The Hebrews or Ivrim עברים discovered YHVH, the divine presence, while in
the Desert. During their journeys they encountered the threshold between this world and the world of spirit. They recognized the limitations of the material world and the vastness of the spirit world. They named this spiritual threshold Adonai אדני, which derives from the Hebrew word Eden אדן, threshold. When the Hebrews settled in the land of Israel they built a sanctuary for Adonai, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. King Solomon built it in about 1000 BCE. For a long stretch of about a thousand years the Hebrews, who were later called Judaeans or ״Jews״ for short, attended the Temple in Jerusalem for rites and rituals that kept them in awareness of… connection with The Threshold, with Adonai. Their spiritual life, their culture, their national identity depended on the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. In 70 c.e. the Jews rebelled against the Roman empire, which now ruled the civilized world including Judaea. The Romans in turn crushed the rebellion by placing a siege on Jerusalem… eventually conquering the city... burning the thousand-year-old Temple down to the ground. They killed many... exiling the rest to Rome as POWs and slaves. Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakai, a contemporaneous sage, escaped the besieged city before its destruction and struck a deal with Titus the Roman general.
0 Comments
(Continued from part 2)
EINSTEIN’S INSIGHT Not enough is known about how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic in spite of a century long history of reductionist medical successes, including past vaccination campaigns. We have been caught by surprise by a new magnitude of health crisis. The pandemic apparently is revealing critical fault lines in the reductionist sciences that have been shaping our lifestyles. The pandemic is revealing profound systemic and slow-moving crises such as the obesity pandemic, a toxin-saturated agricultural system, climate and environmental degradation, to mention just a few. (Continued from part 1)
GREATER THAN OUR PARTS Scientism, or Reductionism, which currently frames our reaction to disease in general and to COVID-19 and its variants in particular, has also been a strong motivator for civilization’s progress during the past century. Reductionism, Materialism, and Isolationism, at the time of their emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offered refreshing alternatives to the prevailing medieval religious superstitions of the day. And indeed, the scientific method at the heart of the reductionist paradigm has solved many problems and improved our quality of life for a time. The campaign to vaccinate a nation during a pandemic has brought into sharp relief a dimension that we, individual-freedoms-loving Americans often resist, that of the “common good”. “In ordinary political discourse, the “common good” refers to those facilities… that the members of a community provide to all... in order to fulfill a relational obligation they all have to care for certain interests that they have in common.... The term itself may refer either to the interests that members have in common or to the facilities that serve common interests (The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy).”
It takes everyone to fight a pandemic, and as such embracing our common interest becomes necessary so we can prevail over COVID 19 and its variants. The transmissibility of the virus taught us early on that as individuals we must protect not only ourselves but also those around us, as we did originally with the simple COVID 19 prevention practices of social distancing, and mask wearing, followed later with the “Warp Speed” vaccine campaign. This demanded that we act as a collective. We learned that a scaled up response coordinated by the highest levels of government would be best suited for this level of challenge, as the virus did not recognize local, regional, or state borders, nor did it distinguish between people’s conservative or liberal ideologies. |
AuthorRabbi Reuben Modek Archives
May 2023
Categories |