What went wrong

 

How did we go from civility to barbarity?

How did we go from peace to anarchy, terrorism, war and the threat of Once-Again God-forbid?

The answer as the Rebbe says, when one wishes to answer a question one must get to the very fundamental core – if a building is collapsing it is no use propping up the walls, one must prop up the foundation.

The reason why civilization is crumbling, is the foundation upon which our civilization is built comes from three different trends:

The most dominant trend is the Bible – the belief in the rule of law – before the Bible, the belief was only “might is right”, a belief which pervades all ancient tribes that were not exposed to Biblical wisdom and is still how large swaths of Africans, the middle-east and I am sure others (though I don’t have good knowledge on many others) actually.

The second trend is Roman imperialism – Rome was a brute force and made the motto “might is right” into something of a faith; as in their famous celebratory defining statement, “We came, we saw, we conquered” – So conquest, recognition in its many various ramifications, from not so long ago western countries (France, Britain etc. literally taking over any country they wanted) is very much embedded into our psyche.

Finally there is the French revolution, and in somewhat different, albeit similar form, the American revolution – the French revolution disbanded the notion of a tyrannical king but didn’t really replace it with goodness and kindness – Napoleon who espoused the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity was a ruthless warrior – in America too, the notion of democracy has led to a pernicious abuse of its freedoms; for whereas the founding fathers in America really did believe that tyranny is abhorrent and did everything in their power to mitigate power, nonetheless, the way people understood American democracy based itself on the France thinking, so they didn’t see themselves as free to do what’s right, but free from doing what’s right!

And this is the crux of the matter:

In Judaism – the only God-based wisdom – life is not a multiple choice.

God didn’t say “See: if you wish to, you may choose to be good or evil” rather he said “See, I have placed before you good and evil, choose goodness!”

We are called by God to shed the demonic lust and narcissistic aims (the Roman and French foundations respectively) we are called to evoke nothing less than the God within!