Nonviolence Read Free Page B

already been made plain that God does not want people to kill each other.
    Generally Jewish holidays reject such violence. On Yom Kippur violence is among the sins for which to atone. On Passover, which celebrates Moses leading the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, there is a moment of sorrow for the Egyptians, the enemy who drowned trying to pursue the Hebrews across the Red Sea. Jews are instructed every year not to hate the Egyptians. It is a fundamental tenet of Judaism that you should not hate your enemies.
    Judaism, too, teaches of the possibility of perfection. Someday, it is said, the perfect human, the Messiah, will come and show mankind the way to perfection. By tradition, the Jews were to return to Israel only when the Messiah appeared, not following World War II. Reform Judaism does not predict a Messiah but an entire messianic age. According to the angry prophet Isaiah, at some point in the future, when God is finally listened to, nations “shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift sword against nation, nor ever again be trained for war.”
    Though most religions shun warfare and hold nonviolence as the only moral route toward political change, religion and its language have been co-opted by the violent people who have been governing societies. If someone were to come along who would not compromise,a rebel who insisted on taking the only moral path, rejecting violence in all its forms, such a person would seem so menacing that he would be killed, and after his death he would be canonized or deified, because a saint is less dangerous than a rebel. This has happened numerous times, but the first prominent example was a Jew named Jesus.

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If the force of arms is considered the only means of authority, it is not an auspicious instrument.
—LAO TSU,
the Tao te ching,fifth century B.C.
    J esus, like Mohammed after him, looked at the great complexity of Jewish law that had been layered over millennia and said that implanted in the law were certain clear precepts of right and wrong. Others offered the same clarity. Hillel, a Babylonian Jew who lived at about the same time as Jesus, also preached a message of simplicity. Like Mozi, Hillel was said to have come from particularly humble origins. He studied by climbing to the roof of the school, literally eavesdropping on lessons, because he had no money to register as a student. Hillel became the head rabbi of Palestine, from which position he constantly wrestled with the conservative rabbinate. In a stance that is unusual even today, he was extremely open to converts. One aspiring convert, apparently frustrated with the verbosity of Jewish law, challenged him to recite the Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel responded, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. The rest is commentary on this. Go and study.” Hillel's followers became the dominant political force among the Jews.
    Jesus and his followers were clearly influenced by Hillel. Hillel's summary of the Torah became Jesus' “Golden Rule” in the Sermon on the Mount: “In everything, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus taught the doctrines of Judaism. Where he differed was in priorities. As with traditional Judaism, his first priority was the love of God. But his number two was the love of man. Jesus believed that love should be given to all fellow humans unconditionally. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' most succinct sermon, which he delivered seated, in the traditional manner of a rabbi, he made clear that he did not want to reject Judaism but to revive it and have its most important laws more rigorously observed. “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.” His first example was the interdiction against killing. But he went even further. Even being angry at a fellowhuman being was a sin. In Jesus' view of