Today’s three-hour cease fire between Hamas and Israel provides a model for a spiritual practice which might turn us all into peace-makers, or at least peace-contributors, without even giving up on those views we cherish most. The idea was sparked by Michael Kress’ guest post on Steven Waldman’s blog. His insight, that peace may come less from being clear about where each of us is right, but in bravely opening ourselves to the possibility of where we are wrong, is brilliant.
The truth is, it’s not a wisdom limited to contributing to peace in Gaza and Israel, but that’s for another time. For now, I suggest that each of us use the three hour a day cease fire promised by Israel as long as no shells our rocket are launched from Gaza during that time, to create a cease fire in our own hearts and minds. If they can manage to temporarily stop the physical fighting over there, perhaps we can stop the verbal volleying over here for the same three hours.
During those three hours, I suggest that each of us entertain the possibility that out most deeply held conviction about the war are wrong – that those things about which we are most certain, the things which “assure” us that “our side” is right and its actions are just, may not be as clear, right or just as we think they are.
Don’t worry, it’s only for a few hours and then we can go back to our certainties and our rightness. But that slow opening of our minds, expanding of hearts, and willingness to ask a few questions, promises so much. Who knows, we might start to see the world a bit differently. We might begin to imagine possibilities that we previously could not. We might actually contribute to creating the peace which everybody says they want.
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Author, radio and TV talk show host, and President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, Brad Hirschfield is the author of 
posted January 8, 2009 at 5:30 am
I have no deeply held views about the moral debacle going on in Gaza.If you dont agree with me please read Genesis 4:23. and Genesis 6:11.
The moral descent of Jews is an amazing feat: from receiving God’s law, face to face at the apex of mount Sinai, to the wanton murder of innocents in the name whatever pretext or revenge in the valley of moral descent.
There is no moral justification in the Bible or teaching of Jewish sages that justifies the level of retaliatory violence that the Israel state is meting out on innocents. If it can grant 3 hours of peace why not 30 hours? 30 months? 30 years? It is a shameful act of playing God with other helpless people’s lives and does not take away the moral accountability that goes with it.
posted January 8, 2009 at 9:03 am
So much for your understanding this post. You see, even if your analyses of Jewish history were correct, you really missed the boat on this one. But moral certitude is a powerful fuel….and a dangerous one. Please be careful.
posted January 8, 2009 at 10:31 am
Hamas and to a large extent all of the Palestinian people are dupes and slaves of the rest of the Arab world. Goading Israel into retaliation is nothing new to the Palestinians. Militants park rocket launchers near schools and store armaments and house militants in hospitals and residential neighborhoods so they can parade dead bodies in front of the TV cameras and act like innocent victims. This latest flare-up of violence in Gaza was precipitated by the recent drop in oil prices. As a pretense for raising the price of oil the OPEC countries ordered the recent rocket attacks on Israel and Hamas dutifully acquiesced rather than lose Arab support, money and arms. There will never be a resolution to this conflict until the Palestinian people throw off the yoke of Arab oppression and deal with the reality that Israel and Jews exist and that they aren’t going anywhere.
posted January 8, 2009 at 3:48 pm
“Militants park rocket launchers near schools and store armaments and house militants in hospitals and residential neighborhoods so they can parade dead bodies in front of the TV cameras and act like innocent victims.”
I’ve heard this argument raised many time with regards to this conflict. I would ask the poster to ponder the following with me.
I am a resident of Burlington, IA. Just a few short miles west of us is the town of Middletown, IA. The town is surrounded by the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, a 15,000+ acre facility where depleted uranium shells for tanks and guns are manufactured.
Back in the 60s and 70s the Atomic Energy Commission operated a line there. This line assembled components for nuclear warheads for our missiles. Roughly 1000 yards away from the AEC line was Middletown Community School.
I would be interested in your thoughts on the wisdom of placing a nuclear warhead assembly line so close to a public school here in the midst of the United States. Were we guilty of the same crime that you see so clearly in the Palestinian’s actions? Students attending that Middletown school were just like the rest of us in that they practiced their disaster drills should a nuclear weapon ever be launched against us. They did this knowing full well that one of the top 15 Soviet missile targets was under a mile from their classrooms, and that they would likely never survive long enough to get under their desks.
Should we not be tarred with the same brush you used on the Palestinian militants?
posted January 10, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Brad, I thank you and others like you for encouraging us to consider and practice different ways of thinking and being.
As a mentor and a conscious participant in my own (!) spiritual journey, I have often found cause to pause and ask of myself and those I work with: Do I really want this (whatever ‘this’ might be)?
So often, we claim we want peace, happiness, a certain career, a partner, children…etc…without realizing that we have simply assumed that they are what we desire (a result of our social/cultural/historical conditioning). In other words, we have not really experienced the spontaneous desire for what we claim we want. Or if we have, it has long been overridden by our ego’s demands/dictates of what it asserts will bring us happiness.
There is no ‘peace’ out there, whether to be made or fought for. The only peace there is is that which we naturally are underneath the layers of our conditioned beliefs, what Buddhists often refers to as our ‘natural great peace’.
Your support of the personal ceasefire that we can each practice is not unlike the practice of daily meditation, where for a few minutes or hours, we allow our conditioned mind and all its deeply held beliefs and judgments to settle, to rest, like mud in a glass of muddy water. Thus is revealed the clear mind/water, that which we naturally are. That space or state of consciousness that Rumi so beautifully points us to:
“Beyond the ideas of rightfulness and wrongfulness, there is a field. I will meet you there”.
May we all soften and expand into the spaciousness of our natural great peace daily, if peace is what we truly want!
In love, Lucy
posted January 11, 2009 at 1:56 am
And why just three hours a day, rabbi? I see your point, but what I have to work on for myself is which issues are fundamental and which are incremental.
And if we can all find a way to decide what is proportional….