Today I was inspired by a Rabbi. Rabbi Leo Baeck. Survivor of the Holocaust, man of deep devotion and of great ethical action. A reformer and traditionalist. He organizes my thoughts on living a critical/skeptical religious life.

"A religious ceremony is every action which... expresses a religious thought; in contrast to the actual religious commandment of duty, its purpose is thus outside of it. The observance of the dietary laws, for example, is the practicing of a ceremony... through which the idea of sanctification is to be presented to us."

"Religion appears within reality only as historical religion which is passed on as an inheritance through the centuries. It cannot be transmitted as pure soul, for it is too intangible; it must approach man through a process of gaining corporality, of becoming symbolized. A so-called natural religion exists only in systems, but not in life. Symbolic ceremonies fulfill this function; they are the language through which religious thought is expressed."

This article comes off of Haaretz. I can't get the link to work so I'm publishing the whole thing below. It gives a good sense of Israeli concerns and expectations.


"Does Hamas still want you dead?"

By Bradley Burston

Wednesday, 25 January (62 days to election day)

With the Islamic Jihad, you know where you stand.
They want you dead.

It's part of a worldwide movement of wanting you dead. They take
orders from people in Damascus who want you dead, people in Tehran who
want you dead, people south of Beirut who want you dead.

With Hamas, knowing where you stand is less cut and dried. With
infinitely more support, personnel, sitzfleisch, than the Jihad, with
more ideological independence, and a network of free medical clinics
and free schools, it almost makes you wonder about the Death to Israel
and Death to America and the second graders they dress up and parade
around in fatigues and miniature M-16's and garlands of plastic grenades.

Now as Hamas prepares to enter the Palestinian parliament, and perhaps
the cabinet, it's time to ask - Will the real Hamas please stand up?

Forget the learned punditry. It all comes down to this: Does Hamas, in
fact, want you dead?

On the one hand, there's Nouvelle Hamas, Hamas Lite, the latter-day
Islamic Resistance Movement of conciliatory if studiously ambiguous
statements.

The poster boy for the New Hamas is Sheikh Mohammed Abu Tir, he of the
leprechaun orange beard, who dispenses homespun medical advice as he
chats amicably, disarmingly with reporters on the Palestinian campaign
trail. The color of his beard and hair? Henna. It's proven itself good
for dandruff, he observes. Even seems to have helped ease the
migraines he once suffered.

Then there's Hamas Classic. The Hamas of Khaled Mashaal. No
negotiations. No clever wording. No part of "No" to misunderstand.

"We don't have to make concessions to satisfy Israel," Mashaal said
this week, "Our position now is not to negotiate with Israel. We will
not kowtow."

There was a time, starting with Hamas' founding at the very outset of
the first Intifada, when it was no problem to know where you stood
with them. They wanted you dead and/or gone from here. They had
decided that we were all either from Russia or America, and we could
all go back there now, thank you very much.

At first they weren't prepared to do anything about it. They were
later on, though. With a vengeance.

Either because we killed their master bombmaker with an exploding cell
phone to the ear, or in order to show their continued explosive
capability, or both, they decided to decide the 1996 election and put
Benjamin Netanyahu in power. It took them nine days. Four bombs,
Ashkelon, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv. Sixty deaths. Hundreds and hundreds of
injured.

Feeling somewhat guilty about having helped them in the early 1980s,
when we thought them to be apolitical, anti-Marxist, useful, we tried
everything to stop them. Exiling 400 of them to a snowy, windblown
hilltop in south Lebanon, including their pediatrician/president Abdel
Aziz Rantisi, did nothing to deter them. We tried assassinating them,
pressing the PA to jail them, pressing the PA to stop releasing them
soon thereafter, assassinating them and assassinating them and
assassinating them.

Now we're at a loss. They're about to join the cabinet next door, and
there's nothing we can do about it.

Can we trust them? The question is academic. We won't trust them.
We'll give good reasons why not. Take Sheikh Abu Tir. Now 55, he's
spent most of his adult life in Israeli administrative detention or
otherwise jailed for weapons possession, membership in a terrorist
organization, and/or directing activities of Hamas' armed wing, Iz
al-Din al-Qassam.

"Israel respects us when we are strong," Khaled Mashaal told a
television interviewer. "This requires a long battle."

Any way you look at it, however, the battle has changed. The last time
Hamas launched a suicide bombing was in August, 2004.

The tone has changed as well. Even the unbending Mahmoud Zahar, whose
son was killed in an Israeli air strike and who narrowly escaped
assassination himself, has given a measure of ground in recent
statements.

"Negotiation is not a taboo," Zahar told reporters this week.
"Negotiations are a means. If Israel has anything to offer on the
issues of halting attacks, withdrawal, releasing prisoners... then
1,000 means can be found."

But a campaign is a campaign, and Zahar couldn't resist a dig at the
rival Fatah party. "The political crime is when we sit with the
Israelis and then come out with a wide smile to tell the Palestinian
people that there is progress, when in fact, there is not."

Oddly, the only moderating influence that seems to have consistently
worked on Hamas is Palestinian public opinion.

The group has entered politics, and even for those unafraid of a
martyr's death, there is little more terrifying for a politician than
his own constituents.

"You are about to enter the Authority. We welcome you," Fatah Gaza
leader Mohammed Dahlan told Zahar on the eve of the elections.

"It's time for you to discover the suffering of being in government."

I believe... in the power of ideals.

The Leadership of the Palestinian people has been handed over to people most Israeli's see as enemies. The speculations as to who is to blame for this development among the English I have heard talking centers on Israel as the culprit. "They wanted this, you know." "They now have the excuse they need to continue their unilateral action." "If Sharron had given more concessions when Fatah was in power they could have proven to the Palestinian People that Fatah was a party that could get things done."
From my talk with a Palestinian Christian woman, leader of an art school in Bethlehem, I understood that the people were fed up with the corruption, that Hamas had built schools in the towns they ran, they had provided the people with public services. So maybe this is why they were elected, not because people believe in their platform, not because a majority of Palestinians think that Israel has no right to exist?
But I also spoke with an Arab-Israeli, a citizen of Israel, a lawyer, educated in England, a man who passed the bar in New York; and he struggled to respond positively to the assertion that Israel has a right to be there. He managed in the end to talk pragmatically about the current facts but really, he dodged the question.
I often wonder at the society around me here, so eager to absolve others of their responsibility, as long as they aren't European. Is this a hold over of the guilt experienced because of the British Empire? I affirm the desire to stand in the shoes of the other, to have compassion but in typical American fashion I ask about the consequences. Shouldn't we respect people as agents of their own destiny? Isn't affirming their moral culpability part of affirming their humanity? Are people really such hypocrites that their ideals can be bought off through large scale public funding, masses of economic aid, development of the economy? Are people's ideals so easily eradicated by consumerism and wealth? Isn't the fundamentalist response coming from the Islamic world a reaction against consumerism and the westernization of their identity? We think that people can be bought off, how insulting.