A Soulful Journey

When I was young I was taught being Jewish meant: You don’t cross picket lines, You work for peace, You fight for social justice, You never forget the suffering of your people as a link to the suffering of others.”  - Sabrina Virgo While  this is true  Judaism  so much more vast than this.

American Jews are “the only ethnic group who earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto-Ricans.” – Milton Himmelfarb

"A youth should ever be in the position of change and revolt.  However, if he stays in his former self he goes from revolt to revolting." -anonymous

“If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart and if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no head.” -Winston Churchill Some things are predictable.   One of them is growth.   We change as we age.   Hopefully.

Idea: It is good to change as we learn. There’s an old expression that says, “A conservative is a liberal that’s been mugged, and a civil libertarian is a conservative that’s been indicted.” Question: Is it self-centered to develop a world view based solely on the bad things that happen to us?

Why is that we take sides?   Why do people have to choose a party or name for themselves? Or feel compelled to place a label on others? “I often think it’s comical How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!” - Gilbert and Sullivan, “Iolanthe” As usual, the team of Gilbert and Sullivan make fun of the all-too-human proclivity to make trouble for itself.   Instead of taking an issue, mulling it over, and making a decision, we seem to prefer taking sides, choosing to identify “us” against “them”?   Must we?  Why do we continue to identify people so?

Time changes all things.   We are not exempt.   Time changes us in profound and sometimes unimaginable ways.   What was once critical becomes irrelevant.   What was meaningless becomes a cause célèbre. “A man who is not a liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a conservative at sixty has no head.”   - Benjamin Disraeli