Witnesses of Mercy for Peace and Reconciliation

25 we all really want to be with God and with the good. But inevitably, because we are human and therefore endowed with the divine gift of free will, we make mistakes and are invariably corrupted. However, Judaism teaches that all a person has to do to be able to return to God is to be sincerely contrite. Then God in His unlimited mercy accepts the sinner and erases his or her guilt as stated in Ezekiel who describes God as saying: “I do not desire the death of the wicked, but that the wicked returns from his evil ways and lives.” So, when we are sincerely penitent, Judaism teaches, God in His unlimited mercy ( rahamim ) and love ( chesed ) receives us back fully to Him. In the words of our sages two thousand years ago, “no matter how vile the sinner is, the gates of repentance are always open to him”. Furthermore God’s mercy expresses a divine imper- ative for humanity, which is what the Bible describes as the commandments to love God and to cleave to Him. This is the concept of Imitatio Dei , emulating the divine attributes. In the words of the Talmudic sage Abba Shaul: “Just as God is compassionate and merciful, so you should be compassionate and merciful.” Accordingly, the name for God found extensively in the Talmud and used abundantly in our liturgy is rahamana or harahaman , which of course is virtually identical with the attributive name that every Muslim knows for Allah. It therefore reflects this shared perception in keeping with the words that we heard from His Eminence the Mufti, which our sages declared two thousand years ago that: “He who has compassion on his fellow human beings, God has compassion on him.” In other words, in seeking to emulate the divine, our actions elicit, as it were, divine pathos accordingly. A fundamental principle that is seen as such a divine imperative of following in God’s ways, is the pursuit of peace; or more precisely, pursuing the ways of peace ( darkey shalom ). These ways of peace are therefore precisely the ways of mercy, of compassion and of for- giveness. Indeed, the Talmud declares that the whole purpose of the Torah, God’s revelation, is the pursuit of peace, that we should live in a peaceful world. Our sages point out that it states in Psalms 34:14 that one should “seek peace and pursue it”. They observe that there is no other instance in the Bible where we are com- manded to both seek something and pursue it. There are commandments that refer to certain situations, certain imperatives. But peace is something that one must seek out and pursue everywhere. Thus peace is an imperative that flows precisely from the compassionate nature of the divine that has to be reflected in human conduct. With regard to models, there are many within our different traditions, but you will recall the story of Moses as it is told in the book of Exodus which pre- cisely describes the stages of compassion that mark the moral evolution of the individual portrayed as the agent of divine redemption. The first story we hear of Moses is when he leaves Pharaoh’s court and sees a task master striking one of the Hebrew slaves and he immediately comes to his defence. Here, his compassion is for the one obvious victim. Then we are told of how Moses goes out on another day and sees two members of his own community fighting with each other and intervenes to prevent further violence, reflecting his compassion for both combatants. Pharaoh learns of his actions, and Moses is forced to flee. He arrives at the well in Midian and finds Jethro’s daughters who are not able to draw water from the well because of the presence of the other shepherds, so he comes to their assistance. Here, his compassion is elic- ited for the vulnerable beyond his own community. And then we read of how Moses came to Horeb in the wilderness, where he has the vision of the burning bush and receives his divine mission. The Midrash (the Jewish equivalent of a Hadith) seeks to explain what Moses was doing so far away from Midian, and tells us that Moses noticed that there was a lamb missing from his father-in-law’s flocks that he was tending. He went looking for it and found the little lamb far away in Horeb at an oasis lapping water; and he said: “Ah, you were thirsty – I didn’t know, and that was why THE FOUNDAT IONS OF MERCY