Isn't It A Pity by Richard Oxenberg

 

Isn’t It A Pity?...

Richard Oxenberg

Some things take so long

But how can I explain?

When not too many people

Can see we're all the same

And because of all their tears

Their eyes can't hope to see

The beauty that surrounds them

Isn't it a pity?

George Harrison

These words from George Harrison's song "Isn't It a Pity?" have been reverberating in my mind as I listen to the devastating news surrounding the latest Israeli-Palestinian war.

At times like these it can seem altogether pollyannish to speak of seeing "we're all the same," but I'm convinced it is the one and only way out.

Ironically, it is this message that is at the core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, even as their adherents - indeed, the most 'devout' of their adherents - continuously murder each other in the name of the God of love and justice they all profess to worship.

How explain this?

First of all, we must understand the nature of religious language, which seeks to express the spiritual by representing it in material terms, with the resultant danger that the devotion due the spiritual will be rendered to the material, a danger the religions are forever falling into.

But to understand this itself, we must become clear about the distinction between the material and the spiritual, a distinction hard for us to grasp precisely because we are so immersed in the material.

The material is what allows for us to be separate beings, it is what makes my life mine and not yours, my interests mine and not yours. It is also, therefore, what divides us. Without the material we could not be distinctly ourselves, but to be wholly immersed in the values that stem from the material is to be wholly self-centered, egoistic, tribalistic.

In the Jewish tradition, the self-interested values arising from the material are called the "yetzer ha-ra," translated, "the evil inclination." But as the rabbis point out, the "evil inclination" is not itself evil, it is but a temptation to evil. It refers to the values of self-interest, self-concern, self-affirmation, arising from our material individuality.

The "yetzar ha-ra" - the "evil inclination" - only becomes truly evil when it fails to subordinate itself to the "yetzer ha-tov," the "good inclination." The yetzer ha-tov refers to the values that stem from the spiritual.

What are these values?

These are the values of love and justice, amity and compassion, solidarity and concord, that arise from our recognition of the Unity of all things, and of our own unity with this Unity.

It is this fundamental Unity that the religions call "God." It is devotion to the values that arise from recognition of this Unity that the religions call "holy," "saintly," "righteous."

This finds expression in the central declaration of the Torah: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is ONE. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might."

To love God in this way is - in the words of George Harrison - to "see we're all the same."

But why does it "take so long" for us to see this?

Because of the material condition of separateness and division in which we are immersed.

This is not to say that this material condition is itself evil. On the contrary, it is what allows us to be distinctly us. It is - ironically and paradoxically - this material condition that gives the spiritual its value. For the beauty of the spiritual is not inherent to the spiritual as such. It is inherent to the relation of the spiritual to the material, to the vision of the spiritual as disclosed to the material.

This is why God must create the material world. God could not be holy without the material world to be holy for.

The Bible expresses this in the first chapter of Genesis. God creates the material world and declares it to be "very good."

But this material world, this extraordinary world of diversity, multiplicity, difference, is only "very good" so long as it lives in relation to, and devotion to, the eternal Unity from which it arises.

When it fails to do so - when we fail to do so - the world becomes a miserable place. This misery is expressed as the "wrath of God," but it is not that there is an actual entity named "God" who becomes angry, it is that the failure to live by the values of God - the values arising from Unity - leads to ruin.

This is the essential message of all the great religions. They are all variations on this same theme.

We are seeing this "wrath" now, this ruin now, playing itself out in the most devastating way, in the war between Israel and the Palestinians.

How, we might wonder, has a nation devoted to Judaism, and a people devoted to Islam, two variations on the same essential truth, come to such a horrific pass?

The answer can be expressed simply: It is due to our failure to subordinate the yetzer ha-ra to the yetzer ha-tov, to our elevation of the material over the spiritual, indeed, to our failure to see the essential distinction between the two.

This is not a failure that began with the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is a failure that has plagued humanity since the beginning of human history, a failure that perverts the very religions designed to overcome it, a failure that created the conditions out of which the Israel-Palestine conflict emerged.

I'm afraid there is no easy answer, but there remains a hope, however faint it may seem amid the present darkness, a hope that has its basis in the Unity underlying the raging divisions of our time.

It is to this Unity we must ever struggle to dedicate ourselves, even as the darkness threatens to overwhelm us. It is the only way out of the darkness.

And so, in this time of destruction, I pray for the Jews, I pray for the Israelis, I pray for the Muslims, I pray for the Palestinians - I pray for us all to finally "see we're all the same."

Maybe then we'll also be able to see "the beauty that surrounds us," and dispel these bitter tears.

Dr. Oxenberg is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Endicott College