A Soulful Journey

"For you as a citizen everything.  For you as a Jew nothing." -Napoleon It was Napoleon's dream to have an empire where all were equal.  Is this possible?

"When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and stars that You set in place, What is man that You are mindful of him, Mortal man that You take note of him? Yet You have made him little less than the angels And adorned him with glory and majesty?"  - Psalm 8:3-5 All of us, even those we dislike are made in the same image.

"I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a man which is not equally so in a woman." - Jonathan Swift When the world knows and acknowledges this, it will be a better place.

"I am inferior to any man whose rights I trample underfoot." -Horace Greeley As timeless as Torah are Horace Greeley's words.  Too bad he is less famous for this statement than for "Go west, young man, go west."

A. Lawford Lowell, Harvard’s president from 1909-1923 once remarked that if Jews were admitted they would “be overcome with and oblivion to the fact that they were Jews, even though all the Gentiles were perfectly aware that they were Jews.” Are these the words of an anti-Semite or prophet?

Alsatians complained to Napoleon that local Jews were ruining them through usury.   Napoleon answered their complaints on April 30, 1806 when he told the Imperial Council it was “dangerous to allow so large a preponderance of the Jews, who constitute a state within a state, in a part of the French empire bordering on the territories of its enemies.” His solution?   Instead of further segregating or persecuting the Jews Napoleon advocated a novel idea: equality and opportunity.

Torah is quite clear about rules of justice. Like the American icons of justice, t is supposed to be blind. Some favor the poor while others lean towards the rich. The Torah commands a rule of equality. One of the members of the Rothschild family spent a weekend on a small farm in the country. When the owner gave him the bill he was startled to see how much was charged. “What? Four francs for an egg? Have you such a scarcity of eggs?” “Not of eggs,” replied the owner, “but we have a scarcity of Rothschilds.”