Main news for 20 March 2025

The fallen world often offers us solutions that appear temptingly simple, but when we resort to them, they lead us into a spiritual dead end, and sometimes not only a spiritual one. One example of such a temptingly easy path that leads to a dead end is violence. Sometimes it appears that violence can solve some long-standing problem, cutting the Gordian knot that cannot otherwise be untied. But on closer examination it always turns out that, after solving one problem for a short time, we have also created several other new ones, and they are often far more complicated than the one we thought we had solved.

Why is this so? Is the use of force always wrong? Obviously not, since even the Torah in some cases does not forbid resorting to force. The question is only whether it is used to keep the commandments given by God or to violate them. Strictly speaking, one can speak of violence only in the second case. And the most terrible thing here is not the use of force as such (in itself this action cannot be considered either good or bad), and not even the violation of justice toward one's neighbor (although that too is terrible), but the fact that force directed against a commandment given by God makes us His enemy and places a wall between Him and us that will be very hard to overcome. And the logic of the use of force is such that one act of violence inevitably leads to another, and the wall will rise higher and higher. That very wall, if it is not torn down, will block our road into the Kingdom. Forever.