Golden Rule

The great Jewish Torah sage Hillel taught throughout Judea 2000 years ago, when Jesus was a young man. According to legend, a rumour had circulated that Hillel could teach the entire Torah while standing on one foot.

Urged by his students to demonstrate this agility, Hillel agreed, assembled his students, lifted one foot, and said:

“What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbor. This is the entire Torah, all the rest is commentary.”

We recognize this as the Golden Rule, echoed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, when he says, “Whatever you would have others do to you, do also to them.”

Five hundred years earlier, we find this rule in the Buddhist Dhammapada, in the Hindu Mahabharata, and in the Analects of Confucius, where he says, “Do not impose on others what you do not desire others to impose upon you.”

The saying appears in the histories of Herodotus, in Persian Zoroastrianism, and in the Sukhanan-i-Muhammad of Islam, which states: “That which you want for yourself, seek for all humankind.”

In a world such as ours, where greed drives our economic theory, and where, at any given moment, someone is killing someone else in the name of God, is there any chance that we can turn our cultures, our religions back to this most fundamental of sacred laws.

Perhaps, if we can step behind the metaphors, legends, and rituals of our religions, we might discover a common human experience, and rediscover this plea for compassion, the foundation of all religions.

This was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Spiritualism . Feel free to respond, or trackback.