BLOG 13

13. Blog: 5^th Nov. Oct 09

Trans-Atlantic Personalities

-          Laibl Wolf, Dean, Spiritgrow - The Josef Kryss Wholistic Centre, Australia

Europe is old. It’s a haughty matron, head held erect, yet realizing within that age has taken its toll. Steeped in history of religious wars, national dominances, glorious architecture, and decadent church and barony, its sun is waning - its last gasps at relevancy reflected in an abortive quest for pan Europeanism: power.

The Americas are a brash and brassy teenager. The suburban go-getter is inventive, fast-talking, enthusiastic and lacking all of the old world savoir-faire. This lad is not interested in royal intrigues or dukedom of castles. He is about markets, challenges, and the exhilaration of wow!

Lands imprint the psyche of its inhabitants. The smooth, correct, cool, and lean European. The uncut American diamond, raw around the edges, innovative and fast talking.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe once attributed the quality of Hessed (generosity and compassion) to the national character of America. It has been good to the Jews.  It has been good to many peoples – a veritable melting pot of refugees escaping the ‘enlightened’ technologies of the Last Solution or those allergic to the cigar smoke of a dictatorial Cuba, or those fleeing the nouveau Asian dictators, and those escaping from drug warlords of South America and Mexico. Where else in the world do you find a body of legislation protecting the rights of illegal aliens and providing them with services and support? Certainly not on that old continent across the ocean whose niceties belie innate intolerance, anti-Semitism, and petty national jostling and beatific pontification from Rome.

I watch the pan handler, the busker, the tramp on a busy New York avenue. What strikes me is not the thousands that pass by, anticipating outcomes of in their next sales meeting. What impresses me are the many dozens who take the time to stop and drop a coin anonymously into a hat, an outstretched hand, or a fiddler’s case. You discover the spirit of a nation not by its majority actions but by its still small voice within – the minority who are the soul of the nation. I walked the streets of Vienna and observed the same human shame, embarrassment and anguish in the faces of those who are forced to beg. But the litmus test of response registered indifference. The minorities are tolerated, not integrated. Same in Copenhagen, Milan and London.

A nation is born, grows, and ages. Sometimes we observe the death throes of a people –a civilization. Inevitably birth takes place somewhere else contemporaneously.  The process takes decades, even centuries, like the eonic death of a dwarf star and the slow motion cataclysm of an emerging new sun.

The Jews are an anomaly. We should have died a thousand deaths. And here we are, always figuring centrally in the emergence of new nations, disproportionate in Nobel prize lists, sitting on governmental advisory bodies in countries around the globe. We exist against all odds – bonded, despite ourselves, a people, a culture, a civilization, propelled mysteriously through the passage of time by a spiritual energy that is indefinable – yet historically and patently visible in its effects and results.

To endure means to enter into a synergistic relationship with the energy of the time-wave of the moment.  A collective exercise as well as an individual challenge. Where are you on the graphic axis of this synergy? Are you riding the wave of Jewish survival to shore? Or will you go the way of the sun-set of Europe? Live life with Jewish vibrancy.  Don’t just go through the motions – the old talk of allegiance, loyalty, fealty. Become an agile spiritual surfer with dexterity of spiritual footwork. Catch the right wave. Be brash, be brassy, be innovative – but always led by the compass of an ancient wisdom that teaches us historical mastery.

 www.laiblwolf.com