We will honor Anil K. Malhotra tomorrow - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - at the Pumphrey Funeral Home, 7557 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, MD with a viewing starting at 9AM, with a funeral service following at 9:45AM. 

Happiness

I have always wondered if there is more to happiness than we realize. I see that the most creative people seem to be those who are profoundly unhappy or have lives that lead them to despair! So are happiness and creativeness incompatible?

Aristotle claimed that happiness is always the ultimate purpose of life. Aristotle’s argument is that if you ask anyone “why do you do what you do?”, and you keep asking the question “yes, but why do you do X” to their answer X, then ultimately they will say “because it makes me happy”. It is the only purpose that appears to be an end in itself.  

As far as happiness goes, most people can be categorized as follows:

1.     Unhappy (small number of people)

2.     Mildly Content (majority of people)

3.     Extreme Happiness or Ecstasy (small number of people)

Research shows that for “Mildly Content” people their happiness is relatively stable over time. But people who experience extreme happiness are more likely in a years time to be unhappy. Intensely happy people often have a roller coaster ride to happiness with intense highs and intense lows. 

Thus one can argue that the first secret to happiness is not to pursue intense happiness but to pursue mild contentment. Advertising and the media want to promote intense happy experiences to get our attention. They are encouraging us to be extremely happy and are ultimately causing our unhappiness.

There are two main types of happiness

1.            Hedonistic based happiness (type 1 happiness). For example the feeling you get after a            glass of wine, or after watching a great movie. Its relatively short lived and roughly lasts          about 15 minutes.

2.            Satisfaction/Accomplishment based happiness. (type 2 happiness). For example looking          back over your accomplishments and getting that feeling of satisfaction. e.g. People               who devote their lives to a cause. It is a more long lasting type of happiness in general.

The second secret to happiness is to pursue experiential happiness and also accomplishment based happiness at the same time”. Happiness has a lot to do with who we compare ourselves with. Some research at the Barcelona Olympic games found that bronze medal winners were more happy on average than the silver medal winners. It is explained by who the medal winners were comparing themselves to. Bronze medal winners compare themselves with the people who didn’t get medals. Whereas the silver medal winners were comparing themselves with the gold winners. Therefore the bronze winners felt happier than the silver winners. Similarly a lot of advertising is directed at getting us to compare our possessions with the possessions of others e.g. Your neighbor has a Porsche but you don’.  The “close shave” focuses your thinking into “what might of been” thinking i.e. a comparison. Psychologists called this “counter factual thinking”. It’s is another form of comparison to others.

The third secret to happiness is “beware and mindful of your ‘what might have been’ thinking as it will impact your happiness”. Imagination is one of the things that probably separates us from animals e.g. we can think “what might have been”.  Imagination is something we probably inherited as the result of evolution, because happiness motivates us to do all the things that ensure our survival. It’s a reward mechanism for survival behaviors that have an evolutionary purpose e.g. eating, sex, competing with others for survival. It also explains why there is a point to “unhappiness”. Anxiety, fear and other “unhappy” emotions actually made a lot of evolutionary sense in the past when we were also prey. Evolution effectively says that the continuation of life itself is the purpose of life. So both happiness and unhappiness are both useful emotions to ensure life prevails.

But in recent years there are some who argue that we are now suffering from an excess of it. Coming out as “depressed” has become all the rage—among cricketers, footballers, even surfers. This spread of depression is partly a side-effect of our addiction to happiness. Conversely, understanding why we are so miserable should liberate us from being too miserable about it. We can feel good about feeling bad. In other words, we need a decent philosophy of failure to save everyone from thinking what failures they are.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud argues that there are three reasons we are so miserable and they all have something to do with disappointed expectations. His enemies of happiness are: (a) religion, especially Christianity for pushing the idea of heaven; (b) 18th-century voyages of discovery—for raising unrealistic expectations of heaven on earth; (c) finally (so self-critically!) psychoanalysis itself, which seems to dangle in front of you the notion that everything can be fixed. One could add another: (d) the pharmaceutical industry (and illicit chemical cocktails similarly).

The notion that happiness is actually attainable belongs to the second half of the 18th century. Previously there had been a general consensus that no one can be called happy until he carries his happiness down to the grave in peace. Paradiso was strictly for the pages of Dante. In Greenland, for example, the Greenlanders bought into Christianity on account of its persuasive description of pain and suffering. The vale of tears was real. Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde (1771) stresses two things. First, that the Tahitians live a life of wellbeing, and don’t have to work too hard either. Second, that the women—and to some extent the men too—throw themselves willingly at French sailors, which adds significantly to the happiness of French sailors. There are of course darker strands to the narrative—Bougainville mentions at least one murder, and hints that in fact sexual bliss may actually have been obtained in exchange for a few nails or other useful items. But nevertheless, one can say that Bougainville was concerned less with the pursuit of happiness itself, than with the fact it had finally been located and lived out in the southern hemisphere. It was just a question of transporting the south back into the north. These traveller’s tales of transcendence had a powerful impact on subsequent thinkers. Freud, for one. His theory of the id and the ego transposes the 18th century map of the world, specifically the north/south divide, onto the map of the human psyche. The “southern” id was having all the fun—the pleasure principle—while the more northerly ego was reining in the hedonistic savage self with a good dose of the “reality principle.”

Charles Fourier, the great utopian philosopher who provided the blueprint for the communist society of the future, looked forward to unfaltering happiness and an age of “harmony” in the “phalanstery,” with mass adultery, public orgies and a sexual AA call-out service for anyone who is still really desperate. 

Albert Camus was equally alert to the tyranny of happiness. In his early work, The Myth of Sisyphus, he satirises the figure of Don Juan and the concept of the orgy, but in the very last line of the essay he asks us to imagine that Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock up the mountain, is “happy.” Conversely, he suggests (in his Carnets) that “we have to fall in love if only to provide an alibi for the random despair we were going to feel anyway”’ Whether you play football or go swimming or rock-rolling—or even write, something always goes wrong. Or, as Sartre, his long-time comrade and adversary, put it: “everything always goes wrong” (tout est voué à l’échec).

From Voltaire to Wittgenstein, the point of philosophy has been to pop the balloon of excessive optimism. “Many happy returns!” said his landlady to Wittgenstein on his birthday as he lay dying of cancer. “No there aren’t,” he replied tersely. Therefore, angst, despair, nausea: welcome! Get thee behind me Church of perpetual wellbeing (the “Wellness Syndrome,” as Carl Cederström puts it).

We all want to be happy and spend a lot of time and energy to avoid the pain that stems from sadness and suffering.  Go to any book shop and you will see hundreds of books all dedicated to helping us to avoid pain and suffering. There are also thousands of blogs and gurus providing just as many ways to “true happiness”.  But you ever stopped to think about the cost of happiness, the most important being the loss of creativity. As Eric Wilson points out: “Creating doesn’t make us unhappy; unhappiness makes us creative.”

In his book “Against Happiness”, he argues that without sadness there would no creativity, inventiveness, imagination, or philosophic thought.  Without melancholy society would lose it’s soul as people would not have the desire to look beyond their “happy state” to find new meaning in life in new experiences and as yet un-imagined existential states.  Professor Wilson argues that we need to embrace melancholia as a necessary and healthy state of life.

There are hundreds of examples of exceptionally creative melancholics throughout time– Abraham Lincoln, Cary Grant, Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill to name a few. Many writers and artists created their greatest works during times of melancholy and depression. For example singer Joni Mitchell once said: “Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it”. Recognizing the darker parts of herself was essential to recognizing the good.

Psychologist Carl Jung studied an ancient Taoist work called “The Secret of the Golden Flower” and concluded that two things that often appear to be opposites may actually be “independent manifestations of the same principle.”   For Jung, the underlying principle was the unconscious.

·       Ying and Yang

·       Darkness and Light

·       Female and Male

To Jung melancholy and sadness often lead to greater understanding, and are a necessary catalyst for insight and self-awareness.  There can be no “shaping of identity” without melancholy.

·       Doubt breeds knowledge

·       Brooding breeds enlightenment

·       Fear breeds strength

·       Worry breeds action

·       Melancholy breeds creativity

Melancholia allows us to see true beauty. As Keats points out “Pain is the muse of beauty.” Without it we would not be able to differentiate it from what is merely pretty.

A lot of our aversion to pain and suffering stems from our fear of death. Connecting to our melancholy helps us to recognize that everything is temporary and fleeting. Instead of escaping our fear of death we should confront it and explore it. By doing so we can more appreciate life’s beauty, brilliance and possibility. We become energized to live more fully and creatively.  It brings us back in touch with reality, but with a open mind of questioning, introspection, and invention.

In conclusion, constant happiness could be argued to be artificial and delusional. To truly experience life we must embrace the dualities of Life’s natural cycles of both darkness and light.

This was the last blog written by Anil K. Malhotra.  Our husband and father expired on August 22, 2014.  

On his behalf we thank all of his readers for their support and encouragement.  

-- the Malhotra family

A review of menus

Jen Doll describes the present fad of food descriptions and status anxiety:

"In 1919 the Hotel Pennsylvania, in New York, opened its first restaurant, with offerings notable for their descriptive simplicity: “lamb,” “potatoes: boiled,” and so on. Nearly 100 years later, the Statler Grill, one of the hotel’s current restaurants, offers updated takes, from a “lollipop Colorado lamb chop” to “buttered mashed potatoes (Idaho potatoes with butter & a touch of cream, whipped to perfection).”

You needn’t be a linguist to note changes in the language of menus, but Stanford’s Dan Jurafsky has written a book doing just that. In The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, Jurafsky describes how he and some colleagues analyzed a database of 6,500 restaurant menus describing 650,000 dishes from across the U.S. Among their findings: fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, use fancier—and longer—words than cheaper restaurants do (think accompaniments and decaffeinated coffee, not sides and decaf). Jurafsky writes that “every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 69 cents in the price of that dish.” Compared with inexpensive restaurants, the expensive ones are “three times less likely to talk about the diner’s choice” (your way, etc.) and “seven times more likely to talk about the chef’s choice.”

Lower-priced restaurants, meanwhile, rely on “linguistic fillers”: subjective words like delicious, flaky, and fluffy. These are the empty calories of menus, less indicative of flavor than of low prices. Cheaper establishments also use terms like ripe and fresh, which Jurafsky calls “status anxiety” words. Thomas Keller’s Per Se, after all, would never use fresh—that much is taken for granted—but Subway would. Per Se does, however, engage in the trendy habit of adding provenance to descriptions of ingredients (Island Creek oysters, Frog Hollow’s peaches). According to Jurafsky, very expensive restaurants “mention the origins of the food more than 15 times as often as inexpensive restaurants.”

Not that the signature elements of a fancy menu are likely to stay exclusive. Food terms—like food trends—have a way of traveling full circle, from rarefied to mainstream to passé and back again. Take the word macaroni, which rich Americans originally borrowed from Italy. In 1900, Jurafsky explains, it was found mainly on high-end menus but “slowly became more and more common,” ending up the purview of all-night diners. Until, that is, top chefs began reclaiming mac and cheese, mixing in delicacies like truffles, or, in the case of Keller’s deconstructed version, lobster.

Already, provenance-oriented menu language is spreading outward from the finer restaurants to the Subways and Applebee’s of the world. The first franchise to take provenance seriously was Chipotle, says the food developer Barb Stuckey. (“They’ve always menued Niman Ranch pork.”) Now some McDonald’s burgers are served not on “buns” but on “artisan rolls,” and TGI Fridays boasts of “vine-ripened tomatoes.”
In turn, high-end food purveyors may head in a different direction. “As this stuff trickles down, the rich need a way to be different again,” says Jurafsky, who notes the burgeoning menu trend of extreme minimalism, seen at the Michelin-starred San Francisco spot Saison, where the set price starts at $248 and the menu comes after the meal, as a souvenir. In some ways, this is “a return to 200 years ago, when you’d say, ‘Give me dinner,’ and they’d just give you what they’d cooked,” Jurafsky says.

Imagine what this could do for the speed of the drive-through lane."

Organizing in the future - some thoughts

In the late 1970s, we were thrilled by the ability to send and receive messages through the revolutionary medium then known as “electronic mail.” At about the same time we wrote books and messages on a computer and stored them electronically rather than on cards or papers stuffed into filing cabinets.

With each new year and each new Moore’s Law–enabled boost in processor speed, transmission rates, storage capacity, and other elements of the information infrastructure, ever more data has come at us, ever faster. Appointments, assignments, driving directions—everything has become part of the expanding cloud of “personal information” necessary for our work and home lives.

Fortunately year by year tools for coping with the onslaught have also been improving—but more slowly. Electronic calendars, online collaboration systems, search engines and archives, and the converging technologies that make up the smartphone revolution did something, but never quite enough, to put people in control of information. “I sometimes wonder whether, with all this data, people have just given up,” said Mitch Kapor, a personal-software pioneer. “They may just have resigned themselves to living in this infinite sea of information.” Kapor first became famous as the founder of the software company Lotus and the designer of the spreadsheet application Lotus 1-2-3, and also the creator of the brilliant early personal-information program Lotus Agenda. 

Individually and collectively, the experts comments boiled down to: We’ve been through the worst. The next stage in information technology will put people back in control, or closer to it, they all foretold. More specifically:

1. The beginning of an end to the e‑mail nightmare

E-mail is indispensable, and unendurable. That is because it does not scale. Every message, represents a task—something to read, a query to answer, a meeting to schedule, a bill to pay, a request to fulfill or deny. Thus senders can generate more tasks than recipients could possibly perform. Clearly the reader’s time is free to the sender, which is a huge market inefficiency.

Dyson says that some market mechanism will reset the balance. One way or another, senders will pay a premium for recipients’ time and attention—as they did in the pre-e‑mail days, by having to request appointments or make sales calls or, at the very least, pay for postage. Phil Libin says improved filtering systems are already solving the problem. “I have 100,000 e‑mails I haven’t answered,” he said. “I know that I can’t even open 90 percent of the e‑mail I get. Am I missing something important I should see? Sure, but rarely.” The remaining challenge is to reduce “the error rate”—that is, the share of important e‑mails that he does miss. And this, Libin said, should be “an easily solvable” problem, with the help of systems that learn whom he wants to hear from, and whom he doesn’t.

2. The spread of anticipatory intelligence

Computers work best when you’re least aware that they’re working at all. Modern cars, for instance, contain the processing power of dozens of early mainframe computers. But most of the time they discreetly scan for problems and alert the driver only if they detect something—engine trouble, poor traction on slippery roads, low gas—the driver might need to address. Someday, car computers might even be powerful enough to detect texting at the wheel on the basis of irregularities in driving patterns.

There are already counterparts in the personal-information world, as simple as smartphones that shift time zones as you travel or that adjust GPS routings as traffic problems emerge. “Computing will become a lot more anticipatory,” Libin says. “You won’t have to search for things. They will come up almost magically. The periods in the day during which you’re exposed to some sort of digital intelligence will increase until there is no time when you’re not exposed to it, in little bursts, as necessary.”

3. Better ways of getting information in, and out

“We still live in a world where if you’re serious about doing work, you have to get from your phone to a keyboard,” Kapor said. “We’re just beginning to get usable software for a small screen.”

He and Libin emphasized that jokes about Apple’s current, fallible Siri system have kept people from realizing how close voice-recognition technology is to being truly usable, and how fast the remaining gap is likely to close. “There will seem to be relatively little progress until all of a sudden it just works, and that time is coming soon,” Libin said.

Kapor expects that the spoken word will also be more and more important in conveying information in the other direction, from computer to user. “There has been a lot made of Google Glass, but they may be dealing with the wrong human sense,” he said. “The ubiquitous device may not be something that you see but something that whispers in your ear—a kind of reading glass for the ear that tells you what you need to know.”

4. The big picture at a glance, via map or dashboard

David Allen’s software goal, which he is now working toward with partners, is a “trusted orientation map” of the obligations, possibilities, information, and reminders relevant to each person at each moment of the day. A quick look would reveal the main tasks or challenges and then, Allen says, “I could zoom in or out to whatever level of detail or macro view I want.”

Mark Bernstein, who has applied some of Allen’s principles in his Tinderbox software, emphasizes the importance of combining big-picture and detailed views. “I think this is David Allen’s core lesson,” he wrote. “You don’t want a constant litany of the thousands of things you want to get done, but you need to be able to look over the whole list from time to time. Finding ways to make your information visible without letting it get underfoot is the big challenge.”

Are such challenges too great? The world is full of sorrows, but these people sounded confident that in their own corner of the world, prospects were bright. 

“It is well known in cognitive science that if you are pessimistic, you sound ‘smarter,’ ” says Libin,“That’s why people are more likely to listen to and repeat pessimistic assessments. But pessimism about the effects of technology is mainly a failure of imagination. We can see all of the problems but can’t imagine the new possibilities.

“I am not being naive,” Libin, who was born in Russia, said. “But the long arc of technology bends toward the more awesome.”

---

A Brief Chronicle of Personal Organization

History

2600 b.c.: Ancient Egyptians develop the first practical calendar, marking festivals and agricultural events.

1760s: The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus invents the index card.

1880s: Filing cabinets become a popular way of storing documents.

1971: The first e-mail is sent (unfortunately, its contents have been forgotten).

1993: The term PDA is coined to describe Apple’s Newton MessagePad.

2006: The total volume of paper mail sent through the U.S. Postal Service peaks.

Prediction

2024: Personal devices feature voice-recognition technology that actually works.

The worlds oldest religion

They are scared of lettuce. They abhor pumpkins. They practise maybe the oldest religion in the world. And now, after at least 6,000 years, they are finally being exterminated  in Iraq.

So who are these Yazidi?

The Yazidi are a Kurdish ethno-religious community, representing an ancient religion that is linked to Zoroastrianism. They live primarily in the Nineveh Province of northern Iraq. Additional communities in Armenia, Georgia and Syria have been in decline since the 1990s, their members having emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany. The Yazidi believe in God as creator of the world, which he placed under the care of seven holy beings or angels, the chief of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel.

Yazidism is much older than Islam, and much older than Christianity. It is also deeply peculiar. The Yazidi honour sacred trees. Women must not cut their hair. Marriage is forbidden in April. They avoid wearing dark blue because it is "too holy".

They are divided strictly into castes, who cannot marry each other. The upper castes are polygamous. Anyone of the faith who marries a non-Yazidi risks ostracism, or worse. Yazidism is syncretistic: it combines elements of many faiths. Like Hindus, they believe in reincarnation. Like ancient Mithraists, they sacrifice bulls. They practise baptism, like Christians. When they pray, they face the sun – like Zoroastrians. There are also strong links with Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

Then there is the devil worship: arguably, the Yazidi worship what Christians or Muslims might call “Satan”, though the Yazidi call him “Melek Taus”, and he appears in the form of a peacock angel.

Why might Melek Taus be “the devil”? For a start, the Yazidi believe the peacock angel led a rebellion in heaven: clearly echoing the story of Lucifer, cast into Hell by the Christian God. Also, the very word "Melek" is cognate with "Moloch", the name of a Biblical demon – who demanded human sacrifice.

The avian imagery of Melek Taus likewise indicates a demonic aspect. The Yazidi come from the ancient lands of Sumeria and Assyria, in modern-day Turkey, Iraq and Kurdistan. Sumerian gods were often cruel, and equipped with beaks and wings. Birdlike. Three thousand years ago the Assyrians worshipped flying demons, spirits of the desert wind. One was the scaly-winged demon in The Exorcist: Pazuzu.

The Yazidi reverence for birds – and snakes – also appears to be extremely old. Excavations at ancient Catalhoyuk, in Turkey, show that the people there revered bird-gods as long ago as 7000BC. Even older is Gobekli Tepe, a megalithic site near Sanliurfa, in Kurdish Turkey (Sanliurfa was once a stronghold of Yazidism). The extraordinary temple of Gobekli Tepe boasts carvings of winged birdmen, and images of buzzards and serpents.

Taking all this evidence into account, a fair guess is that Yazidism is a vastly ancient form of bird-worship, that could date back 6,000 years o r more. If this is right, it means that Yazidism is therefore the Ur-religion, the mother ship of Middle Eastern faiths, and it is us who have incorporated Yazidi myths and beliefs into our religions, of Christianity and Islam and Judaism.

The 40,000 Iraqis stranded on a mountain and facing possible genocide at the hands of surrounding Islamic State fighters are the last surviving community in their ancestral homeland of the Yazidis, long misunderstood by the outside world as "Devil-worshippers".

One of the most persecuted minorities in the Middle East, the Yazidis in fact find even the mention of the word "Satan" profoundly offensive, and have kept their ancient religion alive despite centuries of oppression.

The Yazidis mark themselves out as different. They never wear the colour blue. They are not allowed to eat lettuce. Many of the men wear their hair in long plaits that make them resemble nothing so much as Asterix and Obelix.

They believe one of their holy books, the Black Book, was stolen by the British in colonial times and is being kept somewhere in London.

But in their home town of Sinjar, from where they have now fled to the mountains above, they were welcoming in a way that belied their fearsome reputation as Satanists.

For ordinary Iraqis, they are bogeymen to frighten children with. But for religious extremists through the centuries, they have been Devil-worshippers to be slaughtered.

The misidentification came about because the Yazidis worship a fallen angel, the Malek Tawwus, or Peacock Angel. But, unlike Lucifer, the Yazidis' fallen angel was forgiven by God and restored to heaven.

Their religion is not just an offshoot of Christianity or Islam. They do not believe in heaven or hell, but in reincarnation, which they describe as the soul "changing its clothes".

They have kept their religion alive through the Talkers, men who are taught the entire text of their missing holy book by memory as children, and who in turn pass it on to their own sons.

The Yazidis once lived in a wide area, across Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Georgia and Armenia. But they have been driven from their homelands, and most have fled to Australia, Canada and Germany. Against all the odds, Iraq is the one place in the Middle East where a sizeable community remains.

They have been persecuted both for their religious beliefs, and for their ethnicity. In Turkey, they faced double discrimination as both non-Muslims and Kurds, and were forced to carry identity cards that listed their religion as "XXX". In Georgia and Armenia, they fell foul of nationalist movements after the fall of the Soviets.

The Yazidis speak Kurdish – they claim theirs is the ancient Kurdish religion – but they have a troubled history with their Kurdish neighbours too.

Their traditions make them highly visible as a separate community. The Yazidis do not practise arranged marriage, like other communities in the region. They have a formal system of elopement, where a man must "kidnap" his bride. If the woman is willing, the parents have to accept the match.

There are darker sides to the Yazidis. They have a tradition of killing any of their members who leave the religion, and 2007 it was reported that Du'a Khalil Aswad, a Yazidi woman, was stoned to death for converting to Islam and marrying a Muslim man.

The Yazidis say they have survived 72 genocides. Now there are fears the last community of them in the Middle East is facing another. And now, in the dusty cities of northern Iraq, Yazidism is finally dying. Moloch has returned to devour the gentle and peaceful Yazidi people, in the form of hateful, virulent, sadistic Islamism. Put it another way, the devil has revealed a sense of irony, even as the rest of us sit back, and passively watch the most ancient culture in the world being erased from human history.

The just war in Gaza?

This article by Jeff McMahan raises issues that all of us should be asking ourselves.

"Is Israel fighting a just war in Gaza"

"Thus far in the war in Gaza, more than 1800 Palestinians have been killed, most of them apparently civilians. Sixty three Israeli soldiers, two Israeli civilians, and one foreign worker in Israel have also been killed."  he writes. " The great disparity between the casualties on the two sides raises the question of whether Israeli military action has been disproportionate. This question remains important even if the war is now coming to an end." 

Despite the bombings of two Palestinian schools that the UN had designated civilian sanctuaries, let us assume that Israeli forces have not been attacking civilians intentionally. It is possible that the killing of Palestinian civilians is a foreseeable but the unintended side effect of defensive military action has been disproportionate in relation to the aim of protecting Israeli civilians and soldiers from attacks by Palestinian fighters.

To preempt misunderstanding, let us accept that Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel are wrong, as are its storing weapons in schools, private homes, and mosques, its locating entrances to tunnels in the same places, and its firing missiles from civilian areas in a way that attracts Israeli retaliatory fire to those areas. But he believes that Palestinian resistance to Israel’s unjust quarantine of Gaza and unjust occupation and settlement of the West Bank ought, for both moral and prudential reasons, is nonviolent in character.

One might think that it requires no argument to show that the killing of Palestinian civilians has been disproportionate, since no Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas in 2013 or 2014 before Israel began bombing Gaza earlier this summer in response to the killing—not, apparently, under the direct orders of Hamas—of three Israeli teenagers. But proportionality in defence does not depend on a comparison between harms one has suffered in the past and harms one causes in response. That is something different: proportionality in reprisal. Proportionality in defence is instead a relation between harms one causes and harms one seeks to avert in the future. And granting that Israel’s war has been defensive rather than retaliatory or punitive in its aims and that Israel’s main aims have been to prevent further rocket attacks from Gaza and to destroy the tunnels that have enabled Palestinian fighters to enter Israel to kill or abduct Israeli soldiers, the issue of proportionality still remains.

In the effort to achieve these aims, Israeli policy has been to give near-absolute priority to the protection of its own civilians and soldiers over the avoidance of killing Palestinian civilians. The permissibility of giving priority to the protection of one’s own soldiers (“force protection”) was advocated in articles by certain Israeli just-war theorists in the middle of the last decade and these seem to have influenced the conduct of the invasion of Gaza in 2008-2009, which in turn set the precedent for the way the current invasion is being conducted. Thus the New York Times reported on 1st August that, as Israeli forces have advanced, “they have pummeled neighborhoods with heavy artillery, which analysts said was militarily necessary to safeguard soldiers. … ‘In a dense urban environment, you need to use aggressive force to save soldiers’ lives,’ [Amos] Harel, the military affairs analyst, said.”

There are thus two questions:

(1) Are the killings of Palestinian civilians proportionate in relation to the aim of protecting Israeli civilians?

(2) Are the killings of Palestinian civilians proportionate in relation to the aim of protecting Israeli soldiers?

These questions are distinct, for it is arguable that the standard of proportionality is more demanding in the second case. 

It is true that the government of Israel has a duty to protect its civilian citizens, the vast majority of whom are not legitimate targets for Hamas fighters. Also the vast majority of Palestinians are not legitimate targets Israeli forces. The main issue is whether the killing of Palestinian civilians as a side effect is proportionate in relation to the threat to Israeli civilians that the invasion has been intended to eliminate.

" One can begin to understand the nature of proportionality by considering the morality of individual self-defence. Suppose your life is threatened by a culpable aggressor but your only effective means of defence will kill an innocent bystander as a side effect. Most philosophers believe that it would be impermissible to save yourself at the cost of killing this innocent person. This is mainly because the moral reason not to kill a person is stronger than the reason to save a person. It is therefore generally impermissible to kill one person to save another, even if the killing would be unintended. This is particularly clear in the case of third party defence of another person. Suppose, for example, that you are unable to defend yourself against the culpable aggressor but that an unrelated third party can defend you, though only at the cost of killing the innocent bystander. Virtually everyone agrees that it would be wrong for the third party to do this."

Some philosophers have argued, however, that self-defence is different from defence by a third party, in that when it is you who are under threat, you have what might be called a “self-preference permission” to give your life some degree of priority over that of another equally innocent person. Hence you may save your life by killing the innocent bystander as a side effect, even though a third party would not be permitted to save you at that cost. Even so, the priority that you are entitled to give to your own life is limited. While it may be permissible for you to kill one innocent bystander as a side effect of saving your life, it is probably not permissible to kill two, and certainly impermissible to kill three.

Next consider what third parties are permitted to do in defence of others. In general, a third party may cause no more harm to innocent bystanders in the course of defending another person than that person would be permitted to cause in defending himself. This is certainly true of third parties who are unrelated to the person they defend, and it is also true even of most third parties who are specially related to that person. If, for example, you hire a bodyguard to protect you, he would not be permitted to cause more harm to innocent bystanders in defending you than you would be permitted to cause them in defending yourself.

Some philosophers who claim that individuals are permitted to give a certain degree of priority to their own life also contend that this permission can be extended to certain others as well. These philosophers suggest, for example, that you can transfer your self-preference permission to your bodyguard, so that it becomes permissible for him to give your life the same priority that you are entitled to give it. But this is controversial. If individuals have a self-preference permission but it does not extend to others, it is then in general impermissible for third parties to cause as much harm to bystanders in defending others as those others would be permitted to cause in their own defence.

With these claims about the killing of innocent bystanders in mind, return now to the issue of proportionality in Gaza. The assumptions that are most favourable to the view that Israeli action has been proportionate are that individuals have a self-preference permission and that that permission extends to the soldiers who defend them. According to the first assumption, an Israeli civilian would be permitted to kill one or perhaps even two innocent bystanders if that were an unavoidable side effect of defending herself against a lethal threat. According to the second assumption, an Israeli soldier would be permitted to do the same—though no more—in the civilian’s defence.

" Suppose for the sake of argument that of the 1800 Palestinians killed so far by Israeli soldiers, a thousand have been civilian bystanders—probably a significant underestimate. Given the two assumptions just stated, these killings have been proportionate only if they were unavoidable side effects of action necessary to save at least 500 Israeli civilians. If we were also to take into account the number of Palestinians that have been seriously injured—which greatly exceeds the number that have been killed—the number of Israeli civilians saved would have to be even greater for the killings and injuries to be proportionate. Yet it is extremely unlikely that the invasion has prevented more than 500 Israeli civilians from being killed. Hamas’s rockets are in general small and inaccurate, while Israel’s anti-missile system is highly effective, which explains why virtually all of the several thousand rockets launched by Hamas have either been intercepted or landed in uninhabited areas. The tunnels are nothing more than means of individual entry into Israeli territory—an instance of the sort of physical vulnerability shared by every state that borders on another."

"Next consider the pair of assumptions I suggested are actually more plausible—namely, that individuals have no “self-preference” permission to kill an innocent bystander as a side effect of self-defence, and that third parties may cause no more harm to innocent bystanders in defending others than those others would be permitted to cause in their own defence. Given these assumptions, it would not be permissible for Israeli soldiers to kill two Palestinian civilians, or even a single Palestinian civilian, as a side effect of preventing the killing of one Israeli civilian. It might, of course, be permissible for them to kill a Palestinian civilian if that were an unavoidable side effect of saving some larger number of Israeli civilians. But assuming that the duty not to kill is stronger than the duty to save, the number of Israeli civilians that would be saved must presumably be greater than two. Suppose, for example, that a police officer could prevent two innocent people from being killed only by acting in a way that would kill one innocent bystander as a side effect. It is doubtful that it would be permissible for him to do this.But let us again make an assumption favourable to the proportionality of the Israeli military action—namely, that it is permissible for Israeli soldiers to kill one Palestinian civilian if that is an unavoidable side effect of saving two or more Israeli civilians. Again assuming that 1000 of the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces have been civilians, the invasion must have prevented the killing of over 2000 Israeli civilians to have been proportionate in the harm it has inflicted on Palestinian civilians thus far. For the reasons given earlier, that is highly implausible."

Some defenders of the invasion deny that those whom Israeli forces are killing are innocent bystanders and claim instead that they are legitimate targets. Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner, for example, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, recently addressed a cheering crowd of 10,000 people outside the UN with these words:

“When you are part of an election process that asks for a terrorist organisation which proclaims, in word and in deed, that their primary objective is to destroy their neighbouring country and not to build schools or commerce or jobs, you are complicit and you are not a civilian casualty. When you fail to heed the pamphlets, the phone calls, the text messages, and the warning shots [from the Israeli army] telling you to evacuate a building, and instead use yourself as a shield and use your innocent children as a shield, you are not collateral damage. When you ignore those very moral warnings and align yourself with Hamas, you are a combatant.”

It is reassuring when men of different faiths agree. In his 2002 “Letter to America,” Osama bin Laden also affirmed that voting is a basis of liability to be killed. He suggested that Americans might challenge the claim that they have done something that might

“justify aggression against civilians. [But] the American people are the ones who choose their government [and] have the ability and the choice to refuse the policies of the Government and even to change it if they want. … This is why the American people cannot be innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.”

The difference is that Kirshner’s view goes beyond bin Laden’s in recognising more numerous grounds for finding people morally liable to be killed. On his view, for example, an elderly Palestinian becomes liable to be killed if she chooses to be unable to afford a mobile phone, or chooses to be too ill to leave home, and thus dares Israeli forces to kill her by failing to heed their very moral warning that they are about to blow up her house.

No doubt there are some Palestinian civilians who have actively aided Hamas in smuggling in and storing rockets, or in building tunnels into Israel. If these particular civilians are harmed as a side effect during the effort to destroy the rockets and tunnels, they may have no legitimate complaint. But the vast majority of civilians in Gaza are neither terrorists nor terrorist supporters. They are normal human beings who would like to live normal lives, but are caught between the IDF, who will not let them leave Gaza, and Hamas militants, who use them as shields. Significantly fewer than half the Gazans who voted in 2006 voted for Hamas, and many of those did so for reasons of domestic policy, as Fatah and the PLO had become notoriously corrupt and incompetent. Approximately half the residents of Gaza are children, who are ineligible to vote.

 "For defensive killing to be permissible" argues Jeff, "it must be not only proportionate but also necessary, in the sense that there is no equally effective but less harmful way of achieving the defensive aim. In the present case, the question is whether the killings in Gaza are necessary to protect Israeli civilians from Hamas. The war is necessary for defence only if Israel continues to quarantine the citizens of Gaza and to occupy and maintain settlements in the West Bank. If Israel were to abandon the aim of controlling territories to which it has no right, and to respect the right of Palestinians to a fully self-determining life in the lands allotted to them in the UN settlement of 1948, those who now fire rockets into Israel and conduct raids on Israeli forces would lose what sway they now have over the Palestinian people. Ordinary Palestinians want what other people want: to live with dignity, free from domination and oppression by others, to be secure and self-determining, and thus to have the opportunity to flourish in their own way."

Modesty the virtue none reveres

When one is universally lauded for a well deserved achievement, it is fascinating to observe how people close to you react. Surprisingly not all of them join the chorus of adulation and praise! Some say "don't be boastful"or "be quiet so that others won't hate your good fortune. Others are genuinely conflicted. A lifetime of modesty has left them unable to revel in the success of their near and dear ones. There are some who believe in keeping " a low profile" lest someone knows of their good fortune and profits from it. Others are innately modest and so shun the limelight. But is modesty really such a virtue?

The  nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt declared modesty “the lowest of the virtues.” “He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others,” he declared. If you have exceptional talent, why should you hide your successes merely to not give others an inferiority complex, I ask. 

Exceptional demonstrations of  false modesty is far more pervasive than its true counterpart, even if genuine modesty is a virtue best practiced by the genuinely talented. 

Modesty might appear to be on the decline because of its association with another supposedly decaying art: manners. Modesty is central to the cultivation of good manners, according to the inimitable Judith Martin, a.k.a. “Miss Manners.” Modesty, writes Miss Manners, “requires decently covering one’s midriff and one’s achievements when not among intimates who find them exciting.” 

But modesty need not mean prudishness, either in attire or behavior. In her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even the radical Mary Wollstonecraft deemed modesty the “sacred offspring of sensibility and reason.” What might a reasonable contemporary approach to modesty be? Consider which is more extreme – a culture that nurtures modesty and restraint, or one that glorifies hedonistic and immodest excess?

Traditionally, modesty is a virtue that has posed particular challenges for women – at least for women who flout its directives. The “gentleness, modesty, and sweetness” of Fanny Price’s character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is judged “so essential a part of every woman’s worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent.” 

Modesty is not limited to bodily propriety, however. It can encompass our approach to learning, it can inform our exercise of power, and it can even influence our understanding of artistic achievement. Genuine modesty springs from an honest assessment of the limits of one’s own knowledge, and in no field is such an awareness more important than in science, according to Robert Hazen. In delineating what we can and cannot know about the natural world, Hazen argues, science offers a useful proving ground for modesty. Scientists who ignore modesty’s boundaries fall victim to that virtue’s opposite: hubris.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that to be effective in the world, nations need “a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom, and power available to us” and “a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities."

In academia and elsewhere, the contrast between the ideal of modesty and a reality that is frequently immodest is often stark; it is the difference between Thoreau’s humble abode on Walden Pond and Trump Tower; the contrast between the acclaim given the dedicated public servant and that offered to the debauched celebrity. 

We can locate no simple recipe for reclaiming modesty for modern times. But perhaps the modest explorations of virtue in here will help close the distance between those ideals we hope to live by and the everyday world that unceasingly challenges them.

Modesty may be a virtue but an excess of it may well be a vice. So rejoice in your good fortune when it befalls you, modesty be damned!

Finally, a rabbi speaks out

Two issues dominate the headlines nowadays - the republican cries for impeachment of president Obama and deportation of children and the incessant pounding of civilians in Gaza by the Israelis. In one case, one can take some action, by contributing to the democratic side but in the other one can only pray for demographics and morality to bring them to some peaceful resolution of the conflict. The actions of both parties are the actions of a bully using his superior power to inflict damage on the weak under the guise of some overarching objectives - the defence of the constitution in one case and the defense of the Jewish state in the other. But both arguments are specious unfortunately encouraged by pacifist onlookers. It reminds one of the schoolyard bully who always preyed on the weak and helpless. How did we deal with these bullies? Because we did deal with them, eventually. One way we did not deal with them was by averting our eyes and walking away. We need to confront these bullying tendencies in the national and international arena by not keeping silent. One wonders why the rabbis and the high priests of Christianity do not speak out. To his credit Pope Francis has spoken out eloquently but what about the chief rabbi of Israel or the archbishop of Christianity? Where are they and where do they stand? For it is at these times that we seek some moral leadership from them. If they are silent now perhaps then they have forfeited all claims to any superior wisdom or moral leadership.

As I was writing this, my attention was drawn to a piece by Michael Lerner, a rabbi which is both eloquent and heartfelt. May many more be encouraged by these two religious leaders to come out forthrightly in these perilous times.

He writes :" Israel has broken my heart: I’m a rabbi in mourning for a Judaism being murdered by Israel.  My belief began to wane in the past eight years when ISRAEL, faced with a Palestinian Authority that promoted nonviolence and sought reconciliation and peace, ignored the Saudi Arabian-led peace initiative that would have granted Israel the recognition that it had long sought, an end to hostilities, and a recognized place in the Middle East, refused toSTOP its expansion of settlements in the West Bank and imposed an economically crushing blockade on Gaza. Even Hamas, whose hateful charter called for Israel’s destruction, had decided to accept the reality of Israel’s existence, and while unable to embrace its “right” to exist, nevertheless agreed to reconcile with the Palestinian Authority and in that context live within the terms that the PA would negotiate with Israel.

Yet far from embracing this new possibility for peace, the Israeli government used that as its reason to break off the peace negotiations, and then, in an unbelievably cynical move, let the brutal and disgusting kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens (by a rogue element in Hamas that itself was trying to undermine the reconciliation-with-Israel factions of Hamas by creating new fears in Israel) become the pretext for a wild assault on West BANKcivilians, arresting hundreds of Hamas sympathizers, and escalating drone attacks on Hamas operatives inside Gaza. When Hamas responded by starting to send its (guaranteed to be ineffective and hence merely symbolic in light of Israel’s Iron Shield) missiles toward civilian targets in Israel, the Netanyahu government used that as its excuse to launch a brutal assault on Gaza.

But it is the brutality of that assault that finally has broken me into tears and heartbreak. While claiming that it is only interested in uprooting tunnels that could be used to attack Israel, the IDF has engaged in the same criminal behavior that the world condemns in other struggles: the intentional targeting of civilians (the same crime that Hamas has been engaged in over the years, which correctly has earned it the label as a terrorist organization). Using the excuse that Hamas is using civilians as “human shields” and placing its war material in civilian apartments, Israel has managed to kill MORE than 1,000 civilians and wounded thousands.  The stories that have emerged from eyewitness accounts of hundreds of children being killed by Israel’s indiscriminate destructiveness, the shelling of United Nations schools and public hospitals, and finally the destruction of Gaza’s water and electricity, guaranteeing deaths from typhoid and other diseases as well as widespread hunger among the million and a half Gazans most of whom have had nothing to do with Hamas, highlights to the world an Israel that is rivaling some of the most oppressive and brutal regimes in the contemporary world.

In my book “Embracing Israel/Palestine” I have argued that both Israelis and Palestinians are victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. I have a great deal of compassion for both peoples, particularly for my own Jewish people who have gone through traumas that have inevitably distorted future generations. Those traumas don’t exonerate Israel’s behavior or that of Hamas, but they are relevant for those of us seeking a path to social healing and transformation.

Yet that healing is impossible until those who are victims of PTSD are willing to work on overcoming it.

And this is precisely where the American Jewish community and Jews around the world have taken a turn that is disastrous, by turning the Israeli nation state into “the Jewish state” and making Israel into an idol to be worshiped rather than a political entity like any other political entity, with strengths and deep flaws. Despairing of spiritual salvation after GodFAILED to show up and save us from the Holocaust, increasing numbers of Jews have abandoned the religion of compassion and identification with the most oppressed that was championed by our biblical prophets, and instead come to worship power and to rejoice in Israel’s ability to become the most militarily powerful state in the Middle East. If a Jew today goes into any synagogue in the U.S. or around the world and says, “I don’t believe in God or Torah and I don’t follow the commandments,” most will still welcome you in and urge you to become involved. But say, “I don’t support the State of Israel,” and you are likely to be labeled a “self-hating Jew” or anti-Semite, scorned and dismissed. As Aaron said of the Golden Calf in the Desert, “These are your Gods, O Israel.”

The worship of the state makes it necessary for Jews to turn Judaism into an auxiliary of ultra-nationalist blindness. Every act of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people is seen as sanctioned by God. Each Sabbath Jews in synagogues around the world are offered prayers for the well-being of the State of Israel but not for our Arab cousins.  The very suggestion that we should be praying for the Palestinian people’s welfare is seen as heresy and proof of being “self-hating Jews.”

The worship of power is precisely what Judaism came into being to challenge. We were the slaves, the powerless, and though the Torah talks of God using a strong arm to redeem the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, it simultaneously insists, over and over again, that when Jews go into their promised land in Canaan (not Palestine) they must “love the stranger/the Other,” have one law for the stranger and for the native born, and warns “do not oppress the stranger/the Other.” Remember, Torah reminds us, “that you were strangers/the Other in the land of Egypt” and “you know the heart of the stranger.”  Later sources in Judaism even insist that a person without compassion who claims to be Jewish cannot be considered Jewish. A spirit of generosity is so integral to Torah consciousness that when Jews are told to let the land lie fallow once every seven years (the societal-wide Sabbatical Year), they must allow that which grows spontaneously from past plantings be shared with the Other/the stranger.

The Jews are not unique in this. The basic reality is that most of humanity has always heard a voice inside themselves telling them that the best path to security and safety is to love others and show generosity, and a counter voice that tells us that the only path to security is domination and control over others. This struggle between the voice of fear and the voice of love, the voice of domination/power-over and the voice of compassion, empathy and generosity, have played out throughout history and shape contemporary political debates around the world. Because almost every single one of us hears both voices, we are often torn between them, oscillating in our communal policies and our personal behavior between these two worldviews and ways of engaging others. As the competitive and me-first ethos of the capitalist marketplace has grown increasingly powerful and  increasingly reflected in the culture and worldviews of the contemporary era, more and more people bring the worldview of fear, domination and manipulation of others into personal lives, teaching people that the rationality of the marketplace with its injunction to see other human beings primarily in terms of how they can serve our own needs and as instrumental for our own purposes, rather than as being deserving of care and respect just for who they are and not for what they can deliver for us, this ethos has weakened friendships and created the instability in family life that the right has so effectively manipulated (a theme I develop most fully in reporting in my book “The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right” on my years as a psychotherapist and principal investigator of an NIMH study of stress and the psychodynamics of daily life in Western societies).

No wonder that Jews and Judaism have had these conflicting streams within our religion as well. In the 2,000 years of relative powerlessness when Jews were the oppressed minorities of the Western and Islamic societies, the validation of images of a powerful God who could fight for the oppressed Jews was a powerful psychological boon to offset the potential internalizing of the demonization that we faced from the majority cultures. But now when Jews enjoy military power in Israel and economic and political power in the U.S. and to some extent in many other Western societies, one would have expected that the theme of love and generosity, always a major voice even in a Jewish people that were being brutalized, would now emerge as the dominant theme of the Judaism of the 21st  century.

No wonder, then, that I’m heartbroken to see the Judaism of love and compassion being dismissed as “unrealistic” by so many of my fellow Jews and fellow rabbis. Wasn’t the central message of Torah that the world was ruled by a force that made possible the transformation from “that which is” to “that which can and should be” and wasn’t our task to teach the world that nothing was fixed, that even the mountains could skip like young rams and the seas could flee from before the triumph of justice in the world? Instead of this hopeful message, too many of the rabbis and rabbinical institutions are preaching a Judaism that hopes more in the Israeli army than in the capacity of human beings (including Palestinians), all created in the image of God and hence capable of transformation, to once again become embodiments of love and generosity.  They scoff at the possibility that we atTIKKUN and our Network of Spiritual Progressives have been preaching (not only for the Middle East, but for the U.S. as well) that if we act from a loving and generous place, that the icebergs of anger and hate (some of which our behavior helped to create) can melt away and people’s hearts can once again turn toward love and justice for all. In an America that at this very moment has its president calling for sending tens of thousands of children refugees back to the countries they risked their lives to escape, in an America that refused to provide Medicare for All, in an America that serves the interests of its richest 1 percent while largely ignoring the needs of its large working middle class, these ideas may sound naively utopian. But for Judaism, belief in God was precisely a belief that love and justice could and should prevail, and that our task is to embody that message in our communities and promote that message to the world.

It is this love, compassion, justice and peace-oriented Judaism that the State of Israel is murdering. The worshipers of Israel have fallen into a deep cynicism about the possibility of the world that the prophets called for in which nations shall not lift up the sword against each other and they will no longer learn war, and everyone will live in peace. True, that world is not already here, but the Jewish people’s task was to teach people that this world could be brought into being, and that each step we take is either a step toward that world or a step away from it. The Israel worshipers are running away from the world, making it far less possible, and then call their behavior Judaism and Israel “the Jewish state.”

No wonder, then, that I mourn for the Judaism of love and kindness, peace and generosity that Israel worshipers dismiss as utopian fantasy.  To my fellow Jews, I issue the following invitation: use Tisha B’av (the traditional fast-day mourning the destruction of Jewish life in the past, and starting Monday night Aug. 4 till dark Aug. 5) to mourn for the Judaism of love and generosity that is being murdered by Israel and its worshipers around the world, the same kind of idol-worshipers who, pretending to be Jewish but actually assimilated into the world of power, helped destroy our previous two Jewish commonwealths and our temples of the past. We may have to renew our Judaism by creating a Liberatory, Emancipatory, Transformative Love-Oriented Judaism outside the synagogues and traditional institutions, because inside the existing Jewish community the best we can do is repeat what the Jewish exiles in Babylonia said in Psalm 137, “How can we sing the songs of the Transformative Power YHVH in a strange land?” And let us this year turn Yom Kippur into a time of repentance for the sins of our people who have given Israel a blank check and full permission to be brutal in the name of Judaism and the Jewish people (even as we celebrate those Jews with the courage to publicly critique Israel in a loving but stern way).

For our non-Jewish allies, the following plea: Do not let the organized Jewish community intimidate you with charges that any criticism of Israel’s brutality toward the Palestinian people proves that you are anti-Semites. Stop allowing your very justified guilt at the history of oppression your ancestors enacted on Jews to be the reason you fail to speak out vigorously against the current immoral policies of the State of Israel. The way to become real friends of the Jewish people is to side with those Jews who are trying to get Israel back on track toward its highest values, knowing full well that there is no future for a Jewish state surrounded by a billion Muslims except through friendship and cooperation. The temporary alliance of brutal dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and various Arab emirates that give Israel support against Hamas will ultimately collapse, but the memory of humiliation at the hands of the State of Israel will not, and Israel’s current policies will endanger Jews both in the Middle East and around the world for many decades after the people of Israel have regained their senses. Real friends don’t let their friends pursue a self-destructive path, so it’s time for you too to speak up and to support those of us in the Jewish world who are champions of peace and justice, and who will not be silent in the face of the destruction of Judaism.

And that gets to my last point. Younger Jews, like many of their non-Jewish peers, are becoming increasingly alienated from Israel and from the Judaism that too many Jews claim to be the foundation of this supposedly Jewish state. They see Israel as what Judaism is in practice, not knowing how very opposite its policies are to the traditional worldviews most Jews have embraced through the years. It is these coming generations of young people whose parents claimed to be Jewish but celebrated the power of the current State of Israel and never bothered to critique it when it was acting immorally, as it is today in Gaza, who will leave Judaism in droves, making it all the more the province of the Israel-worshipers with their persistent denial of the God of love and justice and their embrace of a God of vengeance and hate.  I won’t blame them for that choice, but I wish they knew that there is a different strand of Judaism that has been the major strand for much of Jewish history, and that it needs their active engagement in order to reestablish it as the 21st century continuation of the Jewish tradition. That I have to go to non-Jewish sources to seek to have this message printed is a further testimony to how much there is to mourn over the dying body of the Judaism of love, pleading for Jews who privately feel the way I do to come out of their closets and help us rebuild the Jewish world in which the tikkun (healing and transformation) needed becomes the first agenda item.

Above all else, I grieve for all the unnecessary suffering on this planet, including the Israeli victims of terrorism, the Palestinian victims of Israeli terror and repression, the victims of America’s misguided wars from Vietnam through Afghanistan and Iraq and the apparently endless war on terrorism, the victims of so many other struggles around the world, and the less visible but real victims of a global capitalist order in which according to the U.N. some 8,000-10,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from malnutrition or diseases related to malnutrition.  And yet I affirm that there is still the possibility of a different kind of world, if only enough of us would believe in it and then work together to create it.

Rabbi MICHAEL LERNER is editor of Tikkun Magazine, chair of the interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives, www.spiritualprogressives.org and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without Walls in San Francisco and Berkeley, California.