Transcript
Hello everyone, welcome to another DailyJim. It is Thursday, February 15th, 2024, the day after Valentine's Day, and today I want to talk about not peace in the Middle East, but love in the Middle East. What if we could have more love in the Middle East? Now you may say that's impossible, or you may say that's foolish, or you may say that's soft, but for me I sit here and I wonder what would happen if Jews and Palestinians loved each other more? What happened if they loved themselves more? What if they loved their neighbors more? They loved their family more? What if there was more trust and companionship and friendship across all these different groups, but also towards themselves?
I watched a, it wasn't really a TED talk, but there's this group called TED, and then there was an interview, a conversation, actually hosted by a girl that I met many years ago at a leadership conference named Chloe. There was a man from the Israeli-Jewish side and then a man from kind of the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian side, Muslim side. I don't know the categories. Honestly, there's so many different ways to think split the categories and I'm not sure if I'm using the correct terms. And they were often talking about peace in the middle east and i've heard that for so many years but they were using words about peace but at some point later in the conversation.
Somebody i think the the is the jewish guy was saying that if somebody wanted to hurt his his palestinian friend they would have to go through him first and for me that's not peace that's love that is deep friendship deep love and the Palestinian guy said something very similar, and they talked about how one of the best peacemaking activities that they saw was somebody invited people out to play backgammon now he said backgammon I was like backgammon backgammon as we'd say here in the U.S. And just invited people out to play it in the park and people from all different backgrounds and ages and economic levels came and played now imagine that's not about peace that's about love it's about play it's about friendship it's about closeness it's about unity it's about coming together and integrating with each other sometimes i think we use the word peace as.
I think peace is often just a synonym for indifference. Let us have distance from each other and be peaceful because we can't even see the other person. What happens when you have to see the person day in and day out? Is there peace? Is peace even possible, this idea of absence of conflict? Conflict is always there. Right now I'm thinking, do I turn the TV off so the noise doesn't pop up too much? But if I turn the TV off now, then I have to pause the recording that I'm doing. Like I'm having conflict in myself right now. And that's just a very thin slice of the conflict I'm feeling right now. How is conflict ever going to disappear? What if we learn to embrace the conflict and try to come together and see people on both sides and realize that we are all feeling a lot of things and we're trying our best. No matter what happens, we are trying our best to love ourselves and love other people.
I think it frustrates me because I think for some reason, oh man, look at that. For some reason, we demonize love. I think it's because we're freaking terrified of it. To be that close to somebody, to be that close to ourselves, to feel the pain, to feel the joy, to feel so much.
I think it scares us so much. I think sometimes we fall in love with somebody and then they, quote unquote, break our heart or our hearts are broken in some way. And then we become so afraid of feeling good things that we're afraid of feeling the bad things. And then we're just afraid of feeling in general and we're afraid of being close to somebody else. And it makes sense. You know, when we're close to somebody else, we can get really hurt. Or just the closeness towards somebody can hurt some other people, right? A lot of places ban public displays of affection, I imagine, because if two people are being very affectionate with each other, there's a third who looks on and doesn't have that affection. That third person can feel very jealous and very angry or very sad. And so in a way, we try to ban, I think, this affection so that the third person doesn't feel those quote-unquote bad things. But what? So then, therefore, we're banning affection?
Are Jewish people in Israel, are Israeli Jews allowed to feel affection towards Israeli Arabs or Palestinians? Again, I don't know the categories. And vice versa? Can they feel too much affection for somebody else within their lives, towards themselves, towards their neighbors, towards their family members? I don't know. And I'm not saying this to highlight them as, oh, there's something wrong with them. I think this is a problem that we experience in so many parts of the world. Are we allowed to really love each other? Are we terrified of it? What would happen if we actually went towards love instead of trying to have peace, this kind of distant, indifferent peace where we never interact with each other and no conflict ever happens? What if we learned to embrace the conflict within each other, within ourselves and in between each other, amongst each other?
And built those friendships, built those deeper relationships and had such love where we would say, you know, if you want to get to him, you have to go through me first. This idea of protecting other people we care about, not attacking, not attacking others, but protecting other people that we care about.
I just wish, I look at situations like that and I say, I wish there were more love between those two sides. Because you know what? When there's love between the two sides, there are no longer two sides. It's just one side. People are united when they care about each other. When we see the commonality between us and them, when we see that we are humans and they are humans, humans, we become humans instead of us versus them. So I hope for that place that they get to that point and not even get to that point, have that desire and that goal to go in that direction towards more unity, towards more love for each other and for themselves. But I also hope that we have that here in the U.S. Politically, racially, economically. There are so many ways in which we We feel divided, but we can feel united if we want to go in that direction.
So I hope that we have more desire to go in that direction.
So this was a more...
Yeah, I'm just frustrated. I'm frustrated, but I'm also hopeful that maybe it just takes a reframing. Maybe the reframing is what we've needed. I don't know. On that note, I am going to let you go for the week, and I will check in with you all on Monday. Thank you for listening. I really appreciate you tuning in, and would love to hear what you are feeling and what you are thinking regarding to this or any other episode that I've recorded. And just happy, and like I said, very grateful that you're here. Thank you. Good night for now.
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