Making Sense of Today’s Society

The prize goes to anyone who can explain this. Making sense of this can’t be easy. The question is whether or not it can be done and even greater, whether it should.

How did society come to a point in which a person can sue for forced abortions on minority children and be lauded as an advocate? Isn’t this something that anyone, on the most basic and fundamental level, really basic, should find loathsome, disgusting and barbarous? At the same time, a person who says that the life of a potential or developing baby is worth more than that of a caterpillar is heckled and jeered at as trying to take away a person’s rights.

A person who believes that men and women should be life partners and that every child needs a mother and father is another “bigoted oppressor” who again seeks to “deny someone their rights.” Apparently, someone’s lusts and the fulfillment of all base desires are so important today that they supersede a child’s rights to the point that we must redefine parenthood to some loose bond that means nothing and in which a child is either automatically denied a mother (with an unrelated male substitute to take her most cherished and needed place) or automatically denied a father (with an unrelated female substitute to take his most instructive and needed place).

And lust, something inherently useless, must be encouraged all over, even to a ridiculous, crass and clearly harmful level. And it destroys and uproots intimacy and commitment, things so essential to a population or to an individual’s survival, which are now seen as quaint at best.

Can anyone make sense of this other than this is what is basically described as happening right before the coming of Moshiach, when G-d Almighty finally perfects the world, and gives us this time to allow us to do our hardest to partner with G-d in rejecting it and replacing it with that which was always known to be sane, beneficial and essential.

Maybe there is some sort of rational answer. And maybe this answer is also found in the first clear life lesson of the Torah (Bible).

Maybe it is the lesson that Adam learned in order to teach us all.

That not all “knowledge” that is consumed is beneficial. That some “knowledge” is the most destructive and dangerous of all, and is only the “knowledge” of harm and self-destruction. It is indeed no “knowledge,” other than the “knowledge” of stupidity.

And therein lies the only answer. G-d, our Creator, wants us to eat from the Tree of Life, which has in it good and beneficial knowledge, not the “knowledge” of nothing more than abject folly.

And maybe that is the life lesson. When you see the “knowledge” of the world provide you with little more than the ability to behave like a lustful snake, turn to G-d’s ultimate knowledge, the Torah, the knowledge that contains everything and upon which every solid society and solid and truly fulfilling life must be based.

It indeed is the true Tree of Life.