The Cure For Being Human
Blessing The Space Between Us
The war in Israel isn’t what I initially planned to write about this week, but it’s all I can think about.
As the death toll rises, the simple fact that the conflict is coming from the epicentre of what is regarded by Jews, Christians and Muslims as the biblical Holy Land somehow makes it all feel worse, like maybe we should know better. The messy fullness of what it means to be human is on full display.
It seems to me that there is a soft searching place in us that wants fairness. That desperately wants peace and for things to be just or to go back to “normal” so we can all feel safe and secure in our homes no matter where we live.
To say that the History of the region is complicated is the understatement of the century. It seems like the news outlets and papers are doing their best to help us better understand the plight of the people in those regions and the action that Israel feels forced to take in retaliation to attempt to restore peace.
But what of the innocent Palestinians living in Gaza, now without power, fuel, food or health services and with nowhere to go, with no way out? They are also victims of the terrorist acts of Hamas and caught up in the retaliatory act of war declared by Israel.
They are children and families.
And what about the Hamas? Are we certain they are the bad guys? If we were persecuted and walked in their shoes wouldn’t we be become “evil” too?
They are human beings and if history repeats itself like it tends to do, this current war is not going to end this ancient dispute.
“We’ve tried everything possible and none of it has worked. Now we must try the impossible.”
Sun Ra
I am filled with sadness for all who have suffered and are suffering in Israel and for their families and friends here.
Regardless of who we think is justified for killing who, I think most of us realize on some level of higher wisdom that peace will be a very unlikely outcome of any war. From a safe distance it feels like a privilege to ask this question, but if vengeance and more war is incapable of restoring peace…
WHAT is?
Author Charles Eisenstein has made the most sense to me during this war and I give him full credit for the foundation of ideas i’ll be sharing today. The horrific savagery of the Hamas attack on Israel and the prospect of a retributive slaughter makes it pretty clear that the policies of two generations of Palestinian and Israeli leadership have both brought the VERY opposite of what they intended to achieve.
“Repression, exclusion, imprisonment, violence, assassinations, wall and fences have not made Israel secure. Rockets, blood shed and terrorist attached have also not returned Palestinians their land. ”
Charles Eisenstein
From many of the emails and texts I’ve received, the question on our minds is who is right and who is wrong?
It’s a tough one. I’m not sure any of us can answer without ensuring that bloody cycles of vengeance continue to grow.
At some point we must choose:
DO we want vengeance, to see the wicked punished and the good vindicated?
Or do we want the horrors to cease?
In our family it seems like everyone has decided what I think many of us consuming the news have concluded, that there are good guys and bad guys and that the bad guys need to be stopped by any means.
They are terrorists. I get it.
I keep hearing it.
But I think there is much more to this than meets the eye. I lamely tried to make this next point at dinner last night, but failed miserably and so I’d like to try again….
Do we really all believe that Hamas is killing Israelis to liberate themselves or to make peace?
Or are they doing this because they are human beings and like Isaac Saul on X suggests in a much better way than I ever could:
“They’re doing this because they represent the devil on the shoulder of every oppressed Palestinian who has lost someone in this conflict. They are doing it because they want vengeance. They are evening the score, and acting on the worst of our human impulses, to respond to blood with blood - an inclination that is easy to give in to after what their people have endured. It should not be hard to understand their logic - it is only hard to accept that humans are capable of being driven to this. Not defending Hamas is a very low bar to clear. Please clear it”.
Reading this quote it moved me and struck me that I have more questions than answers.
Who is justified with a right to defend themselves?
Who has the right to resist oppression with armed force?
Do we really know what is the right thing to do here if we’re caught up in the human energy of retribution and vengeance?
Can any of us really say after watching the news over the past week that we can’t see the future implications for all of us around the world?
I’m pretty sure that you won’t be reading this in any newspapers today, but war is a collective act whether we want it, or not. We have all created this world through our adherence to the historical ideas we share and our silent agreement to these things over millennia has solidified them.
Paul Selig’s “The Book Of Innocence” has been playing in my ears on my morning walks this week and this line stopped me in my tracks… “The transposition of war can only happen when we we lift our consciousness to a higher level”. When we take a higher road than retaliation.
When we have mercy and we forgive without retribution. Tragically what we still primarily choose in the face of a crisis is an act of aggression.
We may not see it collectively for several generations until we’ve all finally had enough of the cycles of violence or out of necessity when more of us have been displaced by war, or have lost our own homes, but we all exist in a single Field of Energy. Everything we witness we are in accord with on an energetic level.
The question I can’t stop asking myself with anguished perplexity this week is WHAT drives human beings to do such things?
I don’t buy that it’s because “they are just evil” or they are “crazed by an evil religion”. I think we all need to rise above this nonsense and better understand the conditions that have given rise to this outbreak of vengeance. The more we understand the history of the region before 1948 but back thousands of years of dislocation and genocide of the Jewish people the less satisfying the pseudo-explanation of “evil” becomes.
If we head up above the tree line and take a God’s eye view in trying to see both sides of this by becoming both sides as we’re all divine beings, we can’t possibly know what to do next. It reminds of that feeling of futility when our own children are trying to harm one other in the back seat of our moving vehicles. We just want to restore the peace. The Good vs. Evil story is a shallow one, it leaves something critical out and today’s piece is about that deeper something.
Bewilderment and forehead scratching seems like the only way we can step away far enough from our very human justifications to attack that keeps plunging this region into hell again and again.
What I know deep in my heart from a lifetime of seeking into our human nature is that all of us have or will suffer injustice whether politically, in a marriage, a job, or in a family. Eisenstein claims that we all have this retributive devil on our shoulder that speaks to us in whispers. He is self-righteousness and claims justice but his main game is vengeance, and his nemesis is FORGIVENESS.
Our continued conquests as a formula for a better world seems to be a symptom of side-taking. A desperate population that has been subject to two generations of violence and humiliation with 50% of their population being children, is a tinderbox of fury waiting to be unleashed in future generations.
“What does Israel, or the world community expect? How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to as subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attache aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry inits to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response?
Chris Hedges
There can be no true justification for war once we really understand both sides as though we were walking in their shoes seeing the world from their perspective.
It’s why we’re divinely forgiven for our sins the moment they occur because until we see this we are caught up in dualistic good-versus-evil thinking. Any explanation besides evil disrupts the narrative that makes it easy and straightforward to know what to do. Who needs to be killed. The thing we really need to keep in mind is that we are not always seeing both sides or reading about Israel’s killing of 250 Palestinians, including 47 innocent children this year in the West Bank.
The same little persuasive devil is on all of our shoulders whispering in all of our ears.
That is our human condition.
So what is the cure?
I’m not sure, but from where I’m sitting Israel is facing a huge choice. It’s Friday early afternoon as I write this and I’m not sure what is to come, but I can’t help but wonder will Israel seek security?
Or will it seek vengeance?
These two goals oppose each other.
Any retaliation makes us all more insecure.
Revenge creates endless new crops of enemies and casts us farther away from security then we were before. If our intellects and rational minds decide that we are the good guys then we can somehow all justify more horror.
In the kitchen last night we had a bit of heated conversation about this topic and I can see why the newspapers are filling our minds with the good vs evil story, but maybe we all need to remember that is how we were all exploited with ideas of the conquest of Iraq in 9/11, even though in the end the country had nothing to do with the attack. As humans we justify our invasions and cause more violence, more terrorism, and less security.
It’s a fact.
We see red.
In the same way much to my horror, one of our sons picked up the driver in his golf bag and took a full swing at his brother’s head in an attempt to decapitate him in a rage over something, I can’t even remember to be honest. (authors note: head stayed on, everyone cried, peace ensued:)
One of my favourite philosophers Rene Girard identified these cycles of vengeance and “the original social crisis”. It’s older than history, self-sustaining and each act of retribution gives cause for further retribution. It’s self-escalating as each atrocity loosens the bonds of restraint. Girard is clearly stating what is hard for us to see when we’re lost in the trees. Our societies shatter or we find scapegoats and dehumanize one another.
There is no such a thing as “good violence” and “bad violence,” Girard emphasized. If we believe in the righteousness of our own violence — or of our side — it is always what we think of as the “good” kind. It is this belief, Girard said, that allowed scapegoating violence to perpetuate throughout history.
But maybe there is a cure for our human condition.
We can break the escalating cycle of vengeance by refusing to participate in it.
No matter how badly we want to, WE CAN BECOME THE FIRST NOT TO HIT BACK.
We can forgive.
We can release all intent to harm those that have wronged us.
We can restrain and end the cycle.
We can seek to secure instead of retaliate.
That is how we end violence. To turn the other cheek.
Can we even imagine what could be possible if Israel decides to acknowledge the suffering and admit their desire to respond with force, but to share in some political and reverent way that more than vengeance they want peace. That they have a greater desire to halt this ancient cycle of violence in the Holy Land?
Would the world not applaud that kind of courage?
If you are wondering how can this be done, I’m not the person qualified to make that kind of recommendation, but I’ve seen a few brilliant suggestions floating around the internet that propose things like:
The cessation of all military operations by all sides.
A neutral temporary governing peace force preventing further attacks
UN committee to help establish a status settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (with a two-state solution)
restoration of water, food, medicine and electricity to Gaza monitored by this special peace force
all hostages and prisoners remanded.
This kind of restraint is NOT weakness as some critics might suggest, it’s powerful beyond measure. It shows a heroic degree of courage and could secure the region without undo force or a higher death toll on either side.
If we go back to our sacred scriptures, it’s what we’re being asked to do in the Talmud, the Bible and in the Qur’an.
Judaism's religious texts overwhelmingly endorse compassion and peace, and the Hebrew Bible contains the well-known commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself".
Christianity teaches that God gave everyone life and that each human is made 'in the image of God'. The belief is that life is sacred and should be protected. The Ten Commandments forbid murder and of course there is Matthew 5:44:
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Jesus
It’s what Jesus demonstrated before his own death when it was reported that he said “forgive them father, they know not what they do”.
Do any of us know any better now?
In Islamic faith, The Qur’an explicitly forbids aggressive warfare- 2:190: “And fight in the way of God with those who fight with you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors.” Muslim scholars have noted that this verse implicitly forbids killing non-combatants, including women and children.
The Book of Isaiah contains the following passage: "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
“Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares” is a bronze sculpture by artist Evgeniy Vuchetich (1908 ¬1974). The sculpture depicts the figure of a man, holding a hammer aloft in one hand and a sword in the other hand, hammering the sword into a ploughshare, a tool to till land for crops. This action symbolizes man’s desire to put an end to war and transform tools of destruction into tools to benefit mankind.
Let’s pray for all the residents in Gaza have the kind of peace filled loving home we all wish for our own families very soon. It’s inconceivable that more than half of Gaza’s population could be asked to traverse an active war zone this weekend.
Israel can change history and so can we. They can pull back and cancel their ground raids that I see were confirmed about 15 minutes ago.
Let’s all do what we can to help these people. Human kindness holds sway in the world and thank goodness because in a world of nuclear weapons, let us hope and pray that someone wise decides to clear the low bar and chooses to hold back.
Let’s put down our drivers.
Shalom.
With love,
Rev Nona
If you are interested in helping with the International Humanitarian efforts underway you can find more information HERE.
I hope you’ll consider joining me in an Intention Experiment run by Lynne McTaggart to help restore peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and stop the killing on both sides:
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
9 am Pacific/12 noon Eastern/5 pm UK/6 pm Europe
Register here: https://news.lynnemctaggart.com/.../israeli-peace...
A blessing by one of my favourite Irish authors and poets..
John O’Donohue
For a New Home
May this house shelter your life.
When you come in home here,
May all the weight of the world
Fall from your shoulders.
May your heart be tranquil here,
Blessed by peace the world cannot give.
May this home be a lucky place,
Where the graces your life desires
Always find the pathway to your door.
May nothing destructive
Ever cross your threshold.
May this be a safe place
Full of understanding and acceptance,
Where you can be as you are,
Without the need of any mask
Of pretence or image.
May this home be a place of discovery,
Where the possibilities that sleep
In the clay of your soul can emerge
To deepen and refine your vision
For all that is yet to come to birth.