DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s “Did You Know” was written by a prominent professor who is a long-time member of Alcoholics Anonymous: No one “deserves” a death sentence simply for being lazy, stupid, or irresponsible, and in particular you do not act with justice if you punish shiftless parents by putting them in a situation where their children will starve to death. Punish someone by killing that person’s children? Most of the idol worshiping pagans acted better than that.
Good Judaism is centered around following the Torah or Law of God, but it avoids falling into legalism and works righteousness (in the fashion of that the Apostle Paul was warning against) in part because the Hebrew word mishpat, which is usually translated into English as “justice,” necessarily includes compassion as one of its major components. A blind following of the written code without a shred of grace and compassion is not true obedience to the commandments of the Torah, and is not justice at all in the Hebrew sense of the word.
In 1935, it was suffering alcoholics who were rejected by all and helpless to save themselves, when Hashem, the Holy one of Israel, heard the cries of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith and stretched out his hand in grace to touch them with his healing power—and commanded them, as the first and greatest of all his requests, to reach out their hands in grace to all the suffering alcoholics of the world, giving what they had been so freely given, and teaching them also to live lives filled with the fundamental principles of the divine hesed.
The healing power of grace is non-theistic religions. Buddha was not only a very wise man; he was above all filled with compassion. Although he had been the son of a great king, and could have lived out his life in a royal palace waited on hand and foot, he walked out of that palace and never came back. Instead he devoted himself to teaching anyone who came to him, and without desiring the fruit of his actions. That meant his acts of grace were genuinely free acts, imposing no obligation on those who were offered them. In Buddhism, if we are willing to tame our own out-of-control desires, which drive us to pursue boundless fame and praise, total control over other human beings around us, merciless revenge for wrongs we believe have been done to us, and the impossible desire to never grow old and live forever, we will find that reality is inherently filled with a strange kind of grace which will automatically heal our troubled minds and bring the cessation of suffering and give us true serenity and real freedom. The Buddhist dharma is a healing discipline, which means that it is a way of life filled with boundless grace. It is the path of grace, because the only way to walk it is to realize that we do not have to earn nirvana or deserve satori by things we do, or by acts we perform in an attempt to win merit and “achieve” things in the world. There are conditions, however, which must be filled, one of which is that we achieve nirvana or satori only when we realize there are no absolutes.
In many Native American religions (for example, the Navajos and the Potawatomis), the realm of Nature is sacred. The Potawatomis and other tribes use the word Manitou for sacred or holy. It is this concept, rather than the concept of a single highly personal God-figure, which is at the heart of this kind of spirituality. I discover the universal harmony and sacredness of all things-Manitou-by doing my best to live in harmony with the world around me, including not only the world of Nature but also my fellow human beings. To be continued…
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