I sit down to write as someone different. Four years ago, in April 2013, I left Tel Aviv - Yafo to return back to the United States. At the time, I was not feeling well. I came down with a bad case of something — the doctor in Jerusalem said laryngitis. I was living in a small apartment off Sderot Yerushalayim in Yafo. Life was good despite that nasty bout of laryngitis, living in a dark and damp studio apartment, and being detached from that City — Jerusalem — which had intrigued and sustained and nudged my soul since that first night on the Mount of Olives. How could I have realized it then, but I was on the cusp of a major shift in my life; isn't it funny how we are so bad at noticing times of transition? The years that followed my return to the United States have been the quickest and fullest so far in my twenty-five years doing this thing we call "life." Here I sit in Jerusalem, in what feels like forever and just a minute all at once, trying to see if I have gaine
Let us pause for a moment to reflect on what we have heard and what we have felt today... There have been many Prophets of Peace – Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and King Jr. (just to name a few). All of these people have advocated for Peace and Justice, and each one’s teaching influenced the other. It must be noted, though, that rarely does a person come along as a 'drum major for justice' and call for things to stay the way they are. Love is revolutionary in a world full of vanity. To be a drum major goes against the grain in a world of standardization, where, the perversion of the drum major instinct reigns supreme. The Drum major instinct is amoral. It can be used as an individual’s way to ignite a fire amongst others for peace, or it can be a weapon of tyrannical injustice. Mother Teresa acknowledged the best of her ‘instinct’ and served the poor. Dictators like Saddam Hussein had just as strong a drum major instinct, yet he was driven by that instinct to commit crimes agains