Seeking the Road to Salvation

On this erev Yom Kippur, as the gate of the year closes, we Jews acknowledge that God controls all, but that humans can "temper the divine decree." In Jewish belief, God cannot forgive all sins. The sins we commit against others have to be forgiven by those we sin against. Why is this? Thomas Merton, a (Catholic) Trappist monk famous for his writings of faith--may his soul rest in peace--writes of the need we have of others for our own salvation. He writes,

God has willed that we should all depend on one another for our salvation, and all strive together for our own mutual good and our own common salvation.

Jesus embraced the Jewish notion of forgiveness, teaching the disciples to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." In this prayer, it is we who must forgive those who sin against us, not God, and vice versa.

If we didn't need to seek forgiveness from those we sin against, we would never learn what it means to be a friend, or a lover, or a member of a community. If God doesn't forgive our sins against others, it is likely out of love.

Perhaps the path to salvation is not a narrow, lonely road, or an opening in a quickly closing gate, but an embrace. Let us seek it out together.

Hope is a Water Issue and Vice Versa

Mayyim chayyim, or "living waters" is a term originating in the Hebrew Bible dealing with laws of purity. For a person ritually unclean to become clean again, s/he would have to self-immerse in a body of natural, moving water in order to be restored to the community and to God. Practicing Jews today immerse themselves in a mikveh for ritual cleansing and renewal. The notion of water as purifying of course is inherent in belief systems worldwide, but Judaism offers a perspective that is much overlooked and very important for us in thinking about our world's water issues today: the root of the Hebrew word mikveh means "to hope," and the act of immersion is a transformation likened to rebirth. That water is inextricably linked to hope and transformation is a concept we should embrace and utilize in our policymaking.

That water scarcity and pollution lead to hope loss and desperate measures for many people around the world is well documented. After years of the West mislabeling the Darfur crisis as an "ethnic" conflict, water scarcity seems to lie at the root of the issue. In the recent special issue of "The Crisis," NAACP magazine, the feature article "Dismantling Toxic Racism" reflects how contaminated water supplies are often left untreated in African-American communities, which are also more likely to be the sites of toxic waste dumps and chemical plants. Rural hog waste lagoons are finally being banned after devastating Eastern North Carolina's air and water quality and affecting the health of many rural residents. Recently, the bottled water controversy has shed light on how corporations like Pepsi Co. have bottled public tap water and given us millions of pounds of plastic to litter the landscape.

Water is a mirror that reflects not only our physical actions with respect to the environment, but also our spiritual well-being. In order to transform ourselves and our world, we must return to seeing water in its spiritual sense: a cleansing and life-giving substance to which everyone should have access. Restoring hope around the world now and in the future will have a lot to do with water, so let's get to work.