Blog Posts — Page 15
The Roots of Our Spiritual Quest
“There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe – imperishable, divine.” George MacDonald “For every sentence (in the Upanishads) deep original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit. In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. They Read More
Loss
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” Norman Cousins “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?” Jesus “Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.” Anne Roiphe I recently returned to a classic book – Herzog by Saul Bellow. It’s a strange Read More
Significance
“The significance of the cherry blossom tree in Japanese culture goes back hundreds of years. In our country, the cherry blossom represents the fragility and beauty of life. It’s a reminder that life is almost overwhelmingly beautiful, but that it is also tragically short.” —Homaro Cantu “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” —Aristotle “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or Read More
Supremacy
“It is only human supremacy, which is as unacceptable as racism and sexism, that makes us afraid of being more inclusive.” Ingid Newkirk Let’s start with a little perspective. There are about 400 billion Milky Way stars and as many as 10 trillion planets orbiting them. On our little planet, there are 8 billion people. Given those facts, how did we come to the conclusion that our planet reigns supreme and that any one of Read More
Congruence and Coherence
“This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make.” —Christopher Alexander “There is an immense, painful longing for a Read More
Citizenship: The Three Imperatives
Dear Annie and Ezra, You are almost 11 years old now, and you are citizens of several communities: your synagogue, your school, your teams, your town, your state, your country, and the world. You have responsibilities to all of those communities. A citizen is someone who has rights and responsibilities in a defined group. Those rights are at risk when we don’t act responsibly. In your Jewish community, your responsibilities are to learn the Torah, Read More
Hope
“Hope of consciousness is strength; hope of feelings is slavery; hope of body is disease.” — Gurdjieff “This is a fearful, hopeless and even nihilistic time.” — Michelle Goldberg “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” — Nietzsche Whew!! Other than placing your hope in consciousness, those are some pretty bleak quotes! Is hope hopeless? That’s the question I want to take on in this post. Read More
The Corrections Component in the Justice with PEACE System
What if jails were able to reduce recidivism by 50% over a three-year period (based on rearrest)? Well, 50 years ago, that’s exactly what we did. How did that happen? We developed a comprehensive and integrated program aimed at multiple stakeholders, and implemented it systematically through five phases: readiness, awareness, acquisition, application, and follow-up. This post will address all five phases of the Corrections component of the Justice in PEACE system I overviewed in the Read More
Justice with PEACE
No justice; no peace!!! That has been the slogan of many protest movements going back as far as the 1986 killing of Michael Griffith, a Trinidadian immigrant assaulted by a mob of white youth in Howard Beach, NYC. Since then, it has been a rallying cry for each miscarriage of justice perpetrated on the disenfranchised. It implies, of course, that peaceful action is impossible without justice. I wholeheartedly agree. In this post, I’m proposing that Read More
Pretending Part II
“Everything hurts,Our hearts shadowed and strange,Minds made muddied and mute.We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.And yet none of it is new” —Amanda Gorman In February, 2021, I wrote a post on pretending. In the last year, there have been so many terrifying tragedies and “none of it is new.” We are still pretending no changes are needed. So, here is Part II. As is my custom, I have been reading lots of books trying to Read More
The Hard Truth Of Uvalde
Zoom into the crippling and crushing grief of any one parent of one of the slaughtered children in Uvalde and you will get a glimpse of the shattered soul of America. Zoom out 1000x and you will get a sense of the enormity of the problem we are facing here. We already knew that there is little justice in American criminal justice. Now it is clear there is apparently little system in the American justice Read More
Change
“Come mothers and fathers throughout the landAnd don’t criticize what you can’t understandYour sons and your daughters are beyond your commandYour old road is rapidly agingSo get out of the new road if you can’t lend a handThe times, they are a-changin’.” Yup, the times are a-changin’. Bob Dylan wrote this song in 1964, and change has continuously accelerated since then. For example, the world population, when he wrote the song, was about 3 billion. Read More