The following is written by a Jew, about Judaism. I can only write about that with which I am intimately familiar and can only bear witness for my personal experiences.
It was written primarily for those Jews who have lost the ability to discern between the wheat and the chaff, a phenomenon so very common today. But as it relates to some of the things that have been written on this list, I thought I'd post it here too.
What is written here may or may not hold true for the laws and customs of other religions. It is not my place to say. That is for the practitioners of those religions to decide.
The God of Israel as Engineer and Architect of Morality
My studies of Anarchy have recently brought me to consider mechanical and civil engineering and architecture insofar as they impact on societal structure. Those are subjects I never thought I'd really concern myself with (what I won't do for The Cause :0). It transpires that I have learned a very valuable lesson from those forays into formerly wholly foreign territory.
Over the years, an on-line epistolary pal has chided my tendency to see meta-messages everywhere and make the simplest, most straightforward matters into metaphors, moral metaphors at that. "Sometimes a fish is just a fish, Doreen", he has told me any number of times. Well, yeah, but sometimes a fish introduces us to an ocean of understanding.
For many years I have been concerned with how it is that Jews are able to learn very profound and subtle moral messages from commandments and narratives from Torah which, on the surface, are anything but moral or subtle. There is no logical bridge between what is said and what many of us are able to understand from the lessons. Often, they seem diametrically opposed.
Outsiders have an even harder time understanding this phenomenon and assume that we live according to what appears to them to be barbarous rules. We don't. We see something beyond the words, intuit something, something that it not immediately apparent. To be more precise, some of us do. Many, too many, of us never get beyond the surface.
In considering engineering and architecture as social phenomena and shapers of social structures, I saw plans on drawing boards in my mind.
I realized that Jewish Law can be likened to a grand plan on a drawing board. It is the outline. It is NOT the structure itself.
Just as the plans of the engineer or the architect must be made actual, must be fleshed out with actual material and are not fulfilled until they serve human needs, so Halakhah (Jewish Law) must be made actual in the form of livable and humanistic societies, livable dwellings, humanistic workplaces, safe day care centers, methods of supplying food to all, education to all, healthcare to all…justice for all.
Jewish Law is only the plan, it is NOT the actualization. The mere performance of the ceremony is not the fulfillment of the plan.
Those who live according to Halakhah and do not flesh it out with real social structures are people who confuse the plan with the structure. Can we live in the drawing of a building? NO! We must build the building itself.
It was no less a figure than Rabban Gamliel, the son of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (the initiator of the redaction of the Talmud), who said: "It is good [to combine] the study of Torah with an occupation, for the effort required by them both keeps sin out of mind, while all Torah study not combined with work will in the end cease and leads to sin. All who occupy themselves with the affairs of the community shall be engaged with them for the sake of Heaven, for the merit of their fathers assists them and their righteousness endures forever. And upon you [says God] I will bestow great reward as though you had accomplished it all by yourselves." (my italics) PIRKEI AVOT (ETHICS OF THE FATHERS), Chapter II, 2.
Those who do not build society based on their Torah learning feel that something is somehow missing. They fill the void they feel inside themselves with excrescent minhagim (assumed customs) and chumrot (assumed stringencies), which, because they serve no purpose and actually impede social change, are nothing but emunot t'faylot (superstitions).
What then is the Halakhah if not the actual behaviors we are intended to perform? Is it mere symbol? NO!
Halakhah is that which arouses, activates, educates and hones the moral sense within us.
Morality is something beyond logic, beyond reason. As David Hume aptly observed, reason cannot tell us why we should prefer the destruction of the entire world to our own finger being scratched. Morality exists on a level that is not rational. That is not to say that it is irrational. It is to say that it is non-rational. It is super-rational. That is the reason that the narratives and mitzvoth are often so very strange to the mind. They are communicating messages to us that go past the level of the conscious mind. They speak another language.
The Torah with its strange-sounding commandments and narratives speaks to us on a level that is beyond reason. It activates the ability to be able to perceive that which is moral, to yearn for that which is moral to recognize that which is moral. It inoculates us against the confusion of moral relativism and prevents us from becoming entangled in that endless morass.
Learning Torah correctly, we become imbued with morality. It becomes an indelible and inherent part of our psyche, our very bodies. We are thoroughly infused with morality until we react to it reflexively. We cannot but react to it. We desire it above all other desire. When we are moved to tears of love and joy at the sight of loving-kindness and moved to tears of outrage and repulsion at the sight of cruelty, when the desire for the Good is above our every other desire, we can be sure that we have been fully inculcated with the Halakhah, and not before that. No matter how "observant" we may be, if we can conscience injustice if we can rest when another suffers, we are not imbued with Torah.
Once we have reached this level we need not be concerned with the minutiae of the religion on an everyday basis. We are living embodiments of Torah. "Those who are busy with a mitzvah (commandment, good deed) need not be disturbed to do a mitzvah."
But neither can we jettison the religion entirely. This is true for two reasons:
1) We do not evolve morally on all of our levels uniformly. Some aspects of our characters are extremely developed, while others lag behind.
2) We must be aware of the Law and not forget it so that we may teach it to the next generation, who will need to learn it before they will be fit to set off on a life devoted to human welfare and justice.
Just as it is true that we cannot live the plan alone, we must flesh it out, make it actual in the form of social systems and structures, so it is true that without the plan we do not know what to build.
If we attempt to build a bridge or a highway without a plan and without knowing the materials we set out to build with, disaster will occur. So it is if we set about attempting to be moral without having our moral sense aroused and developed by Halakhah.
We must learn and do Halakhah for the sake of what is called in German and in Yiddish das Menschenleben, never are we to sacrifice human living, human welfare, justice for actual human beings for the sake of customs, practices or Laws. The latter serve the former, prepare us to undertake the former, bolster our strength and resolve and give us courage to endeavor to better the world. They are means to that purpose, not ends in and of themselves.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Who Said This: LABOR VIS-À-VIS CAPITAL?
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Abraham Lincoln's First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.
My, my how things have changed in the US. Can you so much as imagine a President saying any such thing today? In an *address to Congress*?
Here are some more quotes from Lincoln. Bush would not know how to spell, or probably the definition, of many of those noble words: http://tinyurl.com/39bt9h
Now add this quote, from earlier the same year, to the quote below about Labor vis-a-vis Capital:
"I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." Abraham Lincoln
Source: February 22, 1861 - Address in Independence Hall
and while you're at it, consider this one:
"That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or any denomination of Christians in particular." Abraham LincolnSource: July 31, 1846 - Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity
Source: http://tinyurl.com/yuebj3
The thinking of the greatest Presidents and statesmen of the United States, those people whose humanistic and enlightened vision it was that served as the wellspring and foundation of the desire for freedom from Britain, the Declaration of Independence and creation of the Nation and those who followed in their Spirit, before she was derailed, was far more in line with that of the Left Socialists than with the Capitalist and Rightists.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Abraham Lincoln's First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.
My, my how things have changed in the US. Can you so much as imagine a President saying any such thing today? In an *address to Congress*?
Here are some more quotes from Lincoln. Bush would not know how to spell, or probably the definition, of many of those noble words: http://tinyurl.com/39bt9h
Now add this quote, from earlier the same year, to the quote below about Labor vis-a-vis Capital:
"I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." Abraham Lincoln
Source: February 22, 1861 - Address in Independence Hall
and while you're at it, consider this one:
"That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or any denomination of Christians in particular." Abraham LincolnSource: July 31, 1846 - Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity
Source: http://tinyurl.com/yuebj3
The thinking of the greatest Presidents and statesmen of the United States, those people whose humanistic and enlightened vision it was that served as the wellspring and foundation of the desire for freedom from Britain, the Declaration of Independence and creation of the Nation and those who followed in their Spirit, before she was derailed, was far more in line with that of the Left Socialists than with the Capitalist and Rightists.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Photos of Kibbutzim (and of Towns) – Israeli Ministry of Tourism Site
I found a new site administered (amateurishly as per usual for an Israeli gov't ministry) by the Ministry of Tourism.
There are some pretty good pictures of kibbutzim on the site that show various aspects of life there. The kibbutzim shown are found from the north to the south (starting with the south) of the country and represent kibbutzim of various sizes, ages and types of agriculture, horticulture and industry.
Just go to Kibbutz on the first drop down menu (Location) and do not specify anything for the groupings. Thus, you will get all of the photos of kibbutz. Unfortunately, some of them should have been rotated.
The pictures of the celebration of "Pentecost" (Shavu'ot) are particularly interesting. Shavu'ot is the holiday of the bringing of the first fruits of harvest to the Temple. On kibbutz the members celebrate the holiday in their own special way. Except on the very few religious kibbutzim it is celebrated as a secular holiday, emphasizing the agricultural aspects. The kibbutz members throw in their own experience. Tractors, as pictured, have nothing whatsoever to do with the holiday. They are brought into the celebrations on secular kibbutzim because they are so much part and parcel of kibbutz everyday life.
The housing shown in the photo picturing the guest houses on kibbutz were once very typical. Today, much richer, the kibbutz tends to build detached villa-like houses. The types of houses seen in the photos are reserved for guest houses; young, single members; soldiers who call the kibbutz home base during their service for one reason or another; people learning Hebrew in the kibbutz ulpan program and volunteers.
The typical kibbutz is verdant, as you will see and very well kept. Kibbutz members are most meticulous about keeping the kibbutz aesthetically pleasing and very well gardened.
Of course, there are photos from the towns and cities and many walks of life on the site as well that are interesting viewing, but my heart will always remain with what I consider to be the crowning Israeli social achievement - Kibbutz and so I take this opportunity to share a very brief glimpse of a way of life so little understood or appreciated.
http://tinyurl.com/254prf
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
I found a new site administered (amateurishly as per usual for an Israeli gov't ministry) by the Ministry of Tourism.
There are some pretty good pictures of kibbutzim on the site that show various aspects of life there. The kibbutzim shown are found from the north to the south (starting with the south) of the country and represent kibbutzim of various sizes, ages and types of agriculture, horticulture and industry.
Just go to Kibbutz on the first drop down menu (Location) and do not specify anything for the groupings. Thus, you will get all of the photos of kibbutz. Unfortunately, some of them should have been rotated.
The pictures of the celebration of "Pentecost" (Shavu'ot) are particularly interesting. Shavu'ot is the holiday of the bringing of the first fruits of harvest to the Temple. On kibbutz the members celebrate the holiday in their own special way. Except on the very few religious kibbutzim it is celebrated as a secular holiday, emphasizing the agricultural aspects. The kibbutz members throw in their own experience. Tractors, as pictured, have nothing whatsoever to do with the holiday. They are brought into the celebrations on secular kibbutzim because they are so much part and parcel of kibbutz everyday life.
The housing shown in the photo picturing the guest houses on kibbutz were once very typical. Today, much richer, the kibbutz tends to build detached villa-like houses. The types of houses seen in the photos are reserved for guest houses; young, single members; soldiers who call the kibbutz home base during their service for one reason or another; people learning Hebrew in the kibbutz ulpan program and volunteers.
The typical kibbutz is verdant, as you will see and very well kept. Kibbutz members are most meticulous about keeping the kibbutz aesthetically pleasing and very well gardened.
Of course, there are photos from the towns and cities and many walks of life on the site as well that are interesting viewing, but my heart will always remain with what I consider to be the crowning Israeli social achievement - Kibbutz and so I take this opportunity to share a very brief glimpse of a way of life so little understood or appreciated.
http://tinyurl.com/254prf
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
TWO PEOPLES BLINDED BY HATRED AND HUBRIS
Israeli Gov't Officials: Islamic Jihad to Bear Brunt of IDF Response to Kassams
"Islamic Jihad will likely bear the brunt of Israel's military response to the Kassam rockets that hit the western Negev on the second day of the school year, including one that slammed into a day care center's courtyard, government officials said Monday night. Islamic Jihad was responsible for all nine of the Kassam attacks, the officials said. The rockets were timed to hit when parents were taking their children to school, defense officials said...."
Source: http://tinyurl.com/2s762y
Is there any doubt in anyone's mind that both the Jews and the Palestinians are being set up to for "culling" a few at a time here, a few at a time there, and are not being allowed to engage in any serious kind of deliberations or implement real plans for the benefit of all that will stop this madness, so that someone can make A LOT of money in the arms business?
Unfortunately, both sides are so filled with hate, hubris and absolute certainty in their own absolute righteousness and superiority that they can't see. They can't see that both Peoples are being set up and that this is the "legacy" that the British left before they folded up the Mandate.
Instead of being stupid and letting those who are setting our teeth at edge against one another to play us for fools at the expense of our lives, we should be joining forces to get the Western dirty business interests out of this area.
Ego always makes for easy victimization.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Israeli Gov't Officials: Islamic Jihad to Bear Brunt of IDF Response to Kassams
"Islamic Jihad will likely bear the brunt of Israel's military response to the Kassam rockets that hit the western Negev on the second day of the school year, including one that slammed into a day care center's courtyard, government officials said Monday night. Islamic Jihad was responsible for all nine of the Kassam attacks, the officials said. The rockets were timed to hit when parents were taking their children to school, defense officials said...."
Source: http://tinyurl.com/2s762y
Is there any doubt in anyone's mind that both the Jews and the Palestinians are being set up to for "culling" a few at a time here, a few at a time there, and are not being allowed to engage in any serious kind of deliberations or implement real plans for the benefit of all that will stop this madness, so that someone can make A LOT of money in the arms business?
Unfortunately, both sides are so filled with hate, hubris and absolute certainty in their own absolute righteousness and superiority that they can't see. They can't see that both Peoples are being set up and that this is the "legacy" that the British left before they folded up the Mandate.
Instead of being stupid and letting those who are setting our teeth at edge against one another to play us for fools at the expense of our lives, we should be joining forces to get the Western dirty business interests out of this area.
Ego always makes for easy victimization.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Sunday, September 02, 2007
RATIONAL RELIGION
It is common nowadays to speak of religion and rationality as though they are mutually exclusive, as though never the twain will, or can, meet.
This premise should not be accepted as a foregone conclusion. It needs to be carefully examined. Upon doing so, we will see that it is in gross error.
The basic premises of religionists and atheists, the latter of whom claim that they are rationalists and hold sole claim to rationality, are equally non-rational. To say that we can reasonably posit the existence of a Being that is Ineffable, wholly non-corporeal, without qualities of any kind and so vastly beyond our comprehension that we cannot begin to fathom It, is a wholly irrational position. Such a position may be taken on an experiential claim, on the basis of hope that such a Being exists or on blind faith, but it is not a rational statement.
The position of the atheists is equally irrational. To say that we can, with any degree of certainty whatsoever, posit that there does not exist a Being that is Ineffable, wholly-incorporeal, without any qualities of any kind and so vastly beyond our comprehension that we cannot begin to fathom It, is a wholly irrational position as well. The only difference between this position and the former is that this position is one that smacks of hubris.
Having demonstrated that the starting points of both the religionists and the atheists are equally without rational basis, we can proceed to examining whether or not rationality can play any part in a religious take on the world.
The afflatus of this treatment of the subject is a new restaurant, the owner and founder of which, Ya'akov Avni (brother of the actor Aki Avni) insists that it not be called a soup kitchen, which opened in the most disadvantaged area of the city of Tzfat, the notorious South (where the author of this essay chooses to make her home).
The restaurant provides full-course meals to come whoever may, no questions asked, for the price of two NIS (about 47 cents American). Great pains have been, and are, taken to provide not only nutritious meals, but to having created a pleasant ambiance in the restaurant, having the meals served by a staff of dedicated volunteers with respect and a smile and giving those who patronize the restaurant the feeling that they are coming to dine (thus the nominal charge) and not having favors dished out to them by a charity.
One can find equally rational and pseudo-scientific reasons for feeding the poor, making them feel wanted and cared for and not. So, it is not therein that the rationality resides.
Having made the leap of faith and deciding to feed the poor and give them a feeling of honor and dignity, the rationality comes in in the planning and implementation of the programme.
It takes a great deal of rational, systematic and methodical thinking to plan such a project, implement it and keep it going.
One has, first and foremost, to rationally and correctly assess the socio-economic situation in which people are found. One must then determine correctly and rationally the needs of real people in real situations. Next, one has to rationally and correctly assess one's own abilities to help them. One has to be able to formulate a plan or programme of assistance in one's mind. Having done so, one has then to arrange for subsidization of the food costs and costs of operation. One has to systematically go about finding an umbrella organization that will assist the program if need be and find donors. One has to go about finding suppliers of the food, buying the necessary equipment, furnishings, arranging the permits from the city, paying the bills, finding the fitting staff for the operation and do on.
Rationality comes into religion in the application of its principles.
Rationality can not be said to be the basis either for a religious position or lack of it, as we demonstrated at the outset of the essay. It must reside in how we carry out the articles of our faith and what we believe to be right.
To date, because many Human societies are so very cruel and do not provide for Human needs rationally or with compassion, people have turned to religion for all the wrong reasons. People turn to God in desperation: for the love they do not get from others, for the security that society does not provide them with, for the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams that society does not allow or has dashed and so on. They come in desperation and, as an inevitable result, their religious practice is pathological.
A society that will foster healthy religion must be created. We cannot dismiss the possibilities of what religion can be and can offer in healthy societies based on the reasons that people turn to religion in sick societies.
I have witnessed in the secular Kibbutz Movement, on wealthy kibbutzim the residents of which have all of their socio-economic needs provided for, that a feeling of superficiality and meaningless begins to creep into the hearts and minds of a good percentage of the members. They begin to feel that, though they have everything they need and want materially, something profound is yet missing. Some of those who feel that way, and they are a goodly number, turn to religion.
They turn to religion not in desperation, not in fear, not in loneliness and not in insecurity or need. They turn to religion for a final fulfillment.
The religion that they consider is based on their traditional religion, but they are not afraid to experiment with new forms of ceremony or discard those which do not seem meaningful to them. They feel free to innovate, to question and to improvise. This to my mind is all very healthy and I believe that were we all living in a communalistic society, as are the members of the Kibbutz Movement, this seminal spiritual/moral enterprising would arise spontaneously and would prove to be fecund, producing new expressions of ancient religions and new religions that would provide the deepest fulfillment of the Human experience.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
It is common nowadays to speak of religion and rationality as though they are mutually exclusive, as though never the twain will, or can, meet.
This premise should not be accepted as a foregone conclusion. It needs to be carefully examined. Upon doing so, we will see that it is in gross error.
The basic premises of religionists and atheists, the latter of whom claim that they are rationalists and hold sole claim to rationality, are equally non-rational. To say that we can reasonably posit the existence of a Being that is Ineffable, wholly non-corporeal, without qualities of any kind and so vastly beyond our comprehension that we cannot begin to fathom It, is a wholly irrational position. Such a position may be taken on an experiential claim, on the basis of hope that such a Being exists or on blind faith, but it is not a rational statement.
The position of the atheists is equally irrational. To say that we can, with any degree of certainty whatsoever, posit that there does not exist a Being that is Ineffable, wholly-incorporeal, without any qualities of any kind and so vastly beyond our comprehension that we cannot begin to fathom It, is a wholly irrational position as well. The only difference between this position and the former is that this position is one that smacks of hubris.
Having demonstrated that the starting points of both the religionists and the atheists are equally without rational basis, we can proceed to examining whether or not rationality can play any part in a religious take on the world.
The afflatus of this treatment of the subject is a new restaurant, the owner and founder of which, Ya'akov Avni (brother of the actor Aki Avni) insists that it not be called a soup kitchen, which opened in the most disadvantaged area of the city of Tzfat, the notorious South (where the author of this essay chooses to make her home).
The restaurant provides full-course meals to come whoever may, no questions asked, for the price of two NIS (about 47 cents American). Great pains have been, and are, taken to provide not only nutritious meals, but to having created a pleasant ambiance in the restaurant, having the meals served by a staff of dedicated volunteers with respect and a smile and giving those who patronize the restaurant the feeling that they are coming to dine (thus the nominal charge) and not having favors dished out to them by a charity.
One can find equally rational and pseudo-scientific reasons for feeding the poor, making them feel wanted and cared for and not. So, it is not therein that the rationality resides.
Having made the leap of faith and deciding to feed the poor and give them a feeling of honor and dignity, the rationality comes in in the planning and implementation of the programme.
It takes a great deal of rational, systematic and methodical thinking to plan such a project, implement it and keep it going.
One has, first and foremost, to rationally and correctly assess the socio-economic situation in which people are found. One must then determine correctly and rationally the needs of real people in real situations. Next, one has to rationally and correctly assess one's own abilities to help them. One has to be able to formulate a plan or programme of assistance in one's mind. Having done so, one has then to arrange for subsidization of the food costs and costs of operation. One has to systematically go about finding an umbrella organization that will assist the program if need be and find donors. One has to go about finding suppliers of the food, buying the necessary equipment, furnishings, arranging the permits from the city, paying the bills, finding the fitting staff for the operation and do on.
Rationality comes into religion in the application of its principles.
Rationality can not be said to be the basis either for a religious position or lack of it, as we demonstrated at the outset of the essay. It must reside in how we carry out the articles of our faith and what we believe to be right.
To date, because many Human societies are so very cruel and do not provide for Human needs rationally or with compassion, people have turned to religion for all the wrong reasons. People turn to God in desperation: for the love they do not get from others, for the security that society does not provide them with, for the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams that society does not allow or has dashed and so on. They come in desperation and, as an inevitable result, their religious practice is pathological.
A society that will foster healthy religion must be created. We cannot dismiss the possibilities of what religion can be and can offer in healthy societies based on the reasons that people turn to religion in sick societies.
I have witnessed in the secular Kibbutz Movement, on wealthy kibbutzim the residents of which have all of their socio-economic needs provided for, that a feeling of superficiality and meaningless begins to creep into the hearts and minds of a good percentage of the members. They begin to feel that, though they have everything they need and want materially, something profound is yet missing. Some of those who feel that way, and they are a goodly number, turn to religion.
They turn to religion not in desperation, not in fear, not in loneliness and not in insecurity or need. They turn to religion for a final fulfillment.
The religion that they consider is based on their traditional religion, but they are not afraid to experiment with new forms of ceremony or discard those which do not seem meaningful to them. They feel free to innovate, to question and to improvise. This to my mind is all very healthy and I believe that were we all living in a communalistic society, as are the members of the Kibbutz Movement, this seminal spiritual/moral enterprising would arise spontaneously and would prove to be fecund, producing new expressions of ancient religions and new religions that would provide the deepest fulfillment of the Human experience.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Thursday, August 09, 2007
PRINCE PETER KROPOTKIN
He was not only born into the royal family of Czarist Russia, he was a prince among men.
Every time I encounter his life's dedication and work, I am overcome with admiration and awe of him anew. Though I have tried time and time again to pour out the admiration I feel for him and others like him, "if all the seas were ink and all the pine trees quills", still there would not be resource enough to praise them sufficiently.
He was a scion of one of the most respected lines in the Russian aristocracy. His family was directly related to Rurik.
He was trained in the Corps of Royal Pages and was offered a military career in an elite corps in the military.
But his scientific proclivity would lead him elsewhere. He became a geographer and insisted upon studying the geography of Siberia. It was there, in the unspeakable cold and harshness of Siberia, that he would develop his theory of Mutual Aid as the basis of survival and he argued his position forcefully against that of Darwin.
He developed a new theory about the structure of the Siberian mountains. His new findings garnered international acclaim.
The Russian Geographic Society offered him a position as its General Secretary.
Torn between the opportunity set before him and that which was in his heart from his early youth he wrote:
"Science is an excellent thing. I knew its joys and valued them...
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery...when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must need be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?...
Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know...What if that knowledge - should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps, and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed? The masses want to know: they are willing to learn: they can learn...only give it to them, only give them the means of getting leisure. This is the direction in which, and these are the kind of people for whom I must work...So I sent my negative reply to the Geographical Society." – MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONARY (New York: Dover Publications 1971) pp. 239-41
He went on to become a member of the revolutionary Anarchist underground in Russia, where he was jailed for his efforts. He escaped from prison in Russia after two years' internment and fled to Switzerland. In France he was interned once again for another two-year stint. Finally, after having been very active in the underground for years, he arrived in England.
He spent his mature years in England where he dedicated his life to research. He continued his studies of geography. He studied zoology, sociology, economics and history as well. The conclusions that he came to as a result of those studies culminated in the publication of two masterpieces in addition to his MUTUAL AID - A Factor of Evolution, those works being THE CONQUEST OF BREAD and FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS.
He explains his purpose in carrying out that research and in writing FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS thus:
"Most socialists had hitherto said that in our present civilized societies we actually produce much more than is necessary for guaranteeing full well-being to all; that it was only the distribution which was defective; I thought, on the contrary, that under the present conditions of private ownership production itself had taken a wrong turn, and was entirely inadequate even as regards the very necessaries of life. None of these necessaries are produced in greater quantities than would be required to secure well-being for all.
But in all civilized countries the production, both agricultural and industrial, ought to and easily might be immensely increased, so as to secure a reign of plenty for all. This brought me to consider the possibilities of modern agriculture, as well as those of an education which would give to everyone the possibility of carrying on at the same time both enjoyable manual and brain work. I developed these ideas in a series of articles in the "Nineteenth Century" (a periodical in his time, my parentheses) which are now published as a book under the title FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS." ibid. pp. 447-48
Kropotkin was invited to return to Russia after the revolution of 1917. He was afforded respect there, but was deeply pained by the treatment he saw the Anarchists receiving at the hands of the Communist Party. After his death in 1921, the same year that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman fled Russia after witnessing the treatment of Nestor Makno and other Anarchists, no holds barred persecution of the Anarchists would be conducted by the Russians.
I come from two great traditions of learning selflessly, only for the sake of betterment of humanity - that of Judaism and that of Anarchism. All of my role models are people who devoted themselves to amassing knowledge not for the sake of vainglory and not for the sake of personal power, but in order to put that knowledge at the disposal of Humankind for our common welfare.
My religion enjoins everyone to learn insofar as the person is able to. Kropotkin too speaks of the ability of all to learn and the right of everyone to access as much knowledge as they can. I too am a staunch believer in the right and the ability of everyone to access knowledge and believe that this will advance the cumulative body of knowledge to a now unimaginable extent. I bristle at every expression of elitism and exclusivity when it comes to knowledge.
A book has been running around in my mind for a long while. Like many who were persecuted and died as martyrs for their religious beliefs, so many Anarchists were persecuted and died horrible deaths for their beliefs. Though the latter group consists mainly of people who considered, and consider, themselves atheists; they are remarkably like the greatest religious personalities that the world's religions have produced. The thesis of my book will be the demonstration of the fact that the Anarchists are the true inheritors, and continuation, of the Prophetic tradition. Do they not, like the Prophets, continue to hope in a future of common peace, prosperity and welfare?
It is because I so dearly love and admire the people who were, and are, scholars for the sake of humankind, who put their genius at the service of humankind without thought to themselves and because I am so very painfully aware of their sacrifice for me, for a world of people they never knew, that I find selfish, frivolous, look at me! amassing of factoids so very revolting.
Isn't the story of Kropotkin's early life and the compassion he exhibited from so young an age for the poor and disenfranchised remarkably reminiscent of the account of the early life of Siddhartha?
And he was not alone. Bakunin too was of noble birth, as was Tolstoi.
More remarkable than Siddhartha, they, most Kropotkin and Bakunin, did not go off in search of "enlightenment" or self-realization.
These men left palaces to live among the people they loved. Everything they did, all that they were, was for others. Nothing daunted them - not rejection by their families and the nobility, not the forfeiture of promising futures, not imprisonment, not exile in Siberia and in foreign countries, not ill health. They fought on till they breathed their last expecting nothing in return for what they did, nothing at all but the betterment of the lot of humankind.
That's as great as it gets in my book.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
He was not only born into the royal family of Czarist Russia, he was a prince among men.
Every time I encounter his life's dedication and work, I am overcome with admiration and awe of him anew. Though I have tried time and time again to pour out the admiration I feel for him and others like him, "if all the seas were ink and all the pine trees quills", still there would not be resource enough to praise them sufficiently.
He was a scion of one of the most respected lines in the Russian aristocracy. His family was directly related to Rurik.
He was trained in the Corps of Royal Pages and was offered a military career in an elite corps in the military.
But his scientific proclivity would lead him elsewhere. He became a geographer and insisted upon studying the geography of Siberia. It was there, in the unspeakable cold and harshness of Siberia, that he would develop his theory of Mutual Aid as the basis of survival and he argued his position forcefully against that of Darwin.
He developed a new theory about the structure of the Siberian mountains. His new findings garnered international acclaim.
The Russian Geographic Society offered him a position as its General Secretary.
Torn between the opportunity set before him and that which was in his heart from his early youth he wrote:
"Science is an excellent thing. I knew its joys and valued them...
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery...when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must need be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?...
Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know...What if that knowledge - should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps, and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed? The masses want to know: they are willing to learn: they can learn...only give it to them, only give them the means of getting leisure. This is the direction in which, and these are the kind of people for whom I must work...So I sent my negative reply to the Geographical Society." – MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONARY (New York: Dover Publications 1971) pp. 239-41
He went on to become a member of the revolutionary Anarchist underground in Russia, where he was jailed for his efforts. He escaped from prison in Russia after two years' internment and fled to Switzerland. In France he was interned once again for another two-year stint. Finally, after having been very active in the underground for years, he arrived in England.
He spent his mature years in England where he dedicated his life to research. He continued his studies of geography. He studied zoology, sociology, economics and history as well. The conclusions that he came to as a result of those studies culminated in the publication of two masterpieces in addition to his MUTUAL AID - A Factor of Evolution, those works being THE CONQUEST OF BREAD and FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS.
He explains his purpose in carrying out that research and in writing FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS thus:
"Most socialists had hitherto said that in our present civilized societies we actually produce much more than is necessary for guaranteeing full well-being to all; that it was only the distribution which was defective; I thought, on the contrary, that under the present conditions of private ownership production itself had taken a wrong turn, and was entirely inadequate even as regards the very necessaries of life. None of these necessaries are produced in greater quantities than would be required to secure well-being for all.
But in all civilized countries the production, both agricultural and industrial, ought to and easily might be immensely increased, so as to secure a reign of plenty for all. This brought me to consider the possibilities of modern agriculture, as well as those of an education which would give to everyone the possibility of carrying on at the same time both enjoyable manual and brain work. I developed these ideas in a series of articles in the "Nineteenth Century" (a periodical in his time, my parentheses) which are now published as a book under the title FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS." ibid. pp. 447-48
Kropotkin was invited to return to Russia after the revolution of 1917. He was afforded respect there, but was deeply pained by the treatment he saw the Anarchists receiving at the hands of the Communist Party. After his death in 1921, the same year that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman fled Russia after witnessing the treatment of Nestor Makno and other Anarchists, no holds barred persecution of the Anarchists would be conducted by the Russians.
I come from two great traditions of learning selflessly, only for the sake of betterment of humanity - that of Judaism and that of Anarchism. All of my role models are people who devoted themselves to amassing knowledge not for the sake of vainglory and not for the sake of personal power, but in order to put that knowledge at the disposal of Humankind for our common welfare.
My religion enjoins everyone to learn insofar as the person is able to. Kropotkin too speaks of the ability of all to learn and the right of everyone to access as much knowledge as they can. I too am a staunch believer in the right and the ability of everyone to access knowledge and believe that this will advance the cumulative body of knowledge to a now unimaginable extent. I bristle at every expression of elitism and exclusivity when it comes to knowledge.
A book has been running around in my mind for a long while. Like many who were persecuted and died as martyrs for their religious beliefs, so many Anarchists were persecuted and died horrible deaths for their beliefs. Though the latter group consists mainly of people who considered, and consider, themselves atheists; they are remarkably like the greatest religious personalities that the world's religions have produced. The thesis of my book will be the demonstration of the fact that the Anarchists are the true inheritors, and continuation, of the Prophetic tradition. Do they not, like the Prophets, continue to hope in a future of common peace, prosperity and welfare?
It is because I so dearly love and admire the people who were, and are, scholars for the sake of humankind, who put their genius at the service of humankind without thought to themselves and because I am so very painfully aware of their sacrifice for me, for a world of people they never knew, that I find selfish, frivolous, look at me! amassing of factoids so very revolting.
Isn't the story of Kropotkin's early life and the compassion he exhibited from so young an age for the poor and disenfranchised remarkably reminiscent of the account of the early life of Siddhartha?
And he was not alone. Bakunin too was of noble birth, as was Tolstoi.
More remarkable than Siddhartha, they, most Kropotkin and Bakunin, did not go off in search of "enlightenment" or self-realization.
These men left palaces to live among the people they loved. Everything they did, all that they were, was for others. Nothing daunted them - not rejection by their families and the nobility, not the forfeiture of promising futures, not imprisonment, not exile in Siberia and in foreign countries, not ill health. They fought on till they breathed their last expecting nothing in return for what they did, nothing at all but the betterment of the lot of humankind.
That's as great as it gets in my book.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
A GOOD LAUGH
We Anarchists, concerned as we are with very heavy matters, tend toward considerable gravitas.
We need a good laugh too sometimes, and this web page certainly provides a few (the part about Big Bill Haywood slays me) : http://tinyurl.com/yrqgz2
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
We Anarchists, concerned as we are with very heavy matters, tend toward considerable gravitas.
We need a good laugh too sometimes, and this web page certainly provides a few (the part about Big Bill Haywood slays me) : http://tinyurl.com/yrqgz2
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Monday, July 16, 2007
EINSTEIN'S INSIGHT INTO THE DESIRE FOR SELF-EXTINCITON ON THE PART OF SOME ANARCHO-PRIMITIVISTS
We were discussing the Anarcho-Primitivists on a group for Anarchists. Some of the Anarcho-Primitivists are neo-Malthusians and a very few of them have resorted to murderous measures. As a result, there are Anarchists who call for disavowing them from the Movement, for expunging the Anarcho- prefix from their chosen self-description.
While most certainly not justifying them in any way, the quote below from Einstein's famous essay "Why Socialism?", which was first published in 1949 in the premier edition of the Marxist journal MONTHLY REVIEW as is republished in the book ALBERT EINSTEIN from the Rebel Lives series published by Ocean Books, lends some insight into their thinking:
"Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supranational organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"
I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering these days. "
While I am wholly against violent methods unless attacked, I do understand the neo-Maluthusian sentiments of some Anarcho-Primitivists and think that a compassionate hand should be extended to them instead of them being pushed away from the fold. It is only being shown compassion that hold out the hope that their will to live will be restored to them.
Solidarity,
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
We were discussing the Anarcho-Primitivists on a group for Anarchists. Some of the Anarcho-Primitivists are neo-Malthusians and a very few of them have resorted to murderous measures. As a result, there are Anarchists who call for disavowing them from the Movement, for expunging the Anarcho- prefix from their chosen self-description.
While most certainly not justifying them in any way, the quote below from Einstein's famous essay "Why Socialism?", which was first published in 1949 in the premier edition of the Marxist journal MONTHLY REVIEW as is republished in the book ALBERT EINSTEIN from the Rebel Lives series published by Ocean Books, lends some insight into their thinking:
"Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supranational organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"
I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering these days. "
While I am wholly against violent methods unless attacked, I do understand the neo-Maluthusian sentiments of some Anarcho-Primitivists and think that a compassionate hand should be extended to them instead of them being pushed away from the fold. It is only being shown compassion that hold out the hope that their will to live will be restored to them.
Solidarity,
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
THE CREATION OF A STATE
This is what is involved in the creation of a state:http://tinyurl.com/2kyw6l
We Israelis too were brutalized and reduced to the ignominy of committing acts that would have been unthinkable before we had a state to defend.
It really does not matter if we are more than, less than or equally brutal to the Palestinian Arabs. We have both become far more brutal and violent than we were - all for the sake of achieving and defending a state with "secure borders".
And that is why when people ask me if I believe in a two-state solution, I tell them that I believe in a zero-state solution.
No state is a solution to violence, to intrigue, to nefarious undertakings, systematic povertization of target populations in order to keep the drug, prostitution and weapons markets humming. No state will not send its young to war for the sake of maintaining the power of the elite.
And although I do not see Israel as an imperialist state because none of the land that we seized was as a result of our initiative, but rather as a result of wars that we did not begin, but were victorious in - still I do not doubt that we would be imperialists and colonialists if we could, because that is the way of the realpolitik of statecraft. And the Palestinians, given the chance, would do exactly the same thing.
From what I understand from scions of families that have inhabited this area for many generations, Arab and Jewish alike; these problems did not exist before the British arrived and fomented discord to their own purposes. Historians say the same. There was also no concept of state in this area until it was imported.
I don't see any solution to the conflicts in this area until states and borders are abolished. Only when there are no borders can disarmament, particularly nuclear disarmament, occur. Only then can prosperity based on truly free trade agreements take place. Only then can there be free educational and cultural exchange. Only then can there be religious speculation that is not the concept by which we measure our pain, as John Lennon so aptly observed, but rather the measure of our joy.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
This is what is involved in the creation of a state:http://tinyurl.com/2kyw6l
We Israelis too were brutalized and reduced to the ignominy of committing acts that would have been unthinkable before we had a state to defend.
It really does not matter if we are more than, less than or equally brutal to the Palestinian Arabs. We have both become far more brutal and violent than we were - all for the sake of achieving and defending a state with "secure borders".
And that is why when people ask me if I believe in a two-state solution, I tell them that I believe in a zero-state solution.
No state is a solution to violence, to intrigue, to nefarious undertakings, systematic povertization of target populations in order to keep the drug, prostitution and weapons markets humming. No state will not send its young to war for the sake of maintaining the power of the elite.
And although I do not see Israel as an imperialist state because none of the land that we seized was as a result of our initiative, but rather as a result of wars that we did not begin, but were victorious in - still I do not doubt that we would be imperialists and colonialists if we could, because that is the way of the realpolitik of statecraft. And the Palestinians, given the chance, would do exactly the same thing.
From what I understand from scions of families that have inhabited this area for many generations, Arab and Jewish alike; these problems did not exist before the British arrived and fomented discord to their own purposes. Historians say the same. There was also no concept of state in this area until it was imported.
I don't see any solution to the conflicts in this area until states and borders are abolished. Only when there are no borders can disarmament, particularly nuclear disarmament, occur. Only then can prosperity based on truly free trade agreements take place. Only then can there be free educational and cultural exchange. Only then can there be religious speculation that is not the concept by which we measure our pain, as John Lennon so aptly observed, but rather the measure of our joy.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
So, what do we mean by civilization?
I was floored when someone who lives in England wrote on a message board recently that British imperialism and colonialism were media for the spread of civilization and that Britain was, and still is, a "beacon of civilization" to the world. I simply could not believe that anyone still held the view that imperialism and colonialism was a favor that the White man did for the "colored savages".
It is all the more surprising when one considers that this person is highly critical of Israel's relationship to the Palestinians. Less surprisingly, this person refuses to accept the fact that it was the British who flooded the area that was to become the state of Israel with Arabs from the surrounding countries, going so far as to apply pressure on France to allow this, and created the Israeli-Palestinian problem in so doing. But that is the subject of other treatises.
The following passage is a first-hand account of a man who lived under colonialism. While he is from Peru, the imperialism and colonialism of Britain was no less barbaric than that of Spain, it's competitor in the attempt to conquer as much of the world as possible.
In the passage quoted below Prada also mentions that the "gentlemen" who owned the haciendas were often educated in England. His description of the effects of that education should be noted.
Robert Graham's Introduction: "Manuel Gonzáles Prada (1848 – 1919) was a Peruvian poet, writer and intellectual who moved toward an anarchist position around 1920. He was familiar with the major anarchist writers, and shared with Kropotkin an admiration for the French moral philosopher, Jean Marie Gayau (1854 – 1888)*, and opposition to Social Darwinism. He was one of the first Latin American writers to discuss the issue of indigenous peoples. The following excerpts are taken from his 1904 essay "Our Indians" translated here by Paul Sharkey."
"A hacienda comes about through the amassing of tiny plots wrested from their lawful owners and the lord wields the authority of a Norman baron over his peons. Not only has he a say in the appointment of governors, mayors and justices of the peace, but he conducts weddings, appoints heirs, disposes of inheritances and has the sons submit to a slavery that normally lasts their lifetime just to clear the debts of the father. He enforces fearful punishments like the foot-stocks, flogging, the pillory and death; or as droll as head-shaving or cold water enemas. It would be a miracle if someone with no regard for life or property were to have any regard for female honor; every Indian woman, single or married, may find herself the target of the master's brutish lusts. Abduction, violation and rape do not mean much when the belief is that Indian women are there to be taken by force. And for all that the Indian never addresses his master without kneeling and kissing his hand. Let it not be said that the lords of the land act that way out of ignorance or for want of education; the children of some hacienda owners are shipped to Europe in their childhood, educated in France or England and return to Peru with all of the appearances of civilized folk; but once they are back on their haciendas, the European veneer comes off and they act even more inhumanely and violently than their fathers; haciendas are tantamount to kingships in the heart of the Republic and the hacienda owners act like autocrats in the bosom of democracy…
So, what do we mean by civilization? …The greatest accomplishment of morality, for individuals and societies alike, consist of its having turned man's strife with his neighbor into a mutual agreement to live. Where there is no justice, mercy or goodwill, civilization is nowhere to be found: where the "struggle for existence" is enunciated as the rule of society, barbarism rules. What is the point of amassing the learning of an Aristotle when one is a tiger at heart? What matter the artistic gifts of a Michelangelo when one has the heart of a swine? Rather than going around the world spreading the light of art or science, better to go around dispensing the mild of human kindness. Societies where doing good has graduated from being an obligation to being a habit where the act of kindness has turned into an instinctive impulse deserve the description highly civilized. Have Peru's rulers attained that degree of morality? Are they entitled to look upon the Indian as a creature incapable of civilization?"
* I heartily recommend the writing of Jean Marie Guyau as well. Excerpts from his work can be found in Kropotkin's ETHICS: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT", Chapter XII, Development of Moral Teachings--XIX Century, (Concluded). See: http://tinyurl.com/2pnqk2
Source: ANARCHISM – A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300C3 to 1939), Robert Graham Editor,
Copyright @2005 BLACK ROSE BOOKS, pp. 322 - 323
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
I was floored when someone who lives in England wrote on a message board recently that British imperialism and colonialism were media for the spread of civilization and that Britain was, and still is, a "beacon of civilization" to the world. I simply could not believe that anyone still held the view that imperialism and colonialism was a favor that the White man did for the "colored savages".
It is all the more surprising when one considers that this person is highly critical of Israel's relationship to the Palestinians. Less surprisingly, this person refuses to accept the fact that it was the British who flooded the area that was to become the state of Israel with Arabs from the surrounding countries, going so far as to apply pressure on France to allow this, and created the Israeli-Palestinian problem in so doing. But that is the subject of other treatises.
The following passage is a first-hand account of a man who lived under colonialism. While he is from Peru, the imperialism and colonialism of Britain was no less barbaric than that of Spain, it's competitor in the attempt to conquer as much of the world as possible.
In the passage quoted below Prada also mentions that the "gentlemen" who owned the haciendas were often educated in England. His description of the effects of that education should be noted.
Robert Graham's Introduction: "Manuel Gonzáles Prada (1848 – 1919) was a Peruvian poet, writer and intellectual who moved toward an anarchist position around 1920. He was familiar with the major anarchist writers, and shared with Kropotkin an admiration for the French moral philosopher, Jean Marie Gayau (1854 – 1888)*, and opposition to Social Darwinism. He was one of the first Latin American writers to discuss the issue of indigenous peoples. The following excerpts are taken from his 1904 essay "Our Indians" translated here by Paul Sharkey."
"A hacienda comes about through the amassing of tiny plots wrested from their lawful owners and the lord wields the authority of a Norman baron over his peons. Not only has he a say in the appointment of governors, mayors and justices of the peace, but he conducts weddings, appoints heirs, disposes of inheritances and has the sons submit to a slavery that normally lasts their lifetime just to clear the debts of the father. He enforces fearful punishments like the foot-stocks, flogging, the pillory and death; or as droll as head-shaving or cold water enemas. It would be a miracle if someone with no regard for life or property were to have any regard for female honor; every Indian woman, single or married, may find herself the target of the master's brutish lusts. Abduction, violation and rape do not mean much when the belief is that Indian women are there to be taken by force. And for all that the Indian never addresses his master without kneeling and kissing his hand. Let it not be said that the lords of the land act that way out of ignorance or for want of education; the children of some hacienda owners are shipped to Europe in their childhood, educated in France or England and return to Peru with all of the appearances of civilized folk; but once they are back on their haciendas, the European veneer comes off and they act even more inhumanely and violently than their fathers; haciendas are tantamount to kingships in the heart of the Republic and the hacienda owners act like autocrats in the bosom of democracy…
So, what do we mean by civilization? …The greatest accomplishment of morality, for individuals and societies alike, consist of its having turned man's strife with his neighbor into a mutual agreement to live. Where there is no justice, mercy or goodwill, civilization is nowhere to be found: where the "struggle for existence" is enunciated as the rule of society, barbarism rules. What is the point of amassing the learning of an Aristotle when one is a tiger at heart? What matter the artistic gifts of a Michelangelo when one has the heart of a swine? Rather than going around the world spreading the light of art or science, better to go around dispensing the mild of human kindness. Societies where doing good has graduated from being an obligation to being a habit where the act of kindness has turned into an instinctive impulse deserve the description highly civilized. Have Peru's rulers attained that degree of morality? Are they entitled to look upon the Indian as a creature incapable of civilization?"
* I heartily recommend the writing of Jean Marie Guyau as well. Excerpts from his work can be found in Kropotkin's ETHICS: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT", Chapter XII, Development of Moral Teachings--XIX Century, (Concluded). See: http://tinyurl.com/2pnqk2
Source: ANARCHISM – A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300C3 to 1939), Robert Graham Editor,
Copyright @2005 BLACK ROSE BOOKS, pp. 322 - 323
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Friday, May 25, 2007
Dr. Otto Gross – The One Truly Committed Psychoanalyst
A bit about Otto Gross:
OTTO GROSS : Nietzschean Psychoanalyst, Love Guru, Pagan Anarchist
http://tinyurl.com/2lozna
Wikipedia article
http://tinyurl.com/2pnslv
Who was Otto Gross?
http://tinyurl.com/38sc78
What made Dr. Otto Gross so dangerous a threat to the establishment?
The BBC documentary series "The Century of the Self", to be found on You Tube, proposes convincingly that Sigmund Freud, and more so his daughter Anna, intended psychoanalysis to be a most power and indispensable tool of population control and manipulation.
Society was held up as the unquestionable standard of normalcy and any aberrant, rebellious or non-normative behavior demonstrated by any individual was considered pathological on the part of the individual. That pathology was to be corrected with psychoanalysis.
In contradistinction, Otto Gross wrote the following, which is excerpted from the small amount of his work that has been translated. Evidently, the psychiatric community would rather keep him in obscurity. You will see why presently.
"…I must assume that knowledge of the Freudian method and its important results is already widespread. Since Freud we understand all that is inappropriate and inadequate in our mental life to be the results of inner experiences whose emotional content excited intense conflict in us. At the time of those experiences – especially in early childhood – the conflict seemed insoluble, and they were excluded from the continuity of the inner life as it is known to the conscious ego. Since then they have continued to motivate us from the unconscious in an uncontrollably destructive and oppositional way. I believe that what is really decisive for the occurrence of repression is to be found in the inner conflict…rather than in relation to the sexual impulse. Sexuality is the universal motive for the infinite number if internal conflicts, though not in itself but as the object of a sexual morality which stands in insoluble conflict with everything that is of value and belongs to willing and reality.
It appears that at the deepest level the real nature of these conflicts may always be traced back to one comprehensive principle, to the conflict between that which belongs to oneself and that which belongs to the other, between that which is innately individual and that which has been suggested to us, i.e., that which is educated or otherwise forced into us.
This conflict of individuality with an authority that has penetrated into our own innermost self belongs more to the period of childhood than to any other time.
The tragedy is correspondingly greater as a person's individuality is more richly endowed, is stronger in its own particular nature. The earlier and the more intensely that the capacity to withstand suggestion and interference begins its protective function, the earlier and the more intensely will the self-divisive conflict be deepened and exacerbated. The only natures to be spared are those in whom the predisposition towards individuality is so weakly developed and is so little capable of resistance that under the pressure of suggestion from social surroundings, and the influence of education, it succumbs, in a manner of speaking, to atrophy and disappears altogether - natures whose guiding motives are at last composed entirely of alien, handed-down standards of evaluation and habits of reaction,. In such second-rate characters a certain apparent health can sustain itself, i.e., a peaceful and harmonious functioning of the whole of the soul or, more accurately, of what remains of the soul. On the other hand, each individual who stands in any way higher than this normal contemporary state of things is not, in existing, conditions, in a position to escape pathogenic conflict and to attain his individual health i.e., the full harmonious development of the highest possibilities of his innate individual character.
It is understood from all this that such characters hitherto, no matter in what outward form they manifest themselves – whether they are opposed to laws and morality, or lead us positively beyond the average, or collapse internally and become ill – have been perceived with either disgust, veneration or pity as disturbing exceptions whom people try to eliminate. It will come to be understood that, already today, there exists the demand to approve these people as the healthy, the warriors, the progressives, and to learn from and through them.
Not one of the revolutions in recorded history has succeeded in establishing freedom for individuality…Only now can it be recognized that the root of all authority lies in the family, that the combination of sexuality and authority, as it shows itself in the patriarchal family still prevailing today, claps every individuality in chains…" – "Overcoming Cultural Crisis", originally published in Die Aktion in April 1913, translated by Dr. John Turner of the University of Wales, Swansea, courtesy of Gottfried Heueer and the International Otto Gross Society, reprinted in ANARCHISM – A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939), pp. 282-3, Robert Graham, editor, copyright 2005 Black Rose Books.
We can see from the passage above, in which he eerily presaged his own "elimination", why Dr. Otto Gross was considered so very dangerous by the psychoanalytic establishment.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
A bit about Otto Gross:
OTTO GROSS : Nietzschean Psychoanalyst, Love Guru, Pagan Anarchist
http://tinyurl.com/2lozna
Wikipedia article
http://tinyurl.com/2pnslv
Who was Otto Gross?
http://tinyurl.com/38sc78
What made Dr. Otto Gross so dangerous a threat to the establishment?
The BBC documentary series "The Century of the Self", to be found on You Tube, proposes convincingly that Sigmund Freud, and more so his daughter Anna, intended psychoanalysis to be a most power and indispensable tool of population control and manipulation.
Society was held up as the unquestionable standard of normalcy and any aberrant, rebellious or non-normative behavior demonstrated by any individual was considered pathological on the part of the individual. That pathology was to be corrected with psychoanalysis.
In contradistinction, Otto Gross wrote the following, which is excerpted from the small amount of his work that has been translated. Evidently, the psychiatric community would rather keep him in obscurity. You will see why presently.
"…I must assume that knowledge of the Freudian method and its important results is already widespread. Since Freud we understand all that is inappropriate and inadequate in our mental life to be the results of inner experiences whose emotional content excited intense conflict in us. At the time of those experiences – especially in early childhood – the conflict seemed insoluble, and they were excluded from the continuity of the inner life as it is known to the conscious ego. Since then they have continued to motivate us from the unconscious in an uncontrollably destructive and oppositional way. I believe that what is really decisive for the occurrence of repression is to be found in the inner conflict…rather than in relation to the sexual impulse. Sexuality is the universal motive for the infinite number if internal conflicts, though not in itself but as the object of a sexual morality which stands in insoluble conflict with everything that is of value and belongs to willing and reality.
It appears that at the deepest level the real nature of these conflicts may always be traced back to one comprehensive principle, to the conflict between that which belongs to oneself and that which belongs to the other, between that which is innately individual and that which has been suggested to us, i.e., that which is educated or otherwise forced into us.
This conflict of individuality with an authority that has penetrated into our own innermost self belongs more to the period of childhood than to any other time.
The tragedy is correspondingly greater as a person's individuality is more richly endowed, is stronger in its own particular nature. The earlier and the more intensely that the capacity to withstand suggestion and interference begins its protective function, the earlier and the more intensely will the self-divisive conflict be deepened and exacerbated. The only natures to be spared are those in whom the predisposition towards individuality is so weakly developed and is so little capable of resistance that under the pressure of suggestion from social surroundings, and the influence of education, it succumbs, in a manner of speaking, to atrophy and disappears altogether - natures whose guiding motives are at last composed entirely of alien, handed-down standards of evaluation and habits of reaction,. In such second-rate characters a certain apparent health can sustain itself, i.e., a peaceful and harmonious functioning of the whole of the soul or, more accurately, of what remains of the soul. On the other hand, each individual who stands in any way higher than this normal contemporary state of things is not, in existing, conditions, in a position to escape pathogenic conflict and to attain his individual health i.e., the full harmonious development of the highest possibilities of his innate individual character.
It is understood from all this that such characters hitherto, no matter in what outward form they manifest themselves – whether they are opposed to laws and morality, or lead us positively beyond the average, or collapse internally and become ill – have been perceived with either disgust, veneration or pity as disturbing exceptions whom people try to eliminate. It will come to be understood that, already today, there exists the demand to approve these people as the healthy, the warriors, the progressives, and to learn from and through them.
Not one of the revolutions in recorded history has succeeded in establishing freedom for individuality…Only now can it be recognized that the root of all authority lies in the family, that the combination of sexuality and authority, as it shows itself in the patriarchal family still prevailing today, claps every individuality in chains…" – "Overcoming Cultural Crisis", originally published in Die Aktion in April 1913, translated by Dr. John Turner of the University of Wales, Swansea, courtesy of Gottfried Heueer and the International Otto Gross Society, reprinted in ANARCHISM – A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939), pp. 282-3, Robert Graham, editor, copyright 2005 Black Rose Books.
We can see from the passage above, in which he eerily presaged his own "elimination", why Dr. Otto Gross was considered so very dangerous by the psychoanalytic establishment.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Zeno, Zeno and Big Bill
It comes as no surprise that the Paradox of Motion, known as Achilles and the Tortoise posited by Zeno of Elea (ca. 490 BC – ca. 430 BC: [ See: http://tinyurl.com/yp2g5r http://tinyurl.com/8xtcy and http://tinyurl.com/2ztsuy ]) should have entertained the mind of Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872– February 2, 1970), as it did so many intellects of eminence since the time of its pronunciation. Russell wrote: "Having invented four arguments all immeasurably subtle and profound, the grossness of subsequent philosophers pronounced him to be a mere ingenious juggler, and his arguments to be one and all sophisms. After two thousand years of continual refutation, these sophisms were reinstated, and made the foundation of a mathematical renaissance…" PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA I, 1903
The date of the publication of the PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA is significant. Einstein was working on his theory of Special Relativity and it was a mere three years after Max Planck had discovered that E=hf. The world was ready for another way of thinking. The work of Zeno of Elea, which had come to be considered mere philosophical amusement, was rehabilitated and given serious consideration once again, this time in light of new thinking about the nature of space, time and movement.
The following is a physicist's attempt to tackle the problems that Zeno of Elea raised: http://tinyurl.com/ky5p5 . The author ends his considerations thus: "Have we now finally resolved Zeno's "youthful effort"? Given the history of "final resolutions", from Aristotle onwards, it's probably foolhardy to think we've reached the end. It may be that Zeno's arguments on motion, because of their simplicity and universality, will always serve as a kind of "Rorschach image" onto which people can project their most fundamental phenomenological concerns (if they have any)."
We should, then, have expected that the Paradox of Motion articulated by Zeno of Elea in the 5th C. BCE would be solved, if at all, by a physicist or an analytic philosopher. Indeed, they tried. While their efforts were admirable, they did not produce a satisfying outcome as they readily admit.
It may be a surprise to some that the Paradox of Motion was most unambiguously articulated, elucidated and finally resolved in December of 1911 by William Dudley (Big Bill) Haywood (http://tinyurl.com/2og22u , http://tinyurl.com/2jpfkr ) who, despite having been referred to as "the Lincoln of Labor" by Eugene V. Debs (see: http://tinyurl.com/bq2h2 ) for his passionate and compassionate desire to emancipate laborers, from whose class he hailed, was also the subject of a biography entitled ROUGHNECK1.
It is highly unlikely that Haywood thought of himself as a philosopher, although his grasp of the conditions that create an underclass of workers was singularly insightful, analytical and sensitive. It is very unlikely that Haywood had considered the Paradox of Motion of Zeno of Elea from a purely philosophical view, if he ever did at all. Haywood was a man of action, not sophistry. He most certainly was not versed in higher mathematics. His education was cut short in early childhood. At the age of nine he began to work in a coal mine. Having been born into the working class in the United States in 1869 there was precious little time for him to learn philosophy or mathematics. It was as an honest man of action that he would solve the Paradox of Motion.
Had Haywood learned philosophy at all, we should have expected him to be more interested in the Anarchistic statement of Zeno of Citium than the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea. He likely would have been in agreement with the stance of Aristippus vis-à-vis society, if not with the spirit of his philosophy.
Zeno of Citium (ca. 336-ca. 224 BC) was so named after the Greek colony in Cypress that he lived in. Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates of Thebes, the Cynic (see: http://tinyurl.com/3aubby ). He was a merchant, the son of a merchant. Interestingly, like the vast majority of Anarchists of over two millennia later; he was not a common laborer, but was deeply concerned about a system of social organization that the common people would most benefit from if it were implemented. He worked at his profession until he reached the age of forty-two, when he founded the philosophical school that we know as Stoicism. The school of philosophy he founded was named for his teaching platform, the stoa, (Greek for 'platform' or 'porch'). None of Zeno of Citium's works are extant, to the best of our knowledge, but one of the quotes of Zeno of Citium that we are in possession of is this: "Men are rational, they do not need control; rational beings have no need of a state, or of money, or of law-courts, or of any organised, institutional life. In the perfect society men and women shall wear identical clothes and feed in a common pasture."
Aristippus (either the elder or the younger, see: http://tinyurl.com/2a9omp) was the founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy, the salient tenets of which were extreme, even crude, hedonism and egoism. Though so very different in his views from the Stoics; Aristippus articulated a similar sentiment concerning government as that of Zeno of Citium. He wrote: "The wise should not give up their liberty to the state".
Mayhap, had Big Bill had the leisure, he would have concerned himself with the Anarchistic ruminations of Zeno of Citium and Aristippus. It is highly unlikely that he did, or would, concern himself with the Paradoxes of Zeno of Elea. So, it is all the more remarkable that he is the final elucidator and resolver of the Paradox of Motion.
In December of 1911, Haywood, who had once been a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America but was leaning more toward Anarchism by that time, told a Lower East Side audience at New York's Cooper Union that parliamentary Socialists were "step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step."
In making that statement, Big Bill Haywood, the child of working-class parents whose formal education ended when he went to work as a nine-year-old boy, made manifest the solution to the Paradox of Motion that Zeno of Elea had posed in the 5th C. BCE, the self-same Paradox that had proven to be so inscrutable a conundrum that the greatest minds who attempted to tackle it since its pronunciation could not solve it definitively.
Haywood, the man of action, dedicated to the cause of Human advancement, understood the nature of action as no analytic philosopher, mathematician or physicist had. Zeno of Elea's Paradox of Motion is not a phenomenological problem at all and any attempt to resolve it as such leads nowhere. No advancement in solving the problem such can be made. Zeno of Elea's Paradox of Motion is a moral question. Haywood understood that those who take action on the pretense of advancing others, while interested only in their own advancement would make no progress either for themselves or for others. To such people attempts at advancement are ever less efficacious. Such people would, ineluctably, become jaded and come to the conclusion that progress for Humankind is impossible.
We see, then, that attempting to solve Zeno of Elea's Paradox of Motion either as a purely phenomenological problem while in a purely intellectual state of mind, and thus not passionately concerned for Human welfare, or attempting to understand it while under the influence of desire for personal advancement will lead one nowhere. That is the moral lesson of the Paradox and, this author believes, is the salient lesson that Zeno of Elea intended when he posited the paradox.
Haywood knew that being untrue to oneself and sacrificing one's values on the alter of realpolitik caused myriad phantasmagoria to arise in the mind because those conclusions are based on convoluted thinking. The convolutions in thinking that people resort to in order to make dishonest decisions is that which causes every path to become crooked and advancement impossible. The illusion that one is advancing is one of the phantasmagoria of the disingenuous, while it is very real in the worlds of those who set themselves to action for Humanity's sake.
Simply stated, opportunistic phonies go nowhere fast.
ROUGHNECK, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, page 199.
Article on CRIMSON BIRD: http://www.crimsonbird.com/history/zeno.htm
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan of Tzfat (Safed), Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
It comes as no surprise that the Paradox of Motion, known as Achilles and the Tortoise posited by Zeno of Elea (ca. 490 BC – ca. 430 BC: [ See: http://tinyurl.com/yp2g5r http://tinyurl.com/8xtcy and http://tinyurl.com/2ztsuy ]) should have entertained the mind of Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872– February 2, 1970), as it did so many intellects of eminence since the time of its pronunciation. Russell wrote: "Having invented four arguments all immeasurably subtle and profound, the grossness of subsequent philosophers pronounced him to be a mere ingenious juggler, and his arguments to be one and all sophisms. After two thousand years of continual refutation, these sophisms were reinstated, and made the foundation of a mathematical renaissance…" PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA I, 1903
The date of the publication of the PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA is significant. Einstein was working on his theory of Special Relativity and it was a mere three years after Max Planck had discovered that E=hf. The world was ready for another way of thinking. The work of Zeno of Elea, which had come to be considered mere philosophical amusement, was rehabilitated and given serious consideration once again, this time in light of new thinking about the nature of space, time and movement.
The following is a physicist's attempt to tackle the problems that Zeno of Elea raised: http://tinyurl.com/ky5p5 . The author ends his considerations thus: "Have we now finally resolved Zeno's "youthful effort"? Given the history of "final resolutions", from Aristotle onwards, it's probably foolhardy to think we've reached the end. It may be that Zeno's arguments on motion, because of their simplicity and universality, will always serve as a kind of "Rorschach image" onto which people can project their most fundamental phenomenological concerns (if they have any)."
We should, then, have expected that the Paradox of Motion articulated by Zeno of Elea in the 5th C. BCE would be solved, if at all, by a physicist or an analytic philosopher. Indeed, they tried. While their efforts were admirable, they did not produce a satisfying outcome as they readily admit.
It may be a surprise to some that the Paradox of Motion was most unambiguously articulated, elucidated and finally resolved in December of 1911 by William Dudley (Big Bill) Haywood (http://tinyurl.com/2og22u , http://tinyurl.com/2jpfkr ) who, despite having been referred to as "the Lincoln of Labor" by Eugene V. Debs (see: http://tinyurl.com/bq2h2 ) for his passionate and compassionate desire to emancipate laborers, from whose class he hailed, was also the subject of a biography entitled ROUGHNECK1.
It is highly unlikely that Haywood thought of himself as a philosopher, although his grasp of the conditions that create an underclass of workers was singularly insightful, analytical and sensitive. It is very unlikely that Haywood had considered the Paradox of Motion of Zeno of Elea from a purely philosophical view, if he ever did at all. Haywood was a man of action, not sophistry. He most certainly was not versed in higher mathematics. His education was cut short in early childhood. At the age of nine he began to work in a coal mine. Having been born into the working class in the United States in 1869 there was precious little time for him to learn philosophy or mathematics. It was as an honest man of action that he would solve the Paradox of Motion.
Had Haywood learned philosophy at all, we should have expected him to be more interested in the Anarchistic statement of Zeno of Citium than the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea. He likely would have been in agreement with the stance of Aristippus vis-à-vis society, if not with the spirit of his philosophy.
Zeno of Citium (ca. 336-ca. 224 BC) was so named after the Greek colony in Cypress that he lived in. Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates of Thebes, the Cynic (see: http://tinyurl.com/3aubby ). He was a merchant, the son of a merchant. Interestingly, like the vast majority of Anarchists of over two millennia later; he was not a common laborer, but was deeply concerned about a system of social organization that the common people would most benefit from if it were implemented. He worked at his profession until he reached the age of forty-two, when he founded the philosophical school that we know as Stoicism. The school of philosophy he founded was named for his teaching platform, the stoa, (Greek for 'platform' or 'porch'). None of Zeno of Citium's works are extant, to the best of our knowledge, but one of the quotes of Zeno of Citium that we are in possession of is this: "Men are rational, they do not need control; rational beings have no need of a state, or of money, or of law-courts, or of any organised, institutional life. In the perfect society men and women shall wear identical clothes and feed in a common pasture."
Aristippus (either the elder or the younger, see: http://tinyurl.com/2a9omp) was the founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy, the salient tenets of which were extreme, even crude, hedonism and egoism. Though so very different in his views from the Stoics; Aristippus articulated a similar sentiment concerning government as that of Zeno of Citium. He wrote: "The wise should not give up their liberty to the state".
Mayhap, had Big Bill had the leisure, he would have concerned himself with the Anarchistic ruminations of Zeno of Citium and Aristippus. It is highly unlikely that he did, or would, concern himself with the Paradoxes of Zeno of Elea. So, it is all the more remarkable that he is the final elucidator and resolver of the Paradox of Motion.
In December of 1911, Haywood, who had once been a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America but was leaning more toward Anarchism by that time, told a Lower East Side audience at New York's Cooper Union that parliamentary Socialists were "step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step."
In making that statement, Big Bill Haywood, the child of working-class parents whose formal education ended when he went to work as a nine-year-old boy, made manifest the solution to the Paradox of Motion that Zeno of Elea had posed in the 5th C. BCE, the self-same Paradox that had proven to be so inscrutable a conundrum that the greatest minds who attempted to tackle it since its pronunciation could not solve it definitively.
Haywood, the man of action, dedicated to the cause of Human advancement, understood the nature of action as no analytic philosopher, mathematician or physicist had. Zeno of Elea's Paradox of Motion is not a phenomenological problem at all and any attempt to resolve it as such leads nowhere. No advancement in solving the problem such can be made. Zeno of Elea's Paradox of Motion is a moral question. Haywood understood that those who take action on the pretense of advancing others, while interested only in their own advancement would make no progress either for themselves or for others. To such people attempts at advancement are ever less efficacious. Such people would, ineluctably, become jaded and come to the conclusion that progress for Humankind is impossible.
We see, then, that attempting to solve Zeno of Elea's Paradox of Motion either as a purely phenomenological problem while in a purely intellectual state of mind, and thus not passionately concerned for Human welfare, or attempting to understand it while under the influence of desire for personal advancement will lead one nowhere. That is the moral lesson of the Paradox and, this author believes, is the salient lesson that Zeno of Elea intended when he posited the paradox.
Haywood knew that being untrue to oneself and sacrificing one's values on the alter of realpolitik caused myriad phantasmagoria to arise in the mind because those conclusions are based on convoluted thinking. The convolutions in thinking that people resort to in order to make dishonest decisions is that which causes every path to become crooked and advancement impossible. The illusion that one is advancing is one of the phantasmagoria of the disingenuous, while it is very real in the worlds of those who set themselves to action for Humanity's sake.
Simply stated, opportunistic phonies go nowhere fast.
ROUGHNECK, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, page 199.
Article on CRIMSON BIRD: http://www.crimsonbird.com/history/zeno.htm
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan of Tzfat (Safed), Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Cho Seung-Hui Morality and Debauchery
OK. Let's discuss morality and debauchery.
Let it be said unequivocally that I would have preferred if Cho Seung-Hui had used the abilities that he honed as an English major constructively and had gone on to contribute to the efforts of the people you'll find mentioned on this URL:
http://tinyurl.com/3bk5hk (Yes, this is a pitch.)
However, I understand that this man did not have the emotional resources to be able to channel his outrage constructively. Not all do.
Rather than elaborating in detail on what I think about Cho Seung-Hui, whom I consider a Attentäter par excellence; I will allow those whom I consider to have expressed the issues most eloquently to speak for me.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."- Krishnamurthi
"Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all…
And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:
The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder…
The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked." THE PROPHET by Kahlil Gibran
"The Psychology of Political Violence" by Emma Goldman: http://tinyurl.com/36mshx
Finally I should like to draw your attention to the following article entitled: "Class War in the School and Office" by Michael Nenonen. See: http://tinyurl.com/3afv9w
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
OK. Let's discuss morality and debauchery.
Let it be said unequivocally that I would have preferred if Cho Seung-Hui had used the abilities that he honed as an English major constructively and had gone on to contribute to the efforts of the people you'll find mentioned on this URL:
http://tinyurl.com/3bk5hk (Yes, this is a pitch.)
However, I understand that this man did not have the emotional resources to be able to channel his outrage constructively. Not all do.
Rather than elaborating in detail on what I think about Cho Seung-Hui, whom I consider a Attentäter par excellence; I will allow those whom I consider to have expressed the issues most eloquently to speak for me.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."- Krishnamurthi
"Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all…
And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:
The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder…
The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked." THE PROPHET by Kahlil Gibran
"The Psychology of Political Violence" by Emma Goldman: http://tinyurl.com/36mshx
Finally I should like to draw your attention to the following article entitled: "Class War in the School and Office" by Michael Nenonen. See: http://tinyurl.com/3afv9w
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Thursday, December 14, 2006
"If there is no flour there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour." - Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah
An antagonist asked: Doesn't our Torah have enough commandments concerning helping the poor and the poor's welfare?
I answered: You sound as though there are so many that they are a burden to you. You should cherish those mitzvot above all others and those are the mitzvot that you should perform most assiduously.
Why do I say this? Because they are the mitzvot that are the conditions upon which all of the other mitzvot can be carried out.
"If there is no flour there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour." - Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah
I'll quote that again: "If there is no flour there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour." - Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah
That statement does not mean that there is no Torah only for those who have no flour. It means that there is no Torah for the ones hardening their hearts, or making of themselves luftmenschen, and not seeing to it that everyone has flour (and water, clothes, shoes, housing, inoculation, education and the conditions under which every individual can grow to her or his maximum Spiritual-Moral, mental, emotional and physical potential).
It is because I see the poor in this country becoming increasing beggared and more and more people falling into poverty, that I feel absolutely confident in saying there is no Torah in Israel. If there was one-third of the children in Israel would not be under the poverty line and they would not be going to school hiding the roll the have from others so that no one will see it has nothing on it, the elderly and infirmed would not be eating out of garbage cans and widows would not have their electricity turned off in the winter.
You stated: It seems to me, there are scores of commandments requiring compassion to the poor; forbidding oppressing the poor.
I responded: And are they being fulfilled? Are people as careful to do those mitzvot as they are when choosing their "glatt" chickens? No! They (maybe) give their 10% tzeddakah and a few hours of their time to help others, which only perpetuates the misery. They do not fulfill the commanment: Unloose the shackles of injustice. They do not go up against the system that creates and perpetuates poverty.
He went on to inquire: Why do we need a philosphy that is not rooted in Torah?
I responded: Do you not see that what I am saying is pure Torah? Shame on your teachers!
From the day that Avraham smashed his father's idols Judaism has been nothing but radical social transformation. Anyone who isn't smashing the idols that keep us in thrall, poor and subject to corrupt regimes is not of the covenant of Avraham, has not begun to understand what that covenant is.
Anarchy is not a philosophy from outside Torah. Anarchy is the mitzvot "concerning helping the poor and the poor's welfare" with the utmost punctiliousness and assiduousness.
Why do you think the old Jew blessed Rudolph Rocker?
I once took a course with a rabbi on tzadakah. At one point he stated that there must always be poor people so that we can do the mitzvah of giving tzaddakah. I left his course and have not read a word that he has to say since. He went down to credibility zero with me when he said that. The cruelty that passes itself off as Torah in this generation is absolutely astounding.
We may be sure that even in a society of Anarcho-Communalism, in which all of our physical needs are provided for; there will be endless opportunities for us to give emotional tzaddakah; to help those who need us in numerable ways and to be helped by others in innumerable ways.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
An antagonist asked: Doesn't our Torah have enough commandments concerning helping the poor and the poor's welfare?
I answered: You sound as though there are so many that they are a burden to you. You should cherish those mitzvot above all others and those are the mitzvot that you should perform most assiduously.
Why do I say this? Because they are the mitzvot that are the conditions upon which all of the other mitzvot can be carried out.
"If there is no flour there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour." - Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah
I'll quote that again: "If there is no flour there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour." - Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah
That statement does not mean that there is no Torah only for those who have no flour. It means that there is no Torah for the ones hardening their hearts, or making of themselves luftmenschen, and not seeing to it that everyone has flour (and water, clothes, shoes, housing, inoculation, education and the conditions under which every individual can grow to her or his maximum Spiritual-Moral, mental, emotional and physical potential).
It is because I see the poor in this country becoming increasing beggared and more and more people falling into poverty, that I feel absolutely confident in saying there is no Torah in Israel. If there was one-third of the children in Israel would not be under the poverty line and they would not be going to school hiding the roll the have from others so that no one will see it has nothing on it, the elderly and infirmed would not be eating out of garbage cans and widows would not have their electricity turned off in the winter.
You stated: It seems to me, there are scores of commandments requiring compassion to the poor; forbidding oppressing the poor.
I responded: And are they being fulfilled? Are people as careful to do those mitzvot as they are when choosing their "glatt" chickens? No! They (maybe) give their 10% tzeddakah and a few hours of their time to help others, which only perpetuates the misery. They do not fulfill the commanment: Unloose the shackles of injustice. They do not go up against the system that creates and perpetuates poverty.
He went on to inquire: Why do we need a philosphy that is not rooted in Torah?
I responded: Do you not see that what I am saying is pure Torah? Shame on your teachers!
From the day that Avraham smashed his father's idols Judaism has been nothing but radical social transformation. Anyone who isn't smashing the idols that keep us in thrall, poor and subject to corrupt regimes is not of the covenant of Avraham, has not begun to understand what that covenant is.
Anarchy is not a philosophy from outside Torah. Anarchy is the mitzvot "concerning helping the poor and the poor's welfare" with the utmost punctiliousness and assiduousness.
Why do you think the old Jew blessed Rudolph Rocker?
I once took a course with a rabbi on tzadakah. At one point he stated that there must always be poor people so that we can do the mitzvah of giving tzaddakah. I left his course and have not read a word that he has to say since. He went down to credibility zero with me when he said that. The cruelty that passes itself off as Torah in this generation is absolutely astounding.
We may be sure that even in a society of Anarcho-Communalism, in which all of our physical needs are provided for; there will be endless opportunities for us to give emotional tzaddakah; to help those who need us in numerable ways and to be helped by others in innumerable ways.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
A Jew Who Knew
Rudolph Rocker was a German non-Jew who devoted his life to ameliorating the conditions of the working poor Jews in London at the start of the 20th C.
He learned Yiddish so well that he became the editor of the Yiddish Anarchist papers Dos Fraye Vort (The Free Word), Der Arbeiter Freint (The Workers Friend) and Germinal.
For his efforts he was detained by the British for years as an "alien enemy of the state".
Shortly after leading Jewish sweatshop workers to victory in a 1912 strike he recalled:
"As I was walking along a narrow Whitechapel street, an old Jew with a long white beard stopped me outside his house, and said: “May God bless you! You helped my children in their need. You are not a Jew, but you are a man!” This old man lived in a world completely different from mine. But the memory of the gratitude that shone in those eyes has remained with me all these years."
THE LONDON YEARS, the last page of Chapter 23 – Workers' Circle. The Great Strike.
In 1912, you may be sure, that an old Jew with a long white beard knew the halakhah.
How many Jews today can honestly say they would do for the Jews what the gentile German Rocker did?
Today, far too many Jews who fancy themselves Orthodox and knowledgeable in Torah would dismiss Rocker as a "sheigitz" or perhaps try to shame him publicly for being an "abominable" Anarchist, or proffer a description of his "touched" personality based on an astrological chart, or throw in his face that his father celebrated Christmas or speculate on his mental state or call him a "freak". (See the Yahoo! group "Tzfat" in order to understand to what I am referring.)
But we all know deep in our heart of hearts that the Jew with the long white beard who was already old in 1912 was the real thing. May God bless him as he blessed those who helped the (secular, Anarchistic) Jews, who he called his children, in their need.
And thank God for a gentile who bothered to learn Yiddish so he could help the Jews, who recorded the words of that old Jew, immortalizing him, so that the voice of true Judaism can still be heard today by Jews like me who yearn to hear it but so very rarely do.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Rudolph Rocker was a German non-Jew who devoted his life to ameliorating the conditions of the working poor Jews in London at the start of the 20th C.
He learned Yiddish so well that he became the editor of the Yiddish Anarchist papers Dos Fraye Vort (The Free Word), Der Arbeiter Freint (The Workers Friend) and Germinal.
For his efforts he was detained by the British for years as an "alien enemy of the state".
Shortly after leading Jewish sweatshop workers to victory in a 1912 strike he recalled:
"As I was walking along a narrow Whitechapel street, an old Jew with a long white beard stopped me outside his house, and said: “May God bless you! You helped my children in their need. You are not a Jew, but you are a man!” This old man lived in a world completely different from mine. But the memory of the gratitude that shone in those eyes has remained with me all these years."
THE LONDON YEARS, the last page of Chapter 23 – Workers' Circle. The Great Strike.
In 1912, you may be sure, that an old Jew with a long white beard knew the halakhah.
How many Jews today can honestly say they would do for the Jews what the gentile German Rocker did?
Today, far too many Jews who fancy themselves Orthodox and knowledgeable in Torah would dismiss Rocker as a "sheigitz" or perhaps try to shame him publicly for being an "abominable" Anarchist, or proffer a description of his "touched" personality based on an astrological chart, or throw in his face that his father celebrated Christmas or speculate on his mental state or call him a "freak". (See the Yahoo! group "Tzfat" in order to understand to what I am referring.)
But we all know deep in our heart of hearts that the Jew with the long white beard who was already old in 1912 was the real thing. May God bless him as he blessed those who helped the (secular, Anarchistic) Jews, who he called his children, in their need.
And thank God for a gentile who bothered to learn Yiddish so he could help the Jews, who recorded the words of that old Jew, immortalizing him, so that the voice of true Judaism can still be heard today by Jews like me who yearn to hear it but so very rarely do.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
DESIGN YOUR OWN UTOPIA
Chaz Bufe, one of the hottest Anarchists out there, and Libby Hubbard (with whose work I am not acquainted other than this one) have created the "Design Your Own Utopia" workbook.
They don't call it a workbook, I do. They call it a questionnaire. But it really reminds me of the workbooks we had in school - but it's for adults and far more fun, revealing and probably educational too. The questions posed will show you who you are by allowing you to answer what your idea of perfection is.
Go for it - design your own utopia: http://www.seesharppress.com/utopia.html
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat (Safed), Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Chaz Bufe, one of the hottest Anarchists out there, and Libby Hubbard (with whose work I am not acquainted other than this one) have created the "Design Your Own Utopia" workbook.
They don't call it a workbook, I do. They call it a questionnaire. But it really reminds me of the workbooks we had in school - but it's for adults and far more fun, revealing and probably educational too. The questions posed will show you who you are by allowing you to answer what your idea of perfection is.
Go for it - design your own utopia: http://www.seesharppress.com/utopia.html
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat (Safed), Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
THE LEAVING FOR THE SAKE OF THE RETURN
One can keep kashrut out of a need to belong, keep Shabbat out of fear of what their family and neighbors will say and keep Taharat HaMisphachah out of desire for a place in the world to come... - all without loving HaShem with one's entire being.
But no one devotes their entire life to humanity, consistently over the period of a lifetime, unless they love HaShem completely and are devoted to HaShem in a way that the Orthodox can only feign being. That devotion need not be conscious, but it is there.
Am I conflated? Am I making a shatnez of Torah and secular ethics? In fact, there is nothing that I have written that is not pure Torah.
Ideally a Jew should keep the mitzvot and serve humanity. They do not only not contradict; they are supplementary one to the other.However, Judaism as it is currently taught and practiced, with all of the chumrot and minhagim that have been added to Torah (in contravention of the injunction not to add to Torah!) does not allow for the performance of both those mitzvot that bring down holiness into the physical plane and the social service aspects of Torah - both of which are essential and should be performed in such a way that they enable and advance one the other.
We have been taught in Chassidut about the principle of the descent for the purpose of the ascent.
In our times, time of darkness and blindness we are in need of a more radical cure for our moral-spiritual ills. We are in need of the leaving for the sake of the return.The only solution to the problem is to leave this farce that we are told is Torah and build a just society that is not based on greed and violence and power-hungriness. In such a society there will be no incentives for Rabbis who serve the power structure to distort Torah and make it into shackles and manacles that bind the mind, the heart and Soul. In such a society Torah can be rediscovered in its pristine purity because there won't be a power structure that will have interests in making the populace spiritual slaves and moral cripples.
Torah has been so horribly misrepresented, so grossly misunderstood and so abused as an instrument of mind and behavior control that the only way to return to it is by leaving what we think is Torah, but is not.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
One can keep kashrut out of a need to belong, keep Shabbat out of fear of what their family and neighbors will say and keep Taharat HaMisphachah out of desire for a place in the world to come... - all without loving HaShem with one's entire being.
But no one devotes their entire life to humanity, consistently over the period of a lifetime, unless they love HaShem completely and are devoted to HaShem in a way that the Orthodox can only feign being. That devotion need not be conscious, but it is there.
Am I conflated? Am I making a shatnez of Torah and secular ethics? In fact, there is nothing that I have written that is not pure Torah.
Ideally a Jew should keep the mitzvot and serve humanity. They do not only not contradict; they are supplementary one to the other.However, Judaism as it is currently taught and practiced, with all of the chumrot and minhagim that have been added to Torah (in contravention of the injunction not to add to Torah!) does not allow for the performance of both those mitzvot that bring down holiness into the physical plane and the social service aspects of Torah - both of which are essential and should be performed in such a way that they enable and advance one the other.
We have been taught in Chassidut about the principle of the descent for the purpose of the ascent.
In our times, time of darkness and blindness we are in need of a more radical cure for our moral-spiritual ills. We are in need of the leaving for the sake of the return.The only solution to the problem is to leave this farce that we are told is Torah and build a just society that is not based on greed and violence and power-hungriness. In such a society there will be no incentives for Rabbis who serve the power structure to distort Torah and make it into shackles and manacles that bind the mind, the heart and Soul. In such a society Torah can be rediscovered in its pristine purity because there won't be a power structure that will have interests in making the populace spiritual slaves and moral cripples.
Torah has been so horribly misrepresented, so grossly misunderstood and so abused as an instrument of mind and behavior control that the only way to return to it is by leaving what we think is Torah, but is not.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Genuine Religious Jews
Jews inspired by genuine Divine afflatus do not engage overmuch in ceremonies, nor do they speak in clichés, quoting others verbatim by rote.
They are not overly punctilious and scrupulous about ritual purity and they do not carry out formulaic actions obsessively-compulsively.
They do not care a whit about their own salvation and nothing they do is for the sake of ensuring an eternal place of rest and joy for themselves.
They act in, rather than speak of, love.
They do not wax pontifical or esoteric. They concern themselves with the needs of human beings qua human beings.
They do not sacrifice the material levels of our beings for the sake of the "spiritual" levels.
They do not profit from the encouraging and teaching of others to observe ritual.
They do not claim immaculate morality on the part of their teachers; neither do they claim that they their tradition or their teachers are infallible.
They do not set themselves up and judge and jury over humankind.
The only abomination they recognize is injustice and the misuse of power.
They need no social acceptance or group to be part to know what they should do or give them a sense of identity. They are strong enough to stand alone, all alone, if need be.
Their every action, the very purpose of their lives and their entire being is given over to the alleviation of the suffering of humankind.
Injustice is intolerable to them and they fight for justice for all no matter what the personal price they must pay for it.
Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Saul Alinsky, Martin Buber and Murray Bookchin were religious Jews. They carried within them the whole of Torah. The received and passed on the torch of the Prophets of Israel. This was true despite the protestations of some of them that they were atheists. It is recorded of Emma Goldman, the self-professed atheist Anarchist, that: "A rabbi who heard her lecture a large conference of clergymen on atheism probably came closer than the public to understanding her antireligious stand. "In spite of al Miss Goldman has said against religion", he announced, "she is the most religious person I know." (RED EMMA SPEAKS, An Emma Goldman Reader, Compiled and Edited by Alex Kates Shulman, Preface to Part Two; Published 1998 by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books)
It is certainly be true that some Jews who adhere to the minutiae of Jewish Law may be true Orthodox Jews, but this is true if and only if they do so in addition to devoting their entire lives to the amelioration of the human condition and the alleviation of human suffering. Their performance of the minutiae of Jewish Law is not that which defines them at genuine Orthodox Jews. That is a mere appurtenance. Their devotion to justice is that which defines them as genuine Orthodox Jews.
Those who teach Jewish Law in such a way that it comes in lieu of acting in the world for the betterment of human kind; if it obviates doing so; if it becomes so all-demanding, time-consuming and burdensome that there is no strength or time for fighting injustice; if the observance of Jewish Law imparts the illusion of being absolutely right and just; if it attenuates the desire to right wrongs or puts off the doing so for the Mashiach to take care of; if it brings one to believe that each of us has only to tend to our own imperfections – then we may be entirely sure that what we have is not Judaism at all, but an ersatz, painstakingly deliberately fabricated and purposefully promulgated in order to confound us, to keep our energies invested in that which will avail nothing and deflect us from our duties by nefarious interests.
A great deal of money, ink and blood is being poured in order to keep Jews distracted from our true purpose and our true values. This is as true of the religious segments of our society as it is of the secular segments. The only difference is the methods being employed in order to dissipate our energies.
History has proven that Jews who are devoted to justice en masse are invincible. It is then that HaShem performs miracles for us.
Every effort is being made, in the religious and secular worlds alike, to prevent us from knowing who we truly are, what our purpose in creation is, from mobilizing in unison, reaching a critical mass of power and changing the course of the world. We can do it. We have done so before. If we were not capable of changing the world, so much investment would not be being invested in atomizing us and reducing our strength.
Do not be fooled. Do not be misled. Do not be bought. Do not be enthralled. Do not be enticed. Do not be led astray.
We Jews were put here for the sake of participating in the creation of a just world with every other and for every other sentient being.
Let nothing, but nothing, be it pseudo-religious principles or iPods and other things that go beep in the night steer you away from what you are and what your designated tasks are.
The Hebrew version of this essay is to be found on the following URL: http://tinyurl.com/yfnud6
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Jews inspired by genuine Divine afflatus do not engage overmuch in ceremonies, nor do they speak in clichés, quoting others verbatim by rote.
They are not overly punctilious and scrupulous about ritual purity and they do not carry out formulaic actions obsessively-compulsively.
They do not care a whit about their own salvation and nothing they do is for the sake of ensuring an eternal place of rest and joy for themselves.
They act in, rather than speak of, love.
They do not wax pontifical or esoteric. They concern themselves with the needs of human beings qua human beings.
They do not sacrifice the material levels of our beings for the sake of the "spiritual" levels.
They do not profit from the encouraging and teaching of others to observe ritual.
They do not claim immaculate morality on the part of their teachers; neither do they claim that they their tradition or their teachers are infallible.
They do not set themselves up and judge and jury over humankind.
The only abomination they recognize is injustice and the misuse of power.
They need no social acceptance or group to be part to know what they should do or give them a sense of identity. They are strong enough to stand alone, all alone, if need be.
Their every action, the very purpose of their lives and their entire being is given over to the alleviation of the suffering of humankind.
Injustice is intolerable to them and they fight for justice for all no matter what the personal price they must pay for it.
Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Saul Alinsky, Martin Buber and Murray Bookchin were religious Jews. They carried within them the whole of Torah. The received and passed on the torch of the Prophets of Israel. This was true despite the protestations of some of them that they were atheists. It is recorded of Emma Goldman, the self-professed atheist Anarchist, that: "A rabbi who heard her lecture a large conference of clergymen on atheism probably came closer than the public to understanding her antireligious stand. "In spite of al Miss Goldman has said against religion", he announced, "she is the most religious person I know." (RED EMMA SPEAKS, An Emma Goldman Reader, Compiled and Edited by Alex Kates Shulman, Preface to Part Two; Published 1998 by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books)
It is certainly be true that some Jews who adhere to the minutiae of Jewish Law may be true Orthodox Jews, but this is true if and only if they do so in addition to devoting their entire lives to the amelioration of the human condition and the alleviation of human suffering. Their performance of the minutiae of Jewish Law is not that which defines them at genuine Orthodox Jews. That is a mere appurtenance. Their devotion to justice is that which defines them as genuine Orthodox Jews.
Those who teach Jewish Law in such a way that it comes in lieu of acting in the world for the betterment of human kind; if it obviates doing so; if it becomes so all-demanding, time-consuming and burdensome that there is no strength or time for fighting injustice; if the observance of Jewish Law imparts the illusion of being absolutely right and just; if it attenuates the desire to right wrongs or puts off the doing so for the Mashiach to take care of; if it brings one to believe that each of us has only to tend to our own imperfections – then we may be entirely sure that what we have is not Judaism at all, but an ersatz, painstakingly deliberately fabricated and purposefully promulgated in order to confound us, to keep our energies invested in that which will avail nothing and deflect us from our duties by nefarious interests.
A great deal of money, ink and blood is being poured in order to keep Jews distracted from our true purpose and our true values. This is as true of the religious segments of our society as it is of the secular segments. The only difference is the methods being employed in order to dissipate our energies.
History has proven that Jews who are devoted to justice en masse are invincible. It is then that HaShem performs miracles for us.
Every effort is being made, in the religious and secular worlds alike, to prevent us from knowing who we truly are, what our purpose in creation is, from mobilizing in unison, reaching a critical mass of power and changing the course of the world. We can do it. We have done so before. If we were not capable of changing the world, so much investment would not be being invested in atomizing us and reducing our strength.
Do not be fooled. Do not be misled. Do not be bought. Do not be enthralled. Do not be enticed. Do not be led astray.
We Jews were put here for the sake of participating in the creation of a just world with every other and for every other sentient being.
Let nothing, but nothing, be it pseudo-religious principles or iPods and other things that go beep in the night steer you away from what you are and what your designated tasks are.
The Hebrew version of this essay is to be found on the following URL: http://tinyurl.com/yfnud6
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
Friday, November 24, 2006
I've begun another web site. Yes, yes, yet another.
I had no choice. This topic must be aired.
The site is called Critique of Judaism and is to be found on the following URL:
http://tinyurl.com/yed5pe
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
I had no choice. This topic must be aired.
The site is called Critique of Judaism and is to be found on the following URL:
http://tinyurl.com/yed5pe
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
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