Soon, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad both will pass into history’s dustbin mingled with the blood of thousands of innocent citizens murdered by each regime. Revenge would be a natural and tragic response by those who have been brutalized and oppressed by each ruler for so long.

I have been thinking about the peoples of the Middle East emotional need for revenge this past week not only because of the revolutions coming to a head in both Libya and Syria, but also in light of the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul that arrives on Monday evening and leads a month later to Rosh Hashanah.

The following are reflections taken from voices uttered over a long period of time on revenge:

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
-Mahatma Gandhi (1869 – 1948, India)

In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
-Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626 CE, England)

Live well. It is the greatest revenge.
-Talmud (500 C.E. Babylonia)

Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind.
-Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, Roman poet, late 1st and early 2nd century AD)

Revenge is sweeter than life itself. So think fools.
-Juvenal (ibid)

Those who plot the destruction of others often perish in the attempt.
-Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852, Ireland)

Revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst.
-Walter Weckler

“From the child you can learn three things: s/he is merry for no particular reason; never for a moment is s/he idle; when s/he needs something, s/he demands it vigorously.” (Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch, d. 1772)

Given the two weeks that have traumatized America and the world with the extreme fluctuations in the stock market, the devaluing of American credit and the loss of pensions and so much more, the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel are worth contemplating this Shabbat:

“A thought has blown the market place away: there is a song in the wind and joy in the trees. The Sabbath arrives in the world, scattering a song in the silence of the night. Eternity utters a day. Where are the words that could compete with such might? Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness in time. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of Eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but the soul belongs to Someone else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world; on the seventh day we try to dominate the self – to set apart a day a week, a day on which we could not use the instruments so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with one another and with the forces of nature.”

Shabbat Shalom!

“Whether a person really loves God can be determined by the love he/she bears towards one’s fellows.” (Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev – 1740-1810)

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

by Wendell Berry

“Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.” Mark Twain

“There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience.”

Hartley Shawcross, barrister, politician, and prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal (1902-2003)