Dear Dr. Babar,
I want to thank you for your courage. Your courage inspires mine, and your speaking out inspires me to speak out. You and so many others of your Muslim brothers and sisters have courageously spoken out against members of your family who have highjacked your religion in the name of hate and violence. Hamas does not represent Islam. I seek to do the same. Organized religion has been co-opted by those seeking political power for thousands of years. I have dedicated my life to reclaiming the religious voice from those who hold it hostage and use it as a weapon. Today, this commitment compels me to say: the Israeli government’s actions do not represent Judaism.
As I prepare to speak today at a rally to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, and to speak out against the Israeli government’s actions in territories that needs to become sovereign Palestinian land, if peace is to exist (may it soon), I am drawing strength from you. I hate that I need strength to speak out but I do.
Right now, the terrorist attack of October 7th has left almost every Jew deeply shaken and traumatized. Almost none of us have had a complete night’s sleep since. Images of babies being raped and tortured haunt us, along with intergenerational trauma that is amplified by rising rates of antisemitism. And I know that you and your community have had no sleep either because of the horrific images that have been fed into the social media algorithms that are amplifying the trauma that is our shared reality. Both of us, committed to healing, are haunted by horrific images of innocent humans being tortured and killed. It has been said that every war is a war against children, and indeed, for this, we should all grieve.
Trauma puts us into our reptilian brains, which makes it hard to think critically or compassionately. The reptilian brain is the way that we are hardwired to act like animals when we feel like our survival is threatened. Our attempts to seek comfort in faith can sometimes lead to more traumatized outcomes, because our faith leaders are human and therefore traumatized.
It is all about trauma: we can’t heal trauma with more trauma
Sadly, Jews are not the only ones traumatized by current trauma, amplified by intergenerational trauma. All humans have been hardwired to have autonomic nervous systems that ensure survival by shutting down critical thinking when we feel ourselves under attack. This means that our brains are not helping us to rise above the trauma right now.
The only thing that can rewire our brains back to healing and hope is mindfulness and compassion. This is the value that has united you and me since we first met, and that has grounded all of our shared work together. Increasingly, compassion-focused therapies have emerged as unique ways to heal us, and my goal with this post, as with everything I try to do, is to let more people know and understand that there are more ways than we think to address some of the seemingly intractable problems of our world.
I learned this from you. And today, as I prepare to go and speak at a rally, to beg the world for a ceasefire, and to ensure that my Muslim brothers and sisters feel my compassionate solidarity viscerally, in ways that I pray can yield healing, I am leaning into my memories of your courageous acts of speaking out in the name of compassion. I am so grateful to you for modeling to me how to speak out… lovingly and bravely… and I am grateful for all the Muslims across the world, who are also speaking out, many of whom I have been blessed to speak with just this week.
Speaking hard truths
Publicly demanding a ceasefire during a time of war ought to be an obvious choice for any human, and a non-controversial decision. As someone who is ordained, and a religious leader, in addition to being a therapist, it seems like it should not be controversial for me to say: let’s stop killing and try to talk. Anyone with a heart has to be horrified by the children who are being killed and wounded, the doctors in Gaza performing life-saving operations without anesthetics on the floor, the premature babies on life support who have already begun to die because of the conditions of their war-torn hospital. It is wrong.
But for many Jews, saying this feels like a betrayal. We live in a binary world where compassion for one side is interpreted as lack of compassion for the other. I know I will get called (by some of my more traumatized Jewish siblings) a “self-hating Jew” and all sorts of other things as a result of lateral violence which is born from survival fears. And so, I am writing this long blog post, with the hopes that it helps more people understand, and maybe even realize that there can be a thoughtful theological Jewish prayer for a ceasefire.
Governments around the world are scared to speak out, for all sorts of reasons, partially due to people’s trauma, but also, disgustingly, because they are complicit in the financial and political benefits that are derived from war by nation states across the planet. This is the real problem but no one is speaking about it. Like in any family or couple argument, the real problems are enacted not spoken. This is how intergenerational trauma repeats itself, and it is reinforced by those who wish to continue to benefit from this horrific cycle.
And so, speak out I must. I draw strength from Vivian Silver, born in Winnipeg and who moved to Israel. She was part of the Palestinian-Israeli organization Women Wage Peace, and helped people in Gaza access medical care in Israel before she was taken by Hamas. I draw strength from her children and all the loved ones of hostages who are protesting this war that is being waged in their names. As so many family members of Israelis taken hostage by Hamas have said, more dead babies will not atone for the babies that were abducted, raped and tortured. As the Rev. Martin Luther King taught: hate cannot drive out hate, only Love can”.
The binary illusion of two sides to a conflict
Colonization depends upon false binaries: good/bad or us/them for example. True peace requires the dismantling of all false binaries and reasserting our unity over all else.
I believe that there can be only one side in this conflict, and on that side we must all stand behind and it is the side for which we must all advocate: we must stand on the side of life. This is not different than the countries who rejected the boats of Jews escaping the Holocaust, like Canada who stated that “no Jew is too many” so many years ago. In Canada’s current silence, I can’t help but hear the echoes of what was said to my people just decades ago.
Similarly, as both Egypt and Israel close or limit their borders and the people in Gaza are trapped, I believe that we must advocate for protection for these desperate people who are being killed at this very moment. As doctors inside of Gazan hospitals please for incubators, I pray that the world awakens.
The moral imperative of speaking out
I believe that we must reclaim the voice of religion from those who have highjacked it and are holding it hostage. This means that I, ordained rabbi, must reclaim my religious voice from those Jews who are holding me hostage, and making me afraid to speak out. I understand that they are coming from a place of deep pain, grief, fear and intergenerational trauma. I understand why they are afraid to speak.
But I also understand, better than most, the profound and soul-crushing weight of staying silent. For me, the only alternative to coming out of the gender closet was death. Silencing what I know is true in my heart is a way to asphyxiate my soul. It is not surprising that so many people struggle with burnout, depression and addiction, or are lashing out as a way of distracting themselves from what their conscience knows is true. We live in a world where neutrality and silence is labeled “self-care”. We are all so very exhausted by the unfairness of this world that most people can barely function, and we think that caring means taking on “another problem”. But that is false math: 1+1=1 when the goal is unity. Caring more about one group means reconnecting to our humanity and recognizing our unity. I can speak from first hand experience that staying silent and avoiding speaking one’s truth makes everything worse. I am saying all this because I want to help more people begin to understand their role in this conflict and their potential role in choosing to join the growing numbers of us seeking to bring true healing to our planet.
This is what I understand: right now, if I remain silent while Palestinian children are murdered in the name of the god of Israel, then I am no better than everyone who stayed silent during the Holocaust. I am NOT saying that Hamas or the Nazis are equivalent to the government of Israel, but I am saying that there is no good reason to kill innocent people, and I disavow any political or religious rhetoric that says that there is.
I speak out and draw on the courage of my father’s first grade teacher who came to his home one night to tell my father and his mother that the Nazis were coming to take all the Jewish children to extermination camps in the morning. I draw on the courage of his family members that risked their lives, and the lives of their loved ones to hide them. In conversation with some of them, they explained to me that their father did what he did because he understood that staying physically alive at the price of being morally dead was not a choice that he could make.
I know what it is like to feel dead on the inside. I choose to speak out because I refuse to let terror and hate win. I speak out because silence is complicity and neutrality is a form of murder in a world where the death of humans is the currency of profits for companies that profit from war. I speak out in the name of faith in a world where religion has been weaponized for too long.
Finding my voice
Well-meaning friends have tried to advise me not to attend the rally today, just like I was scared to attend the solidarity rally for my own people eight years ago. Holocaust survivors and their descendants tend to be scared of large crowds.
And I know that, sadly, I will stand alongside people who are also fighting against other parts of my identity. I wish this were not true but sadly, in Canada, a growing part of Islam has been highjacked by people like Kamel El-Cheikh, to organize massive protests against the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. I have been told by many well-meaning people that I should stay away, for my own safety, as my voice is just starting to crack with the effects of testosterone. But, indeed, this is the point: I am just finding my voice and this is exactly how I wish to use it, by standing firmly in the center of my intersectionality, and speaking out in the name of Compassion.
The hate speech that has resulted from the recent protests against the rights of all children to feel safe is leading to an explosion of violence in schools across the country. In my day job, I am working night and day to try to keep children from killing themselves or getting attacked because of parents who proudly encourage their kids to hurt other children. This is happening across Turtle Island while people think that free speech somehow means that hate speech is acceptable. When children die because of hate speech, it ceases to be free. And children are dying because of misinformation about gender-diversity, while freedom rallies let people avoid thinking about their guilt for the privileges they enjoy at the expense of the rest of us.
So, I am speaking out for children and every innocent human whose life is at risk because of lies and misinformation. And that means that if I care about the lives of all children, then I must also speak out to protect the lives of children in Gaza, and indeed all human life. I am vegan because I do not want to benefit from the exploitation or death of any living being. And so, I feel a moral imperative to speak out.
Faith over fear
But I am scared. And, truth be told, deeply ashamed of my fear. I am scared because I was taught to be scared, by my life and the lives of my ancestors. I am scared because our world is scary. But I also know that my fear is nothing compared to what it must be like right now in a hospital in Gaza for those children who are needing care, and those brave doctors and nurses who are risking their lives to care for their patients. My fear must be contextualized, not obeyed blindly. I am scared that my words will be used against me. I am afraid because speaking out puts a target on me. I am scared because I already have more targets on me than I can tolerate. Death threats are not metaphors for me… but they have not been for most of my life. As a queer rabbi who was a public figure, I have spent a lifetime being targeted. It is exhausting.
But I am even more scared of letting fear win. This is the real goal of terrorism: when fear turns us against one another and away from our shared humanity.
I know about fear more than most. I have spent a lifetime hiding. I had decided that the world could barely handle a queer rabbi, it could not handle a transgender rabbi. But I learned that closeting part of myself in the name of safety actually made me less safe, because I turned on myself and began to harm myself in my efforts to stay hidden. I came out of the closet to save my life: even if I get killed, at least I will have lived authentically. And, the one thing that has shocked me over the last several months of my coming out is how deeply alive I feel in a way that I never knew was possible. I feel in ways that before were just numb. I feel joy and hope and courage in ways that almost eclipse fear and shame. I also feel a well-spring of Compassion that requires my speaking out, about this, but also about the dangers of letting fear and shame silence us.
I already know what many of my colleagues will say, because I have listened to them say it about others. I know they speak from a place of fear, but I still fear their judgment. But, the last several months of coming out have taught me how to grieve people who I thought were friends but were actually not interested in whether I stayed alive, so long as I just reinforced their assumptions so that they did not have to do the uncomfortable work of examining their own colonized binary assumptions. I have already survived people who have turned on me and stopped talking to me because I have come out publicly as myself. I have found out who is really safe and who really cares about me. I have begun to live a life that is real and authentic, and the grief over those who do not share my values is infinitely easier to deal with than the self-betrayal of my silence and complicity.
Gratitude for you and all my role models
And as I come out of the ways in which I was socialized to be silent, I am grateful to you, Dr. Babar, and to all of my courageous role models. You show me what is possible, and your very existence is triumphant. You embody courage and compassion, authenticity and hope. You make me want to do the same. I pray that together we can unleash a tidal wave of compassion that can creative healing restorative justice for all people. The Hebrew Bible commands in Deuteronomy: tzedek, tzedek tirdof: justice, justice you shall pursue. Why is the word “tzedek” or justice repeated twice, the rabbis ask? Because justice for one people requires justice for all people. Justice for me is justice for you. This is the same belief that is at the core of the African Ubuntu principle that teaches that I am because you are, and you are because I am. We are one: everything else is an illusion.
I am speaking out because this is what it means to live a life of faith: it means to feel the fear and do it anyway. And as I speak out, I give thanks to my role models who have been speaking out alongside me, and for the amazing group of people who joined us on Wednesday night for the first ever Turtle Island Interfaith and Intercultural Dialogue that is part of the new growing WREN: We are all Related Empathy Network in partnership with Interfaith Paths to Peace (mark your calendars for the next one: December 13th and January 10th).
So, all this to say, my dear friend, Dr. Babar, I speak out, grateful for our friendship, strengthened over years of collaboration, as we celebrated together Iftar dinners together and spoke on interfaith panels, advocating for peace and a reduction of violence. Rather than focus on where we are different, our commitment to compassion implored us to focus on where we agree. As a sign of solidarity and expression of my faith, I made sure that Muslim doctors had Halal food and prayer rugs in our chapel at Jewish hospital. This is part of how friendship and solidarity grows: we take baby steps and then bigger steps toward one another. We learn from one another and push ourselves into less comfortable places, because this is how we grow. I am so deeply inspired by the ways you do this, like when you traveled to Israel to try and begin to understand a different perspective from your own. I pray more of us stop listening to what others tell us to believe about people, and instead, reach out to hear from them what is real and what is true. This is how compassion and peace are born.
Sometimes trauma can be a wake-up call
Together, with a growing number of people, we are beginning to wake up to the harms of colonization that have hurt each of us in intersectional ways, and that depend upon each of us reenacting that trauma to one another, do that divided, we are all easier to conquer, while the few and the rich get richer. For all its imperfections, Canada has been showing me what happens when we focus on Truth and Reconciliation, even when it is uncomfortable… and we begin every meeting with a land acknowledgment and begin to recognize that every nation state is part of the colonial problem.
It is not by accident that we are both health care providers, nor that we were both living in the state of New York and traumatically impacted by the terrorist attacks on September 11th. We understand the dangers of binary propaganda that places ideology over human life. I am grateful for how you, like myself, are organizing health care providers to address the underlying psychosocial determinants of health and focus on those things upon which we can agree: namely the sanctity and dignity of every human life that must be protected and saved. It is so interesting to me how many parallels there have been in our journeys, even if we are so very different in other ways.
Gratitude
I am grateful for the hope you have given to me and the courage you inspire in me. I am therefore rising up to reclaim my place by your side and join you in speaking put as loudly as I can to demand peace and justice for every human being. I can’t decry the lack of nuance at a protest if my voice is not present. Rallies are one-sided because my voice has been absent. I have to speak out, in the fullness of my intersectionality, no matter how scary it is to my internalized Holocaust survivor. I have to speak our precisely because I have the luxury to be silent, while so many in war zones, in Gaza and elsewhere, do not. I speak out against every war and every time religion is weaponized.
I speak out, because I am grateful for you and for our friendship. Even after moving away for years, I was able to reach out to you a few weeks ago and ask you for help and immediately you connected me with your leadership with Muslim Americans for Compassion and we began to join together with the growing numbers of us humans who want to stop this ridiculous and evil polarization and re-member our shared commitment to bodying compassion and making this world better. That is the point of all religion. The end.
There doesn’t need to be debate: just solidarity. This is the founding purpose of our growing Turtle Island Interfaith and Intercultural Dialogue Network: We are all Related Empathy Network, that is meeting once a month, over zoom, to build new pathways of dialogue and connection. The goal: not to debate, but to come with an open mind and an open heart…. to remember our shared humanity.
Remembering how we met: the power of solidarity
I remember first meeting you at a solidarity rally at the Jewish Community center, in January 2015, when multiple gunmen, associated with Al-Qaeda, attacked and murdered innocent humans in France because they were Jewish.
Your words of solidarity that day melted my heart and healed me from my fears. I felt less alone, and inspired to do my part to step into the ways I could join you in making a difference. I recall when those attacks in France first happened, that January 2015, I was terrified. Was history repeating itself we all worried, as indeed, Jews fear at every attack. Being a second generation-Holocaust survivor, this is always my fear. Not a day goes by that I am not deeply processing the layers of intergenerational trauma that is at the heart of all my intersectional identities.
I remember, I was scared to attend that solidarity rally held at the Jewish community center, because I was taught that wherever Jews are publicly and visibly gathered, there we will paint a target upon ourselves. I remember when that solidarity rally was called, I did not want to attend. I was terrified to attend. I am ashamed to admit this, but solidarity has always felt scary. When I have acted in solidarity, I have had to deal with the fears and risks associated with speaking out.
My fears about attending that rally are the same fears that have caused me to remain closeted about so many other parts of my identity over the years. And these fears have been reinforced by several assaults, starting with being a teenager in Montreal and being attacked by neo-Nazis in the subway for wearing a star of David, and more than once since then, for all of the different ways that I have looked different, and been targeted for being different by the world around me.
But I felt like I had to attend. I was a rabbi, and the vice-president of a large interfaith hospital system that included Jewish hospital. I felt an obligation to show up. And so, reluctantly, I made my way into that rally and stood in the back, conflicted and somewhat resentful of the ways my sense of obligation had once again won.
Remembering your prophetic voice
So we all gathered together, standing room only. I remember when you spoke, I felt electricity in my body, like you were speaking G!d’s Word. Obligation dissolved into a sense of Calling. I felt a kinship that I now understand was a recognition of our shared destiny. I felt your bravery deep in my gut, in the parts of me that I had buried under layers of trauma and fear. Your moral courage pierced through my closet and touched my heart and soul with a knowing that transcends time. I close my eyes now and feel the echoes of your words resonating deep within me.
You spoke out and denounced the terrorists who claimed that they were acting in the name of Islam. You stood up for your faith: “These deaths are not in my name. These actions are not in the name of Allah most merciful or the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.” This act of courage and solidarity led to you and your community becoming more visible, and therefore, becoming a target for hate.
But it also led to our community wrapping itself around your community when you were attacked. Hundreds of us gathered together to paint over graffiti that defaced your mosque, covering hate with Love and prayers for peace and compassion. It was your decision to show up and speak that opened the door to a new era of interfaith collaboration that I pray will lead to a true and lasting peace for all people.
The seeds of courage grow into a forest of compassion and healing
This was the start of our beginning to work together. It continued to evolve as we were both invited to participate in a special project that the FBI initiated until Trump came into power and decided that this was not a priority for his government. We were part of this exciting and innovative national project to connect individuals at risk of radicalization with community supports to reduce the risk of the ways in which unaddressed psychosocial determinants of health can lead to violence.
This approach aligned so beautifully with our respective traditions. Indeed, Judaism and Islam share so much in common, despite what the current media wants us to believe. For centuries, Jews and Muslims lived peacefully together: both were attacked by the ways Christianity was weaponized for political power, not only in the Americas, but across the planet, with the Crusades. We both experienced the ways religion was weaponized, and this was the trauma wound that continues to haunt us both, as we both experienced the colonization of the entire Middle East, and continue to deal with its aftermath.
The approach of providing psychosocial supports to those at risk of radicalization is grounded in our shared values. This approach to peacemaking that we began together reflects the Jewish understanding that war or “milchamah” is related to bread or “lechem”. When our basic needs are not met, there will be war. And where there is war, there is someone who is profiting financially. I still believe in this approach, and also think that this interpretive lens could solve a lot of our conflicts. Who is profiting from this war, and how can we address this? Too many lives are at risk to not ask hard questions.
My life’s prayer: never again
As a social worker in addition to being a rabbi and interfaith chaplain, I have dedicated my life to fighting hate and violence by addressing the underlying psychosocial determinants of health. I do this in honor of my grandfather who was murdered in Auschwitz and my other grandfather who survived the extermination camps with permanent physical disfigurement as a result of the horrific medical experiments that were done on him. I do this in my father and my grandmother who survived by being hidden. Tattooed on my arm, in the same place as the Nazis tattooed numbers upon the arms of my people, I have the Hebrew word: Yizkor that is the memorial prayer for those who were killed, alongside the words “never again”.
But how to turn this prayer into a reality is the question? So many of my people, deeply traumatized, are reenacting intergenerational trauma. We are terrified of the words “from the river to the sea” which gets chanted at many “peace” rallies because we hear in those words the words of numerous Palestinian liberation organizations that state that they will not rest until every Jew is driven out of Israel. While this phrase has been interpreted metaphorically by some, to reflect the prayer of every Palestinian that lives inside of Israel, to have a Palestinian home… it is also interpreted literally by terrorist organizations like Hamas that want to murder and exterminate Jews, and “cleanse” Palestine of the Jews that have lived there, alongside Arabs, for thousands and thousands of years.
Fighting colonizing fear
Terrorism works through terror. The more we are scared, the more scary we become. In theory, faith is the antidote of fear. But when religion becomes intertwined with politics, it becomes scary. Colonization depends upon the ways that religion justifies political control. Since Constantine converted to Christianity and weaponized it, both Jews and Muslims have been victims of this weapon in horrific ways that continues to haunt us all. The crusades are one way that both Jews and Muslims were murdered in the name of religion. And so it is that their descendants have learned to reenact this intergenerational trauma upon one another.
The crusades are one way that Christianity was highjacked and weaponized in order to claim land. The colonization of the entire Middle East reflects a complex geopolitical nightmare of inherited trauma that was displaced onto distant lands. It is not just one country that is colonial. Every country is colonial. The concept of patriotism over the valuing of human life is colonial. Colonization looks different for every people. For people of African descent, they were uprooted from their land and exploited for their bodies to do the work white people did not want to do. Slavery and white supremacy remains the legacy imprint of colonization upon everyone of African descent. The fact is that this evil continues: slavery remains enshrined in the US constitution in the 13th amendment.
Our world would be better if we stopped pointing fingers in an effort to detract from the ways in which we are all complicit in unjust systems. Every nation state is complicit. The question is, can we recognize this truth and work toward restorative justice and a true peace that is grounded in respect for human life and that does not blame only one side?
I am grateful for the work that you have continued to lead, and that I am trying to build and help extend here in Canada. I really want us to begin to connect across the colonial border that separates Turtle Island into the colonial countries of Canada and the United States. Like children of an abusive parent that each have different memories of what it was like growing up, every intersectional identity has their own experiences of colonization. Canada and the United States have very different relationships with the British crown. Just like trauma can lead to multiple responses, including: fight or flight, fawn, flop and freeze, so has the United States, through its revolution of independence, has tended to respond with fight and flight, reenacting and projecting, while claiming to be different; while Canada has fawned and flopped, with the Queen of England still on our money and a deep passivity over its role in the residential schools and its continued failure to act on the missing women, girls and two spirit people, amongst other ways that it has identified with the oppressor.
We (along with the rest of the traumatized world) both struggle with freeze: the silence that enables the oppression to continue. Like in therapy, speaking out us the beginning of healing. We must begin to be honest for what happened and talk about it without shame. We all inherited a system that was unjust and colonial, and that existed before any of us were born. It is like oxygen. It is just there. We may not even see it because that is the way it is designed to work. But, just like a fish may not know what water is because it has never not been in water, so too are we all colonized and participating in a colonial world. To demand that one country address its colonial roots and not acknowledge one’s own is disingenuous. But if we all waited for others to step up to do their part, it would never start. We must begin somewhere, and that beginning begins with ourselves. We have to be the change we want to see in the world.
The work of Truth and Reconciliation has just begun here in Canada, but at least it has begun. And it has been my biggest teacher and healer. No class or conference or meeting happens without a land acknowledgement where we repeat the words of acknowledgement that we are on stolen lands. What would happen if every colonial country did a land acknowledgement? What would happen if Israel became the first decolonized country, and we worked to create a land acknowledgement that was grounded in the voices of people who live there, rather than in the displaced emotions of everyone else who lives in their own colonial/colonized countries? Now that is a “holy land”.
Gratitude for the seeds of healing
I don’t know the answers, but I give thanks you, and I give thanks for the awakening in me, and I give thanks for the growing number of people joining me to ask for a new way to deal with this very old conflict. As I prepare to speak at this rally today, I gratefully take my place alongside all the peacemakers and teachers of compassion that have modeled courage for me and helped me to discern my call, as a rabbi and as a human. I share all this praying that more join us.
May the time come soon when the 99% will visibly and audibly outnumber the colonizing few that have tricked us all into thinking that we are powerless so they can keep getting rich while everyone else turns on each other or on ourselves. Enough is enough.
My religion is compassion. I believe in the sanctity of all life. I commit to doing everything I can to prevent suffering of all living beings. May we stop distracting ourselves from the true emergency facing us all. I know that compassion is not only at the heart of my religious faith, but it is also at the heart of yours. When we decolonize our understanding of faith, we will find compassion at the root of everything.
But it all begins with speaking out…
Dr. Babar, eight years ago you came and spoke to my people in the name of compassion. And that act of courage changed everything. One person can do so much… I can’t help but dream of what might happen if more of us spoke out to reclaim the religious voices that have been weaponized against what we know in our hearts to be true.
Eight years later, here I am in another country, but the seeds of peace planted by your compassion and courage continue to yield new flowers that I pray will lead to further acts of loving kindness and righteousness that I cannot yet imagine. On this armistice day weekend, as war rages on and the hospital in Gaza goes dark, I pray that the world awakens finally and joins us in working to prevent suffering and violence by planting more seeds of justice and healing. All it takes is choosing courage and compassion and faith over fear and death.
As the Bahai prayer asserts: “Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of Light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory.”
May the fruits of the tree of compassion nourish us all. I invite everyone reading this to please click here for this beautiful quote set to healing music and hope you all will join me in praying that more people awaken to this truth:
Emerging Torah as Rabbi Nachshon emerges 