It is our national legacy to adopt a foreign policy that spreads these values. How?
We can:
· Establish cities of refuge where our values can flourish.
· Spread our values through educational campaigns. There are many possibilities here. Among them are campaigns that mock evil systems, that invite others (like those visiting teenage orphans stopped by Hamas) to see the reality of our values, and that rank the moral performance of foreign governments (as the State Department does now).
· Defend, as we do, our friends. The reliability of human relationships is a pre-cursor to relationships with the divine.
· Help those societies that have internalized something resembling a productive and holy and protective set of values, to throw off evil or even foreign domination. If these ingredients are in place, such a revolution will be successful – as it was in the United States and Poland.
· Limit our own drive for pleasure, greed or glory. This will prevent us from taking what is not ours. When others choose to attack us, it will be because they are either seeking to curse us or are seeking their own pleasure, greed and glory. In either case, we have a license to arur them and make them a lesson for mankind.
The world weighs in on our morality. It is time for us to embrace our divine mission and turn the focus to them. The urgency for this is great. Among our neighbors, moral choices seem to be vanishing. They can choose destructive forms of Islam- either Sunni or Shi’ism- or totalitarianism. All three pose a dire threat to mankind and our relationship to the positive and creative values of G-d.
Israel is not like other nations. We do not have our land simply to live in it; we have our land to fulfill our national purpose. If we fail in this, we risk destruction.
Israel is probably unable to change Iran’s nuclear development – but their society might respond to our values. We might undermine the hatred and destruction that rules those people. But for this path to succeed, we must act quickly. If we fail in our national purpose, then Iran will empty its cities and Israel will disappear – a flash like the Crusader kingdoms of yore. In later years, Israel will be established again – but our opportunity will have been lost.
The world hates us for the same reason Joseph was hated. We have a dream and the world interprets it as a dream of domination; as a dream of their undoing. Like Yosef, we can teach them that ours is a positive dream. Like Joseph’s dream, our dream is one in which we enable physical survival and spiritual growth of our brothers.
It is time we, as a nation, helped make it a reality.
