Monthly Archives: May 2014

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FTAC – Focusing on Dictatorship

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology

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As dictatorships inspire or motivate conflicts worldwide, it may be worth taking a moment to delve into the psychology involved. Getting a handle on “malignant narcissism”, “narcissistic supply”, “narcissistic mortification” and similar other terms may help open some windows and let in some insight into how cycles of despotism and subjugation come about, how they work, and why they are so difficult to diminish.

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In political psychology, one might find the principles simple enough but the machinery complex and difficult to take apart and rebuild.

As much may characterize the experiences of the states now collected under the rubric “Arab Spring” and those continuing to suffer along within systems of corruption, despotism, and patronage.

To readers even loosely in the field, whether in academe or, as I seem to be, in pseudo-academe, a model like, oh let’s just make one up, “dictatorship –> narcissism –> political and social control of others –> sadism” may beg a “so what else you got?” but what informs that apprehension may not be universal: do the subjugated know that those they have entrusted with their destiny are actually using them to abet their own aggrandizement and glorification?

Have those in the path of a Bashar al-Assad (there are many like him today) understand what echo in themselves facilitates his progress while compromising their own in their efforts to defend their people.

In the olden days, one could flee a troubled space, wander around lost for a while, perhaps create a more congenial environment for one’s own, but in a world compressed intellectually by the system on which you are reading this and physically by jets and supertankers and superhighways, where is the someplace else?

Well, there is a someplace else: the language of the mind, i.e., that which informs political concepts, including self-concept and ideas about others plus ideas about the world.

The Internet has brought about the appearance of a new global intelligentsia — with Facebook buddies from Riyadh to Islamabad, I think I can support that suggestion — and if we can take a firm step where the dynamics of dictatorship are concerned, we might allay, diminish, or eliminate much sorrow otherwise guaranteed by our ignorance with regard to a basic political and social psychology concept.

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“Mohammed Dajani Speaks on Refusing to Be A Bystander”

18 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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“Mohammed Dajani Speaks on Refusing to Be A Bystander”

Related: WASATIA: The Middle Road

Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi is the al-Quds University professor who has taken Palestinian students to Auschwitz, and been mightily criticized for it from within the anti-Semitic ranks of extremist and far left Palestinian advocacy.

Related: “Why Palestinians Should Learn About the Holocaust”; and by Robert Staloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (2006).

 

FTAC – On Ambivalence in Scripture and the ‘Humanity of Humanity’

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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I call that other force “the humanity of humanity” but while hoping the same aggregates toward the middle, mild, and moderate one also confronts immense cowardice and lethargy in the face of violent ambition. At one point, for example, an estimated 10,000 al-Shabaab fighters making a mess in Somalia had displaced, in effect, some 1.25 million Somalis to camps in Kenya and to make-do camps around Mogadishu. How is it the same were not organized — governed, self-governing — to stop “The Youth” in their tracks at first appearance? Of course, political anarchy and the individual interests of competing warlords and such then maintained conditions for an AQ-type landing or development.

Each of the societies hosting what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” exists with an incoherence sufficient to keep its destructive miscreants in business — and in business with money supply drawn from combinations of criminal activities (“narcoterrorism”) and rogue but princely largesse.

Ambivalent or difficult injunctive text may be neutral in the manner of a Rorschach — it maintains many things corresponding to the innate character of the reader, and it’s the reader that drives the character of the text into some kind of social reality.

I’m loath to reflect here on commands, demands, and judgments in scripture but may suggest for improved relations and peace that open and far ranging discussion — whatever it is, drag it out into the sun and let’s have a look at it together — may be the best aid in navigating OUR way toward something better.

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My old rabbi, a conservative with a lefty past, said he liked Reform Judaism because it “forces you to think”.

Perhaps some of us who read the Torah fresh find that it neither directs nor instructs but more often puzzles and thereby asks that we bring as much as we may to understanding something that we have just experienced through it.  In effect, and running on very little familiarity with the five books, my close reading of the Adam and Eve story would suggest it is not about the “loss of innocence” and very far from “original sin”: instead, it’s about the gift and onset of human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience.  God says to Eve that if she eats of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she will die, and the snake tells her she won’t die — and they have both told the truth!

What Eve does with that bite of the apple is transform.

Not to go on with that exegesis here, the point is the story refuses to dictate its message.

Moreover, if one chooses to do a close-reading crawl through the two well-known sections (Genesis 2 and 3), one may discover many puzzles in the way of comprehension: why, for example, does the snake mention just one tree to Eve when there are two — the other is the Tree of Life — planted in same place?  The Church, for another example, may connect the fig leaves with shame, but why not mutual regard, for, when it comes to dressing for success, God sews for his two daring children — whom He is about to dispatch into human life — their first useful and protective clothing?

And so it goes.

The effect on the mind: deep aggravation and perturbation.

Should not God have told us about how we’re supposed to live?

Oh no — that would have been too easy and perhaps too cruel: we are forced instead to think through our way and the way ahead.

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FTAC – On The Preoccupation

13 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Political Psychology

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“It is ridiculous that Israel opens Jerusalem for foreign tourists, while millions of Palestinian Christians and Muslims are being banned from entering their occupied capital,” said Nabil Shaath, a confidant of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.” —  We humans do ourselves in with our mouths, and our mouths do in others through their ears.  When hate is the cause, the cause is poison, the body politic, should it care to care for itself, takes appropriate measures.

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Inspiration for that thought: Pomegranate: The Middle East.  “Caught in the middle: Christians in Israel-Palestine.”  Blog.  The Economist, May 12, 2014.

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Nora Berend: Monuments and Memory

13 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Eva S. Balogh's avatarHungarian Spectrum

The reader should imagine a memorial plaque on the wall of a house: ‘From this house 36 people, including 10 children, were deported in March 1944, with the active participation of the Hungarian government, and murdered in Auschwitz, because they were born Jewish. Let us never forget them.’ And imagine similar plaques not once, but over and over again: on the houses where murdered Jews lived; on every school that the murdered Jewish children used to attend before they were deported; on every public building from which state officials helped the deportation; at every train station where the deported were forced into the wagons.

In Hungary, this is purely imaginary, but in Paris, it is reality. Some examples. ‘Over 6100 children were arrested in Paris with their families by the police forces of the Vichy government, the accomplice of the occupying Nazis; they were murdered in Auschwitz because they were…

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Shaykh Shpendim Nadzaku To Serve as Imam for the Islamic Association of North Texas

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Religion

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THE “COOL” WAHHABIS. A modernized, “cool” offshoot of the conservative Wahhabi-Salafi Dar-us-Salaam (in Maryland, USA) that later transformed into a full-fledged organization of its own, the al-Maghrib Institute and its affiliates now attract more followers by making Wahhabism look less closed-minded and more open-minded and “doable” in modern society (US, UK, etc.). Beneath the paraphernalia, however, is the same ugly accusations of “shirk” and “kufr” against the majority of Muslims . . . .

http://sunni1.wordpress.com/purpose-of-this-blog/ – circa 2012.

The “cool Wahhabis” must have won a round or two, for “sunni1.wordpress” appears to have stopped publishing about the al-Maghrib organizations in March of 2012.

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Shaykh Shpendim Nadzaku is an inspiration to all those who are starting their knowledge-seeking late. He did not grow up learning Arabic or the Qur’an; in fact he went to the Islamic University of Madinah with only a few short Surahs memorized.

http://ruhma.almaghrib.org/instructors/shpendim-nadzaku#profile – n.d.

Section Update – September 10, 2018

The above link has been discovered defunct, and so after so many years dimmed for viewing.  Nothing has been made up out of nothing, earlier or later, so BackChannels wishes not to send the section (in Orwellian fashion) down the “memory hole”.  This adjustment has been made because traffic has risen for this page, which has long pulled two to a few looks a day, and the editor thought to have a look at it.  It appears as much was done in 2015 as well.

In addition: the “sunn1.wordpress” page’s most “recent” post appears to have been published March 6, 2012 — “NEW! Yaser Birjas says: Muslims can eat chicken in fast-food restaurants in America”, so the blog appears also abandoned.  Its information was but two years old when this post was developed; it is now six years old. Moreover, Sunni1’s “About” page leads to an indeterminate “Muhammad”, so one shy BackChannels (in 2014) has no way today of reaching the source blog’s author for a chat.  😦

Finally, and now from “long ago” — a day on the World Wide Web can be a long day, and four years (is that all it has been?) may feel like a decade or more — BackChannels impression had been that Turkish imam Yusuf Kavakchi had “retired” from his mosque in a hasty manner without fanfare.  Who knows why?  Appointed in his place not too long thereafter: a Macedonian born American raised in New Jersey and for his profession educated at the Islamic University of Madinah. 

Section Update – October 21, 2015

The cited URL is defunct: this location, however, continues to provide a paragraph — search the page — about Shaykh Nadzaku: https://sunni1.wordpress.com/al-maghrib-institute-exposed/ —

“Shaykh Shpendim Nadzaku has an intriguing name that roots back to an intriguing country reflecting his even more intriguing character. Born in 1973 to Albanian parents in the beautiful city of Ohrid Macedonia, his parents immigrated to America when he was just a year old. He was raised in New Jersey and soon took to the UNIVERSITY OF MADINAH where he graduated from the College of Shariah in 2001. He was contemporary to our other instructors from Madinah, Shaykhs Mohammad Alshareef and Yasir Qadhi.” 

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Alhamdulillah! The Boards of IANT are pleased to announce that inshaAllah Sheikh Shpendim Nadzaku will be joining the IANT community as our Imam and Resident Scholar from mid-June. May Allah SWT bless him and his family and make their move to our community a blessed one.

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Related: Islamic Association of North Texas.

Related on BackChannels: Richardson, Texas – Imam Leaves Dallas Central Mosque, Quietly.

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My sources sometimes nudge me toward domestic events, and I remind right back that . . . what happens in America in the the imam’s / priest’s / rabbi’s office stays there, rattles around in there, makes waves or shakes it up in there, but outside of the church, mosque, or synagogue no one cares unless or until something really bad — worth going to jail for — happens in connection with it.

Add: and no smart imam / priest / rabbi should care today to play an Anwar al-Aulaki / Holy Land Trust  / Weather Underground, etc., role in his or her church / mosque / synagogue.

The Dallas Central Mosque’s former imam, the esteemed Yusuf Kavakci, returned without fanfare — actually, without public notice — to Turkey the week ending October 12, 2013 according to my then surprised and baffled source.   The Muslim pluralist universalist on the spot, Mike Ghouse, wrote of the event the following week as if it were happening as he composed the farewell.

Hmm.

The moment remains ever curious: after more than two decades of continuous service, why the swift flight to Istanbul by the former imam?

Be that mystery as it may, seven  month’s later: congratulations are due Shaykh Shpendim Nadzaku, whom it appears will pick up the reins at IANT come June.

Addendum

Mike Ghouse’s original has disappeared from its primary space at Blogger’s “worldmuslimcongress”, which is why I chose an alternative link; however, after some reading through that location and some searching, I found it appearing on Ghouse’s “The Ghouse Diary”: “Great Imam of Dallas, Dr. Yusuf Zia Kavakci Retires” (October 17, 2013).

The cute, well known, and naughty travel slogan, “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” applies everywhere in business of every sort in the U.S. until whatever has happened in Vegas has made its way into a report on a police blotter.

Count that a good thing.

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FTAC – On Boko Haram and the Ghost Army

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Books, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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The assembly of “Islamic Jihad” beneath or sharing the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah banners effectively goad Islam to wake and stand from the center of its humanity and for the rest of the world with Islam to bond across the center.

It’s not going well in or around the hot conflict zones.

The center has not held.

The persistence, strength, and viability of dictatorship on general terms (e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) has not waned; the want of Arab Muslim exclusivity in a war of all against all (possibly 90 percent of the schoolgirls kidnapped were Christian and “fight them . . . jizya . . . humbled” alone would have sufficed for license) has been powered up by energy earnings the west wants to recover in trade; and no bonded army of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others has appeared in the field with the possible exceptions of U.S. / NATO intervention — post-Enlightenment secular states operating armies reflective of their national and international make-up — and an expansion of western buy-in creating or strengthening helpful alliance, e.g., Israel-India with moderation and modification in the Muslim-majority states, e.g., Pakistan and Turkey.

China’s not far outside of all of this either — it too has a vested interest in dictatorship while it’s issues with Islam on its flanks seems well managed enough for brushing aside. China’s role is “the money”, and it has been doing business with its eyes closed (e.g., as in Sudan) except where an absolute authoritarianism similar to its own has been challenged.

Perhaps as Uncle Sam has learned — and one way of the other, however’s he’s set up, whoever his handlers, if he has them, Obama knows — fighting Boko Haram isn’t about money alone: it’s about something in the concept of a “common humanity” that needs to surface, discover affinity and “common cause”, and then work to diminish the challenges and disruptions posed by so many “malignant narcissists” parading beneath so many banners — and with language fitted to the support of their too lofty contempt.

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I had really set out this morning to take a glance at political psychology, narcissism, and the role played by contempt in states of affairs (because to the criminally elevated, contempt both defends the damaged and feels good besides).  However, in the way of life online with Facebook, the deflections and distractions are the first things met.

On sorting the political psychology, I got as far as “discovering” Macalester Bell, who last year published the book title for the age: Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt (Oxford UP, 2013).  The Oxford price appears half that of the Amazon hardcover quote, so maybe, but not right now . . . what’s really needed here (in western Maryland) is a brick-and-mortar conflict and peace studies library with a wing devoted to political psychology (anyone want to talk?).

Be that as it may, other intelligent work showed up quick on the radar: from Canada, Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile, a novel developed around the experience of anti-Semitism on campus.

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Talmud teaches the need for many voices. The Gemara takes us on a journey of debates through the centuries, deconstructing the smallest detail-pilpul. In the Talmud we are given the majority as well as the minority view to examine. Some of the comments may cause discomfort-but so be it, as we are a people judged by our actions, not our feelings.

Bederman, Diane Weber.  “The Second Catastrophe”.  The Times of Israel, May 11, 2014.

“The Awesome Conversation”, which name I’ve given the Facebook chatyping but may well extend that idea to Google+ and every other platform for cultural and political salon, hosts all voices, some perhaps more predominantly loathed than others, but it’s important that they are heard as censorship knows only the ends, ultimately, of the censorious, whom, if self-appointed, may be themselves The Problem.

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The “Ghost Army” — that’s the Russian Army that should have intervened in Syria to modify the Assad regime and bring Syria toward democracy without wildly altering its demographics.

Instead: “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” have risen to the defense of absolutism, well demonstrating that the dictator had an army and a mixed host of moderate revolutionary and Islamic extremist revolutionaries could raise armies but not sort their differences toward a robust common sense of cause.  A fair portion of the millions of Syrians stranded between hotheads have been made the casualties and refugees of general warfare, and while they may enjoy an army of NGOs and experienced refugee camp administrators, the same would seem still incoherent as to ends (including the want of destroying Israel, which anti-Semitic raving no longer suffices for social bonding) and unable to wrest back their lands from either the heartless dictator or the vacuous Islamist.

The ghost army in Nigeria has form — at least there is an army to deploy against Boko Haram — but it may not have yet the virtue of a passion for addressing so evil a devotion to brigandage as that displayed by Boko Loco’s criminal mentality as abetted by Qur’anic injunction: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled” (Surat 9:29).

In Loco’s upside-down world, the Loco are the righteous.

Elsewhere, from Afghanistan to Brandeis (I’m thinking about the still recent Ayaan Hirsi Ali brouhaha and the possible effects of Prince al-Waleed’s wealth) to Crimea / Ukraine, The Money would seem the morality, and armies, ghost or not, and their generals (and presidents) must be paid — or paid off — and left in power to rule as they may see fit.  That is their most personal contest (so Hitler asked famously, “Who says I am not under the special protection of God?”).   From Karzai to Yanukovych, the leaders are not all alike although the degree of their corruption may be a common issue: in real time, in “realpolitik”, what forms up in arms beneath their sway spells the future for constituents (x area-squared) affected by their ambitions, behavior, outlooks, and proclivities.

One day, perhaps, the Ghost Army will appear across the span of the Islamic Small Wars but what divisions and patrols there may be today would seem to be faltering before evil.

Reference Off to the Side

Miller, John J.  “Clash of Cultures: How donors can increase understanding of the Middle East.”  Philanthropy Roundtable, cover story republished from the July / August 2007 issue of Philanthropy Magazine.

Fox News: “New video appears to show kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls praying to Allah.”  May 12, 2014.

Spencer, Robert.  “90% of abducted Nigerian schoolgirls are Christians; jihadists released Muslim girls.”  Jihad Watch, May 11, 2014;

Fani-Kayode.  Vanguard. “Chibok Affairs: The Emerging and Uncomfortable Facts, By Fani-Kayode,” May 10, 2014:

The bitter truth is that regardless of wherever you come from, whatever your faith is and whichever side of the political divide you stand, we all have a duty to get to the bottom of this matter, join forces, close ranks, find out what is really going on and bring this nightmare to an end. We must join hands with all men and women of goodwill and, together, we must fight this insidious evil that seeks to envelop our land and overwhelm our people.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “Palestinian Authority: Combatants Against Peace.”  Gatestone Institute, May 12, 2014:

But the Palestinian Authority [PA] leadership and many Palestinians obviously don’t share this view. In fact, they see the participation of Palestinians in an event commemorating Israeli victims of violence as an act of treason.

The PA government in the West Bank — who do not miss any opportunity to tell Westerners that they remain committed to peace and coexistence with Israel — even went as far as disbanding the Palestinian branch of Combatants For Peace in June 2013.

Who has the real army?

National Post.  “‘They cut hands, cut heads, play with corpses’; Islamic extremists fighting brutal war against Kurds in Syria.”  May 11, 2013: “Residents of this new Islamist state are living in conditions of extraordinary brutality. Christians in Raqqa must pay a special tax — the jizya — in accordance with Shariah law. Anyone caught drinking alcohol is imprisoned and tortured.”

Halper, Daniel.  “#BringBackOurDignity.”  The Weekly Standard, May 12, 2014: “My editorial this week ended with a coda praising Ayaan Hirsi Ali and, in effect, daring Hillary Clinton to stand up for someone who, as the savagery of Boko Haram has reminded us, has been so right about Islamist terror.”

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan.  “Boko Haram and the Kidnapped Schoolgirls: the Nigerian terror groups reflects the general Islamist hatred of women’s rights.  When will the West wake up?”  The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2014.

Johnson, Charles.  “Nigeria Accepts Israel’s Offer to Help Find Kidnapped Girls.”  Little Green Footballs, May 11, 2014.

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FTAC – On Comparisons Between Jewish Success and the Perception of Underachievement in Islam

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics, Religion

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For the record, Alfred Nobel was a Lutheran Christian and the prize he created from making a fortune on dynamite he ordered administered by a Norwegian Nobel Peace Price Committee. (See my point)?

I have always battled this analogy between the comparatively small global community of Jews, fewer than 14 million worldwide, and the astoundingly large and varied community of Muslims, the Ummah comprising a subscription of about 1.6 billion.

Although Moses flees Egypt with the Jews and a “mixed multitude” — a note given much consideration by those who study the Torah — the fact from the beginning is the doctrine is defensive, not expansive, the people gathered out of necessity (perhaps opposition to Pharaoh may be likened to opposition to Bashar al-Assad) and existing as a people together in common cause, together in history and scattered by history, cannot be compared to either the myriad societies courted or conquered by generals Constantine and Muhammad and their like through the generations (world Christian population: 2.18 billion according to the Pew Forum).

About 1.7 million Israelis live in poverty, which in turn lends Israel the distinction of sustaining one of the highest — if not the highest — poverty rate in the developed world.

So much for having produced great wealth and disproportionate numbers in Nobel laureates: imagine 1.3 billion Jews and extrapolate accordingly if other factors were not to be brought into play.

If one is to assess a “global state of affairs for Muslims” with contemporary Jewish achievement and fortitude in mind, one may be well advised to revisit the wellspring of Jewish thought plus the near 0 CE revolution in Jewish argument and law explored by Hillel the Elder. If Jewish energies seem both more confident in the world, more resilient in the shadows of immense disasters, more free to argue, discuss, research, and discern how things work in many fields, and less obsessed with other means to power and status, it may have to do not only with intellectual behavior traced from before Moses to Hillel to Maimonides but with the progressive temperament and smaller numbers to suit or facilitate that growth.

Oppression, ironically, also places a premium on what may be carried in the mind — knowledge and relationships — and what must be abandoned (in materials, workshops, and stores) from time to time and place to place.

The embrace of humanity and values that propel Jewish accomplishment, so I believe Hillel would be the first to note, are not exclusive.

Hillel the Elder has been noted as living between 35 BCE and 10 CE but precise dates vary.

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The premise for the response “from the awesome conversation” (FTAC) seems voiced regularly from within Islam as encouragement and goad supporting education and modernization within the Ummah.  While one may suppose jealousy and resentment powerful motivators of ambitions shaped to suit individual and national self-concepts, and those emotions fit the pattern of the statement that is essentially “Jews win more Nobel Prizes than Muslims”, the comparison itself bears examining, and so I whip something together like the above (pointing out the disparities in numbers and the character of the communities involved) and the rest adds its very small dot to contemporary cultural and political influence.

My conclusion echoes what I’ve invented — distilled, proposed — and written into the column to the left: the Jews are a global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and its soul invested in the body of the Land of Israel.

More or less.

Moreover, the Jewish People share a mythos that is ancient and not “overwritten” by whatever johnny-come-lately plus ambitious writer-leaders arrived to in essence scoop up more loose human energy from the sea of humanity surrounding them in their time.

The Romans were a mixed lot by the time Jesus-Paul-Constantine arrived (over time too, but not so much by millennial standards) to sweep through the continent and establish Rome as capital of a Christian civilization.

Perhaps centuries later, Muhammad conceived of a more difficult and sudden task, i.e., the imparting of some facets of Jewish spirit as if the Jews were decadent impious cheats and himself the voice of God on Earth, perhaps fair reason, fair license, to develop pretext to inveigle, murder, and plunder the Banu Qurayza for arms, women, and the pleasure of their silence.

Jewish rejection of the new monotheist religions, each in their time, sets the stage in each for enterprise-wide supersession to be leveraged by anti-Semitic libel and slander accompanied by discrimination in law and other persecutions aided by clever (like “dhimmi status”) devices.

For squabblers (and a few malevolent narcissistic sadists) beating each other’s brains out over the matter of God’s favor, the gentle Hillel the Elder — whose life overall precedes the Christian concept and rise of Christianity but also at 0 CE — at the end of his life — approximates its inception — effectively challenges rote observance within Judaism and expands the space in law and in social relationships given to good principle founded in knowledge of the Torah.

Perhaps all of the rest has been bloody commentary as well.

Reference

Wikipedia: Hillel the Elder.

Jewish Virtual Library.  “Hillel and Shammai”.

Jewish Encyclopedia.  “Hillel”.

Telushkin, Joseph.  If Not Now, When?  Schocken, 2010.

Possibly Hillel’s Four Most Telling Epigrammatic Statements

“That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another.  That is the whole of Torah.  All of the rest is commentary.  Now go and study.”

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“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am not for others, what am I?  If not now, when?”

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“Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

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“Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and drawing them near to the Law.”

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