JEWISH YES:
There are a few ways to create a beautiful world:
1. Burn down all that exists and start over.
This approach is almost always the wrong one because it means destroying whatever beauty existed in what you’re burning down. And there is absolutely no guarantee that what you build will turn out any more beautiful, and it’s quite likely it will end up much uglier.
Realizing this requires deep humility, and an ability to let go of pain and anger.
2. Starting something of your own.
With this approach, you avoid the need to burn down existing beauty, and have an opportunity to create a beauty that’s all your own. But it also means you’re still left with the risk that whatever you’re creating may not be the solution people need, or may make problems worse. But ultimately, because it’s yours, you can work with all that, and you can adjust your approach to make sure you don’t make mistakes others have, and that you have.
This approach also requires humility, or you will end up just as deformed as the world you’re trying to make an alternative to.
3. Beautifying the world that exists.
This one has a huge amount of potential. While the world you may be angry at for not being as beautiful as it should be may be ugly and maybe even disgusting, it also has beauty. Beauty that exists is so much easier to work with than beauty that must come from thin air. In many ways, you can focus on shaving off the ugliness to get to the core of goodness underneath.
But this approach is also immensely difficult. It means you have to enter the ugliness, you have to walk in the muck. And if you get caught too deep in it, you can come out just as dirty as those around you. Or you may end up so disgusted by it all that you decide option 1 is the only thing left.
So this approach, too, requires a deep humility. Without humility, all you’ll see is the ugliness and imagine you’re above it. You wouldn’t know that if you had chosen choice 1 or 2, your world would probably be just as ugly as the one you’re in.
And it requires a clarity of vision that allows you to imagine the potential of the world you’ve entered. To be able to see the beauty under all the ugly, and commit to building it up.
May we all discover the choice that best fits us, and may God help us in our endeavors.
Believing in Torah means:
1. Believing all will be for the best.
2. Believing that it’s our job to get there.
Both cannot truly thrive within us without the other.
JEWISH NO:
I honestly do not understand Jewish people following the lead of Billy Joel and feeling comfortable wearing yellow stars that Jews were labeled with during pogroms and the Holocaust. It is interesting to me that it gets no response, but if any of them dared to wear a Jewish star, I am sure we would hear all about it.
http://www.newsweek.com/yellow-stars-jewish-celebrities-and-why-some-say-protest-trend-needs-stop
I am fascinated by Jewish history, and below it explains how Jewish people were labeled, before many of us were just “white” since we don’t fit in any other category, and what many people learn incorrectly from Wikipedia.
Coach Yulia
Dani Ishai Behan
Although today’s antisemites claim that we are white Europeans, it used to be common knowledge that Jews come from Asia. In fact, they tried (but ultimately failed) to denaturalize us precisely because we were a non-European diaspora. But now that it’s beneficial for us to have our heritage recognized, antisemites angrily assert that we are either European converts, or have been away from the Middle East for so long that we have essentially become one with our rapists. The hypocrisy is revolting.
“Asiatic Exclusion League. San Francisco: April 1910. Pg. 7. “To amend section twenty-one hundred and sixty-nine of the Revised Statutes of the United States. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that section twenty-one hundred and sixty-nine of the Revised Statutes of the United States be, and the same is hereby, amended by adding thereto the following: And Mongolians, Malays, and other Asiatics, except Armenians, Assyrians, and Jews, shall not be naturalized in the United States”. ~ Asiatic Exclusion League. San Francisco: April 1910. Pg. 7
