Please read the whole thing.
"Judaism is supremely a religion of life. That
is the logic of the Torah’s principle that those who have had even the
slightest contact with death need purification before they may enter
sacred space. The parah adumah, the rite of the red heifer,
delivered this message in the most dramatic possible way. It said, in
effect, that everything that lives – even a heifer that never bore the
yoke, even red, the colour of blood which is the symbol of life – may
one day turn to ash, but that ash must be dissolved in the waters of
life. God lives in life. God must never be associated with death."
"Eyal, Gilad and Naftali were killed by people
who believed in death. Too often in the past Jews were victims of people
who practised hate in the name of the God of love, cruelty in the name
of the God of compassion, and murder in the name of the God of life. It
is shocking to the very depths of humanity that this still continues to
this day."
"Against this we must never forget the simple truth that those who begin
by practising violence against their enemies end by committing it
against their fellow believers. The verdict of history is that cultures
that worship death, die, while those that sanctify life, live on. That
is why Judaism survives while the great empires that sought its
destruction were themselves destroyed."
That last paragraph is making me cry.
We survive with our tears, and holes in our hearts and our love of life.
