DailyJim: Anti-Semitism, fighting against hate, but not fighting for love?

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, May 7th, 2024. I want to talk about anti-Semitism being against hate and how often we are not for love.

So these days there are lots of claims that people are being anti-Semitic. Sometimes there are claims that people are being anti-Muslim. They don't say it so much. They say Islamophobic because we often use different words for different things or for the same things. And I was just, I think I was reading something earlier on Twitter about how it's almost like this fight against anti-Semitism. And I thought, okay, we're fighting against the hate. We are anti-anti-Semitism.

But are we pro-pro-Semitism or whatever you want to call it? Like, we are against hating a certain group of people, but are we for loving them? Because maybe they're different things. Being against hating somebody is not having that bitterness, that resentment towards that person, but it doesn't mean that we have deep affection for them. And i think this shows up a lot in romantic relationships where people say no no i want to be a friend i don't want to hate you but i don't want to love you i kind of want this weird, middle space where i kind of care about you but i'm semi semi apathetic but i'm not going to say apathetic i like i care but i don't care and i don't care too much this may be fear of caring too much or loving too much. And I wonder if people in the Middle East or people around the world stopped hating Muslims or Palestinians or whichever group you want to choose in there, and we stopped hating Jewish people, does it resolve it? Because is the absence of hate, what is the absence of hate? Is the absence of hate love? Is the absence of hate indifference and being at peace with somebody which means yeah you do you I do me and frankly whatever happens to you I don't really care about because I'm numb to different experiences in life. Is that the goal? What's the goal? If the goal is to just get rid of hate what are we replacing it with.

This idea of destroying, or if it's like a destruction of the hate, okay, what are we constructing? What are we putting in its place?

I think we don't talk about this often, probably because I think what I would like to put in a place is love, affection, care, consideration, compassion, connection, unity, alignment. Maybe not alignment. Yeah, but even alignment in some ways. Not harmony, yeah, maybe harmony in some aspects where we are working together and connecting.

But I don't know if we actually want that so much in life. Or maybe we really want it, but we're terrified of it. And maybe we're terrified of giving it to someone else when they don't give it to us. That's kind of been the essence of something I've struggled with where it's, and I'm sure other people have struggled with this too, of, what if I want to love somebody more than they want to love me?

So not whether I love somebody more than they love me, but whether I want to love them more than they want to love me.

Now imagine how this plays out maybe in the Middle East in this conflict. Maybe there are some people on the Israeli Jewish side who want to love some more people And then some people maybe in Gaza who also want to love some of the Israeli Jewish population.

But other people in their life say you should not want to love them because they don't love you. So if they don't love you, why would you want to love them? But maybe it's just this misunderstanding. Maybe actually we all love each other. It's just about whether we want to love each other. Maybe love is just so natural. The connection and the compassion is so natural and so quick and spontaneous. But the cultural and personal institutional knowledge that says, ah, you do not want to love that person often overrides what's going on underneath. And so I don't, for me, I don't find it very actionable to not hate somebody. Okay, it's like saying there's a hundred different food options and you tell me five foods you don't want to eat and there's 95 food options left. Okay, you got rid of the five foods that you hate. Okay, it's helpful. It's helpful because maybe you have an allergy to them or whatnot. Fine. But there's still 95 other things to eat. Now, if you say, here are five things I really want to eat, more affirmative approach, then the list of 100 went down to five instead of going from 100 down to 95. So I think sometimes this plays out, sometimes this plays out very often in relationships where we care about somebody more than we want to. How does a human being see what's happening to some of these children in Gaza and go, ah, and not feel connection, not feel the empathy, not feel the pain, not feel the sadness, not feel the anger, not feel the fear, even to a small extent. I think we do. I think most of us, if not the vast majority of us, feel it. But then we maybe have this filter on top of, do I want to feel this? Do I want to feel that connection to them? Do I want to feel such love and empathy for them? And then years of years and maybe generations of people saying nope you're not supposed to love that person you can override that and it's not just talking about the children gaza it's talking about the children or the adults in ukraine russia sudan ethiopia um in israel as well, like in different parts of the world. I think we feel, I think fighting against the hate. Fighting against, yeah, it's like fighting against anti-Semitism doesn't bring pro-Semitism, doesn't bring, I think what we really should be fighting against is the fight against love.

So suppression of love. I think that's the bigger fight because I think we naturally love and then I think we just squash it down because of so many things that people tell us and we tell ourselves.

And that's what I hope for. I hope people just let themselves be more affectionate, not even just let it. I hope people want to be more affectionate. I hope people want to feel the pain of others and feel the pain of life so that we can also feel the joy of life, so that we can also feel the excitement and the gratitude and the blissfulness of life. Because if we don't feel the pain, if we don't feel things that are happening, if we keep kind of push down this love of somebody else or the love of life, if we keep trying to squash it, what do we have left? So I hope this inspired some of you to think about these things a little little bit differently and uh yeah i'm feeling pretty good after that despite coming into this feeling a little sick so i hope this helped and look forward to talking to you soon bye.