Torah Tales
For people who actually do it, reading the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or whatever serves as basic scripture of your faith, is both useful and helpful in the sense that it gives our life more meaning, provides focus to our thinking, our statements and our actions, and leads us into the path of the “flow” — that force greater than ourselves that moves objects, energy, and matter the universe, and presents us with events that benchmark what we choose to believe as our history.
On a more mundane level, but equally important to those of us blessed to live in the imperfect political world of the United States, frequent reading of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution would serve a similar purpose — in that these are the foundation “scriptures” of our society.
I have often said that it seems that everyone has an opinion of the Bible but few have actually read it. Fewer still have thought about it very much after reading any part of it. And still fewer have actually analyzed it enough to come to their own opinions, beliefs and perceptions about life’s meaning and what that means for them — how they will act , speak and perform in our society. The same is true about the documents written by the brilliant founders of our country, although they too were imperfect people who created a masterpiece, yet not perfection. A reading of the Declaration would reveal many similar conditions today that were recited as grounds for breaking the bonds of political relations and assuming a new government.
A reading of the constitution today would settle many heated arguments — because the answer to many vexing issues is resolved fully and with finality — like guns in the 2nd and 9th amendment, and the rights of unborn children in the 5th and 14th amendment. Simply stated, the founders made it clear that they wanted the people to have the right to bear arms in a military sense. They said so.
I don’t like guns or the proliferation of gun related violence in our country but if I want something different I either have to leave for another country where guns are not permitted, or get the support of enough people in this country to amend the constitution. It is the Supreme Law of the Land.
I don’t like the whole idea if termination of pregnancies, nor meddling in the private bodies of women I don’t know telling them what they can or cannot do. I wouldn’t want anyone to do that with my body. But the rights of the fetus do not exist under the constitution. It says so very clearly that only a person actually born in the Untied States or to a person who is a U.S. Citizen is entitled to call themselves a citizen. And only citizens have the rights of “people” described in the constitution. As with guns, the battle cry of pro-life people should be to move to a country where or create one where pregnancy terminations are illegal or to get the support of enough people to amend the constitution to make terminations illegal here.
There are many more mundane example of earthly application of reading, meditation, thinking, meditation, analysis and uncovering what is in your heart and how you can live in an imperfect society. And just as the founding documents of our great country are the supreme law of the land, even if they do not perfectly represent our conception of how a perfect society should operate, so too is the bible of your faith the supreme word of a force or forces greater than yourself as to how to exist in the real world and how to seek change by doing good deeds.
Considerable effort has gone into the completely irreconcilable question of whether the bible is literally the work of a God who created the words, the scrolls and every letter, or the work of Moses who committed it to writing as best he could, or the work of multiple personalities over centuries. The latest archeological evidence points strongly in favor of Moses being the author of the Torah. Just as the latest archeological evidence also points to the fact that a man named Jesus existed and his teachings had a powerful effect on the rest of human history.
And as with our country’s founding documents, people have tended toward spending their money and time investigating things that are actually irrelevant. We spend an inordinate amount of effort deciding the ways things should be rather than determining the way things are.
Thus we argue over who wrote the bible rather than what is in it. We speculate about what the author of the bible meant when we can decide what it means for ourselves, without some “leader” telling us. We argue over who the messiah is or will be rather than examining our own lives and whether we are acting within our concepts of right and wrong, good and evil.
In our politics, our religion and even our economics, we ignore the elephant in the living room and go about proving ourselves right on agendas that don’t matter now and will be long forgotten in less than a generation. We align ourselves with others to be part of a collective rather than to perform acts of charity and goodness. We form political parties and organizations of religions as though the organizations themselves were the point rather than acting in accordance with natural moral law.
This work, published for now over the Internet, seeks to change the dialogue from man’s search for power and people’s search of proof they are right, to the moral issue of creating meaning in our lives and meaning for our species, lest when we are shaken off by the process some call evolution and others call the will of God, we are relegated to a historical fact that some other species might or might not discover in a few million or a few billion years.
In short, I seek to stimulate the pursuit of a goal — to find out how we live love, if we will love one another in the year 2500, 3000 or 3500 A.D. or if we will exist at all having destroyed ourselves in the collapse of a grand or minor experiment created by the forces of evolution or the will of God.
Torah Tales 