Glimpse from the Journey: “A man should concern himself more that he not injure others than that he not be injured.”
Toward the end of our trip, we had the good fortune to visit & study Rabbi Aaron Tamares’ texts in his beautifully renovated shul in Milejczyce, Poland through the Hereland Collective, founded by artist-educators Julie Weitz and Danya Voskoboynik.
A prescient pacifist and anti-Zionist active at the turn of the 20th century, Tamares teaches us that a central question of Judaism is “How do we emancipate ourselves without becoming oppressors?”
We must not assume that we live in a dog-eat-dog world, that it is every person for themself, that humans will ultimately kill each other and so we must defend ourselves and our kind. And the way to counter this fatalistic assumption is to begin living by another, outlined in his words below:
From A Passionate Pacifist: the Essential Writings of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares:
“…both individuals and entire peoples must order their lives on the basis of the saying recorded in the Tosefot to Baba Kama 23:
🌳A man should concern himself more that he not injure others than that he not be injured.🌳
For when a man tries to keep watch that his fist not injure others, by that very act he enthrones in the world the God of Truth and Righteousness and adds power to the kingdom of justice; and it is precisely this power which will defend him against injury by others. This does not happen, however, if a man is preoccupied with watching out only for himself and keeps his fist always poised to prevent others attacking him; for by such a pose he in fact weakens the power of justice and stirs up evil. When a man constantly portrays in his imagination scenes of terror, when he asserts that everyone wants to obliterate him and that he can rely only on the power of his own fist, by this he denies the kingdom of truth and justice and enthrones the power of the fist. And since the fist is by nature poor at making decisions, in the end defense and attack become reversed: instead of defending himself by means of the fist, such a man becomes himself the assailant and destroyer of others. Hence, like begetting like, others repay him in kind, and so the earth is filled with violence and oppression.”
