YAHH, Are You For Us or For Our Enemies?
Dear beloved chevra,
In turmoil of thought and feeling, in painful uncertainty of concern over the bodies of our beloveds in danger, and in agony of Spirit, I send you this as a possible balm of healing and a possible guide to action now or later.
With blessings of shalom,
Arthur
—
The Book of Joshua, Chapter 5: 13-15.
Now it was, when Yehoshua was at Jericho,
that he lifted up his eyes and saw:
now here, a man standing opposite him,
with his sword drawn in his hand!
Yehoshua went toward him and said to him:
Are you for us or for our enemies?
He said: No!
Rather, I am the commander of YHWH's infinities-of-energy.*
Now I have come!
Yehoshua flung himself on his face to the ground and bowed low,
and said to him:
What does my lord have to speak to his servant?
The commander of YHWH's infinities-of-energy said to Yehoshua:
Put off your sandal from your foot,
for the place on which you are standing— it is holy!
And Yehoshua did thus.
I read this to be saying:
YHWH, Yahhhh — Try to breathe those letters with no vowels, you will feel and hear them as a Breath — the still small voice Elijah heard when God was present, the Interbreath of life, does not support one human community to make war against another. Rather, YHWH (Breath of life) calls us to take off our shoes to feel the Earth that gives us all our birth. We may name it Canaan or Palestine or Israel, but it becomes holy when we take our deepest stand: Its name is simply Earth and we are simply Earthlings.
If we were to take seriously this teaching from God’s messenger, we might say: This lethal attack by Hamas on suffering Israeli people was a profound moral sin, and so were and are other such lethal sins by Israeli governments in the past and very present that have brought suffering on Palestinian people.
This suffering cannot be healed by doing the same thing to other suffering people. It can only be healed by Tshuvah, Tawba, Repentance. We must insist that an Israeli government and a Palestinian government of the West Bank and Hamas, sit together to say, “We have all sinned by forcing death upon the God of life. We must stop and make peace with each other."
—
Why do we think it both truthful and important to invite all Jewish religious, spiritual, and ethical leaders to support the statement above?
We believe that serious Jewish teachers and leaders and those of other spiritual, religious, and ethical communities should name the Hamas attack on many Israeli communities, many purely civilian, as a profound sin.
But the response to that attack by the present ultra-right-wing Israeli government simply repeats the sin, especially if we take into account previous ultra-destructive attacks on Gaza’a life-sustaining infrastructure. Moreover, criticizing only the Hamas attack is likely to strengthen the genocidal impulses and the closely linked anti-democratic impulses within the present ultra-right-wing Israeli government. Our statement is intended to provide a serious avenue to peace, not to applaud another blood-soaked war.
If you wish to support this statement, please register your name and role by clicking to https://theshalomcenter.org/joshua5-13-15. Our information form invites but does not require a contribution to do out-reach for the statement.
Early 4th-century CE manuscript of Joshua from Egypt, in Coptic translation.