Thursday, June 11, 2020
Little things that make a BIG
difference
Ken Spiro
The famous 19th-century British missionary and
explorer, David Livingstone, once wrote “It wasn’t the lions and tigers that
got us, it was the gnats.” (He died of malaria in 1873 in what is today
Zambia). The point he was making was
very powerful: sometimes, and often unexpectedly, it’s the little things that
make the biggest difference.
This past winter humanity got a big dose of that lesson with
the Covid19 pandemic. The world was faced with something it hadn’t seen in a
hundred years. The last time this happened was between 1918 and 1920 when the
Great Influenza, also known as the Spanish Flu, struck. That pandemic was far, far worse than
Covid19. An estimated 500 million were
infected and between 50 and possibly up to 100 million people may have died. In 1918 the world was deeply divided and
fighting what was the first of the great conflicts of the 20th
century- World War I (Some historians believe that the virus actually ended the
war prematurely as the German army lacked enough healthy troops to launch their
final great offensive.)
Covid19 was a very different experience. There was no world
war and no taking sides. In many sci-fi movies: War of the Worlds,
Independence Day, Battle: Los Angeles, nations put their differences aside and
unite to fight off the existential threat of an alien invasion. But this winter
the enemy came from within. In the space of a few weeks, virtually every
country on the planet was under attack.
It took a microscopic virus to do it, but suddenly everything else was
out of the news and the entire human race, with a lot of help from the internet
and the mainstream media, was all on the same page, focused on the same threat
and working together to win the war against an unseen enemy that threatened the
whole world.
This could well have been the silver lining in this terrible
event-a tiny virus pushed the world into an awareness of our shared
vulnerability and the need to work together for a common good. The enemy did
not recognize borders and didn’t care about race or creed. It was the human
race versus Covid19.
The death of George Floyd changed everything. Literally
overnight difference was in the spotlight and difference was sowing division
and disunity especially in America, where the country was suddenly ripping
itself apart-more divided then it has been for a half-century. Black Lives Matter and “white privilege” were
all over the internet and mainstream media.
Science tells us that ALL human beings share 99.9%
genetically identical. Between you and me and everyone else on the planet,
there is .01% physiological difference.
Anthropology teaches us that all homo sapiens (The fancy scientific term
for humans which in Latin means “wise man”) originated in the same place
(Africa) and migrated over millennia to all corners of the planet. The racial differences we see today: Caucasoid (white), Negroid (Black), Mongoloid (Oriental), etc.
are all a by-product of a long period of separation and adaptation to different
geographic areas and climates. Bottom
line, the superficial difference in the color of our skin, hair and eyes aside, we
really are all part of one giant extended family and are remarkably similar to
one another.
The origins of this understanding
of common ancestry go way back before modern science. 3,700 years ago, in The Middle East, a man named Abraham brought a radically transformative concept
into the world-one God - the infinite creator of the universe and the father of
all humanity. The beginning narrative in
the Bible, the story of Adam and Eve, makes a foundational point that all
humanity shares common physical and spiritual origins and despite any
differences in our appearance, there is fundamental equality amongst all of
us.
Abraham’s mission was not only to teach the
world about one God but also to teach the world about one common destiny-a
world living in harmony, united by universal, God-given values and principles. That,
in a nutshell, is the Jewish, messianic vision for humanity.
It took thousands of years, but this concept
of ethical monotheism transformed the vision and values of the world and served
as an ideological foundation for the political evolution of much of modern
civilization as clearly stated in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence of
the United States:
“WE hold these Truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit
of Happiness.”
In practice, it didn’t work out exactly as preached. The majority of the Founding Fathers,
including Thomas Jefferson, were slave owners, and its practical implementation
has proven to be a long, hard, uphill struggle, but this statement enshrined
the concept of equality as the fundamental principle of liberal democracy.
The Jewish
people - the nation tasked with the unique responsibility of teaching the world
these concepts- have also not always found it easy to practice what they
preached. Fractiousness and divisiveness have plagued the Jewish people for
millennia. We all know the joke about a
Jew, stranded on a desert island, who builds two synagogues-one he prays in and
one he refuses to enter. We have spent
way too much time focusing on what divides us: Reform. Conservative, Orthodox,
Ashkenazi, Sephardi, etc. and not enough on what unites us. We must always remember that Jew-haters make no
such distinctions-In Auschwitz there was only one line and one final
destination for all of us.
Maybe all
the recent events that have so shaken up our world should serve as a warning
and a wake-up call that we all need to make a paradigm shift in how we look at
ourselves and others. Rather than focus on difference which only leads to
divisiveness, we must start to focus on how much we all share and how much we
all have in common. Maybe the Jewish people, who first introduced these concepts
to the human race, should make the first move.
Perhaps it
is fitting to close with the words of the great Rabbi Akiva, in The Ethics
of the Fathers. They are as relevant
today as when they were first written almost 2,000 years ago:
“Beloved is man for he was created
in the image [of God]. Especially beloved is he for it was made known to him
that he had been created in the image [of God], as it is said: “for in the
image of God He made man” (Genesis 9:6). Beloved are Israel in that they
were called God’s children… as it is
said: “you are children of the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 14:1). Beloved are Israel in
that a precious vessel was given to them [the Torah]. Especially beloved are
they for it was made known to them that they were given a precious vessel
through which the world was created, as
it is said: “for I give you good instruction; forsake not my Torah” (Proverbs 4:2).
Labels: Little things that make a BIG difference
# posted by The View from Jerusalem @ 6/11/2020 
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