[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Once Again

Once again we're up against it: in Mumbai and in the Middle East, people 
are increasing the sum total of the world's suffering. At least in Mumbai, 
it doesn't seem to be turning into a tit-for-tat eye-for-an-eye revenge 
business; there have been, so far as I know, no retaliatory bombings. And 
Muslims turned out to donate blood, denounce the train bombings, and reach 
out to their shattered Hindu neighbours -- something that always raises my 
hopes. Behavior like this is a comfort to our Creator.

But in the Middle East, tit-for-tat is going full blast, and the rest of us 
are watching, feeling helpless and wanting very badly to knock heads 
together until some common sense gets in. I'm not going to take sides, 
neither "Israel good, Hezbollah bad" nor the other way around. All 
concerned are behaving in ways that can only make things worse, and the 
reactivity on both sides is right through the ceiling.  I want to yell out 
my mother's old line when my sisters and I fought: "I don't care who 
started it; stop it NOW!"

They won't. We can talk about pre-emption and like concepts, but I believe 
the key word here is "reactivity". When we're being reactive, our 
hindbrains are firing off like crazy; we're being run by ancient hardwiring 
that thinks only of the moment, not the future. It's our response to what 
we perceive as immediate and serious threat. It's the same wiring that 
gives rise to panic. Everything rational, predictive, thoughtful, and 
commonsensical goes out the window: what truly runs us is rage and fear. 
The knowledge of good and evil doesn't exist in the hindbrain. It lacks 
that sophistication. It doesn't think; it merely acts.

Interesting -- our acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil is 
(according to Genesis) what first makes us stumble out of innocent Eden 
into the painful world. There's a presupposition there that we were, in the 
beginning, innocent, whole and holy, integrated and undivided, and that 
learning about the separation of good and evil was a sort of contagion that 
caused all the ills of this world. It's a powerful and attractive image: 
that we began in God, trusting God to know good from evil, and that when we 
lost that trust, trying to take God's place, we fell.

There's a possible different reading, though: that we humans begin not in 
the innocence of angels, but in the innocence of  animals. My cats, 
hunting, have no understanding that they inflict fear and suffering upon 
the mice they bring home; they're operating on pure instinct, as is the 
hawk dropping from the sky or the heron striking long-necked into the 
water. My cats too have hindbrains, which govern their behaviour as needed: 
the hiss, the growl, the laid-back ears, the fluffed tail, the wild-eyed 
tearing run for safety. But it's not in their nature to understand that 
there is good and evil and to take any responsibility for their 
actions.  Cats are, in that sense, entirely innocent. The hindbrain of the 
cat is a very practical matter. Hindbrains generally are.

But we aren't cats; we do have some of the character of fallen angels. 
Whether we got here by being fallen from perfection or by slowly emerging 
into consciousness from our hominid forebears, we still find ourselves in 
the middle. We are creatures whose hindbrains can still send us off in 
dizzying directions, but we are also creatures born "to do justice, and to 
love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God".

It's not an either-or; it's a both-and. We are both prisoners of our 
reactive hindbrains *and* called into freedom by love and justice. There's 
an old Aboriginal saying that we each have two wolves, a wolf of fear and 
anger and vindictiveness, and a wolf of harmony, justice, and peace. The 
question is which wolf we feed.

Right now, the Middle East is feeding its own darkness; it has turned away 
from God's walk and is plunging deeper and deeper into hindbrain behaviour, 
without regard for the immediate or long-term consequences, which are 
appalling. Hindbrain behaviour may save us in the moment, but it doesn't 
get us far in the long run. We were given the knowledge of good and evil to 
keep ourselves from running on sheer instinct -- to transcend our 
reactivity and govern ourselves in love, not fear and anger.

When my own hindbrain goes "kerblooey!" (and yes, it sometimes does) it is 
my duty to my Creator to take a deep breath, go for a walk, consciously get 
my reactivity down, do some modest reality-checks, consider the long-term 
consequences, and then address whatever set me off, as calmly as I can, in 
love and in justice. I don't always manage that. But I still believe it's 
still the way to go.