Tag: love

• July 16, 2014

  Reflections on Disunion and Union

  
  

  It is hard to over estimate who is bleeding more in all the people that you meet. The walking wounded are everywhere. Like zombies. That puts conflict management and mitigation in a whole different light. 
  
  There is no battle in the war on prejudice. The battlefront is us. Expect everyone, including yourself, to be prejudiced and then be pleasantly surprised.
  
  We are all hopelessly divided especially, in the strange brain patterns that we call ideologies. But it is equally true that love conquers all, even the most bizarre differences among us. We have all witnessed that this is possible.

  Two people claim the same house. They build a vision of a world without the other. Then they meet. Then they look into each other’s eyes and fall in love, just then. Then they proceed to pray for peace together. The insane beauty of the human capacity for sympathy, compassion, and …

• July 3, 2014

  Reflections on the Middle East June 2014

  Humans are using powers of reasoning and planning to make a far less violent planet than ever before in history http://tinyurl.com/lrdratd . Lets accelerate the pace.

   

  The defeat of violence is silence, for in silence there is observation, and observation yields reason, humility and compassion.

   

  Revenge and Compassion are the same. Both are crying mothers with raw hearts. But one gives birth to Hell, and the other to Heaven.

   

  When you oppose hatred with hatred you cannot win. Only hatred wins. Embrace those who hate and undermine their hatred from within. #Wisdom

   

  The only victory against hatred is love. Everything else is a defeat.

   

  Hatred is fire, and love is water. The hatred of the few burns the many who have no water, but those with water easily extinguish the fire.

   

  Policies without love cannot extinguish the fires of hatred. Policies with love are a mighty river. Human Rights …

• November 16, 2011

  The Strategic Value of Forgiveness

  A version of this essay appeared recently in the Jerusalem Report on November 21, 2011.

  The Arab Awakening is facing serious challenges, and some new strategic decisions are required that will end up being good for all the revolutionary movements afoot this year, in the Middle East, in Israel and beyond.

  The essential point is this: The Arab Street has demonstrated incredible heroism and nonviolent principles in the face of torture and death, and even Libya began as a very peaceful revolution, even if Libyans felt at some point that they had no choice but to fight. This is a paradigm shift of ethical and political values that will be remembered for generations. It may also signify a broad-based Middle Eastern democratic shift.

  The going is tough, however, because no revolution easily dislodges corrupt structures of power. The temptation is just too great for those immediately below the revolution’s chosen …

• October 1, 2011

  Swept by Vision

  This is a poem that I wrote in honor of my daughter Lexi’s Bat Mitsvah. Many who heard me recite it at the Bat Mitsvah wanted me to make it available. Here it is. 

  SWEPT BY VISION

  August 31, 2011

   

  Wrapped in blankets,

  And swept by vision,

  Her eyes on fire with dramas unseen,

  She told a tale,

  Like ancient bards and mystics.

  She breathed in her words,

  And her eyes spoke of places

  Far away and never conjured before,

  Her massive shock of little curls

  Dramatizing the contours of her serious face.

  She was four.

  She was in the middle of telling a story

  To me in her bunk bed,

  At darkened bed-time.

  Without warning she jumped to the end of the bed,

  Curled up in a ball.

  There was a rainbow,

  And it was in the room.

   

  Years later I saw a thick rainbow,

  In Arlington,…

• July 3, 2011

  And Beyond Cursing There is Absolute Love: The Portion of Balak

  I grew up in a world of blessings and curses, and I mean a world of radically elaborate blessings and curses. I speak of course of the Yiddish world, the world of Jews from Eastern Europe. It surrounded me and was in the air all the time. The incredible creativity in describing problematic people attests to the chief complaints about women and men. The sheer number of names for a useless person, a shlemiel, a shlemazel, a shmendrik, a pisk malocheh, and much worse, all very colorful. Jews never held anything back in their criticism of each other, which naturally psychologists might see as internalized persecution.

   

  Some people I knew had a very hard life with bitter disappointments and losses. They used to call many people “chaleria”, which later I would learn meant roughly, “a piece of Cholera”. Many people were requested to …

• September 6, 2010

  Reading from the books that some would burn | The Shalom Center

  Hello friends, I want to join Rabbi Arthur Waskow in calling on everyone to read from the Koran on September 11 as an act of solidarity with the Muslim community of the United States as they suffer the insult of the terrible act being committed on that day in Gainesville, Florida.

  The best way to resist hatred is with love, humiliation with respect, ignorance with knowledge, alienation with friendship.

  Reading from the books that some would burnBy Rabbi Arthur Waskow | 8/31/2010 Devoting Jewish Holidays to Peace Interreligious Relations Rosh HaShanah Yom KippurClick here to see a listing of all recent blog postsIn New York, speaking out for freedom and diversity might mean joining a vigil at 7:15 pm Friday evening September 10 at 51 Park Place [near the Park Place stop of the #2 or #3 subway], the location of the Muslim-rooted community/ cultural center that has been the

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• August 20, 2010

  ‘Ground Zero’ Imam: ‘I Am a Jew, I Have Always Been One’ – Politics – The Atlantic

  Jeffrey Goldberg writes a simple and devastating piece on Imam Rauf. Here is the man vilified by the neoconservative and right wing mob in the United States.

  You can read the full text of his remarks on the B’nai Jeshurun website, but here is an especially relevant portion:

  We are here to assert the Islamic conviction of the moral equivalency of our Abrahamic faiths. If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind and soul Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad; hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.

  If to be a Christian is to love the Lord our God with all of my heart, mind and soul, and to love for my fellow human being what I love for myself, then not only am I a

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