The line drawn between the good and the bad

Here, to begin with, is a joke from real life.

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.

Simcha Handley.