Middle East: The Wisdom of Peace by a Wise Rabbi
The challenge is to honour this deep deep connection with the land for both Palestinians and Israeli’s. This is when we see ourselves in each other. I would add the connection is in women as well. I felt a deep connection to Australia when travelling. I feel it with the world as my home. I love the reference distinguishing the ego and the instrument of the flow. He is very clearly connecting people to their spiritual nature. When you become an instrument for peace you naturally flow, you allow a higher energy to guide your actions. This is not understood well in religious and spiritual circles. The ego is dissolved and the greater good becomes the energy flow one works with. I love these words I don’t see the person’s identity as a rabbi I see peace flowing through this one. May all the peacemakers on all sides become visible and show another way. The old way is simply ego that knows not what it truly does.
“Peace between a man and his fellow man, between a nation and its neighbor is all a kind of mental adjustment, a decision of the soul, which wants to move to the side of peace …
I feel that there is something very, very deep in the love between man and land. That has always been my image. Man is made from dust and to dust he will return. The connection between man and his land is the connection to his life source. That connection can derive from love or it can derive from possessiveness: meaning that you want to be the owner of the land, to control it. Instead of being swallowed up in your wife, you want to be the owner of your wife … Rumi writes that one can be swallowed in the earth like sugar that dissolves in water. If you have an orientation toward being swallowed, of abnegation in the face of the objective truth, that is peace …
The problem is not only settlers and non-settlers, religious and nonreligious. It is all a matter of mental orientation. Whether you build everything on your ego, or you are an instrument of the general flow − for the general truth, for the general peace, even if operates from an awareness of “I will decide, I will navigate,” … And even more powerful than being a pipeline for what is general is being humble, with the goal of abnegation, of being an instrument consciously. The Holy One blessed be He can also work in strange ways, but the direct way is through people who wish to be an instrument for the general peace. Those who wish to be such an instrument, and that is their life’s goal, that is the most direct and the simplest way to live a worthy human life. What I say is that the most important thing is to be a genuine human being … That is the human purpose: to be a man; a mensch, as they say in Yiddish. The main thing is to be a human being, all the rest is just a means …
Peace, fundamentally, is an alliance that accords each of the two sides its freedom.”
— Rabbi Menachem Froman, from an interview in Hareetz, July 20, 2012.
http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/the-west-bank-s-rabbi-menachem-froman-has-the-solution-to-the-conflict-1.452325
This has been revisited in 2026 and the video is gone. Who removed it? Clearly those not interested in peace.