Rabbi Mark H. Levin, D.H.L.

President Schaal, Pastor Davis, members and friends of the Stone Church congregation, and participants of the 2005 Peace Colloquy, thanks for inviting me to be here. I am deeply honored to be invited to preach this morning at the historic Stone Church and at the close of this year's interfaith Peace Colloquy, in the shadow of a Temple dedicated to the pursuit of peace.

Let me begin with Psalm 34: 12-15,

“Come, my children, listen to me; I will teach you what it is to revere the Lord. Who is the person who desires life, who desires years of good fortune? Guard your tongue from evil, your lips from deceitful speech. Shun evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”

Do individuals or events change history? Was it Moses who changed Western civilization, or the Bible? Was it the men of the Continental Congress or Democracy that created America?

Some choose the person; some choose the event. Judaism says it’s both and neither. It’s both because unique personalities and overwhelming events are dynamite charges redirecting the flowing river called history. It’s neither because when we search under history, at what channels the direction and destiny of all events, we discover God’s will.

Saying that God directs history is a radical statement for a liberal rabbi. I do not believe that God directs all personal decisions. God certainly does not have an opinion between my purchasing Oreo cookies or chocolate chips. The divine mind does not descend to trivialities. But the interactions of nations and peoples determining the destiny of humanity no doubt reflect God’s plan.

And friends, we are witnessing history changing drastically. Inexorable forces are leading us to a global community. That global community, creating ties beyond nations, beyond peoples or religions, lays waiting just down the road of communications satellites and fiber optic cables.

The most important choice awaiting humanity is now emerging like a volcano from the sea: whether the future world responds to aggression as the United States did against Afghanistan, with retaliation, or whether it responds as the United States did with North Korea, with negotiation. This global choice, seemingly so removed from us, lies definitively in our hands. A new world is coming into being, and we are privileged to be present at its birth pangs. What must we do to build a world at peace?

The Bible commands, “Therefore choose life, that you and your people may live.” The time to heed God’s warning falls urgently upon those who envision peace: As Margaret Mead wrote famously, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

First, as we birth this new world you and I must heroically demand moral advancement. As Abraham 4 millennia ago ushered in a new world of monotheism that took 1000 years to take hold, so we are witnessing the delivery of a millennial era. But this time around change will not take as long. History that once unfolded at a tortoise pace now races like the hare, and change is telescoped in time.

Like Abraham, the prophets standing in the forefront will not have it easy. Advancement requires vision and conviction. Witness the moral development after the tragedy of atomic warfare and the Holocaust. It is no small feat of moral growth that the shadow of the mushroom cloud has prevented the repeat of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our shame is that the memory of Auschwitz did not prevent Rwanda or Darfur; or that our acquiescence to our government’s second response to 9/11, a war against Iraq, was quite simply fear coupled with vengeance: a hateful cocktail! Old thinking patterns must change with new realities. Remember that “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” may have been biblical law, but subsequent generations reinterpreted its meaning. Since post-biblical times Jews have exacted “the price of an eye and the price of a tooth,” substituting compensation for retaliation, turning revenge into justice. Changing world circumstances open the opportunity for moral growth.

Consider the world’s dramatic new direction in contrast with the last century. I believe that the 20^th century will be subtitled “the century of anonymous life and death.” Forty million people died in World War II alone, including nearly 6 million Jews exterminated. Some 110 million people died in wars between 1900 and 1995. (Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century by Robert S. McNamara, James G. Blight – 2001)

Meanwhile industrial society automated production, and men and women became nameless cogs in a corporate engine. Despite more free time supposedly heaped on us by instant meals, microwave ovens and countless time savers, we found ourselves lonely and bored. Desperate for meaning, many try to find salvation through serial love affairs. We may as well have had numbers tattooed on our arms for all the individuality many felt we possessed. Willie Loman was the icon of the age.

But in rushes the 21st century. Fed up with anonymity in life and death, new technologies enable us to connect interpersonally anytime and anyplace. Butterfly collectors in China can bond instantly with butterfly collectors in Maine; and Russians and Kansans are playing chess for peace in Lindsborg, Kansas. Barriers of time, culture and space are being dismantled like the Berlin Wall, as people climb out electronically from behind nameless cubicles. Any nation seeking advancement requires computers; and any individual with a computer and access to the internet or a fax machine can trumpet his/her opinions.

Coupled with a surge toward giving a face to every human, historic forces are moving the world toward unity. In Europe we find the economic initiative to compete with the United States impels cooperation. Europeans are struggling to overcome ancient, nationalist enmities in favor or current realities. Globalization of corporations and economies constructs a new world map. Astonishingly, we don’t get into hot wars with globalizing countries. The era of hope dawns upon us with the possibility of moral progress.

It becomes the religious community’s challenge and responsibility to be midwives to the birth of a new world of human dignity and recognition to replace the 20th century of death and anonymity. What does that mean?

According to a 1999 Los Angeles Times, one precision guided bomb costs $60,000. (Los Angeles Times April 6, 1999) We spend such huge amounts on individual weapons because our soldiers’ lives matter to us. Each American combat soldier receives a $1,500 ceramic bullet-proof vest; and Secretary Rumsfeld very nearly lost his job over failing to provide adequate, factory-installed armor on military vehicles. We care infinitely about each American life.

Yet, we refer to the Iraqi civilians killed by our $60,000 smart-bombs as collateral damage! They don’t even have human names! We regard them not as human beings but as damage statistics. But in reality they are fathers and mothers, children and grandparents. Their deaths have impacts for generations.

Armies know they must destroy any notion of the sanctity of the enemies’ lives. How could soldiers possibly destroy people they imagine as real, as being just like their brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers? That’s the precise reason the Nazis finally developed the gas chambers. The Nazis began the process of extermination of Jews by gassing people with carbon monoxide in the backs of vans and shooting people in Eastern Europe. But the up-close slaughter was too personal, and sickened even Nazi soldiers. They needed the less personal gas chambers, with Jewish slaves to remove the bodies, so the slaughter didn’t nauseate the Germans and make them question the murdering.

And we Americans prefer to kill from the air so that we do not have to confront the human faces of those blown to bits. To willfully take life we must refuse to admit our enemy’s inherent human individuality and dignity.

The world-wide-web is called that for a reason! The human family is becoming interconnected in a spider’s web of relationships. How could I send my son to slay the son of the man I talk to weekly about our mutual love for a hobby? The 20th century was about anonymous death and vapid life. The 21st century must be about encounter: webs of individually established relationships that truly matter: with the coming technology, people have faces and names once again. Now, here is where we come in. It must become our primary religious commandment to restore the face of the individual person. We are created in God’s own image; and the collective face of humanity approximates the face of God. On the subject of interfaith dialogue Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “What unites us? … Our being accountable to God, our being objects of God’s concern, precious in God’s eyes.” The primary religious task must become purposefully encountering and recognizing the face of the other, establishing peace as the assumption of all of our actions. This is the religious revolution of our age.

In the new era, our mindset for every decision must be not for revenge, as with Iraq, not for retaliation, but for human dignity and recognition, leading to peace. We are birthing a world in which acknowledging God means acknowledging the primacy of the divine image stamped into the face of humanity. Any religion that does not establish that will become suspect in people’s minds; a world in which religions work cooperatively to achieve world peace.

What happens in the United States matters because we are the principle arms supplier to the world. To the extent the United States refuses war and supplying armaments, the world becomes a much more peaceful place. In the new world the first commandment becomes the psalmist’s proclamation: Who desires life? Keep far from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it. (Ps. 34:15)

What did the psalmist mean, “Seek peace and pursue it?” It’s not enough to seek peace. Peace must become our moment to moment mindset. Every time we exchange words with another person, we are commanded to ask ourselves, “Now how do I achieve peace out of this?”

Few people questioned attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. We presume war as the response to violence. But after spending over $300 billion dollars on the way to $500 billion, after committing over 300,000 troops, after 2,000 dead American troops and over 15,000 injured, we must ask if we could have bought peace with all of those resources instead of war. Is war any longer the right tactic to attain peace?

Change, like healing, grows in small increments. Begin with the smallest of movements. Every interaction in our personal lives – with children, family, friends – should reflect the desire for peace. To do so we must consciously encounter the other. We have failed as religious people not because we have not filled libraries with doctrinal statements of what God wants for every ritual. We Jews have perfected the intricacies of selecting dates for holy days and when to bow in prayer, of when to stand and when to sit in worship. But do we religious people equally know the intricacies of peace? We have failed as religious people because we have failed to keep God in our hearts at every moment, for were God a present reality how could we commit so much money, so much of ourselves, to slaughtering the image of God in the world? We take the easy way out by killing to establish peace.

There is a Hasidic story of a rabbi on his way to a new town. He comes across a young boy whom he asks for directions. The boy inquires, “Would you like to take the long short way or the short long way?” The rabbi doesn’t entirely understand the question, but the long short way sounds best. The boy directs the rabbi down a road, and the rabbi moves happily along a lovely path, until he arrives at the outermost limits of the town. There he finds a sheer, rocky ledge and the town surrounded by a seemingly impenetrable wall. Recognizing that he could not possibly scale the cliff let alone surmount the wall, the rabbi returns on the path he just traversed. Finding the same boy at the same spot the rabbi said, “I asked you how to get to the town. Why did you deceive me?” The boy said, “I didn’t deceive you. You chose the long short way. You must have really wanted the short long way.” Declaring war is the long short way to peace. It won’t get us to our destination.

What does the psalmist mean, “To seek peace AND pursue it?” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” Just as we cannot achieve peace by means of war, so we cannot achieve peace between nations without making peace ourselves with individuals, because only when peace instead of war is our knee-jerk mindset will we be capable of achieving peace between nations.

This new century presents a gift from God. The new era depends upon personal connections, upon people speaking heart to heart and standing shoulder to shoulder before they go eyeball to eyeball. The key is crossing cultural, religious and national barriers to encounter the other heart and soul. The key is looking the next person in the eye when you speak. The key is hearing the tones behind your neighbor’s words, the human emotion imbedded in the thoughts and postures. In the new age, international and intercultural friendship becomes a real possibility. The short long road to peace is in each individual developing webs of personal relationships.

How did Cindy Sheehan, the mother who camped out in Crawford, Texas, capture the attention of the world? She was only a single individual who lost a single son, one of 2,000 American soldiers already killed in this conflict. Why did she matter so that she has become the center of a movement? Because Cindy Sheehan personalized death. She gave death a human face. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that we live in an age that depersonalizes the personal. (ibid. p. 295) The Bush administration tried to prevent soldiers’ caskets returning from Iraq from being photographed in order to depersonalize death, because they know that giving death a human face makes death and war unbearable. The god of war sits astride the depersonalization of death.

The transition to the assumption of peace will likely be no easier than Abraham convincing the world of a monotheistic universe. So, too, impediments to peace are everywhere. Peace is not the natural human state. The Bible forbids grudges and vengeance because humans are naturally vengeful. We are self-centered and greedy. We have to be trained to believe that what we want does not come first in human priorities just because we want it. Naturally selfish people, we are willing to rationalize killing to achieve national goals like securing our oil supply. I shudder to think that America killed little children in bombings, and parents cried pitifully, so that we could avoid paying $4 a gallon for gasoline. We have such high regard for our own children, and so little regard for the children of others.

After Hiroshima we anguished that we might destroy the world with atomic weapons. Yet we produced thousands of atomic and nuclear bombs. We work against our own welfare. We refuse to cut our fuel or wealth consumption in the United States to protect the world environment and insure an adequate supply of oil by conservation. Denying reality, we insist that the long-short way is best, right up until we arrive at the cliff and the wall, and we fail to achieve our goal of peace. We literally pour trillions, not billions anymore, but trillions of dollars down the unnecessary endless rat hole of war.

Yet, new historical forces push the world toward the interconnectedness that will make peace ultimately inevitable. Whether people of faith will join the struggle early or late becomes a major issue in terms of how rapidly we can move in the direction God intends: to live peacefully worldwide.

It now becomes necessary to declare: the basis of peace will be crossing the barriers that divide us as people. As intensive as this is, as unlikely as it seems, world peace can only be built one encounter, one relationship at a time. And this is the real reason I am here with you today. With 6 billion people in the world it seems impossible. But this web will be built not by a single spider, but by billions of human beings who create spider webs of interconnections, taking a human interest in other people: one at a time.

You know what is so intriguing about the new age? God sent a new technological development that connects people, and that they have become obsessed with desiring to do. You don’t have to convince people to use the internet. Where 20th century anonymity drove us apart, the web and globalization bring us together.

The role of religion thus becomes radically new: to hear the other. We now are principally commanded to know the soul of the stranger. The skill that will save us is the ability to truly hear and respond to what the other is saying. The command, “Seek peace and pursue it” cannot be accomplished without fulfilling the command to know the soul of the stranger.

For instance, Christians sincerely presume that their religious responsibility is to preach the gospel to non-Christians. It’s a matter of lovingly extending salvation to those who are unsaved. When that is done to Jews, Jews understand the sharing of the gospel as an attempt to destroy the Jewish people. Jews take unanticipated gospel preaching as a high-handed assault on Judaism from theological boors.

Bridging the gap between theological approaches requires listening intently to the heart-felt beliefs coming from separate images of God. Given the culture of religious chauvinism in the United States today, this is not likely to be immediately successful, and certainly not easy. But our Talmud says all beginnings are difficult, and a millennial change how much the more so.

We needed the anonymous death and destruction of the 20th century to bring us to this place. Historic forces have brought us here. Why must war be our first assumption upon being attacked? Do we feel commanded to achieve vengeance, or peace? Does God live in our doctrinal books, or does God live in our hearts and our relations with people? Are we open to a new direction, to God calling us in real time, in our own lives, to move toward the goal of history? The living God commands us to seek peace, to pursue peace, to choose life. The forces that lead away from annihilation in the twentieth century, from the killing fields of Asia and Africa, and the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz, command a new way. Jews, Christians and Muslims, all religions, need to learn to hear and respond with respect for the dignity of the other.

The technology of the internet establishes new cultural forces, the spark in kindling from which a bonfire of peace can flame forth. Do we have the vision and courage to fan the flame, beginning with our own listening intently to each neighbor, to our spouses, to our children, to our parents, to our friends, and then finally, to the other? More essentially, can we hear the voice of God demanding that we not just appreciate peace, but pursue peace to the ends of the earth, recognizing the dignity of every human being? God is sending us a message as the prophet Zechariah proclaimed: “On that day God shall be one, and God’s name shall be one” (Zechariah 14:9)– and one humanity will unite in God’s name.