The Abraham Accords Are the Way Toward Peace – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

There’s a story in the Talmud of a rabbi whose son comes to him one morning and says, “Father, I had a horrible dream. Those unworthy bottom-dwellers were on the top, and the lofty people were on the bottom. I saw an upside-down world!”

His father replied, “No, son. You saw the world straight on, just as it is.”

I often think about that when reflecting on awards. Let us take what is touted to be a supreme award — the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama won it before having done anything. As for peace, Obama’s achievement was to see that Iran would be assured a nuclear bomb and that the whole Middle East would be rebalanced to make possible Iran’s client-executed reign of terror. This came some years after Yassir Arafat received the prize for his duplicitous skill in conning the West to believe that he meant peace while orchestrating his own barrage of suicide bombers against the country with which he supposedly came to terms.

On the other hand, Winston Churchill, the man who did the most to make sure the world would not fall to the man who made violence a religion, never received this peace prize. Neither did Ronald Reagan, despite engineering the bloodless and peaceful demise of the Soviet Union, the birthplace of the Gulag Archipelago and of political violence and murder on a scale never seen before. Nor did Harry Truman, despite overseeing the transition of Japan and Germany from organized murder states to peaceful democracies.

It therefore was more of the same when the Abraham Accords, the spectacular series of peace treaties between Israel and five Muslim states, was largely ignored by legacy media and of course by the Nobel committee. Clintonite Democrats didn’t like the contrast of peace treaties that actually brought peace with the peace treaty Bill had brokered with much ballyhoo and then turned into a pumpkin long before midnight. Obamaite Democrats didn’t like them because they proved the absurdity of their premise that an Arab Palestine 100 percent Jew-free and hostile to Israel had to be established before any peace was possible. Biden didn’t like it because his declining brain had room for only one criterion  — anything to do with Orange Man has to be bad.

The eminently reasonable Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, has spoken at length in praise of this peace process which has sprung up organically, outside the usual channels of what Harry Truman liked to call “the striped-pants boys” of the State Department and their colleagues around the world. Peterson realizes the power of culture and especially of the deepest level of culture, religion. The Abraham Accords have found the spot where Muslims’ and Jews’ most deeply held beliefs impel them wholeheartedly towards peace. The attempt of Iran to bury this process under an avalanche of slaughter, kidnap, and rape on October 7 failed.  It’s not just that Iran’s ability to make war has been severely degraded — it’s that the Abraham Accords held.

Last week, Peterson uploaded an inspiring video of his long-form interview with former Congressman and freelance peace broker Mark Siljander. Siljander had an epiphany that turned him towards the core teachings of his own faith to find a better way towards peace with the Muslim world. Key for him, too, has been finding a common ground in religion itself.

That is a difficult thing to do, given the history of violence between religions that stretches back to antiquity. There is a temptation to achieve agreement by trivializing the differences between faith doctrines and ignoring their centrality in the lives of their communities. But Siljander seeks this confluence by pursuing more deeply his own tradition’s valuing of love.  He labors to find ways to better reflect that love to enable conversation at a deeper and more meaningful level. Siljander speaks movingly of how he managed to be heard by the President of Northern Sudan, a man with much blood on his hands, and how he successfully communicated that they had a common religious interest that did not belie their faiths, but rather furthered and deepened them.

Siljander related to Peterson how he struggled with Muslim rejection of key ideas in his own faith, in particular, the idea of God “begetting” a son, to use the language of the King James translation. Siljander sought the guidance of his own faith mentor who spoke Aramaic and could guide him in the understanding of important religious texts without the filtering of a translator.

In my own teaching, I have regularly found it helpful to reference original texts and explain meanings which get lost in translation. Siljander went this way, and launched into an analysis of an ancient Christian Aramaic text where he found an answer to his dilemma. There, he noted a distinction in the use of the Semitic root WLD to denote the begetting of a son by a human father and how it was used in a different, passive form to denote the begetting the King James ascribes to God. Siljander described what he believed he had found, that WLD in its active form has the implication of a male engaging in sex, which neither Christian nor Muslim would ascribe to God, even when asserting divine fatherhood.

His discovery energized him, and he shared it with the president of Sudan and later with Muslim scholars, and all found an opening that energized the movement towards peace, which Sudan was eventually to join formally.

My own religious tradition teaches of the merging together of love and respect as they mature and grow strong. The mystical classic text Zohar describes love and fear/respect as two wings, both of which are necessary to fly. If love and truth (AKA respect) are seen at odds, likewise, they both fail — the love will lack power and the truth will be bloodless and inert, leaving no mark outside of the world of endless abstractions.

I love Siljander’s basic insight and his courage to move forward based on his deepest commitment in life, to God. It is, though, no contradiction for me to offer a criticism of the point of language Siljander made. In the light of the Hebrew texts that antedate all Christian and Muslim texts, the root WLD simply has do with birth — a child is a YeLeD (W and Y regularly interchange in Semitic languages), to bear a child is YaLDa, to cause a child to be born is hoLiD (the Y or W being weak, it occasionally disappears — it’s the same root).

It is never the root that is used in Hebrew to indicate directly the sexual act. That is indicated in Hebrew Scripture by the euphemism of ‘Lying with –Sh-Ch-V’ or by the much coarser root ShGL. It just so happens that for a physical human birth to come about, it entails sex. But WLD as a root is not used to indicate the sex act primarily.

Furthermore, in Psalms 2, where God says of the anointed king, “You are my son, this day I have borne you,” this last verb is expressed in the original by the root WLD in a direct and active form. Despite that, it has not ever been understood by Jews as talking of God engaging in physical sex or of God bearing the anointed king through a physical birth canal.

Peace Is Integral to the Abrahamic Faiths

So out of respect for truth, I disagree with Siljander’s assertions about the root WLD, but my disagreement is in pursuit of the same well-conceived goal to which Siljander’s faith brings him. I have a faith, as I believe he does, that by revealing a larger confluence of all the Abrahamic traditions on this point, we will increase the peace that can only come through wholeness and not through careless compromise that is unconcerned with truth.

For God brings the entire creation into life and is therefore called Father of all. Awakening to God’s presence in all things, we obtain a vision of wholeness and peace that cannot rest until it is actualized. As a computer screen refreshes itself every second, all of existence is continually upheld and brought anew into existence — fathered — by God.

The Song of Songs was included in the canon because it was defended as the love song between God and His people. The explicitly sensual imagery of this most beautiful book caused the rabbis to hesitate, for those of a spiritual bent always find matter and bodies obstacles to the unity they know must pertain.

But the message of the Bible from the beginning, echoed in the literature of all Abrahamic faiths, is that the world is not here on its own, unaccountable to God, but is a divine creation. God Himself pronounces His creation good, even very good. It is our own smallness, our own wanting to create God in the image of our own limitations that traps us in a duality of spirit versus matter and to cringe at our own bodies.

But God beckons us and calls us His children, not His disembodied spirits. His oneness beckons us to find our own way to peace that is the goal towards which He leads us all. Thanks to Peterson and Siljander for pointing us in this direction.

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