🔒 It's Getting Better All The Time (In Spite Of Appearances)

Hey there, thanks for listening. Today I want to re-approach something that I talked about a few weeks ago on a podcast episode, and that's the conflict in the Middle East that's going on right now between Israel and Hamas, or Israel and the Palestinians, if you want to look at it that way. I prefer to say Hamas, because Hamas is a terrorist organization. It doesn't really represent the Palestinian people. But as I was thinking about this, I mean I'm shocked and I'm saddened by the events, like everyone is. As I record this, on November the 9th, almost exactly a month has passed since Hamas took out the brutal, violent, disgusting terrorist attack on Israeli people, doing unspeakable things in the name of protecting, I guess, the Palestinian people. We're all in pain about this. We're all wondering what could cause such brutality, and then we see Israel responding by going into Gaza, by bombing Gaza, and now even going in the Gaza and killing people. Now I want to keep in mind again this is not equivalent. Hamas has openly declared its intention to eliminate Israel. This is alarming, unacceptable. It should not ever be allowed to stand and not just eliminate Israel, but also to kill Jews in general. The toll on human life in Israel and in Gaza right now has been staggering. Estimates of over 10,000 Palestinians killed. We know over 1200 Israelis were killed, over 200 Israelis taken hostage. It's just unbelievable. And the numbers continue to rise and will continue to rise, even as voices around the world are decrying the violence, because there is a collective yearning, I believe, for peace over war and I want to keep that in mind as we go through this talk today.

Let's keep in mind the perspective that we have right now. Not so very long ago, just a little bit past the time I can remember, we had something we called World War II. When we had the first World War, we never thought there could be a second right, so we didn't even name it World War I until there was a World War II. And now we're talking about possibly, you know, world War III, but this was something we didn't even want to imagine. But even as these fears of a third world were arised and let's keep in mind, there's some geopolitical things going on here that are pretty intense. We've got Iran, who are backing people who are going after Israel. We've got Iran aligned a lot in a lot of ways with China and Russia. We've got China who wants to take over Taiwan. We've got Russia and Ukraine. We have this conflict that we can see spelling over to something even more than we see right now. But let's go back to World War II and let's put that in perspective.

In the middle of the 20th century, the world's response to aggression back then was completely different. Jews pursued conquest and domination with little opposition. When Hitler started marching across Europe, the United States, frankly, didn't really care that much. When Hitler was killing Jews, the world turned their back and let Hitler kill Jews, thinking that's somebody else's problem. The United States wasn't dragged into the war until we were bombed at Pearl Harbor. So let's keep in mind that now look at the world's response.

Right now, rightly or wrongly, the world is trying to get Israel to hold back. The world is actually a lot of them are condemning Israel for being too aggressive in their response. So this brutal attack by Hamas Almost universally Hamas has been condemned. There are a few people that think Hamas is freedom fighters, but most people recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization. So the way that things used to work empire's expanding and war as a means to an end it was widely accepted. It's not so much anymore. There's a lot of pressure on Russia worldwide to get out of Ukraine to stop what they're doing. There's pressure to control the civilian conflicts.

I want to go through some numbers, to give you some scales on World War II, because there are numbers that we can't even imagine today. So again to review probably about 1200 Israelis killed by Hamas on October the 7th. Approximately 10,000 Palestinians so far lost their lives in this conflict and World War II. We saw numbers that we can't even, as I said, it's hard to even fathom. United States, in response to the world war going on to put it into a, decided to shock Japan and we killed somewhere between 110,000 and 210,000 in the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We did the unthinkable. We dropped atomic bombs and the world accepted that that was something that we. There was a thing that we're doing more, and it wasn't just the United States. With that, germany was bombing London, germany was bombing cities, london and France and the United States bombed German cities 600,000 to 800,000. German citizens were killed deliberately by the United States and the allies by bombing their cities. So the capacity that we have for destruction at that time was insane. Six million Jews there were so many millions of people that died in World War II, and so I'm encouraged to see, even though this conflict is ridiculous, all these conflicts, ukraine what's going on in Israel right now.

The world is recognizing. We don't want this to happen. You know, at a very, at a much earlier stage, the world is urging Israel to pull back and to limit civilian casualties. In fact, israel just heard today has agreed to have humanitarian breaks in the, in the shelling and the bombings, so that people can move about in Gaza. So there they are. Israel is responding to try to limit them.

So this is what I see as a silver lion, this is what I see as progress. And while it's disheartening that people still fight wars, that people still kill each other deliberately, I have never understood it. I never will understood it. At least we're getting a little bit better about trying to limit the numbers of people that we kill and not kill as many as possible. So the idea of indiscriminate bombing again it's wildly condemned. Israel is being asked to hold back and it's not just in warfare that we've advanced.

National norms have evolved a lot. Child labor, for one thing, was once rampant. Now it's denounced. It doesn't mean it's gone away, but it has been denounced by most places in the world that we consider to be civilized and we're putting we're trying to put an end to it. Women's rights have come a long way from a time when women were seen as property. You know just, it was just about a hundred years ago that women got the opportunity the right to even vote in the United States. We turned from what was a terrible, terrible norm into an historical atrocity. We now see slavery for what it was an atrocity. I believe these are signs of our growth as civilizations.

Now, of course, the journey isn't over. We have to continue to push for the rights of all and for the protection of the vulnerable, but I know our collective efforts can bring about peace in conflict zones like Israel, ukraine and beyond. We can influence our leaders to reflect the will of the people, because the people don't want to kill each other. There's an organization of Jews for peace that are trying to protect the rights of the Palestinians. People in general want to get along. It's our governments that sometimes get out ahead of us and we need to rein them in, and I know that we are.

So what we can do as spiritual people instead of focusing on the negative, instead of focusing on the wars and the people that are dying, we can focus on what we want to see, that we want to see peace. We can focus on the progress that we've made and pray that we continue to make that progress and we can hope that it happens sooner rather than later. We can keep in mind that this world that we live in, with this huge range of consciousness from the consciousness of someone like Hamas you know a fighter or a Hitler, to the consciousness of a mother Teresa or a Martin Luther King this huge range that we experience is part of what we come here to experience as human beings. We come to push back against the darkness, to push back against evil, to raise the consciousness and, in a sense, I guess, to maybe even shrink that range by bringing the people who are doing evil, by bringing them up, and that's what I believe a lot of us are here to do now. So I would like to encourage us to again look at the progress that we've made, to pray for more progress, to put our focus on more progress, to look at those little beacons of light that we see shining through now, the little things that Israel's saying we're going to have a humanitarian pause. The woman who came out of the conflict a couple of weeks ago, who had been kidnapped and shook the hand of the person who had kidnapped her.

The Jews that are working for peace, that are working for the rights of the Palestinian people, that are not seeing them as their enemies, but as human beings and as souls. So I hope this discussion has provided you with food for thought. Please share your actions with me. Let me know what you think. How should we approach the conflict in the world, how should we approach the evil in the world, and how can we together explore and envision a world where progress isn't just a possibility but it's a reality? Let me know what questions you have for me to address in the future, and I'd be happy to do that. Thanks for listening and have a wonderful day.