common is the ability to run very fast and in short
spurts so I should be able to genetically be a good forward player. Apart from that I have a fairly white chest a
slim build and I am fairly hardly. Then
I found out I had yet another problem...
I checked when the trials were they were on
the 1st of June 2008. The
problem here was there on the same day I had a training for my new part-time
job. In order to see if I could still
take part I contacted the coach ‘Jon
S’ told me that anyone could join for the trials and I do not need to go to
the one on that Sunday. I informed him
why I intended to take part. All I
needed to do now was register at www.maccabigb.org
which had cleared ball he didn't tell me was that it would cost £20! I applied to the open part of the form
answered a few questions. First were the
usual questions your name your date of birth your next of kin then came the
medical questions. I am as fit as a fiddle
apart from type 1 diabetic and filled in the form and sent off the slip. Within
minutes an e-mail came from the Maccabi website.
This
leaves me with a number of questions? When do I buy that new mouth guard I'm obviously going to need for
playing rugby? When should I start
training? What diets should I have? The fact I'm diabetic how will that affect my
health and playing in a competitive sport?
Then
there's other questions the fact I'm doing this as a blogger will I be able to
talk to my other colleagues? That if I
get past the trial stage which at this stage seems highly unlikely as far as I
am concerned. One last thought that
comes through my mind as I see the e-mail from Maccabi
website is purely personal. None of my
friends are in a big way into sport apart from my mate Jason from university and
he's not up to a professional level. One
of my reasons for leaving the Mount Grace rugby team all those years ago was
that I never ever seem to socialise with people who played in competitive sports
now I am testing myself to the limit. There are so many questions of what could go wrong at this point I just
want to leave it to my imagination and ask other people.
So now I find myself looking at
my screen having almost finished the first of a series of blogs which can be
called as a group ‘ my rugby blogs’. All
I need now is a coach to show me how to play rugby again! The good news is I only need to be ready by
September!
Uncle Keith has reminded me that I should do my best either to keep within the subject of dialogue with one another or come up with something that the Jewish community aren't talking about. I hope that here I shall do a bit of both.
My first blog dealt with my realisation that there is not just one Jewish religion, called Judaism, but lots of different Jewish religions. Some call themselves Judaism, others don't. For example, I would call Zionism a Jewish religion, in which we worship the state, or the land, or some combination of the two. My second blog dealt with the way that religious people draw a line between the good and the bad, and what it was like for me to be put into the dustbin of the bad. Most, if not all, religion claims that it has some moral imperative, dictated by God, on which it considers that it must act. Unfortunately, moral imperatives are always a moveable feast.
For example, if we took Torah at face value, we would be executing children for disobeying their parents, and cutting off the hands of women who, if their husbands have the misfortune to be physically attacked, indecently assault the assailant in order to stop the fight. We don't take Torah at face value because our Rabbis have, quite rightly, told us not to. Although the texts in our sources still exist and cannot be abolished, we have chosen to read them in accordance to agreed methods of understanding which allow us to devise a way of life that works. Otherwise, we would be caught in the moral trap of either taking the commandments literally and therefore acting with brutal savagery, or else rejecting them altogether.
Unfortunately, we don't appear to be capable of admitting that we devised our halachot on utilitarian, rather than on moral, grounds. This helps to explain why we are not very good at dialogue with one another. If it is a question of dialogue with the belief systems held by the overwhelming majority of the Western world, namely Christianity and Islam, we find that relatively straightforward. This is because, unlike Christians and Moslems, we have never believed that our religion is the only way to God. Even the barmiest of the weird among us do not suggest that we should be organising missions to convert our Gentile neighbours to Judaism. Therefore, we will enter into the dialogue with other religious believers with no intention to get them to change their ways.
But when it comes to dialogue among ourselves, we are for the most part utterly convinced that Judaism, or to be precise our version of Judaism, is the only way to God for ourselves. The dialogue therefore breaks down as everyone tries to persuade the other that he/she is mistaken. However, if we are humble enough to admit that, basically, all our ideas are manmade and that we adopted them simply because we thought to do so would get the optimal result, we can take the moral heat out of the discussion and consider, hopefully calmly, what course of action will achieve our aims. What will work, in other words.
This is the meaning of the First Step to Peace: I acknowledge that some of my old beliefs about God and Life are no longer working.
If we want to achieve the end of a thriving Jewish community in Britain, it appears that if the statistics are correct we are not doing too well at it. If we think that our communal answer is the morally correct one, we shall do nothing but alienate those of us who think diffently. If however we stick to the question of what will work, we will have a common ground to go forward on. We also won't be looking down on those of us who have chosen a lifestyle different from ours as their answer to the question of communal survival. We may also be in a position to go beyond questions of mere survival and begin to deal with matters of what sort of community we have got. Is it the kind of community that people actually want to be in, and if not why not?
And finally, if we aren't dealing in rights and wrongs we may become more open to one another. That would be the start of the answer to the questions of some of our other contributors.
My opinions on anything are subject to change. My love for you will not change.
Contents of a Passover skip, 17th April 2008, 8.30 a.m., on corner of The Ridgeway and Woodstock Road, London NW11: a child's car seat, a bicycle, a microwave, a clothes airer, toys, a suitcase, another bicycle, cot frames, a wooden chair, a table, window frames, shelving, mops, brooms, a piece of old kitchen worktop, and the occasional magpie rooting around the bin bags mixed in with all this.
I've been thinking about the language used by the religious opponents of the State of Israel. Classical anti-semitism often centres around rumours of an evil Jewish conspiracy for world domination. I wasn't aware, until recently, that certain of our community believe just as firmly in an evil Zionist conspiracy for atheism and rebellion against God. I don't share that viewpoint because I believe there are no such things as evil conspiracies. Rather, there are people doing exactly what they conceive to be right given their model of the world.
To illustrate from experience, some years ago, I was accused, quite seriously, of working for the Devil. The counsellor who helped me recover from the shock advised me to look at my accusers as people who did not know any better. According to their belief system, there are the good, and there are the bad. It just so happened that the line drawn between the good and the bad moved, and I found myself in the category of the bad. Nothing else had changed. That advice made sense, because to have seen the actions of the accusers as a deliberate conspiracy would have made the healing process very difficult, if not impossible.
Over the years, this insight has been developed in two directions. The first of these is the nature of forgiveness. We cannot experience anything unless we perceive in some manner, either through one of our five senses or perhaps through gates of spiritual perception that the world of science hasn't cottoned onto yet. Either way, if we decide that we will look upon an event in our past differently, it becomes a different experience. We can, quite literally, change our past through our own perceptions of past events. That shouldn't be surprising. We are made in the image of God, after all. If He is not bounded by constraints of time such as past and future, nor are we. The ability to re-evaluate the past and thus change our experience of it is the key to real forgiveness.
The second is in the area of moral philosophy. I do not believe in any absolute standards of good or evil. As far as I am concerned, we are all making up our moral standards, myself included. Even if we think we heard it from God, we are still making it up.
You may say that I am advocating moral relativism, in which anything goes. In fact it's the other way about. The people who insist that there is absolute right and wrong are the ones who are creating a situation in which anything goes. To return to my own experience, the faith community that I was in who accused me of being on the side of Satan had very strong views on what was right and what was wrong, and I found myself in the "wrong" basically because the people in charge of the community who decided what was right and what was wrong decided to move the goalposts. If you want to know what I did to deserve such an accusation, here it is, although it is so trivial I can barely bring myself to write it: I became an Amway distributor. Yes folks, in modern Britain there are people who genuinely think the Amway business is somehow Satanic, never mind the fact that it was set up by two thorougly repectable and impeccably evangelically Christian Dutch Americans. You couldn't make it up.
More seriously, there have been times in our history in which it was seen absolutely right to burn traditional pre scientific healers as witches, or else to execute Protestants (if the Catholics were in charge) or to execute Catholics (if the Protestants were in charge), or to send gays, gypsies, conscientious objectors, and Jews to the gas chambers. Examples can be multiplied from every religion in the world. It isn't only religious people who behave like this. Those who don't believe in God or the Devil devise dualistic theologies around animal rights, the Middle East, the environment, politics, and whatever else you get passionate about.
If on the other hand you acknowledge that you are making up your own belief system, whatever it may be, then you will not put anyone else into the dustbin of the "wrong" and you can then help yourself and others around you to answer a much more important question than what is right. That question is, given what you want to achieve, what will work?
Wait a minute, Reb Simcha, you will say. Aren't you meant to be an orthodox Jew? Yes, I am. Well, don't you believe that God commanded us the Torah? Yes, exactly. I do believe that. It is a commandment because I believe it is a commandment. If I didn't believe it was a commandment, it would not be a commandment. If I have signed the lease on a property, I'm commanded to pay the rent. If I haven't signed the lease, the landlord can rant and rave as much as he likes, but I'm under no obligation.
The Torah, holy and eternal as it is, has to be interpreted before it can be put into practice. It is therefore entirely dependent on the way that we choose to interpret it. Our sources quite deliberately include all the opinions on it so that we know there is not only one way. Unfortunately, for whatever reason much of the Jewish world acts and speaks as if there were only one way. That is why we have to be different.
My opinions on anything are subject to change. My love for you will not change.
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is about to put an
advert up on www.jobs.ac.uk for a collaborative
doctoral studentship funded through the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Youth call, looking
at issues arising out of conflicts relating to student faith groups at British
universities. If anyone is interested please contact
Professor Gordon Lynch at g.lynch@BBK.AC.UK
Today I read in the Evening Standard on the Thursday the 10th of April 2008. The headline reads stop picking on Jewish schools, Balls Told. It talks about how the children Secretary Ed Ball has been unfairly attacking Jewish schools over their admissions policy. The article continues by saying how the president of the board deputies for British Jews Henry Grunwald recognized the problem but felt that they were being unfairly picked on. I went to Sinai primary school and after a year and a half at another school which was non-Jewish I tried to go into the JFS from what I heard it is common practice for Jewish schools to ask extra payments. This helps shows how many of the divisions there are in the Jewish community.
At the weekend I saw another result of how we run the Jewish community in this country and how such policies are now damaging it. In the Jewish Chronicle I read that over 50% of Israelis living in Great Britain did not mix with local Jewish people. This may not sound that important but there around 50,000 of them in the United Kingdom. What is more shocking is that I'm not surprised as I know the reasons why they've not mixed with the bulk of the community in the United Kingdom secondly I was not surprised at the result. To understand why it's really happened you really need to just see what is going on.
One friend of mine born in Israel who had spent most of her life in South Africa told me after two years living in London. After encountering London's Jewish community she had been totally put off of being Jewish. When she first came to this country she joined of a couple of organisations here in London. She was not a one-off. When I was younger 10 years ago I too was a member of the organisation FZY. Unlike the other young people who went to Jewish schools or private I went to a normal comprehensive. I soon found myself that I could not mix with the other members as they had all known one another from the age of 10. I was a 16-year-old and I found myself in a community which claimed I was a member but which none of the people who were there are really seen me as a member. The result in years according to a few friends (I don't know for certain if this is true) that the UK Jewish community is known to have the highest levels of social exclusion of any community in the United Kingdom.
I saw a repeat of this when I was at university in Manchester, a acquaintance of mine had come from India. His parents are originally from London but they'd moved to India on business. Whenever he tried to join a Jewish organisation he was turned down. Both his parents were Jewish in fact they were both members of the United Synagogue. After a few months he gave up he became one of the heads of the Manchester University Senate. When he warned a number of you UJS members about motion one he was ignored. The result was an anti-Zionist motion was almost passed by the University of Manchester's students union. I can think of other examples but I'm now going to talk more about what the media are saying and what I think could happen if we don't do something to stop this madness.
In the Jewish News a writer suggested that is the Jewish community here in Great Britain was falling numerically the more of us should move to Israel. I could not think of all worst idea but I could also not just think of a more out of touch idea of reality than what this man is saying.
In the law we are taught sometimes to read between the lines for example some unscrupulous landlords will call a leasehold a licences to remove their tenants when they want to sell their property. In the UK organisations say that people are not as Zionist as they should be.
In the article in the Jewish Chronicle the Israelis were saying that every time they tried to get involved with the British Jewish community they could not. The problem here is that I'm willing to bet it's not just Israelis who are having a bad time of trying to get involved with Britain's Jewish community. As I read the article in the Jewish News I actually felt fairly sick.
From my time in the Weitzman Institute I knew for a fact that most Israelis strongly believe in the survival of the European Jewish community and the last thing they would want would be us all moving to Israel. In any case these days we live in a more and more globalised world some Israelis see this as a big advantage for a small state in a poor part of the world which just happens to be a first world state. I read in the Guardian yesterday that there are food shortages in Egypt and it hit the point even stronger than before what I had read in city of oranges as it showed just how unstable the Middle East was.
In the last chapter of the book City of Oranges they talk about the Russian Jewish immigrants and how some of them are using drugs and one of the people they're interviewing is suggesting that immigration into Israel should be reduced. You may ask how this has anything to do with our community.
What shows just how unrealistic that writer is in the Jewish News? Some of the worst offenders are trying to help people in Israel but if you actually meet the people running the organisation's what you tend to find middle-class British-born public school educated Jewish people.
Sometimes you hear about it from Israelis I was the only British Jew studying at the Weitzman Institute. I spoke to the Israelis who was studying at the Weitzman Institute and had lived in Great Britain virtue all of them had been upset by how community treated them. They told me they liked individual British Jews but they couldn't stand us as a community.
So how can we stop this happening? I would suggest more community projects but I think the projects need to be not run by people from inside the community unfortunately. I've read about small American communities building campuses where they share the upkeep of elderly people but the solution to the problems with the British Jewish community I think would need to go deeper then this.
In my last blog I talked about the growing Orthodox community. I can see in a matter of decades that at some point the ultraorthodox will make up the majority of the Jewish community of this country. If we have a minority of Jewish people who are rich middle-class many of the moving out to South Hertfordshire we are likely to end up with a similar community to the one that was in Holland last century. My great- great-grandfather when he came over to Britain in 1870 met a nice Sephardic Dutch woman my great, great grandmother. They fell in love and got married but I was always told that her family disapproved of him marrying her. The reason for this was many of the Dutch Sephardic disliked the Ashkenazi immigrants. In Holland itself the division was even worse between the two communities today in Britain's Jewish community with seeing I believe the late stages of a situation like that in Holland. We have a large minority that is dictating increasingly to the majority on its own terms the sort of community it wants to see. Over the last few years we've seen increasingly the large sections of the Jewish community in this country resent the way it is being run.
It is now even catching the attention of our own government when they investigate Jewish schools in this country it sees how badly they treat the people they should be serving. More often than not the most students going to these schools will marry people who they meet at these schools or they met when they were a member of the youth movement. They then have children themselves they send them to the same youth movement and the cycle repeats itself. The problem is we live in a multi-ethnic society even in our own community is divided into different factions some of them are immigrants, some of them simply come from different parts of the country which does not have a big Jewish community. As I write this article I am becoming increasingly aware of just how badly our community is seen both at home in Israel and other parts of the world by both other Jewish people and Israelis. The message is simple things need to change if they don't we will have even worse problems in the next-generation. People don't take inequality in society ever if they did the present structure of Britain's Jewish community would be fine.
As this is my first post here, I'll introduce myself: I'm Simcha, and I live in London NW4.
Here's a joke to start with: what is the shortest time interval possible for a secular Israeli? Answer, the time between the lights changing to green and the driver behind you blowing his horn. What is the shortest time interval possible for a frumme Yid? Answer, the time between turning off the heating in shul and turning on the air conditioning.
Differences of opinion are not only desirable, but essential for life in a physical world. If we all thought the same, there would be no new ideas, no inventions, and no progress. We have to have differences. The fun in life is to learn how to manage them.
Some years ago, I read a story in Wouk's "This is my God" about the Vilna Gaon. A friend of his came to visit him in his study and said to him, "Please look out of your window." The Gaon did so. "Look at your fellow Jews in the market", said his friend, "slaving away to earn a living through a welter of oppressive rules and regulations. If you had to live that way, would you still be the Vilna Gaon?" On hearing this, the Gaon broke down and wept, because he knew in his heart that the answer to his friend's question was a resounding no. With this story in mind, I have suggested to various people in the Jewish community an exercise in trading places. Let one of the Dayanim of Stamford Hill serve for one month as Rabbi of Plotznick United Synagogue. Let the Rabbi of Plotznick United Synagogue serve that time as Dayan in Stamford Hill. Have them compare notes, and then they will understand one another better. The reactions that I've had to this suggestion have caused me to realise that what is normally thought of as the religion of "orthodox" Judaism is not really one religion at all. It is lots of different religions, like many little circles on a piece of paper. Sometimes they intersect, and you can live in the intersection, other times they do not.
When I became aware of this, at first I was very disappointed. Having thought things over further, I can now see there is nothing unusual about this state of affairs. If we had lived in Temple times, I doubt we would have been able to guess whether the halachah would go according to Beit Shammai or Beit Hillel. We wouldn't even have been able to predict which out of the many belief systems then current in the Jewish world would be accepted as normative Judaism.
Today, you can attend a certain place of Jewish learning in my neighbourhood and be told that Independence Day and Jerusalem Day are halachically mandated Yomim Tovim. A few hundred metres away, you can attend a certain shtiebl and be told that Zionism is the greatest possible rebellion against God, and that the modern Hebrew language is an unholy tongue, founded on atheism. Both these institutions can quote copiously from our sources in order to justify their position.
The question is not whether either of them are right or wrong. The question is, given what we want to achieve, do these belief systems work?
The approach that I intend iyh to explore further is as follows. The first principle is to understand that everybody does exactly what is right given his model of the world. Therefore, there is no mileage in being against anyone. We have to get away from the paradigm of victims and villains. If something is happening to us that we do not like, then the question to ask ourselves is, what are we doing to perpetuate it? Or, to put it as the Baal Shem Tov did, sinners are mirrors in which we see our own shortcomings.
Secondly, there are certain steps to peace that we can all take, the first of which is to realise that there are elements in our belief system that are not working.
Thirdly, we can come to a realisation that we are all one. I'm not saying that we should behave as if we are all one, or what a good thing it would be if we were all one, but that we literally are all one, whether we like it or not. The fact that we are walking around in physical bodies makes it difficult to appreciate the fact of our essential oneness, but it exists none the less. Therefore, we don't merely do to one another as we would have done to ourselves, nor indeed do we refrain from doing to the other person that which is hateful to ourselves. Rather, we face the fact that whatever we are doing to the other person, we are doing to ourselves.
My intention in writing the above is to begin to develop another way of dialogue which may prove helpful. It's improbable that I will have anything more to say this side of Pesach, so I'll wish everyone a very happy and peaceful Yomtov.
My opinions on anything are subject to change. My love for you will not change.
