As One Family
An article in The Jerusalem Post today:
My comment
A famous American Rabbi once said that basically all of the Jewish Holidays center around the theme: “They wanted to kill us, we on, let’s eat!”
But there is a deeper and much more important theme to everything that happens to us: “As long as we stay together and act like a single family, as long as mutual guarantee works between us since we can keep our “brotherly love” above and despite the constantly awakening “unfounded hatred,” we prevail and prosper.
When we lose the sense of family and give into our instinctive urges to turn on each other, to infight and succeed at each other’s expense, we immediately face external pressure and existential danger.
The unity we experience as a result of collective pain and grief is simply not enough, and it is a very unwise and foolish unity.
We have the “know-how” and experience to build and sustain unity and the sense of family even without being forced. Instead of “unfounded hatred,” we can create “unfounded love and unity” for the sake of love and unity above and against our inherent nature.
It is this unique, “unfounded” Jewish unity that is the basis of our survival, and it is also the basis of life since this is the same unity and mutual integration nature’s finely balanced and mutually integrated system is based on.
Thus, through our unique, purposeful, and active unity, we also become the channels for nature’s positive forces and influences to reach and help everything and everyone. To become this channel is our Jewish purpose.