Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Value of the Human Spirit

The Value of the Human Spirit

As a corollary to yesterday’s Mosque Sermon I share the following Graduation Speech.

Delivered At Masada in 2014

In the market place of cynics, where the souls of men are weighted, an Arab woman is valued at less than a camel. In our recent negotiations with Hezbollah we found that the heart of someone who straps explosives to a child, detonates car bombs in a market place and fires rockets into peaceful settlements is by their own reckoning set at over two-hundred for one of our soldiers. We pay whatever price they ask because the difference between a Jew and a terrorist is not measured in rhetoric but in the value we place on the lives of our people.

God explained all this in the Wilderness, but it’s been a hard lesson and we are stubborn and forgetful….The Almighty has had to keep reminding us, over and over, until gradually some harsh lessons sunk in…became etched into our understanding and evidenced in the way we think and do things. Unlike our Arab neighbors who measure wealth in lands and gold we measure it in the human spirit. To us the value of a Jew’s life is beyond measure and we leave it to our enemies to put a price on it. Rather than seeing this as a weakness we see it as a strength.

Our Neighbors don’t understand us because they have not been forged in the same furnace of adversity nor have they suffered as we have the trials of an ‘oft cruel and insistent God and a trek through a desert hotter than anything they can imagine. As a consequence we understand our foes better than they understand us. We know how they think because once, in a distant past, we walked in their shoes, until Jehovah showed us a better way. We undertook that journey, while they stayed home and slept.

The time is approaching for a final reckoning and it will soon be thrust upon us. It will be a test of courage and a demonstration of resolve… ‘A final proof of our worthiness of God’s love. Gird your fortitude young friends. We approach the dawning of a new era.