Over the last fifteen years, 2000 to 2015, since my retirement from FT, PT and most volunteer work, after an employment-and-student life of half a century, 1950 to 2000, I have often written about the Jews and Judaism with comparisons and contrasts to a people and a religion I have now been associated with for more than 60 years, the Baha'is and the Baha'i Faith. The following post contains some of these comparisons and contrasts, among other aspects of both the Jewish world and the Baha'i world.
I put the following compilation together after watching Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews on SBSONE TV in Tasmania, on 23/3/'14 and 30/3/'14, 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. His interest in the identity of the Jew, now and in history, stimulated my own interest in the identity of the Baha'i, now and in history.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 24/3/'14 25/3/'15.
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OUR FRESHLY MINTED TEARS
Part 1:
The longer I have been a Baha’i the more and more I have seen parallels between the Baha’i experience and the Jewish experience, between what it means to be a Baha’i and what it means to be a Jew. While individual experiences, inevitably, vary greatly, certain overall themes are common between the two religions: a history of persecution; a body or writings and myths that separate the believer from non-believers and that give adherents a foundation of meaning and identity in their lives; a spiritual homeland of holy places and holy men and women who act as models and metaphors for living; the importance of written history and a transcendent Being as a source of order for man and society; the importance of Torah, or Law, written law, to bring daily life into conformity with the original teachings; a foundation in charismatic revelation and a transition to an institutional theocratic state; the place of vision and a sense of the future in history and; finally, the crucial interrelationship between the individual and the community.
I have found my Baha’i experience has been helpful in understanding general social and moral issues. I felt deeply conscious of being a Baha’i, and active in spelling out what it meant. Part of the effect of this consciousness has been to make me feel out-of-place, and separate; part of the effect, too, has made me feel integrated with, at one with, the social setting wherever I went. Another effect has been to give me many definitions of homeland: house, land, word processor, place of birth, the planet and a range of serendipitous locations where chance and circumstance has brought me to be. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 2014.
Part 2:
This Baha’i business
plays a role at so many
different levels, and in
such varying intensities.
We have our holocaust
on a much smaller scale,
and our freshly minted tears,
from innocent, bewildered
eyes; the world’s forgetfulness
will not debase this coin of gold
which enters through a portal
from which no man returns.
We have our prophets
who came to this same
grainy, parched, landscape
and its unquenchable sun,
and the crazed hot wind
which mutters so very, very
apocalyptically. They were
placed in this oven where
the heat consumes every
thing but compassion.1
Our combustible souls, too,
vanish in a puff, but not before
those prophets, speaking
redemptive words of glacial
austerity and honey-dew
from an unseen world
viewing the entirety of
complex human history.
1 Roger White, “A Desert Place”, Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, Oxford, p.97.
Topic: The Jews and the Baha'is (Read 2229 times)