The Kind of Unity We Need

An article in The Jerusalem Post:

The Jews of October 8th — opinion

My comment:

This is a very important article and I fully agree with the message.

Indeed, the Jews of the 8th of October were Jews who rediscovered their national unity.

However, this unity was still the instinctive unity that happens as a result of collective suffering and collective grief. And this is not a wise unity that needs the preceding blows to ignite, and this is not the unity we are supposed to build and sustain.

Our original Jewish unity is unique, as it is proactive and consciously and methodically built above and against the inherently selfish, egotistic, individualistic, and exploitative human nature.

This Jewish unity needs the special method of the Torah that enables us to draw and harness unique developing external forces that can raise us above our inherent nature to enable us to unite despite everything that separates and rejects us from each other.

This requires, first of all, the bitter and tangible recognition that we are indeed in slavery under the original egotistic nature we cannot escape from. Even this recognition necessitates a unique method that allows us to see ourselves objectively and honestly.

Only when we already feel how our ego consumes us and stops us from uniting, and we develop intolerable hate against our own inherent nature can we ask help from reality’s single governing force to liberate us from our own egotistic selves so we can collectively pledge to become a true Nation in mutual guarantee, “as one man with one heart.”