How to be a chosen people?
A blessing for all mankind if you become an living example of what Chinese culture might call - having the ‘character of a superior man’. Without a whacking big dose of humility - in light of such a huge responsibility - you fail.
Just listening to an audio link, provided by Gilad Atzmon, quoting Israeli leaders ..... and it’s a hideous spewing forth of vitriol against all who aren’t Jewish.
I am, at best, a beast on two legs and only here to serve the chosen.
Utter nonsense and a pathological condition when found in individual human beings.
Judeo/Christian wasn’t a term used when I was growing up in a small Welsh village. There is no Judeo/Christian reality ... it’s a rubbery phrase ..... smarmy and slippery. If you’re Jewish then Christ was a fraud and the Jewish scriptures deride him as such.
Why wouldn’t you deride a monstrous fraud? And the followers of such a fraud ... what to make of them?
When you see your tribe as surrounded by enemies ‘Turn the other cheek.’ is an alien concept. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ is definitely an injunction which needs careful consideration and plenty of amendments if it’s going to work in the real world .... or this world anyway.
As for ‘Love your enemy.’ ...... you are joking aren’t you?
No. Christ wasn’t joking - not in my limited understanding. It’s all a natural outgrowth of an understanding that - whatever we conceive God to be - love governs all at a cosmic and local level.
It makes it inclusive not exclusive.
Mandela dies and most of us - not that I know ‘most of us’ - would see him as ..... a good example, a decent human being ..... a light in a dark world.
And articles sprout accusing or just stating that he was a Marxist, a terrorist and .... whatever.
It doesn’t matter what ‘isms’ he followed and perhaps discarded. It’s his ‘awe inspiring’ forgiveness of his captors and his forgiveness of the apartheid state of mind which resonates within ‘most of us.’
He achieved on a world stage that which most of us have trouble achieving within the confines of our families and co-workers.
That sort of broad vision is exceptional wherever it’s found.
‘Love your enemy.’
There’s a challenge for us.
Wild weather here and the tiger lilies - glorious orange and green - appear to leap and crouch in small groups within the garden beds. Tree-ferns crowned with fronds of emerald green stand tall above the play. Some were burnt by too hot early summer sun and will take months to bounce back
Christmas became Xmas, without any explanation, somewhere in my late childhood. It’s funny that the desperate attempts to commercialise Christmas - for most of my extended family - have resulted in less and less gift giving but more time spent with each other.
As for Israel .... Nazis and master race couples up nicely with Zionism and chosen people. Same behaviour - show me the difference? Ask a Palestinian if a slow holocaust is different to a speedy version?
It’s an ongoing disaster for all of humanity to believe that one tribe is inherently better than the next .... particularly so when there isn’t the slightest evidence to support this delusion.
On a happier note, I’ve ‘got’ most of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to where the written lyrics aren’t needed. This makes me a bit ‘slow’ on the uptake but I’ve always been that way and expression takes time to percolate.
No need perhaps for a disclaimer but Leonard Cohen’s religious persuasion doesn’t matter to me. My Jewish neighbour is no different to any other good neighbour I’ve known.
If either - in their faith - want to wait for a messiah who is yet to come then who am I to stand in the way.
Just as Christian fundamentalists don’t represent Christianity as a whole so the ‘chosen’ aspect of Judaism and the more sinister applications of such belief don’t necessarily have impact in the life of my Jewish neighbour.
Mandela left the world a better place than when he found it.
Doesn’t that cut across any boundaries set by race or creed.