THIS IS WHAT A HANUKKAH FOR HUMANITY (NOT JUST JEWS) LOOKS LIKE
Hanukkah Is a Pit Stop on Life’s Race Track, Coming from the Words “Hanu” (“Park”) and “Koh” (“Here”).
The more we advance, the more we encounter such stops. They let us discern what we have done, and whether we should change our direction in order to progress more optimally.
HUMANITY NEEDS TO STOP AND CHANGE DIRECTION
At one point or another, we all encounter thoughts that throw our whole path in life into question: “What am I doing with my life?” “Am I living my life to the maximum, or am I wasting it?” “How can I live in a way where I won’t be sorry afterward for not making the most out of it?”
The more we plod on in life, we more we find ourselves struggling with all kinds of circumstances. We thus need to ask ourselves: “What are we struggling for?” “What is the purpose of it all?” “Where are we headed?” “What does it mean to ‘win’ in this struggle?”
Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations that make us stop and rethink our lives’ entire course. Also, sometimes we need to forcefully stop ourselves, even if we want to continue, recalculate where we’re headed, and whether we should impact a change for a better future.
Today, we are in latency. Even though society races forward, we still have the opportunity to look at ourselves from aside, and ask: “Where are we headed?” “Are we going the right way?” “If we detect that we’re going the wrong way, do we have the ability to change direction?”
Therefore, we should see in the words, “Hanu” and “Koh” (“park here”), a desire brewing in humanity to cry out and stop the current way we’re running our lives, and change to a more fruitful direction.
THE PROBLEM WITH OUR INDIVIDUALISTIC, CONSUMERIST AND MATERIALISTIC LIFESTYLES
Our current individualistic, consumerist and materialistic lifestyles, where we live from one Friday to the next, are leading us into greater debt. Our debt is not only monetary, it is our lag behind our balance with nature’s increased demands on us: to connect our attitudes to each other in order to match nature’s connectedness.
It is impossible to pay back the massive debt we have accumulated, but one way or another, we’ll have to pay it. In the meantime, we continue extracting from nature as much as we possibly can.
Neither do we listen to our own thoughts that momentarily surface, questioning the way we live our lives, as they get drowned in the noise of the constant barrage of mixed messages, nor do we listen to those who explain to us how nature operates on us, the general tendency of our development, and offer advice on how we can benefit our future progress.
Ignoring these hints for change, we continue running our egoistic race.
HOW HANUKKAH IS A STATE HUMANITY NEEDS TO UNDERGO TODAY
Essentially, humanity needs to stop for a moment and think of how it can achieve more balance within itself and with nature. Hanukkah is much more than a holiday marked on a few calendars. It is what humanity as a whole needs to undergo.
However, we can make no such stop until we recognize the cause of our individualistic, consumerist and materialistic lifestyles, gaining awareness of how the consumerist cycle—manufacturing products we don’t need, advertising them so that we want them, buying, selling and disposing of them—ultimately does no good to ourselves or to our planet.
We are overdue in making this pit stop. If we continue business as usual, then we can simply count the days it will take till nature will activate a major blow upon us: pressures and disasters that would make life unbearable.
However, what is the alternative? If we stop our current consumerist race, what would be able to replace it? And how would we know its replacement would be better?
THE ALTERNATIVE TO CONSUMERISM: POSITIVE CONNECTION
In order to understand consumerism’s alternative of positive connection, we need to first understand the importance of social influence.
Society determines our values according to what it promotes to us as enjoyable, worthwhile and important. The fact that we compare ourselves to others and try to have what they have, then since we’re promoted consumer goods all the time, seeing people enjoying and discussing them, we thus also want them.
Therefore, we need to determine what is most advantageous for us all to enjoy, so that we won’t live our lives in a way where we empty our pockets to fill richer pockets, whenever we make a transaction to buy something else we don’t need.
For instance, instead of Black Friday, we could advertise a “Global Picnic Day,” a day where families and friends meet up in a park, at the beach, in nature, or go to the cinema or a trip somewhere—to promote a fun day together with family and friends. It all depends on what we decide to promote to ourselves. If we saw people around the world posting about themselves on Global Picnic Day, on the news and social media, celebrities, influencers and all our friends celebrating it in different ways, we would find ourselves also wanting to organize ourselves somehow to enjoy the day. We would also find that such a day would give people much more pleasure than a global day of buying and selling.
So why don’t we do that?
Instead of wasting our money buying a whole bunch of things that we’ll mostly discard of, we would instead focus on enjoying ourselves in positive connection with other people.
Therefore, if we really stopped the way we currently live our lives, we could pop the consumerist-materialistic bubble that we have blown up around ourselves, and start to advertise a new approach to life that we could ultimately enjoy a lot more from: one where we focus on positively connecting to each other, and which would bring us to greater balance in our relationships and with nature in general.
Posted on Facebook December 7, 2019