WWJCS?
In the category of what would Joseph Campbell say, to wit:
God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.
Rosh Hashanna starts tomorrow night and begins the year 5772; I engaged in a conversation on Linked In (TED) about Israel that was provoked by the recent article Thomas Friedman wrote in Sunday’s NYT and I’ve thought a lot about this new year coming, about God’s manifestation in my life, about Israel and about being a Jew. I think the failure in leadership right now comes from the crisis of the severed head.
Rational thought will only get you so far and could very well destroy what it seeks to construct. Leading with the heart won’t offer you the same apocalypse. Campbell collected all myth and collapsed it into universal concepts. God is a metaphor. Religions imbue the metaphor with meaning, people corrupt the meaning and rationalize their actions.
Jewish belief might be honed to one sentence: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. No one looking at Israel right now believes the leaders are following this moral dictate. Their rationale for killing their neighbors and brothers, for denying them a place to live, is that they are persecuted, so they have rationalized themselves as persecutors. The mind is a terrible thing.
On the eve of Rosh Hashanna, in this house, we will eat honeyed apples, bread with butter, drink wine, and open our hearts and spirits to the sweetness that life offers and we will hope for sweetness in your life too.