Judaism – Engaging Peace

Sabbath Satori

Posted on January 26, 2018January 25, 2018 by kathiemm

Stefan and John.
author: Lewis Randa, Life Experience School.

by Stefan Schindler

“Do we want to preserve the traditions – the history, prayers, rituals, and faith – which make Judaism distinctive, or do we want to become just a bunch of ethicists?” An ethicist advocates virtue, and the rabbi’s question was rhetorical. Now stay with me here; this is not complex.

Sabbath is the Hebrew holy day, beginning on Friday evening and extending through Saturday. Satori is a Japanese Buddhist word for enlightenment. One Saturday morning long ago, when I was still a child and attending a religious instruction class at our local temple, I had a mini-enlightenment.

I was only 12, and I found the Sabbath morning class inspirational. It was intellectually stimulating in a way that school was not. That morning, the rabbi’s question struck a chord. The name of that chord is irony. A Jewish education is ironic because, at its best, it’s Socratic: it teaches one to doubt and inquire. The same is true of Buddhism.

I was too shy to voice my response to the rabbi’s challenge; besides, he was on a roll. But I have always remembered that moment. Adding a retrospective flavor, here’s what I thought:

Although my mother was a Christian, she converted to Judaism to please my father. During the process of her conversion, my mother asked the rabbi if there was a conflict in being both Christian and Jewish. She wanted to convert, but she also wanted to keep her Christian values.

The rabbi responded that ethics is the heart of the Torah; therefore, at the deepest, most important level, there is no conflict. He told the story of the Hebrew sage who was asked to summarize the Torah, standing on one leg. So the sage stood on one leg and replied very simply: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

And so, dear rabbi, on this glorious Sabbath morning for which I do give thanks, kindly allow me to say: I would much rather have a world of ethicists, committed to peace and the Golden Rule, than a world of religious rivalry and strife. Religious distinctiveness has its beauty, but it also contributes, tragically, to what Hegel calls “the slaughter-bench of history.”

I would, therefore, gladly abandon all religious difference in favor of – and here comes irony again – a postreligious world committed to what the Dalai Lama calls “a common religion of kindness.”

After all, isn’t what all religions have in common more important than how they differ?

And at the heart of all religions, is there not a common urge, prayer, and path to the Peaceable Kingdom on earth?

When religions get it right: The Golden Rule

Posted on October 27, 2016 by kathiemm

An Illustration of the Golden Rule by Norman Rockwell used as the cover of the April 1, 1961 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. In the public domain.

by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

The aspirations for peace and justice are as old as written human history, but the behaviors are not commensurate.

Tragically, the Golden Rule is easily dismissed and disregarded when importuned to pursue selfish aims.

If treated as arbitrary, the Golden Rule becomes a deceptive Sunday, Saturday, or Friday night comfort and parody.

Can you hear the plea: “If only they would follow what they preach!” Who preaches, who follows, who lives, who dies, who …….?

Religion at its best promotes the Golden Rule. See the message here, in 11 different religions.

“If you seek justice, choose for others what you would choose for yourself.” (Baha’i)

“One should seek for others the happiness one derives for one’s self.” (Buddhism)

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (Christianity)

“What you do not want done to yourself, do not unto others.” (Confucianism)

“Do naught to others which if done to thee would cause pain.” (Hinduism)

“No one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” (Islam)

“We should . . . refrain from inflicting upon others such injury as would appear undesirable to us if inflicted upon ourselves.” (Jainism)

“What is hurtful to yourself, do not do to our fellow man.” (Judaism)

“As thou deemest thyself, so deem others.” (Sikkhism)

“To those who are good to me, I am also good; and to those who are not good to me, I am also good. And thus all get to be good.” (Taoism)

“Do as you would be done by.” (Zoroastrianism)

(Anthony j. Marsella – Adapted and Expanded from Steven Blessman)

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21 books and more than 300 publications noted for challenging the ethnocentricity and biases of Western psychology and psychiatry, and for advocating peace and social justice. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

What it’s really all about

Posted on August 1, 2016August 1, 2016 by kathiemm

The argument you get from the warlords, the arms industry, the right-wing extremists, the power-seekers is that some forms of torture are needed to fight terrorism, to save lives endangered by “ticking bombs.” Bull hoowey. If you want to understand why people torture, consider the components of this definition from Miriam Webster:

Torture is “the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.” (emphasis added)

To punish. That’s a biggie, one we’ve discussed before on this blog. The monotheistic religions “of the Book” (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), as well as countless other religions from earlier centuries, have promulgated visions of Hell in which “sinners” (e.g., violators of cultural norms, rebels against authoritarian rulers) will be punished (tortured) by eternal burning and sometimes other horrors.

That preoccupation with punishment has a broad reach and is as American as apple pie. Parents who inflict intense pain on children (e.g., whipping, burning) for “not minding their manners,” for “giving lip” or “being sassy” are inflicting torture on their children—and were often tortured themselves while growing up. Both men and women often torture their partners physically or psychologically to punish them for infidelity and other “crimes.” And racism in this country has, for centuries, been associated with the torture and murder of people of color, both in the streets and in prisons, to punish them for their differentness.

To coerce. Okay, in today’s world “coercion” could be interpreted as requiring an admission regarding the location of a ticking bomb (although there is no evidence of such a location ever having been discovered this way) but for centuries coerced confessions involved, for example, admitting that one was or was not a “good” Catholic. Think Inquisition. We may well ask how effectively torture worked to protect Catholicism from infidels and purify the image of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

For sadistic pleasure: Heartbreakingly, torture for sadistic pleasure is widespread in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world where abuse of various forms is a part of everyday life. My guess is that every one of my readers has at some point in his or her life met someone who got pleasure from inflicting pain on some person or animal. Right?

Regardless of its purpose or motive, torture, as well as cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, is banned at all times, in all places by international law.

Shouldn’t people of conscience be acting to resist its use in their homes, their communities, their country, and wherever their efforts can reach? Time to stop excusing it?

Warning: Do not behave like our perpetrators

Posted on March 31, 2011March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie MM: Today we welcome guest contributor John Hess, who has been an anti-war activist for 40 years, and worked for over 30 years in the construction business. He is currently a full-time faculty member in English and American Studies at UMass Boston, where he is a member of the executive committee for the faculty-staff union.]

I found this video the other day and thought it well worth passing on. It is a fascinating comment on the situation in Palestine/Israel from Dr. Hajo Meyer, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.

Meyer observes that Jews were “the pioneers of interhuman ethics” and that he “wants to wake the world” to speak out against the horrible treatment of the Palestinians by Israel.

One of the enduring strengths of Judaism is its strong moral tradition and it is in this tradition that Meyer urges Israelis “not to behave like our perpetrators” (the Nazis) toward the Palestinians and calls on the world to speak out against this behavior.

Watching the video led me to think about both the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine/Israel today. It seems to me they are in some important ways linked, so I took a long look at a book I haven’t glanced in quite awhile, The Cunning of History by Richard L. Rubenstein.

The Holocaust, Rubenstein said, was “a thoroughly modern exercise in total domination that could only have been carried out by an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy” (p. 4).

Rubenstein provides a warning that it is well worth heeding today: “One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization” (p. 21).

In his view, “The Holocaust was an expression of some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the very same culture of modernity that produced the two world wars and Hitler” (p. 6).

What parallels do you see between the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine–or even other parts of the world?

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston