The Raven Foundation

 

 

We believe in something inimical to all human beings.  We believe that it has the power to right the wrongs committed against us and we believe that it has the power to make the world a better place.

 

We believe in violence.

 

In general, we humans believe that violence, the intention to harm another person or group, is an effective way to make the world a better place.  Anders Behring Breivick’s cruel rampage in Norway on July 22 illuminates humanity’s belief in violence.  Breivick believed violence was the best solution to “save his country from ruin.”  In the 1,500 page document he posted on Facebook just before the brutal attack, Breivick revealed his anger toward the Norwegian Government for its fostering of multiculturalism. He felt threatened by Norway’s Islamic presence and stated, “We will eventually wipe out every single one of them.”  He went on to justify his assault claiming, “We must risk everything for the chance to get our freedom and secure freedom for our relatives again.  I have prepared myself mentally for a very long time and I would like to sacrifice my life for the benefit of my European brothers and sisters.”

 

Breivick believed violence was an effective way to secure freedom for Norway.

 

Many commentators claim that Breivick is deranged; that his document is “a manifesto of madness if there ever was one.”  Nothing would make me happier to assert that Breivick is an aberration of humanity, but reality leads me to believe otherwise.  His problem is his belief in violence.  Unfortunately, he is not alone in that belief.

 

Soon after the tragic bombing in Oslo that killed eight people and his inhumane killing of 68 young people attending a summer camp, many commentators began calling the massacre Norway’s 9/11.  Of course, 9/11 exposed Al-Qaeda’s belief in violence to defend their way of life, which was threatened by the encroachment of Western globalization.  When the United States responded with the “War on Terror,” we exposed that we share the same belief in violence as our enemies.  President George W. Bush justified the war in the name of freedom and peace, stating in his 2004 State of the Union Address, “For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein’s regime is a better and safer place.”  That claim is dubious, as during the last 10 years Americans have been forced to give up certain freedoms long cherished and we live under the constant threat that our enemies will soon seek revenge.

 

We believe in violence.  Our enemies believe in violence.  Our shared belief makes us enemy twins, killing one another in the same name of justice, peace, and freedom.

 

Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s Prime Minister, condemned the attack and then said this, “I have a message to those who attacked us.  It’s a message from all of Norway: You will not destroy our democracy and our commitment to a better world.”

 

Breivick was committed to a better world.  So was Al-Qaeda.  So was George Bush.  So is Barack Obama.  If Stoltenberg is serious in his commitment to a better world, he will respond to the tragic events of July 22 with creativity and nonviolent action.  If he responds in any other way, he will reveal that he shares the same belief in violence as Breivick.

 

The violence unleashed in the name of bettering our world is only creating more enmity among human beings.  Our shared belief that violence as an effective way of making the world better must be named for what it is – a myth.  Violence will never engender a better world.  It will only reinforce the belief that violence is an effective way to right any wrongs done to us.  If we are truly committed to making this a better and more peaceful world, we need to find better and more peaceful methods.

 

There is a growing number of people throughout the world who no longer believe in violence.  We have an opportunity before us.  In the aftermath of the horrific and meaningless tragedy in Norway, and as 9/11/11 approaches, those of us committed to a better world need to pledge our lives to nonviolent action.  The only way we will live in a peaceful world is by courageously choosing nonviolent and peaceful means to right any wrongs committed against us.

 

The world needs a new kind of hero.  The world needs heroes who seek peace by peaceful means.

 

 

We recently received this comment on our new project page “Honor Their Memory – Be a Hero for Peace”:

 

You say you are Christian based but you don't quote scripture in your so called peace movement. Let's take this step by step, First of all the name Raven alone you will find that it is a unclean bird and unclean people assocciate themselves with such, book of LEVITICUS. The book is about Clean and Unclean. Jesus Christ did not come to give peace on earth but, rather a division,LUKE Chapter 12 Verses 51,52,53.
You want others to be a hero for peace, So lets find it in our FATHERS word, PSALMS Chapter 144 Verses 1,2

I responded with this:

 

Hi,

Thank you for your comment. Indeed, the raven is an ambiguous creature, but the raven is not a bad bird. It is part of God's good creation. Humans have done a good job scapegoating ravens, which is a major reason we chose to identify ourselves with it. But remember, it was the raven who came to the prophet Elijah's aid in the desert. Ravens can be an instrument of God. If Elijah can associate himself with the "unclean" we figure we can, too.

In the first century, Jesus did bring division between family members. That is true - and he continues to bring division between family members today. He challenged human systems of violence and encouraged his followers to challenge those systems, too. That challenge causes family divisions because family members may think that violence is redemptive, which it isn't. Only love is redemptive, which is why Jesus calls his followers to love their enemies. Any quote from Jesus that looks like an endorsement of violence must be interpreted through the cross, where Jesus takes the human system of violence upon himself and refuses to retaliate in kind. He subverts violence in the most subversive way: with forgiveness - "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

I'm not sure what you mean by referring to Psalm 144:1-2. Are you suggesting that if we kill all our enemies we will have peace? It seems as though humans have been trying that for a while now, and it hasn't worked. It has only led to more cycles of imitative violence. Isaiah 53, Leviticus 19:18, and Jesus offer the way out. It's time we take them more seriously.

Thanks again,
Adam

 

I think my response was fair, but, I really wanted to respond with something like this:

 

First, we really don’t claim to be a Christian movement.  We are ecumenical in our project and hope Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Secularists, and Atheists will join in the movement to bring peace by peaceful means.  But we do happen to be Christians, and as a Christian I feel responsible to comment more about the statement, “Jesus Christ did not come to bring peace on earth but, rather division.”  In my original comment I pointed to the partial truth of that statement.  Unfortunately, partial truths are always misleading.  If we want to see why Jesus is a hero for peace, then we must look at the historical context of first century Rome and the Jesus movement.

 

First century CE Rome was guided in large part by Caesar Augustus’s exploits during the first century BCE.  In fact, the Battle of Actium between Octavian (who, of course, would become Caesar Augustus) and the forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra was a battle for the future of Rome.  Octavian won that battle, due in large part to the poor military strategy of Antony and Cleopatra, who decided to have their army hide out in a swamp … a mosquito infested swamp.  OOOPS!!!  That was more than an annoying blunder, as many of their soldiers caught malaria and died.  Antony and Cleopatra soon committed suicide.  Octavian won, changed his name to Augustus, and sought to conquer the world.

 

But, really, Augustus was offering the world peace.  The Pax Romana.  For Rome to spread Roman peace, it had to spread Roman culture.  Thus, Rome sought to “Romanize” the world.  And Augustus had the god given right to force people to become Romanized and to live into the Pax Romana.  A whole Roman theology of conquest was created to support Roman political conquest.  For example, in Virgil’s Aenid we are given this line from the great Roman god Jupiter: “For these I set no bounds in space or time; but have given empire without end [to] the Romans, lords of the world, and the nation of the toga.  Thus it is decreed” (I.278-83).

 

“The nation of the Toga.”  Thanks be to the Romans for togas.

 

Aeneas, the original Roman, was reminded of Rome’s manifest destiny by his father, Anchises – “You, Roman, be sure to rule the world, to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and crush the proud” (6.851-53).  Of course, “the proud” consisted of anyone who wanted to maintain their culture by refusing to become Romanized.

 

Virgil’s theology of Roman conquest and Augustus’s actual conquest reinforced each other.  Take this inscription Augustus made in the city of Nicopolis, named after the Roman god of victory, Nike, “From here I went forth under heavenly protection to complete my divine mission and to fulfill Rome’s imperial destiny.”  Octavian left Nicopolis to defeat Antony and Cleopatra.  His “heavenly protection” came in the form of mosquitoes.  But it didn’t matter how he won.  What mattered was that victory meant the gods were on his side.

 

Then there’s the inscription Augustus had engraved in a monument at Ancyra, Turkey.  “I added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people.”  He then continued to create a long list of other nations he conquered, including this statement, “When an army of Dacians crossed the Danube, it was defeated and routed under my auspices, and later my army crossed the Danube and compelled the Dacian peoples to submit to the commands of the Roman people.”  All of this, of course, was in the name of bringing “peace” to the world.  As Augustus would claim, “I brought peace to the Gallic and Spanish provinces as well as to Germany.”  Roman peace was secured by victory; by defeating the enemies of Rome and killing “the proud.”

 

This was the way of Rome and it was strengthened by a theology of conquest, military might, and the leadership of Caesar.  Dominic Crossan, in his book God and Empire, puts Caesar’s influence like this, “There was a human being in the first century who was called ‘Divine,’ ‘Son of God,’ ‘God,’ and ‘God from God,’ whose titles were ‘Lord,’ ‘Redeemer,’ ‘Liberator,’ and ‘Savior of the World’” (28).

 

Anyone who said otherwise would be viewed as an enemy of Rome and killed in the name of “peace.”

 

Enter Jesus.

 

It’s true.  Jesus did not come to give peace, at least, not peace like Roman peace.  For Jesus, peace would come only by way of peaceful means.  That is why he refused to use violence.  He could have.  He had the choice to be like Rome.  When he was arrested, one of his followers attempted to protect him by hacking off someone’s ear.  Jesus replied, “YOU FREAKIN’ IDIOT!  WHY ARE YOU SO DAMN SLOW?!?  YOU’VE BEEN FOLLOWING ME FOR THREE YEARS AND YOU STILL DON’T GET IT!”

 

Okay, that’s not exactly what Jesus said.  According to Matthew he said, “Put your sword back in its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.  Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”

 

Jesus could have used violence, but he refused.  And he asked his followers to do the same.  And eventually they got it.  The first century Christians refused to use violence and they would call Jesus names like, “Divine,” “Son of God,” “God,” and “God from God,” and they would give him titles like “Lord,” “Redeemer,” “Liberator,” and “Savior of the World.”

 

I fully admit that those names and titles weren’t original, but they were high political treason.  Which makes the early Christians officially B.A.  In claiming “Jesus is Lord, God, Son of God, and Savior of the world,” they were saying “Caesar is not.”  In claiming that Jesus is the “way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) they were subverting Caesar’s way of violence.

 

Jesus had choices, and he chose love and non-violence.  We have choices, too.  We can choose to respond to violence with the way of Caesar or the way of Christ.  When George W. Bush sent us into the “War on Terror” he did so in the name of God.  That was the god of Caesar, not the God of Jesus.  When Barack Obama claimed “anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined” he was speaking as a follower of Caesar, not a follower of Christ.

 

Like Jesus, we have options.  We are not enslaved to the gods of Rome.  We can choose another way.  We can choose to claim that Jesus is Lord.  We can choose to claim that the way of violence and revenge is not Lord of our lives.  We can choose to show the world another way that involves courage, forgiveness, turning the other cheek, and loving our enemies. It’s been 2,000 years.  It’s time Christians choose the way of Jesus.  It’s time we choose peace by peaceful means.

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Adam discusses the Psalms. Why are we so uncomfortable with violent passages of the Psalms? They make us confront our own ugly desires for revenge. But the Psalms also allow us to see that the Judeo-Christian God stands with the victims of culture. As the Bible continues, we see that God stands with the victims, not in order to create more victims, but to heal broken relationships in the spirit of love and forgiveness.

 

 

Emotions have been running high since last week’s acquittal of Casey Anthony in the murder trial of her two year old daughter Caylee Anthony.  Many have lived with this case since Caylee’s murder three years ago.  The case has been a media sensation for many reasons, one being that Casey Anthony has made for a very good villain.  She is portrayed as monster of a human being – a mother who would rather party and hook up with men than care for her daughter.  She lied to police and investigators at the beginning of their investigation into Caylee’s whereabouts.  Public opinion turned against her as she was seen partying just hours after her daughter went missing.

 

As the father of a boy who just turned three and another boy soon to turn 5, I understand the extreme emotions felt by many throughout the country when Casey Anthony was acquitted of the murder.  But, the facts remain that, for one reason or another, the case against Casey was weak.  As John Cloud of Time Magazine states, “Casey Anthony is guilty of many things. She is an enthusiastic liar. She was an indifferent mother. She mooched off her overindulgent parents for years. Even after her daughter went missing, Anthony partied and got a tattoo. But the state of Florida did not make a good case that Anthony murdered her daughter. In acquitting Anthony, the jury made the right call.”

 

The jury not only made the right call, but it was also a very brave call.  They knew the high emotions of the American public riding on this trial.  We wanted a guilty verdict so that we could know justice had been done.  So, an acquittal meant that, for many of us, justice failed.  One prominent television talk show host on a major new network put it like this: “there's something wrong with that. Because Caylee — is dead. And her body decomposed, 15 houses away from where the Anthonys put their head on the pillow every night, every day searching, searching for this little girl. Now I know, I know it is our duty as American citizens to respect the jury system. And I do, believe me I do ... But I know one thing. As the defense sits by and has their champagne toast after that not guilty verdict? Somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight.”

 

I think this commentator is right - the devil is dancing, but for reasons the speaker is blind to.  The devil is not so much a red mythological figure personified with horns and a pitchfork.  No.  The devil is so much more dangerous than that.  The devil is symbolic of a way of life that paradoxically leads to chaos and to order.  As Mark Heim writes in his book Saved from Sacrifice, “Satan is the sower of discord and also the bringer of order.  The devil delights in nothing so much as in instigating conflict among humans” (148).

 

The devil continues to dance because the seeds of conflict continue to be sown, and those of us on the side of “justice” are not innocent.  We sow those seeds.  For many of us, justice means retribution, which is a nice word for revenge.  The satanically mimetic pull of uniting against a common enemy is in motion.  We are thus well ordered in uniting against Anthony for a crime that can’t be proven.  We have already begun to unite against a jury which made an honest and brave decision based on the lack of evidence put forward by the state of Florida.  They made that decision with great risk, as jurors have even been threatened with murder, one by her co-workers!

 

We hate Casey and we hate the jury with a mimetically shared and uniting hatred.  That hatred blinds us to our own corrupt desires for revenge and violence that we validate in the name of “justice.”  And, indeed, that hatred, and that form of justice, is the song that causes the devil to dance.

 

 

 

 

  "Love never fails."

- I Corinthians 13:8

 

As we launched the “Honor Their Memory: Be a Hero for Peace” project last week, Suzanne and I reflected quite a bit on evil, loss, and meaning.

 

One of the sayings we will continue to hear as 9/11/2011 approaches is “America will not forget!”  How can we?  The terrible images from that day are etched in our minds.  We will always remember where we were when it happened.  We will not forget.  There is no doubt about that.  The question is, “In what way will we remember 9/11?”

 

Because we can choose how to remember evil events.  We can remember them in ways that lead us to more evil, violence, and destruction.  Or we can remember them in ways that lead to healing, reconciliation, and love.

 

I was beginning my senior year at Linfield College in the small town of McMinnville, Oregon on 9/11/2001.  The previous year I changed my major to religious studies in order to explore the meaning of human suffering.  That topic may seem to some as an impractical existential concern.  Many parents balk when their college student majors in religious studies, but for me there was no choice.  I had to do it.

 

My mother died two weeks before the end of my sophomore year at Linfield.  For 10 years she suffered from cancer.  It was evil.  No other word can describe it.  It never should have happened.  Sometimes, well meaning people would say things like, “All things work for good in God’s time.”

 

To that statement, I want to say, “No.” And then I want to say, “Yes.”  It’s a paradoxical response, but I think any response to evil must be paradoxical because evil is an existential paradox.

 

There are things that happen in our world that are evil and should be called evil.  The cancer that took my mom was evil.  It never should have happened, but it did.  Her suffering, the pain she went through, the pain her family went through – it never should have happened.  No good came from the cancer.  My family and I continue to grieve her death.  It’s a loss we will never forget.

 

That’s the “No” to the above statement.

 

Here’s the “Yes”: Love overcomes evil.  As my mother was dying, I witnessed the most amazing love between her and my dad.  I remember my dad holding her, comforting her, and loving her in the sincerest, most heartfelt, way.  When my mom was at her lowest, most ignominious point in her life, dad was there.  As the cancerous evil took my mom’s life, and as she lay in her hospital bed, her husband of 25 years sat by her side.

 

During this time, my dad and my mom were both models of how to love.  Dad gave love.  Mom received love.  They loved with courage and they were both heroes in my eyes.  My mom died, but the love between my parents never failed.

 

Love won.  And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

 

That’s how I choose to remember my mom and her experience with cancer.  Love overcame an evil that never should have happened.

 

The evil events of 9/11/2001 happened soon after my mother’s death.  I witnessed 9/11 from my college campus.  I awoke later than usual on that day.  As I walked to the living room of my apartment, my roommates faces were glued to the television screen – their faces blank.  “What’s going on?” I asked.  After a brief pause, one of my roommates turned his head and told me the news.

 

Like the rest of the United States, we were all in a state of shock.  Some of us went to class; others didn’t.  I remember watching the events of that day unfold on the television in our student union.  The terrible evil and violence of that day is etched in my mind, but so are the selfless acts of love and heroism.  Firefighters, policemen, and countless others sacrificed their lives and health in order to save people they didn’t know.  That kind of sacrificial love is courageous; it’s heroic.  In the midst of tragic evil, there was love.

 

That’s how I choose to remember 9/11/2001.  I can’t forget the evil and violence, but I remember that evil didn’t have the last word.  Love didn’t fail on that day.  Love overcame evil.  Love won.

 

As heroic and courageous as love is, it is hard to trust that love never fails.  So, we easily get caught up in evil – we punch back.  And that’s what the United States did.  The problem is that, as Walter Wink claims in his book The Powers that Be, “Evil is contagious.  No one grapples with it without contamination” (124).  As we are entering the 10^th year since 9/11, and as we enter the 10^th year of the “War on Terror,” we are beginning to realize that war, violence, and evil cannot win.  Evil, violence, and war are contagious.  The United States got sucked into its trap and we are suffering the evil done to us and the evil we’ve inflicted upon others.

 

So, how do we remember the past and move forward?

 

Our friends at the Metta Center suggest we respond by doing something counter-intuitive and extremely courageous.  They are challenging us to respond with the 2,000 year old wisdom of loving our enemies.  We at Raven are trying to do our part by encouraging people to “Honor Their Memory – Be a Hero for Peace.”  During the next few months, we will have activities on the Raven website that will help do and be just that.  We invite you to join us and the Metta Center in this project.  The world needs courageous people who trust that “love never fails” and who, in their daily lives, will bravely be heroes for peace.

 

 

 

What do I see when I see a man?  I see him first as one other specimen of the human species, then as a specific, particular individual who can be named or identified; but then he stands before me as the only entity in nature with which sanctity is associated.  All other sacred objects in space are made holy by man.  Human life is the only type of being we consider intrinsically sacred, the only type of being we regard as supremely valuable.  The particular individual may not be dear to me—in fact I may even dislike him.  But he is dear to someone else, to his mother, for example, although that too is not the reason for his eminence.  For if even nobody cares for him, he still is a human being.

 

-Abraham Joshua Heschel

Who Is Man, page 33.

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1907.  His parents were both admired religious leaders.  His father, Moses Mordecai Heschel, was a highly respected Hasidic rabbi whose congregation consisted mostly of impoverished Jews.  Heschel’s mother, Reizel Perlow, was also greatly admired for her spiritual piety.  She often took on a rabbi’s role, as men and women would ask her to pray on their behalf.

 

Both of his parents were following in the tradition of their highly revered Eastern European Jewish families.  Abraham Heschel was named after his grandfather, who was a close disciple of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, also known as the Baal Shem Tov.  The appellation Baal Shem Tov is translated in English as “Master of the Good Name.”  He is known as the founder of Hasidism, or Jewish mysticism.  The Baal Shem Tov was born into an Eastern Europe where Jews were frequently oppressed and persecuted.  It was a dark moment in Jewish history, but the Baal Shem Tov brought light and joy.  He challenged his followers to see the presence of God everywhere, but especially in their fellow human being. “Unlike the sages of the past, who delivered discourses about God” wrote Heschel in his book A Passion for Truth, “the Baal Shem . . . brought God to every man.”

 

The Baal Shem Tov was a major influence on Eastern European Jewish life in general, and on Heschel in particular.  From his early childhood, many hoped he would continue the work of the Baal Shem Tov.  In the book Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought, Jewish scholar Samuel Dresner states that “At the age of 4 or 5, scholars would place him on a table and interrogate him for the surprising and amusing answers he would give them” (13).  Heschel’s father passed away when he was ten years old.  By that young age, this prodigy had already mastered many classical religious texts and proved himself to be a good communicator.  Many saw such promise in the young boy that they called for him to become the successor to his father.

 

Although he was a promising religious leader, as a teenager Heschel decided to pursue secular studies at a gymnasium in Vilna.  But he couldn’t shake free from his religious calling.  After graduating from the gymnasium, Heschel went to the University of Berlin where he earned a doctorate in Jewish studied.  During the mid 1930s, he taught Talmud (historical Jewish discussions and traditions concerning the law, ethics, philosophy, and customs) at the University of Berlin.

 

Unfortunately, the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe where Heschel grew up was destroyed by Nazi German.  On October 28, 1938, Hitler ordered Polish born Jews living in Germany to be expelled.  That night, Heschel and 12,000 others awoke in the middle of the night to the German Gestapo demanding to take them by train to the Polish border.  This expulsion marked the beginning phase of the Holocaust.  Soon Nazi Germany would destroy Heschel’s European homeland.  But before that could happen, he was invited to come to the United States, where the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati offered him a teaching position.  After five years at Hebrew Union, Heschel spent the rest of his teaching career at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

 

Heschel escaped Nazi Germany, but his mother and four sisters did not.  They were murdered by the Nazi onslaught.  Heschel spent the rest of his life torn between the life of joy he received from the Baal Shem Tov and the pain he experienced at the hands of the Nazis.  He knew that although God was present to every human, there was something radically wrong with the world.  Paradoxically, in the horrific experience of the Holocaust, Heschel gained strength from the only person whose influence rivaled the Baal Shem Tov: Rabbi Menatham Mendle of Kotzk, also known as the Kotzker.  Whereas the Baal Shem Tov emphasized joy, the Kotzker could only feel pessimism and despair at the horrors humans inflict upon one another.  The Kotzker made a prophetic judgment that the world was not right.  In A Passion for Truth, Heschel wrote that the Kotzker “felt the crassness of the world, its falseness, its corruption.”  The Holocaust was one more obvious example that there was something drastically wrong with the world and with human relations.  The Kotzker influenced Heschel to boldly make prophetic judgments against the violence human inflict upon one another, while the Baal Shem Tov influenced Heschel to push people beyond our propensity for violence by emphasizing God’s joyful presence for the world.

 

Heschel believed that violence was a major concern for humanity, but it was also God’s concern.  Throughout his life Heschel stressed God’s pathos.  He described God’s pathos in his seminal book, The Prophets, stating, “Pathos in all its forms reveals the extreme pertinence of man to God, His world-directness, attentiveness, and concern.  God ‘looks at’ the world and is affected by what happens in it; man is the object of His care and judgment.”  He also claimed that “God’s presence in the world is, in essence, His concern for the world.  One word stands for both.  And both are expressions of His unity.  Divine unity implies concern.  For unity means love” (618 and 619).

 

Heschel believed that God’s pathos, God’s concern for worldly affairs, was a result of God’s radical immanence.  God is not somewhere out in the universe, detached from the world.  Rather, God is radically present in the world and in the lives of humans.  The ethical and theological implications of God’s immanence are summed up in Heschel’s book Man is Not Alone, where he wrote, “Whatever man does to man, he also does to God” (225).  God’s presence in human life inspired Heschel to be involved in many social justice issues.  He was invited to participate in the Second Vatican Council and challenged the Catholic Church to drop all language that spoke of anti-Judaism and an appeal to conversion.  After he personally met with Pope Paul VI, that language was abandoned.  He joined the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, holding hands with Martin Luther King, Jr.  He also protested the war in Vietnam, claiming that “The answers to that misery was not in killing the rebels but in seeking a just solution to the economic and political issues in the land” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 225).

 

Heschel passed away in 1972 from heart failure.  He had two books at his bedside: a Hasidic classic and an exploration of the Vietnam War.  Those books symbolize Heschel’s life.  He lived between the tensions of the Baal Shem Tov and the Kotzker; between the tensions of a world full of God’s joyful presence and a prophetic judgment of a world full of human violence.  Throughout it all, Heschel believed God had not abandoned the world and that humans are responsible to respond to God’s presence.  God cries out when humans suffer.  He wrote, “There is an eternal cry in the world: God is beseeching man … An air of expectancy hovers over life.  Something is asked of man, of all men.”

 

Heschel continues to ask: “How will we respond to the cry of God?”

 

 

Questions for Individual or Group Consideration:

 

1. Do you agree with Heschel that “whatever man does to man, he also does to God?”  If you do agree, how might that change the way we treat our enemies?

 

2. Do you think it is important to balance the joy of the Baal Shem Tov with the despair of the Kotzker?  What might happen if we primarily emphasized joy?  What might happen if we primarily emphasized despair?

 

3. How do you think Heschel’s experience in his youth influenced his adult life?

 

4. Heschel wrote before our present ecological crisis.  Does his emphasis on the sanctity of human life bother you?  Does his emphasis on the sanctity of human life distract us from caring for the environment?

 

For further reading see:

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1995).

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder (New York: Crossroads, 2000).

 

John C. Merkle, ed., Abraham Joshua Heschel (New York: Macmillan, 1985).

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1951).

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965).

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth is the Lord’s (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1995; Originally published in 1949).

 

Maurice Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Ellie Wiesel: You Are My Witnesses (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987).

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 2001; Originally published in 1955).

 

 

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Adam discusses the recent sex scandals among high profile men. He claims that there is more to sex scandals than men behaving badly. We live in a hyper-sexed culture. Sexual images on billboards, magazines, television shows, movies, and music all create a hyper-sexed culture. Blaming a few men distracts us from the bigger picture. What's the solution? Adam claims it is through spiritual discipline. What do you think?

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Taylor Swift’s latest hit, Mean, is full of anger, resentment, bitterness, and a desire for revenge.

 

And I like it.

 

Swift apparently wrote Mean after a critic wrote very “mean” things about her.  So, Swift is a victim of a mean critic and she sings the song for all people who have been victimized.  She claims, “When you write a song and it comes from such a vulnerable moment in my life and then you get to stand on a stage and the affirmation that 50,000 people have gone through that too and they’re singing along, it’s been kind of wonderful.”

 

It may be a wonderful feeling, but is it good?

 

As I mentioned, I like the song.  I think it’s catchy, but more than that, I think it’s very human.  There is an anthropological truth to the song that we can all relate to.  And yet, in our culture, we’re not supposed to give voice to that truth.  As civilized people, we shouldn’t talk about our feelings of anger, resentment, bitterness, and desire for revenge.  No.  We should bottle up those emotions because it is socially unacceptable to talk about them.  You may discuss them with your psychiatrist, but you may never admit them in public.

 

I appreciate Swift for giving voice to emotions we all experience and for giving us the opportunity to discuss them.  At some point in our lives, we all feel victimized.  So, I’ll go first.  When someone belittles me and has me “feeling like I’m nothing,” I want revenge.  Sure.  I want to see that person suffer in some way.  We victims like to see the tables turned.  My hope is similar to Swift’s hope when she writes, “Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city, And all you’re ever gonna be is mean.”

 

“Yeah,” I think.  “Someday, the tables will turn.  I’ll be successful and live in the big city while that jerk will be known as ‘a liar and pathetic and alone in life and … mean, and mean, and mean, and mean!”

 

Ohhhh, it felt wonderful to get that out.  And I think it’s good that Taylor and I can be so honest about our feelings.  Yes, yes.  There are dangers.  Revenge feels good, but in the end, we become mimetic doubles.  That is, my desire for revenge makes me just like my enemy.  As Rene’ Girard points out in his latest book Battling to the End, while you are in a conflict with another person you “must always believe in your difference and respond more and more quickly and forcefully.  From the outside, the adversaries look like what they are: simple doubles” (page 14).

 

Mean comes close to recognizing this mimetic truth when Swift sings, “I bet you got pushed around, Somebody made you cold, But the cycle ends right now, You can’t lead me down that road …”

 

But, from the outside, we can clearly see that Swift and her critic walk hand-in-hand down the same road of anger, resentment, bitterness, and revenge.  Indeed, her critic may have been mean, but her song is mean.  It is due to bitterness that she rants about personal success while her enemy becomes “washed up … ranting about the same old bitter things.”

 

Along with Swift, we may want the cycle to end, but it never will as long as we desire revenge.  Mean is a very human song that expresses very human emotions, but it doesn’t point to the only thing that can provide personal healing – the spirit of forgiveness.  Forgiveness is more empowering than revenge.  Living in the spirit of forgiveness means we are no longer enslaved to a relationship of anger, resentment, bitterness, and revenge with our enemy.  The great danger is that once we are enslaved to those emotions, they infect our other relationships, too.  The spirit of forgiveness frees us from those toxic emotions and empowers us to walk down the road of healing.

 

In her book How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, Laura Kipnis describes why we all like a good scandal.  The influence of Rene’ Girard and mimetic theory are apparent when she writes:

 

As scandal reveals, the social world is in an eternal search for scapegoats.  This makes it a brutal place, to be sure, but the scapegoat process is intrinsic to every social group.  Societies have always purified themselves through shows of moral indignation, dumping their burdens off onto designated candidates – all the abnormality and moral disability that threatens to poison the community.  Those cast in this unlucky role don’t have to be innocent victims either; a scapegoat’s crimes can be entirely real.  If it’s the scandalizer’s fate to enact the self-sabotaging tendencies that vex the human personality, then what better sacrificial figure? (196).

 

What makes Kipnis’s statement, and thus mimetic theory, so compelling is its universal nature.  Human cultures are in “an eternal search for scapegoats” so that we can purify ourselves through “moral indignation, dumping [our] burdens off onto designated candidates.”  Currently, the designated candidate in the sports world is LeBron James.

 

A few years ago, LeBron was one of the most liked NBA players.  Sports Illustrated bestowed upon him the moniker “The Chosen One” when he was a junior in high school.  The media and NBA fans loved him while he played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, quickly dubbing him “King James.”

 

But there’s an unfortunate reality to being king – kings make really good scapegoats.  We can all unite in mimetic admiration of the king.  But the same mimetic impulse allows us to quickly unite in condemnation against the king.  LeBron is now the now the scapegoat of the NBA.  One website claims, “But I’m sure that we can all say that LeBron James is hated by 90 percent of NBA fans.  (The other 10 percent being Heat fans.)”

 

And, as Kipnis claims, a scapegoat doesn’t have to be innocent.  Lebron is a scandal because he didn’t leave Cleveland on good terms.  He signed with the Miami Heat, where he would play with two other superstars: Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.  Most people expected (maybe “feared” is a better word) that the three would be unstoppable.  James, Wade, and Bosh expected that, too.  The Miami Heat organization held a party for the three, where Heat fans packed the American Airlines Arena in Miami and the three promised 7-8 championships before they were done.

 

 

Well, the first championship will have to wait.  The Miami Heat lost in 6 games to the Dallas Mavericks.  (Interestingly, Cavalier and Maverick fans found unity in their shared hatred for LeBron and the Heat as they facetiously called the Dallas Mavericks the “Mavaliers” during the championship series.  How’s that for unity against a common enemy?)  Then LeBron said this after game 6 when he was asked if he was upset “that so many people are happy to see [him] fail”:

 

Absolutely not.  Because at the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail … have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that.  They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to the real world at some point.

 

Well, that didn’t gain LeBron any friends.  It offended many people, and LeBron was forced to backtrack.  But here’s why the statement was so painful for many: Because there is a hint of truth in it.  As Kipnis points out, the reason we love a scandal is because it allows us to dump our burdens off onto another person.  In other words, our shared hatred of another allows us to project all our personal problems upon them.  In that sense, LeBron was absolutely right.

 

But LeBron was wrong in another sense.  Our culture is addicted to scandals.  Unfortunately, our scandals aren’t isolated to politicians, athletes, or celebrities.  Some of our worst scandals are against family members, co-workers, neighbors, and friends.  The sad thing is that scandals and scapegoating is our real world.  It’ll take us “a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be” and we will move on from LeBron.  But, unless we break the cycle by finding more creative and compassionate ways to form unity, we are destined to find for more scandals and scapegoats.

 

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Is it possible to battle bullies with kindness? 

 

Lauren Parsekian and Molly Stroud think it is. They started a website called Kind Campaign and since September 2009 they have been traveling to schools throughout the United States, filming a documentary they named Finding Kind. The film emphasizes girls bullying girls. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune called "Battling bullies with kindness" Parsekian stated, "It really upset me that girls are so mean to each other, so Molly and I decided to get on the road and travel the country and see if we could get the word out to other females that we need to stop being competitive and mean with each other and start supporting each other."

The documentary's trailer (shown above) states that "There is a universal truth shared by all females, a truth which has been swept under the rug for generations." This statement resonates with our work at the Raven Foundation. We believe that the universal "truth which has been swept under the rug for generations" is the truth of scapegoating. Scapegoating is the universal way humans form community. The easiest way to form community is by pointing the finger against a common enemy. It's a problem among girls, but they are not the only people who scapegoat. We all do it. 

Scapegoating may be universal, and it may be the easiest way to form community, but it's not the only way. There is an alternative. Parsekian and Stroud are on the right track by pointing us in the direction of the spirit of kindness. They are wonderful adult models of kindness for young people. I haven't seen the documentary yet, but there can be a tendency in schools to bully the bully. For kindness to be transformative, though, kindness needs to be all inclusive. In other words, true kindness even includes the bullies. Yes, people who bully need to be told bullying behavior is unacceptable, but it could be that people who bully need to have kindness modeled for them more than anyone else.