Food for Thought

B"H

In limitation as well as in potency (both great), the neo-frum Israeli settlement ethos is to ownership of Zion, precisely as the modern heksher is to kashrut.

Any takers?

Shabbat Shalom!

More Shelter from the Storm

B"H

On Israel-Palestine in North America: If you want healing, don't pick at the scab. There seems to be a very painful tenderness of ego dominating all discourse in North American culture (if not globally). We are in the age of the Self ascendant. Revelation in our time lives and is found in Self narratives. This puts tremendous pressure on the individual, who is now autonomous and mobile to an unprecedented extent, which opens vast opportunity for abusive power. We see this exploited as a matter of course throughout the Consumerist language -- you, as you are, you lack, are inadequate, therefore you must acquire Product X—and this language is the engine that makes the world as we know it go 'round. In other words, the modern retail economy depends upon wounded and volatile ego.

Home must be a refuge from this onslaught. As it stands, we will not stop the onslaught any time soon; it has tremendous global momentum, not to mention our own investments in the status quo. So we must learn to create and maintain effective shelter. In the specific area of peaceful relations and solidarity-building between Jewish and Islamic neighbors, this means we must develop (and apply) disciplines for minimizing the Israel-Palestine noise in the discourse, precisely because Middle East geopolitics is emotionally charged in the very most painful ways: For the Muslim, Palestine's strife invokes shame and outrage at Islamic culture's universally second-class status in the modern world order. For the Jew, Israel's disacceptance invokes millennia of fraught, tortured dwelling in an impossible enterprise, that of making a real homeland from peoplehood with no ownership of place. These are the Muslim's and the Jew's deepest wounds, so a true Home for safe and peaceful relationshipping between the two must leave them unprodded, to slowly, imperceptibly slowly, mend.

This is a good model for shelter in other terms as well. At a stage of collective consciousness development characterized by any good or ill being something to take personally, the process of home-making, of dwelling, is for anyone or any collective largely a commitment to comforting the Self, that it may feel empowered by the assurance of its inherent, immanent wholeness and adequacy, just as it is. One important dimension of this comfort has to be balm for sore spots in the dweller's identity, by way of relief from particular soreness triggers, as well as of identity reempowerment. To further develop the Jewish-Muslim instance, this would entail both relative avoidance of business-as-usual details from the Middle East conflict, and also measures of express emphasis that Muslim identity, with all of its problematics, is in no way inherently inferior, and that Jewish identity, with all of its problematics, is equally accepted in this place.