Eugene Delacroix. Liberty leading the people. 1830.

352 — Homo Amor: A Warrior of Sensemaking

To do sensemaking is to become intimate with reality; sensemaking means integrating and synergizing

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [July 9, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.

Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.

Summary: The meta-crisis we are living through is rooted in the utter halt in the evolution of interiors, and it is our responsibility to address the meta-crisis by jumpstarting this evolution — to evolve the story of what it means to be a human being. Who is included in my story? Is it ever OK to turn away from suffering? How do we reconcile our love of peace with the tragic necessity for war as the only response to brutality and aggression — which is still the truth of our time, making pacifism the worst kind of moral equivalence? Faced with the moral dilemmas posed by righteous wars, how can we discern the truth beyond the superficial flow of daily news and pervasive propaganda from all sides? This conversation addresses these painful questions in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Since it evolved in response to comments and questions from the listeners, we have included the most relevant comments from the chat box in this publication.

We are the evolution of love

Where are we? We are in One Mountain Many Paths.

• We are in an evolutionary synagogue.
• We are in an evolutionary secular humanist center.
• We are in an evolutionary church.
• We are in an evolutionary mosque.
• We are in an evolutionary Zendo.
• We are in an evolutionary ethical cultural center.
• We are in an evolutionary Taoist center.

And we are in an evolutionary space in which there is no center, in which everyone is right in the stuff and space of their lives, and haven’t found their way to any kind of communion in this generation.

We are gathering everyone.

We are everyone gathering everyone.

We are the vision of a new Universal Grammar of Value, which becomes a context for our diversity. We are the vision of a potential world religion that is the music, the underlying musical score, that desperately needs — and makes spacious room for, and is animated by — all of the unique instruments, the unique religions, the unique systems.

We are the evolution of religion.

We are the evolution of love — because the evolution of love is also the evolution of religion.

Because what is religion?

Religion is the story of reality’s interiors.

There is the exterior story of evolution, and then for many, many, many, many, many, many, many thousands of years, the interior story, the inside story of evolution, was the evolution of interiors. The evolution of interiors expressed itself as the evolution of religion. And even the abandonment of religion — for quite good reasons, because religion overreached and made mistakes and became cruel in many ways — but the abandonment of religion is itself part of the evolution of interiors.

Religion stands aside.

Universal human rights appear, democracy appears, new ways of gathering information appear, new ways of relating to each other appear, the emergence of the feminine, the claiming of embodiment. All sorts of things happen — but these are part of, in essence, reality reaching for a new religion, reality becoming heretical.

Reality says:

• I am a heretic. I deny the overreaches of the old religion, because they are expressions of a small comprehension of reality. They are expressions of a contracted understanding of reality, and they are no longer expressions of Eros, of reality as progressive deepening of intimacies. Religion has become regressive and fundamentalist in a way that it’s no longer intimate with reality, or with the human body, or with itself, or with the sense of the universal family of life and of humanity.

In all these ways, religion, and then the emergence of various forms of humanism, become the evolution of interiors.

Reality is not merely a fact, it’s a story.

It’s not an ordinary story, it’s an evolutionary story. The evolutionary story is the evolution of exterior structures: techno-economic basis, socio-structural basis, governance basis (those are all at the human level, but it’s exterior is all the way up and all the way down) and the evolution of interiors.

The existential risk is rooted in the utter halt of the evolution of interiors

Evolution is the story of evolution, the progressive evolution of the outsides and the insides — and at this moment in human history, our story of the evolution of the inside has ground to a halt. We have made almost no progress for 250 to 300 years in our inside evolution, while our outside evolution has gotten ballistic: it has ramped up, exponentiated beyond imagination —

• in many ways, bringing great blessing, the great dignities of modernity,
• but in many ways, bringing, ushering in the structural seeds of existential risk: risk to our very existence, of catastrophic risk.

Imagine a famine in India in which 200 million people could be killed in a week, because we haven’t engaged the climate and haven’t created the necessary protections: catastrophic risk. Rogue nuclear devices, weaponized drones, methane gas under the tundra.

We have developed a linear materials economy, whose very structure is exponential growth, which has to fall off a cliff, whose very structure is potentially self-terminating. This self-termination, this existential risk is rooted in the utter halt, the utter stoppage, the utter blockage, the utter cessation, the utter atrophying of the evolutionary process of interiors, which is the evolution of love, which is the evolution of Eros, which is the evolution of intimacy.

Wow! And what we’re saying here at One Mountain Many Paths, which is the heart of the revolution, is that it’s our responsibility. It’s the overwhelming, celebratory, joyous, urgent, ecstatically urgent, filled with trembling, and yet privileged responsibility — to actually address this meta-crisis. We address this meta-crisis by jumpstarting the evolution of interiors, the evolution of the inside. And the inside, the interior is, at its core, a story, a narrative.

It is a story about love.
It is a story about intimacy.
It is a story about the evolution of intimacy.
It is a story about the progressive deepening of intimacies.

I spoke yesterday with someone I don’t talk too often, we talk every X amount of time, Perry Marshall, who is a wonderful man. He is a brilliant business player, but his true greatness lies, I think, in his work in science. He published an important article on how biology transcends computation, and another two very, very important essays. He has done incredibly important work on reversing cancer research, on the relationship between evolution and cancer, and he really convened, together with James Shapiro and Dennis Noble, a community of heterodox evolutionary thinkers.

We have been in touch over the last several years, exchanging and sharing, and we are writing in different languages. I was sharing with him this notion — it was just beautiful to hear his holding of it — this notion of reality as the progressive deepening of intimacies. He said, well, that’s Marc Gafni language. But what he meant was: yes, that’s exactly right. He said, I am writing in a different idiom, and he is. He is writing a particular kind of scientific, peer-reviewed important articles — but he understood very clearly exactly what I meant. And we are writing in the idiom of the new sciences, which merge interior and exterior science together.

Evolution really is the progressive deepening of intimacy. That’s really what it is about. And at the core, the progressive deepening of intimacies is the evolution of story. It’s a New Story we tell about ourselves.

What we want to do today is we want to evolve the story of what it means to be a human being, with the understanding that only by evolving that story can we respond to the meta-crisis. Does that make sense, everyone? That’s what we’re about today, that’s what we’re going to be engaged in.

Pacifism is one of the worst forms of moral equivalence

And particularly, I want to respond to, and not directly — I don’t think it needs direct response — a beautiful presentation made by one of my close associates, who is deeply partnering with us here at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, Dr. Elena Maslova-Levin, who spoke two weeks ago about Ukraine and gave what I thought was a very, very important talk, challenging — correctly — what happens to our attention span.

How do we lose attention?

We begin with our attention completely focused on Ukraine, and then we are not quite sure how to keep our attention there. I am not going to enter into the labyrinth which is Ukraine today, but I will just say very simply — in a second simplicity, and this is a a well-considered second simplicity:

We need to stand with Ukraine.

I have not changed my position. I’ve done a little reading to catch up in the last few days. I have not changed my position that I was articulating at the beginning of the Ukraine war in the first four weeks, and Elena and I actually put out a book about it, on the first four weeks of the Ukraine war. It is available now as an ebook. It’s called Glory to the Heroes, and my core positions that I expressed there, and shared with Elena, I stand by 1,000%.

We need to stand with Ukraine.
We need to be arming Ukraine in the best way we can.

It is a tragic situation. Putin is a tragedy, and the structure of Russia today, its moral structure in terms of its hierarchies of power, is a tragedy. It is critical that Ukraine, which is a very complex place — it’s not only filled with heroes; there are obviously fifth columns, and there’s obviously, like in any place in the world, some bad stuff happening — but Ukraine is standing insanely heroically for value, and Ukraine is standing for Western values.

It is a hard moment. There is this great fear of Putin’s nuclear capacity, and I don’t think that’s a misplaced fear. I think it needs to be taken seriously, and responded to seriously — and we need to support Ukraine, to stand up with Ukraine, to arm Ukraine, and to stand for a righteous conflict.

This is very, very, very important. There are still wars that — tragically — need to be fought. There should be no more ground wars. There should be no more cybernetic wars.

We should be at the end of war — but we are not; we are not there yet. And as long as there are wars, we need armies.

When I sat with the Dalai Lama in his home in Dharamsala, he and I talked about the notion that there should be one world army. He said, it would be absurd to suggest that there should be no army at a time when the Putins of the world have armies. Of course we need an army, and of course we need to be able to respond to brutality with force. There is absolutely no choice about that — it needs to be done. I pray that we come to a time in the world where that won’t be necessary, where we won’t need any army, where we can in fact beat our swords into plowshares, in the words of the prophets.

But that day has not yet come.

To adopt a position other than an activist position, to adopt a pacifist position or a position of moral equivalence in this moment is a mistake. Pacifism is one of the worst forms of moral equivalence, at least from my perspective, and from the Dalai Lama’s, and quite a few others of us. If we had been pacifists during World War Two, we would have had a world controlled by Nazism. We need to say that, and we need to say that clearly and unequivocally. There has been all sorts of writings, which I pointed out at the beginning of the Ukraine war, that make subtle moral equivalences between the Western position and the Russian position, which is actually not the case.

Now, I want to be clear again, and this is critically important.

Of course peace is a value.

I’ve buried more students than anyone on this call, at 18 years old, who died fighting for the preservation of peace. My two sons are Commandos in a Western Army, who fight for peace and risk their lives regularly. The notion that we can just lay down our arms, unilaterally, is absurd, and is a violation of She.

It is a violation of the Goddess.

That just needs to be said.

Making moral equivalence is a tragedy, and forming superficial opinions is a tragedy

Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean that there are no ulterior agendas.

That doesn’t mean that the West has not engaged itself in moral violations that are significant. Just read David Graeber’s book, Debt, to look at one of the great moral violations of the West, in terms of how the World Bank has been operating. The World Bank has done an enormous amount of good and enormous amount of damage, on multiple levels. The entire system and structure of an exponential growth curve, in which a very, very minuscule part of the world uses most of the world’s resources, is tragic. That’s a given. A world in which a billion people don’t have drinking water is tragic, 1,000%.

Chat box (Ineke): Stand with Palestine also!

I will not, in any sense, make a moral equivalence between Israel and Palestine — I know the facts way too well. I actually lived — not in Holland or in Germany — I actually lived in Israel with a beautiful Arab family I was very close with. I lived right next to Qalqilya, one of the four towns in the West Bank. There is no moral equivalence between the Israeli position and the Palestinian position, it’s not true. Anyone who thinks there is simply doesn’t know even one fact about what’s going on.

Israel has sued for peace again, and again, and again, and again.

Israel is a pluralistic Western democracy, with full rights for men and women, which has empowered its citizenry in an incredible way.

You can walk into Hadassah Hospital at the center of Jerusalem, and you can see Jewish and Arab doctors working side by side, saving and healing anyone. That’s why the Hadassah Hospital at the center of Jerusalem was nominated for a Nobel Prize. If you show me any hospital on the West Bank, where I lived, any hospital anyplace in the world, or certainly any hospital anywhere in the Arab world, where you have Israeli and Arab doctors working side by side, saving Israelis and Arabs in the exact same way, well, then I will step back. But that’s not the case. Everyone knows that the only place that that’s possible, the only place is in Jerusalem, under a Western democracy, which is called Israel.

To make moral equivalences is a tragedy, and to get your news and to evaluate what’s happening based on superficial headlines, is also a tragedy.

Israel is a very, very good example of moral equivalence, which needs to be taken into account.

Again, that does not mean that there is no corruption in Israel, and that does not mean that the Israeli army hasn’t made mistakes. It has. But I’ve studied the Israeli army very, very, very closely. If you’ve ever read the moral code of the Israeli army, written by Asa Kasher — and I would recommend everyone to read it — it’s the most incredible moral code of any army in the world. And my children have described to me their friends shot left and right, because of the care that Israel takes in trying its best not to harm civilians — the care that no other army that I am aware of in the world (having researched this for 30 years) takes. So, I am going to just be careful on moral equivalence.

There is a need, tragically, in the world today, to bear arms.

We cannot unilaterally dismantle our armies.

Who is included in my story?

Ukraine is an example of a moral war — with all of the complexities. Therefore, we have to actually engage and stand with the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians have lost so many men and women and children, in a war that they did not want, in a war that was forced upon them — and they are actually standing for value, with all of the complexity at hand.

My position on this hasn’t changed. I apologize for growing silent on it. I did go silent on it. I was caught up in any number of other existential risks. We need, of course, to stay completely focused, in every way we can, on Ukraine, and at the same time, on the implications of at least ten other tragic spots in the world.

And that is not simple — and that’s the topic of today, that’s what I want to talk about today.

How do we actually do that, what does that mean? I want to talk about that this week and next week. If I can frame the question, the question is, who is included in my story?

Who is included in my story? That’s the question.

Are the people included in my story only those people who are in my family?

Or are the people included in my story those people who are in my extended family?

I go to war, appropriately if someone breaks into my house and wants to kill my children — I go to save my children, for sure. Someone breaks into someone else’s house — do I go to save those children? Well, no. Why? Because I am not aware of it.

But what if I am aware of it? What if I can act?
I really want to go into the depth of this question.

In other words, what does it mean to place our attention on suffering?
What does it mean to be a human being, which is this noble and glorious and privileged experience? To be human in the world, to have the ability to live and feel and breathe in the world — and to know of suffering —

• and not to be able to engage all the suffering,
• and to feel like we are forced to turn away.

What does that mean?
What is that experience?
And when is it okay to turn away?
And maybe it’s never okay to turn away. Is it ever okay to turn away?

That’s the question we’re going to talk about.

Hold your speech responsibly

Chat box (Brad): Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is not a “moral war.” It’s the same old racism and gradual genocide as is in their tradition.

I am just going to say to Brad — whoever Brad is, but I certainly love you — I am going to say this very directly, and if you never come back again, it’s totally fine. I am just completely honoring you, my friend, but actually, that is absurd, right?

The notion that it’s the same old racism and gradual genocide is not to understand what the word genocide means. That it’s the same old racism is beyond absurd, beyond absurd. My boys are directly involved in it, my daughter is directly involved in it. I lived in Israel for 20 years, I lived on the West Bank. I walked around unarmed, and was deep friends with some of the most wonderful Arab families who are at the center of the West Bank. You would have to know a lot of information, Brad, to make that statement in the chat box. I’ve spent my life talking to both wonderful Jews and wonderful Arabs, on both sides of the divide.

It is an extremely complex issue. You need to understand how we got here, who the players are — and so you’ve got to be very, very careful before you say things in the chat box, accusing Israel of gradual genocide. I’d be very careful, my friend. That is an unequivocally false statement, from beginning to end. I say that tenderly, fiercely, gently.

Again, it doesn’t mean that Israel is always right, it doesn’t mean Israel doesn’t make mistakes.

It doesn’t mean the United States is always right. The United States makes significant mistakes.

But Israel is a pluralistic Western democracy, that is animated at its core by pluralistic Western values. It is not the case of any of the twenty two states that surround Israel, several of which are still committed to its destruction today, and most of which have been committed to its destruction for the last several decades. The ethos that guides the Israeli army and the ethos that guides the surrounding armies are entirely different.

Let’s hold that there, and here we go.

Here we go, and we cannot be afraid to make moral statements. Even when there is complexity, there are moral statements. There are so many chat boxes in the world where people lightly will accuse Israel of genocide, Ukraine of being a CI outpost that we are blindly defending, making moral equivalences between Putin’s army and the Ukrainian army. It’s just not true. It’s just not true, and we can’t — we can’t, we can’t, we can’t, we can’t, we can’t.

And as I said — very, very clearly — there are people on both sides. That’s what I just said. I just said, I am very close friends, personally — not writing in the chat box — with some of the leading Arab families, some of the leading Jewish families. I lived for many, many years in this region of the world. I know it better than I know almost anything else, both directly, personally, both in terms of its history and in terms of its players.

One of the things that the woke world does is that it just makes belied statements, and doesn’t actually hold its speech responsibly. We’ve got to be very, very careful before we throw around words like genocide. We’ve got to know a lot of information.

My general policy — and I said this to my kids as well: whenever my kids want to take a position, I say to my kids, argue the other position. If you want to take this position, argue the other position. Argue it powerfully. Read all the opposing positions that completely disagree with what you’re saying. Argue the opposing position well, and if you can do that well, then go back to your position. See if you still hold it — and if you do, then hold it strongly. I have never ever, in my entire life, read only one side of an issue. I always, always read very carefully and speak very carefully on both sides, and then come to integrate the largest integration we can make. But there is no way that, in One Mountain, I am ever going to be afraid to make a moral statement.

There is no way — and Dalai Lama, my dear friend, stands with me in this, as do many other people — that I am ever going to be afraid to say that pacifism, adopting a pacifist position, for example in World War Two, or in this Ukraine moment, is not a moral position.

That is a violation of Outrageous Love.

We are taking responsibility in this moment

Outrageous Love never requires — never allows — you to demonize, to fully demonize the other. Even when you are obligated to go to war, you have to treat the person you have to go to war with dignity, if it’s a righteous — a sad and tragic, but righteous — war.

Every war is tragic. There is no war that’s not tragic. Wars are tragic, and we want peace to be the reigning value in the world. We have to do everything we can to end all wars.

And as long as we’re still in a place where there is a moral obligation to make a war, which is tragic, we have to do it with Outrageous Love — in how we treat prisoners, how we treat men, women, and children, how we try and hold our relationship to civilian populations, etc. There is an enormous possibility, even in a tragic war, to hold that tragic war with dignity and with honor, and not to have it reduced to a worst horror than war already is.

All of this just needs to be said.

Chat box (Ineke): Tears.

Yes, Ineke, it is tears. It’s completely tears. These are holy and broken Hallelujahs, which demand tears.

I am just going to give you one more image, and it is a tragic image.

When I came to Israel and worked with people in Qalqilya to create, near a place called Kfar Saba, a little village called Tzufim, what happened was: anyone who would work with us, or several of the people that worked with us, had people in their family brutally hurt or killed. And it happened all over the West Bank: people who actually worked on creating educational systems, and nurseries, and beautiful programs together, creating this really intensely beautiful Jewish-Arab gorgeousness, had often their children shot in the stomach and left to die, by the extreme elements of the West Bank population, who had been morally hijacked by Yasser Arafat’s PLO. And I would go to the homes of my close friends, my close Arab friends, whose children had been killed because they were helping to start a nursery, and we would sit, and we would cry together. So yes, there are tears. Yes, there are tears.

And oh my God, when the United States and Great Britain bombed Germany at the end of World War Two, it was a horror. The bombings were a horror. They were a horror. I mean, there is nothing other than tears in war.

What does war mean?
People killing each other.
It’s a horror from beginning to end. It’s beyond tragic.

But not to oppose the worst forms of tyranny, Nazism, for example, is an even greater tragedy than war.

And when we go to war, what we are saying is: We are standing not just for the present, we’re standing for the future.

When we go to war, when we tragically, horrifically have to go to war — and may there be no more wars — what we are saying is that there is a covenant between the generations. And in this covenant between the generations, we are standing for the trillions of unborn people, and we’re saying we are taking responsibility in this moment.

This is the moment in which we need to take responsibility. And it’s deep, it’s deep, it’s deep. Had that not happened in World War Two, we would have lived in a completely different world.

Let’s feel that, and let’s hear that, and it’s a big deal.

Chat box (Richard): Sure would like more factual information that says Brad is wrong.

Let me just suggest to everyone, not a book that’s on the right wing of Israel or the left wing. Take a look, brother, at a bunch of books by Daniel Gordis, who’s a colleague of mine in Israel; take a look at his books on Israel. That’s one very, very, very good way to start. Take a look at that, that will give you a very, very deep sense. He’s a middle-of-the-road Israeli position. His books are extremely intelligent, they are insanely well-researched, and it’s a deep history of Israel and of the conflict. It’s probably the single best introduction. He has written a couple of books on it, and they are well worth reading. Again, it’s a very, very intelligent, centrist position. Danny is completely meticulous with facts, so if someone wants to read one book, that’s what I would recommend.

Evolutionary Love Code

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
If there were two children outside of your home, and you saw 
them suffering on your front lawn, you would stop everything 
you are doing to help them. But if the same children are in 
another part of the world, even if you are aware of their 
existence, and aware of the fact that they are suffering, all too 
often, the overwhelming majority of human beings go on with 
business as usual. 

To be or not to be, that is the question. It’s a question that every 
human being must ask in this moment of meta-crisis. What 
does it mean to be human? What’s the nature of our joy as 
human beings? What’s the nature of our tears as human 
beings? What are the actions required of us as human beings? 
What are the responsibilities required of us as human beings? 

What are the rights required of us as human beings? And what 
are the raptures required of us as human beings? We ask these 
questions not from a place of shame, not from a place of
brokenness, but from a place of wholeness and celebration. 
From a place of agony, but also from a place of ecstasy. We 
stand together in the nobility of our humanity, and in the 
ecstatic urgency of our humanity. 

And we invoke the possible human. And the possible human is 
omni-considerate for the sake of the whole. The possible 
human feels as if the whole of humanity, the whole of Reality, 
is visible to the naked eye in their front lawn, their front yard.
The possible human feels the truth that the whole includes not 
only every human being in the present, but also every human
being in the past and in the future. The possible human stops 
business as usual, and acts for the liberation of the whole. The 
possible human understands that to be is to be Homo Amor.

You cannot be an Outrageous Lover without doing sensemaking

This code is incredibly important, but we are definitely not going to be able to get into this code, so we are going to have to pick this up next week, but I want to spend another couple of minutes to continue the conversation we have started. I know this was an unexpected topic, I am not quite sure how we got here. But clearly, it was necessary.

I want to also talk about the broken information ecology.

If I understood the information based on the broken information ecology that we live in, then I would have come to very complex conclusions — and very different conclusions than those I’ve come to. It takes something to penetrate the surface of information ecology, to actually gather information. The way you have to do that is not reading the daily news. You cannot get it from The Guardian, you’re not going to get it from The New York Times, you’re not going to get it from CNN. You are not going to get it from a particular echo bubble.

You’ve got to read more deeply. To be able to get sufficient information takes something.

I am just going to give you an example about Israel, because that’s what we were talking about. I am just going to give you one example. Israel foils three to four terrorist incidents which are aimed at civilians, every single day. Anyone know that? That’s actually the gig.

In other words, you’ve just got to understand that in order to gather information, in order to look at anything, you need to understand its context:

• What caused it to happen?
• What are the things that lay behind it?
• What is it going to cause in the future?
• What is the alternative to not doing it?

And to do that, to gather information on any topic that you want to talk about in public, I would do at least two things.

This is just a process, a way to play.

One, read two books on opposing sides of the issue, not the daily news. Get out of your own filter bubble, and read two books. Not I don’t have time. If you are going to talk about something publicly, and if you are going to form an opinion about something, you have to become Homo Amor.

And Homo Amor has to be a warrior, and a warrior needs to be able to do sensemaking — and to do sensemaking is to become intimate with reality, so always read at least two books, two serious monographs, that give you opposing sides of an issue, and read them carefully. Start with two; two is a good place to start. If you can do that, you can begin to find your way. You can begin to gather information.

The second suggestion is: don’t have an opinion on everything. It’s very hard to have an opinion on everything. There are lots of things going on in the world. Don’t form your opinion by reading surface sheens of news. Pick an area where you are going to engage, what you are going to talk about, and where you are going to be actually engaged in doing something about, where you are going to engage it in a serious way — and in that area, go deep. In that area, go deep, learn, become a master in that area.

I am very, very, very concerned with the healthcare crisis in the United States, and there is a lot to say about it. I am about to start talking about it at some point, but I don’t feel I have mastered it. It’s a very, very complex issue, and the notions put forth on most of the internet sides of this conversation actually don’t take the facts into account. How we can create the best healthcare in the United States is a real issue, and we need to do something. It’s a tragic situation — and I am not going to speak about it publicly until I feel I’ve mastered it, and I have synthesized the information, and I can actually suggest a way forward.

That’s always what we need to do. You have to pick where your energy is going to go. I wouldn’t spread it all over the place. I would be a little monogamous here, or at least polyamorous with a couple of issues. Pick an issue or two where you can actually become a master.

Most people are completely lost. The information ecology is utterly disturbing. There are massive propaganda campaigns which are waged on all sides, and how you find your way beneath propaganda to actually be able to do sensemaking is critical.

Just to begin with, pick one or two issues, not more. In other words, have the moral center not to have to speak on everything. Pick one or two issues, and then I would read deeply on both sides. And then, if possible, find and speak to people if you can. You can find people through the web, you can talk directly. Speak to people on both sides of the issue.

Pour yourself in.

Pick one issue, and then become somewhat of a master of it, and then add to the conversation in a deep and powerful way. That’s part of what it means to be an Outrageous Lover.

You cannot be an Outrageous Lover without doing sensemaking — and sensemaking means integrating and synergizing —

• opposing,
• deeply felt,
• intelligent,
• madly loving,
• articulated

perspectives — synergizing them into a larger whole.

It’s not pro-life or pro-choice — both sides are propagandizing. There is a larger synergistic whole.

Honoring each other even in impossible situations

When we are talking about, for example, Ukraine and Russia, or we’re talking about Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict, it is clear there is a side that’s standing for democracy and Western value, and a side that’s not — but that doesn’t mean that the side that’s standing for democracy and Western value is perfect or makes all the right policy decisions.

I am going to just give you guys an example, I’m going to make this very real.

I almost got thrown out of the settlement in which I was a rabbi, because there was a post in a paper that was very popular in the communities that I was involved with, and the post was talking about Yossi Sarid, who was a very, very popular left-wing politician. It basically had a list of Arab terrorists, and because Yossi Sarid had spent his entire life opposing Israeli policy on the West Bank, this newspaper listed Yossi Sarid with a list of Arab terrorists who had committed terrorist acts.

That was a morally heinous act. It was a horrible thing to do — and I wrote and spoke every place I could, and said that the people who have just listed Yossi Sarid and demonized him are actually themselves committing an act of terror. That’s a violation of Eros, it is a violation of love, and it seeds the ground for political assassination. We can disagree fiercely with Yossi Sarid, but love him dearly, and love his integrity, and love his honesty, and love the free-spirited, fierce, fierce, fierce debate in a pluralistic democracy.

It was an incredible moment. Yossi Sarid called me, and we became friends. And soon afterwards, Yitzchok Rabin in Israel was assassinated by someone who held their position so strongly they couldn’t hear the other position, and demonized the other position — which is tragic beyond imagination. It’s a big deal.

Number two, I want to stay real close with this. I am going to get really personal here for a second. I lived in Tzufim, right next to Qalqilya. You literally weren’t safe to walk around without a revolver and a machine gun, because Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, a terror organization, shot people in the stomach, raped people, closed down educational institutions — it was a complete horror. The Arab population of the West Bank hated them, but they were imposed from without. That’s a long story, how that happened.

Obviously, everyone walked around armed. I walked around unarmed. I made friends with some wonderful families, including those who didn’t want us there. I said, here is the deal, I am walking around without a gun; stupid thing to do, but that’s what I’m doing — and I did. I did for two years. Many, many, many, many times, I walked into places where you just didn’t have the possibility to walk around without a gun — and I just said, you know what, I am going without a machine gun, kill me, but let’s make peace. I share Brad’s sentiment for peace, and I love Brad for expressing it the way he did — but sometimes, there is a tragic necessity for war.

I am going to give you the third example, and with that, I am going to finish.

There are checkpoints in Israel. There is this huge population from the West Bank that travels into what’s called Israel’s green line, in the political boundaries of Israel before the 1967 War. A huge part of the West Bank works in what’s called Israel proper. If there weren’t checkpoints, there would be buses of schoolchildren blowing up every single day. That’s just true. That’s just a simple fact. In other words, if there weren’t checkpoints to stop Arabs coming from the West Bank, a minuscule amount of them — but a minuscule amount is enough to blow up school buses every single day, so there have to be checkpoints, and there have to be searches.

There is no choice.

However, who is doing the checkpoints and the searches, and how are we doing them?

I made a suggestion on Israeli television that we shouldn’t have these untrained rough units. We should have units that are strong militarily, but before you search someone in front of their children, you bow, you apologize, and you ask permission. You have juice stands set up, in which you have someone else from the unit, who serves juice to the children and honors them.

If we have to do searches — which we do have to do, because otherwise you will have school buses filled with children blowing up — let’s figure out how we are going to do searches. Let’s do searches in ways that honor the people that we are forced to search, and don’t demean them, and don’t demean them in front of their children, because imagine what it’s like to grow up every day, and to see your father searched every single day, what that does to you. And especially if you are searched in a way that’s not honoring. So, if we have to do searches at checkpoints in Israel, which we do, then let’s do it in a way which actually honors people, which is dignified, which is reverend, which holds the tragedy, which holds the tears. Does everyone feel that? In other words, we have to find ways to honor each other, even when we are in impossible situations.

How to celebrate life and not turn away from suffering?

Let’s hold it here for a second, my friends. This was a big conversation, and an unexpected conversation. We started with Ukraine, and honoring Ukraine, and honoring the battle in Ukraine. The Israel example came up because it came up in the chat box, and I responded to it, and so we spent some time in Israel.

We talked about war and the complexity of war, and the tragedy of it. We held a real and sacred conversation here in One Mountain, which is what we should be doing.

Thank you, everyone, for being here. We are going to end with prayer — and appropriately, the prayer is about the holy and the broken Hallelujah. Because everything we’ve been talking about here, my friends, is about the holy and the broken Hallelujah.

We are going to come back next week, we are going to start with the code, and we are going to talk about what it means to be a new human.

How do we celebrate life, and feel suffering, and not turn away?

That’s the ultimate question.
That’s the ultimate, ultimate question. That’s what we need to be talking to each other about.

How do we include more people in our story than just the people we need to survive?
What does it mean to change the very nature of what my story is?
How do I evolve my story?

Thank you, everyone, with a tender, broken, and yet ecstatic heart — ecstatic to be with you all, ecstatic to have this conversation, ecstatic to feel each other and to honor each other. And forgive me for any moment that I wasn’t clear, and thank you for your forgiveness.

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