Richard H. Schwartz for Times of Israel
What a wonderful path Judaism is!
Judaism worships a God who is the Father of all humanity, Whose attributes of kindness, mercy, compassion, and justice are to serve as examples for all our actions.
Judaism teaches that every person is created in God’s image and therefore is of supreme value.
Judaism asserts that people are to be co-workers with God in preserving and improving the earth. We are to be stewards of the world’s resources and to see that God’s bounties are used for the benefit of all. Nothing that has value can be wasted or destroyed unnecessarily.
Judaism stresses that we are to love other people as ourselves, to be kind to strangers, “for we were strangers in the land of Egypt,” and show compassion to the homeless, the poor, the orphan, the widow, even for enemies, and for all of God’s creatures.
Judaism places great emphasis on reducing hunger. A Jew who helps to feed a hungry person is considered, in effect, to have fed God.
Judaism mandates that we seek and pursue peace. Great is peace, for it is one of God’s names, all God’s blessings are contained in it, it must be sought in times of war, and it will be the first blessing brought by the Messiah.
Judaism exhorts us to pursue justice, to work for a society where each person has the ability to obtain, through creative labor, the means to lead a dignified life for himself and his family.
Judaism stresses involvement, nonconformity, resistance to oppression and injustice, and a constant struggle against idolatry.
Why should Jews be more involved in society’s issues today?
1. The world faces many tremendous problems today: extensive poverty, pollution, climate change, the destruction of tropical rain forests and other ecosystems, widespread hunger, shortages of resources such as water and energy, and rapid population growth.
2. Judaism has much to say about these issues. The application of Jewish values such as those related to pursuing justice, sharing resources, exhibiting kindness and compassion, loving our fellow human beings, working as partners with God in protecting the earth, seeking and pursuing peace, and, in general, imitating God, are necessary to finding solutions to these problems.
3. Unfortunately, there has been a shift away from these basic Jewish values at a time when the world needs them more than ever before. There has been a political shift to the right in the Jewish community–a shift from prophetic values to chauvinistic values. There has been little effort to apply the Jewish tradition to the many critical problems that face the world today.
4. In the face of today’s urgent problems, Jews must return to progressive Jewish values. We must remember our mission to be a light unto the nations, a holy people, a kingdom of priests, descendants of prophets, champions of social justice, eternal protesters against a corrupt, unredeemed world, dissenters against unethical systems. We must work for radical changes that will lead to a society where there is an end to oppression, hunger, poverty, and alienation. Jews must become actively involved in the missions of Jewish renewal and global survival.
The afternoon service for Yom Kippur includes the story of Jonah, who was sent by God to Nineveh to urge the people to repent and change their unjust ways in order to avoid their destruction. Today the whole world is Nineveh in danger of annihilation and in need of repentance and redemption, and each one of us must be like Jonah, with a mission to warn the world that it must turn from greed, injustice, and idolatry to avoid global oblivion.
‘..a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell–mouths mercy, and invented hell–mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honourably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him! - No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved fire sides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
[After a pause. ] “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! — The messenger of the Most High waits!”
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
Mark Twain war prayer
“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
― Mark Twain
… and moreover, kol nidre, the encapsulated judaism, teaches never to lie, to avoid hypocrisy and deceit, speak nothing but the truth, honor all vows, oaths, anathemas, pledges of all kinds.
what’s not to like about yehudism.
Richard H. Schwartz has a promising career in stand-up comedy ….. I mean, this is a parody, right?
Another ect candidate