Peace thru People: In Bethlehem and around the World

Last week, I went on a spiritual tour of Israel with some of our students from around the world. We visited many places, including the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron—the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs (from the Bible), and the Idra Rabba—the place where Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai revealed the Zohar, the primary text of Kabbalah.

In Bethlehem, we visited the Church of the Nativity where we had lunch with the priest who is responsible for the church, the governor of Bethlehem, and many other amazing people of different faiths and walks of life. Together we spoke of peace, tolerance, human dignity, and the spark of Light that exists within all of us, regardless of who we are, what we believe, or where we come from.

I've mentioned this before, but we will never be able to bring peace to this world or create any real lasting change unless we can establish a binding of people based on the spark of the Creator that is within each of us. Whether we pray lying down, standing up, or on our knees, we need to come to a place where we can be together in one room without hatred.

The Bible tells us a story about how the descendants of Noah wanted to create a tower to reach the gates of Heaven. Now here was a huge undertaking! Imagine building a tower to Heaven!

In the end, the only thing that stopped them was the Creator coming down and confounding their speech, creating multiple languages so that they were unable to communicate. In other words, the people were so unified in their intention and so focused in their action that they almost made the impossible happen.

Any association of people is powerful, even if it sometimes exists for negative reasons. A group of individuals with enough desire can do anything. So at this chaotic time, let's think about how we can affect the world if we bind together our individual strands of consciousness to blanket this world with positive energy. If we can come together in our spirituality and in our goal of creating human dignity for all, then together we can move mountains.

Let this serve as a reminder that we live in a time of potential chaos that requires more of us and our spiritual work. Each of us is a single individual. But if for this week, we each uplift just one other person, and then that person in turn uplifts one other, by Friday we will have affected thousands of people, if not more. 

And that, my friends, is a true blessing. If we can feel those around us and extend love instead of judgment, we can create unity among peoples, and our words and actions will reverberate around the world.