Forgive Me

I have mixed emotions about the "celebration" of the Jewish holidays/Holydays.  Mostly, this stems from my inability to rationalize organized religion.  At its most intense, our fates and actions are either being controlled or judged (or both) by an ever-present deity or deities.  In some religions, free will is wistful and wishful thinking.  Your actions are merely an extension of the divine.  What happens to you is predetermined.  You are but players on the stage of life, acting out perfectly scripted roles.    

In the most strict sense of Judaism, the Talmud (Jewish book of law) says that on Rosh Hashana, God inscribes everyone's name into one of three books. The righteous go into the Book of Life, the evil go into the Book of Death, and those in-between have judgment suspended until Yom Kippur.  You best attone for your sins that God then writes your fate into the correct book.  

Some liberal observations:

No one is 100% good or 100% evil; 
Plenty of good people die which flies in the face of a literal interpretation;
By the same virtue, plenty of bad people survive to do horrendous things;
From a scientific vantage point, natural systems are both orderly and, at times, chaotic.  Humans, being a part of nature, are no different, and our ability to correctly predict human actions, based on precedent, is immensely difficult if not impossible.  Sometimes, the signs are there, whether we see them or not (Stoneman Douglas), and other times, we are caught completely unaware (Las Vegas).

"Sometimes the lights are shining on me, other times I can barely see."

My values, shaped by a Jewish upbringing, but firmly grounded in science, makes me continuously question the self-righteous actions performed by humans in the name of religion.  I am no Zionist, and the recent nationalist actions of Israel make me sick, especially the bulldozing of settlements of HUMAN BEINGS in the West Bank.  Similarly, it should be obvious that I have no love for the white-supremacist-accepting millionaire, Donald Trump.  I don't believe the man is intentionally racist.  I do believe that the man doesn't understand anyone without his ethnic and cultural background, and has no interest in trying to.  Do I understand that Jewish people in the 1940s were targeted for eradication?  Yes.  Do I also understand that Israel was established to ensure that a permanent place was available for an outcast people?  Yes.  Do I also understand that Trump's enthusiasm for Israel may be based on his understanding that a monotheistic society/nation-state with a single dominant religion is possible and it fuels his desire to move the United States in that direction through walls and tariffs and travel bans, etc.?  Did you know that "In God We Trust" was added to paper currency in 1957 to perpetuate the lies of McCarthyism?  Did you also know that "under god" was added to the pledge at the same time for the same nationalistic reason? 


While Trump's intentions may be pure conjecture on my part, the uncertainty of human actions makes this a difficult time to live with pure convictions.  By that, I mean, we (everyone) need to relax our strict definitions of religious edict.  We need to be more understanding that there's more than one way to achieve a goal, and that even the smartest of us can't solve our collective problems.  Whether this is your holiday or not, take this week to look past the religious veneer of your neighbors.  Until we stop caring whether someone has humbled themselves before an invisible god, or attended religious services at Yom Kippur, Easter or Christmas, or fasted during Ramadan, we are doomed to continue the divisiveness born from our collective ignorance.  Because, ultimately, the message of all religions is the same: don't be a jerk, and if you were successful at not being a jerk today, then try again tomorrow, and make sure to thank the people who enrich your lives the most.  The actions of your goodness speak the loudest, regardless of your upbringing, or your cultural habits, but it takes courage.
"If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously."  Jerry Garcia

While my "J" may be different than yours in "WWJD," their logic about humanity frequently overlapped.  Because, as Buddha says "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path."