Posted on 09/22/2006 8:17:16 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
I've heard the admonition, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem" all my life.
And every Easter I have prayed: "for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of His Name and in faithfulness to His covenant."
As a Catholic, all I can say is, "God bless the Jews."
Ha Shana Tov Ping
Beautiful.
Shana Tova....feminine form
Column One: A prayer for 5767
By CAROLINE GLICK
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1157913682095&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Pope Benedict XVI has become political Islam's newest excuse for rioting. Mobs from Rawalpindi to Ramallah are burning him in effigy. Muslim leaders from Gaza to Indonesia to Qatar, from Turkey to Washington and London are attacking the pope and demanding that he apologize to Islam for what they consider to be a heinous attack against their religion.
To recap what has been exhaustively reported in recent days, the pontiff's "crime" against Islam occurred in the course of a scholarly lecture at the University of Regensburg in his native Germany earlier in the month. Benedict quoted from a dialogue between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a Persian scholar of Islam circa 1391 where the emperor criticized harshly the Islamic practice of forcibly converting non-Muslims to Islam.
In the pope's words, the Byzantine emperor, "addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'
"The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God,' he says, 'is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.'"
As Benedict explained, the harsh judgment that the Byzantine emperor rendered on Islam stemmed directly from his Christian understanding of God as a reasonable deity. According to Benedict, the reason a Christian leader was able to judge Islam, and so conduct a meaningful inter-cultural discussion on the merits of Islam and Christianity, was because he had a clear understanding of how his religion construed the God-created world and conceived of man's relationship to God.
Expanding on this theme, the pope told his audience that European civilization itself is a fusion of Christian faith and Greek philosophy of reason. Europe's current cultural drift, he argued, stems from the cultural separation between faith and reason that began with the Reformation and went on through the Enlightenment. By relegating faith to a subculture that has no place in discussions of practical human endeavors, he said, Europeans have rendered themselves incapable of understanding who they are or of defending themselves and their values in a manner that the Byzantine emperor, in the pre-scientific era, was able to do so stalwartly.
IT COULD be said that the Islamic world's hysterical and violent reaction to Benedict's use of the 600-year-old dialogue only serves to reinforce the Byzantine emperor's impression that Islam does not perceive God as being a reasoning deity. But limiting an analysis of Benedict's lecture to the Muslim world's hysterical reaction would ignore the pope's central point. Benedict's overarching message in that lecture was that to survive, a culture must be willing to embrace its identity, for if it does not, it won't even be capable of understanding why it should survive.
While Benedict's specific message was to his fellow Christians, the Jewish people should take heed of his general message. Today, the Jewish people, in Israel and throughout the world find ourselves under attack from all quarters. The rise of anti-Semitism globally, and particularly in the Islamic world, finds us in a period of grave self-doubt. Like the Europeans, our ability to defend ourselves against the swelling ranks of haters is dependent on our ability as a people and as individuals to embrace our identity as Jews.
Commenting on the nature of this surge in Jew-hatred, the great (non-Jewish) Canadian pundit Mark Steyn wrote last month in the National Review, "The oldest hatred didn't get that way without the ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are - so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they're hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless-cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they're hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they'd be hated for that, too."
It is crucial that all of us internalize the message that these lines convey. For in recent years, rather than recognize the prejudice of our detractors, we have devoted ourselves to attempting to understand and so justify the hatred they heap upon us.
We tell ourselves we are hated because we are too strong - or because we are too weak. We are hated because we are too religious - or because we are not religious enough. We are hated because we insist on defending Israel - or we are hated because we are willing to compromise on Israel.
Yet, as Steyn wisely notes, we are not hated because of what we do, we are hated because we are Jews. In light of this, the best way to defend ourselves, the best way to safeguard our freedom and our heritage, is to embrace and celebrate our identity as Jews. As Elie Wiesel once explained to me, the key to defending ourselves is to never allow our haters to tell us who we are. "Hatred only defines the haters," he said.
And indeed, when we look at the manner in which Jews in Israel and throughout the world are being attacked today, we see that the attacks are based not on Jewish actions but on the fact that we are Jews.
Thus, in the midst of yet another wave of violent attacks by Muslims against Jews in Norway last month, Norway's Jewish community warned its members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public.
Thus it is that the charter of Hamas, the movement that now controls the Palestinian Authority, calls not for compromise with Israel but for all Jews to be expelled from the Land of Israel or forcibly converted to Islam as part of the global jihad.
So it is that attacks against Jewish supporters of Israel in the West target not the substance of their arguments, but their right as Jews to lobby for Israel in their countries of citizenship.
"We Jews," Wiesel explained, "have always defined ourselves as the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Indeed, at Mount Sinai, in our acceptance of the Ten Commandments, the Jewish people became the first nation in history to self-consciously define itself. And each subsequent generation of Jews has remade that choice. Jews do not exist, as Jean-Paul Sarte ignorantly argued, because anti-Semites exist. The leader of the existentialist movement should have understood; anti-Semites exist because anti-Semites choose to exist.
AS STEYN notes, today hatred against Jews is anchored on Israel. Provoked by this new form of Jew-hatred, some Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora see Israel as a burden. This is a self-inflicted tragedy. For if we look at Israel, we see that far from being a burden, our Jewish state is one of the most stunning successes of Jewish history.
Today, Israel is the home of the largest Jewish community in the world. More Jews live in Israel today than at any time in our history. And the state in which we live is one of the most vibrant, optimistic, "happening" countries in the world. We have the highest birthrate in the West. Rates of entrepreneurship are among the highest in the world.
We are one of the most highly educated societies in the world. Over the past 15 years, more than a dozen colleges have been established in Israel and last year the government decided to allow two colleges to join Israel's nine research universities as full-fledged, independent research universities.
Israelis are among the most patriotic citizens in the world. Our patriotism is expressed in the high level of volunteerism in all age groups. In the recent war, tens of thousands of reservists willingly left their families and jobs to take up arms and defend the country, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis volunteered to help our one million brothers and sisters whose homes were targeted by rockets, missiles and mortars.
Jewish life blossoms in Israel as it has nowhere else in our history. The rates of literacy in Jewish learning in Israel are higher than they have ever been anywhere in our history. Israel is the home of some half dozen generations of Jews whose mother tongue is the language of the Bible and the Talmud.
Israel's success stems from its serving as a vehicle that allows us to express our heritage in all facets of society. And our Jewish heritage is one of the most precious heritages known to man.
The Jewish people gave humanity the concepts of God, liberty and law. Our understanding of the fallibility of mankind has prevented us from being tempted by false prophets promising us heaven on Earth, and has allowed us to take practical steps toward improving our lot and our world.
All of the ideals that Israel represents, both spiritual and physical, have formed the foundations for human progress and freedom throughout the world for millennia. Our willingness to stay loyal to our identity and our heritage has been the key to our survival throughout the ages in the face of the countless foes who sought to destroy us both spiritually and physically.
Rosh Hashana marks the beginning of the Ten Days of Repentance that precede Yom Kippur. To properly atone for our sins and correct our mistakes, we must understand who we are, what we represent and what we can and should aspire to as Jews. To do this, we must reject the notion that those who hate us can tell us who we are. To do this we must embrace our Jewish identity and uphold our commitment to our collective destiny.
The fact that hatred of Jews has endured for so long says nothing about the nature of the Jewish people. What does speak volumes about that nature is the fact that through the ages our fortunes have been directly related to our ability to spurn our enemies' distorted portraits of the Jewish people and our willingness to endure and progress as Jews in the midst of that hatred.
Pope Benedict is able to discuss Islam because, secure in his Christian identity, he has a clear basis for judging the goodness or unreasonableness of Muslim values and behavior. Whether we agree with his judgments or not, through his willingness to judge, Benedict capably defends and advances his faith.
When we embrace our moral and intellectual identity as Jews, we are then capable of meeting the challenges of our times. It is my prayer that in 5767, the Jewish people will rally around our heritage, history and culture and so pave the way for a secure, peaceful and moral future for our people and our world.
Thanks. I posted the complete article in 6 from the Jerusalem Post which doesn't require excerpting.
High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. also
2006israelwar or WOT
..................
Complete article in post 6
God Bless the Jewish people on the eve of their New Year.
Those who bless the Jewish people are blessed in returned.
Jews are not hated, I love them.
Thank you!
Thanks. A wonderful article, and it needed to be read in its entirety.
bttt
I pray for the Jewish people every day - they are being persecuted today all over the world, nearly as much as during the Holocaust. What bothers me most is the virulent anti-Semitism that seems to be rising here in the U.S.
I have been reading books all week on Judaism, Israel, history of the Jewish people from 70 C.E. to now; by progressive and conservative authors. It makes me cry because Christians, generally (with a few exceptions) fared no better than Muslims in their relations with the Jewish people until about the middle of the 1800s. There were brite spots from time to time, both in Muslim and Christian lands, but they never comprised a permanent change in the dominant view of how Jews could be treated and were most often understood, even by the Jews, as privileges granted a second-class people, not rights conferred as right belonging to everyone.
Toward the end of their formal persecutions in Christian lands, they were better treated in Muslim lands at the time; possibly only because they were extreme minorities, did not represent a cultural threat to the dominant culture and, segregated considerably from the dominant culture, they were left on their own more.
Most major exceptions, in Muslim or Christian lands, were individuals who so excelled in some area that they were given a wider range of social and official freedom, as privileges; privileges not granted to most of their own Jewish peers.
Until the modern era, whether under Muslims or Christians, the Jewish people were almost always treated as some form of second-class people who deserved persecution, sanction, ridicule, segregation and most often looked on as foreigners who deserved all the ill treatment they got, even after hundreds of years of living in a country.
After six days of my reading, I realized that the Holocaust cannot be allowed to stand as one of the most significant reasons for establishing the state of Israel in 1948. The Holocaust was in reality a final summation of the previous 1878 years that Jewish people lived under Christians and Muslims. That 1878 years alone, without the Holocaust comprise enough evidence and legitimate demand, in my mind, for the settlement of the Jews in their homeland.
I mean, for example, there aren't any more separate or identifiable Danes or Jutes or Angles or Saxons in Britain, or Normans in Sicily, or Phoenicians in Tunis, or --- you get the picture.
How is it that the Jews persisted as an identifiable people--- always treated (sadly, but maybe not surprisingly?) as foreign, outsiders, aliens -- in whatever nations they lived, for two millennia?
It's something I wonder about.
When Jewish people died in Europe, willingly, rather than covert under duress, the common response was that they had no choice but to let their tormentor murder them "to honor the name of God".
Between the three, Judaism is also the only one that does not believe in going out and trying to produce converts. In Judaism, converts must seek to be a Jew on their own; in fact, there is a formal process that a convert must go through to insure the fullness of the independence of the decision before the education steps for conversion can proceed.
Two other peoples that I know of who have succeeded in refusing to assimilate over many centuries, in spite of many different conquering empires, mass expulsions from one area to another and partitions between different empires and outside nations are the Kurds and the Armenians.
What makes them strong enough not to assimilate? LIke the Jews, I suppose it's language and religion, and an avoidance of intermarriage.
Which reminds me that one Jewish commentator stated that the Jews' main problem here is not that "they hate us," but that "they love us" --- which is to say, intermarriage is the main force that could shrink, and maybe extinct, the Jewish community in America.
Yes, interfaith marriage is becoming a concern among some Jewish groups in America - though you would not know it in my community in New Jersey. Orthodox and Conservative Jewish families have been growing non-stop here for the past fifteen years - by having large families and by lots of new families. It may, nationally, become a situation that does not concern Orthodox and Conservative Jewish families in the long run, if most of the interfaith marriages are with Reformed (Liberal) and secular Jewish people. The news reports about the concern may be originating in the Reformed and secular Jewish community.
"What makes them......not..assimilate" (Kurds, Armenians and Jewish people)? It may be genetic. Abraham began his many-years-long migration, starting from the ancient city of Ur. The site of ancient Ur is about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It would not be a stretch if Abraham's people were related to the peoples who became the Kurds and the Armenians - each of the three groups migrating in different directions from the center of Mesopotamia - Iraq. I read report about a genetic study of people around the world and their genetic relationships. One item it reported was that the Kurds have more genetic markers in common with the Jews than do any other people of the Middle East.
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