Absolute Carmel

True colors

Read this post in Hebrew

Many religious people await the mythic war between the light and darkness without being aware that the war is already being fought and they’re in fact aligning with darkness. It is the war between the people who love only the ones who are similar to them, and the people who love and embrace diversity. The war between people who think there’s only one truth and they’re holding its key and the people who see the complexity of many truths in different contexts and for different people. The war between those focused on exclusion and separatism and the ones focused on inclusion and connectivity.

Last week, an anonymous killer still running loose, started shooting at a community center for gay teen in Tel Aviv. Two teenagers were killed and 15 were wounded. The liberal city of Tel Aviv in the democratic country of Israel was shocked such a hate crime is possible, but some said that they always knew Tel Aviv to be a liberal bubble, inside a country that 46% of its people think being gay is a form of perversion and its formal religion explicitly bans gay relationship, comparing them to animal sex and condemning the parties to death.

These are not the words of God. There are enough God-wannabes spreading disarray through messages “channeled” by different people, only nowadays we take them less seriously than our BC ancestors. God, the spirit and consciousness of all living things, cannot be a fundamentalist, cannot afford to exclude some of its parts. It’s not so divine and barely even makes sense: if God wanted everyone to follow the same rule he/she/it wouldn’t have made everyone so damn different.

God doesn’t live between the pages of a book and doesn’t speak only to the ones who grow beards. god is in the world, it is in the details, in the small things, in everything. So God must love colorfulness, God must love diversity because unity is made of diversity and a ray of light breaks into the colors of the rainbow. This is the true face of God. Indeed, we’re all made of both light and darkness, like the Yin & Yang symbol suggests, but are we aligning ourselves with the light, containing our darkness, or aligning with the dark, swallowing and oppressing our light?

Some of my best friends are gay and I always thought sexual orientation was a private thing and either than that one could hold various opinions on different issues, but I understand now that being a gay activist and having a gay identity is necessarily taking a liberal stand, it must also mean being feminist and respecting minorities etc. We identify with complex identities in order to create bridges: while our national identity might be rivalry, our sexual identity might create something more important in common for us.

I stand with the gay community in Israel these days because it moves me to see them forge a strong political identity due to recent events, showing everyone their true size and true colors, and I’m so proud of them. God has made them a bit different so they could appreciate the beauty in our differences and help fight for the freedom of love, thus I count on this community as a partner for the vision of a new world.

I took this footage (with English subtitles) at last night’s memory, pride and tolerance rally held in Rabin Square a week after the brutal shooting:

Tags: colorfulness, diversity, Gay, God, identity, Liberalism, light and darkness, Pride, religion, Tel aviv, truth, unity