“Lions & Scavengers" Audiobook: Chapter 2

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Chapter 2.

The Pride.

Jerusalem, Israel.

I write these words in Jerusalem, the city of David, the city of Jesus, the city where the West was born.

This is my first visit since the October 7th, 2023 massacre, since Israel's massive response in Gaza, since the opening of a multi-front war by Israel's enemies, Lebanon in the north, the Houthis in Yemen in the south, the Iranian-backed Shia militias of Syria and Iraq, and Iran herself.

Prior to the war, Israel was riven by deep political division, large protests every Saturday night, unhinged language about the possibility of economic collapse or even civil war.

And yet now, as we walk through the streets of Machnehuda, the bustling and thriving market center of the city, the night air refreshing us, the streets are full.

Israel is a late-night country.

People don't go to bed until deep in the evening, and so even children run around the narrow market streets.

Men and women in army uniforms, armed with M4s, stand chatting and smoking outside restaurants.

Just an hour's drive away, the brothers, fathers, and husbands of these same soldiers are serving in Gaza, moving house to house in the night, attempting to uncover hostages and kill terrorists.

A few nights ago, the Israel Defense Forces performed one of the most astonishing rescue operations in modern history.

Four Israeli captives, Noah Argomani, Shlomi Ziv, Ahmog Meir Yan, and Andrei Khazlov, had been kidnapped on October 7th at the Nova Music Festival.

The images of Argomani in particular became infamous.

She was forced onto a motorcycle while while crying and shouting, don't kill me.

The four hostages were held by Gazan civilians.

Kamas sympathizers paid for the privilege of holding the kidnapped victims in two separate apartments in Nusayrat, a major city in the center of the Gaza Strip.

There, they were starved and beaten, deprived of air and sunshine.

For months, the IDF searched for them.

Then they received information that the hostages were being held in Nusayrat, but they required confirmation.

Posing as refugees from another part of the Gaza Strip, members of special forces placed themselves in Nusayrat, seeking further intelligence.

They finally received confirmation of the location of the hostages, and then they launched a daring raid, freeing the hostages amid a frenzy of enemy fire.

Counterterrorism Unit Commando Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, 36, died during the rescue attempt.

He left a wife and two small children.

A few weeks earlier, Zamora had written a message for his fellow soldiers.

The memory of the friends is still sharp and clear and their actions still resonate and make waves.

Every day, more and more details are revealed about that cursed Saturday and what we had to deal with.

That day made me even more aware of how lucky I am.

I was privileged to serve by your side.

The team stands at the decisive points and I want you to know that I wouldn't ask for anyone else next to me but you.

Celebrate our 76 years of independence.

It is you who have made it possible and are making it possible.

It is you and your families who are sacrificing for all.

I want you to know how proud I am.

and how I love you.

Western civilization is filled with people like Arnon Zamora, people who stand when when asked to defend their families and their country, who take all the adversity life can throw at them and keep coming, who ask not what the world can do for them, but what they must do for the world.

These are the followers of King David, who told his son Solomon on his deathbed, I go the way of all the earth.

Be you strong, therefore, and show yourself a man.

Keep the charge of the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes and his commandments and his judgments.

and his testimonies, as it is written in the Torah of Moses, that you may prosper in all that you do and wherever you turn yourself.

These are the hunters.

These are the warriors.

These are the weavers.

These are the lions.

The hunters.

Survival relies on those who hunt.

Lions hunt.

This is a simple reality.

It is not unjust, unkind, or indecent.

As Kipling writes, the jackal may follow the tiger, but cub, when thy whiskers are grown, remember the wolf is a hunter.

Go forth and get food of thine own.

The world is a place of limited resources.

This means that in order to survive and to allow the pride to thrive, lions must outperform either physically or mentally.

The fastest and strongest lions historically won the race for resources.

In ancient societies, the most fearsome warrior generally became the leader.

No wonder the ancient kings declared themselves the chosen of the gods and bragged of their power.

The Behistan inscription, dictated by the Persian king Darius the Great, around the turn of the fifth century BC, reads both as a promise to allies and a warning to enemies.

I am Darius, the great king, king of kings, the king of Persia, the king of countries, the son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsimes, the Achaemenid.

I restored to the people and the pasture lands and the herds and the dwelling places and the houses which Gomata, the Magian had taken away.

I settled the people in their place, the people of Persia and Medea and the other provinces.

I restored that which had been taken away, as is was in the day of old.

I have ruled according to righteousness.

Neither to the weak nor to the powerful did I do wrong.

Whosoever helped my house, him I favored.

He who was hostile, him I destroyed.

There was another model for the provider of ancient times, the gods, who could provide plenty from scarcity.

The Greek god Zeus, according to myth, had to be spirited away from Kronos, the father who would eat him.

He was protected by a goat, Amalthea, who nourished him on milk.

Zeus, growing powerful, snapped off one of her horns, a horn that then became a wellspring of continual nourishment, the so called cornucopia.

The cornucopia became both a Greek and Roman symbol of plenty.

But there was no true cornucopia in ancient times.

Human beings could not stretch beyond the limitations of geographic reach, of primitive technology, of the expansive cost of time.

In today's world, however, the cornucopia is real.

That is thanks to innovation and innovators.

Pure physical might, the ability to raise a roving band or to amass laborers to work the fields, is no longer the main attribute of the hunter.

The hunter no longer wanders the physical savannahs in search of sustenance for the pride.

Today, hunters are innovators.

The ancients would have called innovation magic.

Innovators have stretched the very nature of our world.

Because we live amid historic plenty, we forget that the natural state of the world is poverty, not wealth.

For nearly all of human history, no one was wealthy, at least not by today's standards.

In fact, the richest man in human history was poor by today's standards.

The richest man in history was likely Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire during the 14th century.

As the master of a swath of land ranging from modern-day Niger to the western coastline of Africa, he presided over nearly half the world's known gold at the time.

Mansa Musa nearly bankrupted Cairo thanks to his vast stockpile of the precious metal.

He visited the city while on his way to visit Mecca and distributed so much gold that he radically inflated the currency for a decade.

He traveled with a retinue of some 60,000 men, including the royal court, and well over 10,000 slaves, all clad in gold.

Mansa Musa owned more gold than anybody who has ever lived.

And in pure monetary terms, that gold is worth far more today than it was in 1337.

But gold isn't wealth.

Wealth is better living.

By that standard, Mansa Musa and everybody else living in 1337 was poor compared to normal citizens today.

Mansa Musa died at the age of 57 in 1337.

The average citizen of a Western nation can now expect to live at least two decades longer, and in many cases, three.

Mansa Musa never sat on a working toilet, neither did anyone else of the time.

Right around the time of Mansa Mansa Musa's death, the Black Death was ripping through Europe, killing one-third of the population.

Mansa Musa took two years to travel from his empire to Mecca.

Today, one could make the flight in six hours.

Mansa Musa would have had to have waited months or years to hear replies to his correspondence.

Today, the poorest citizens of the world have a magical device that allows them to talk to anyone else on the planet with the press of a button.

Mansa Musa was certainly richer than anyone else of his time, but he lived in a non-wealthy world, which meant that he lived a life of relative privation, a world of horrific sights and smells, of infant mortality and illiteracy, of discomfort and disease.

Yes, he owned a lot of a particular type of non-rusting yellow metal, but that doesn't make you wealthy.

The only thing that makes you wealthy are the goods, products, and services available to you.

Put the richest man in the world on a desert island without access to the rest of the world, and he'd be as poor as a church mouse.

So, what changed things?

Innovators.

All the materials we currently use in all our technology have existed on Earth before mankind.

But it took innovators to turn those materials into things worth having.

Take, for example, sand.

Sand has existed for literally all of human history.

It is one of the most plentiful substances on Earth.

There are approximately 7.5 sextillion grains of sand on the planet.

Sand was, for nearly all of human history, not only useless, but annoying.

It got between your toes, damaged your home, and generally made itself a nuisance.

Today, sand is one of the most important stores of value on the planet.

The silicon dioxide in sand is processed in order to make silicon.

Then it is processed again and again and again.

The silicon is processed until it is 99.9999% pure.

It is then poured to create ingots, which are then sliced into infinitesimally thin wafers.

Those wafers are then polished, sent to a semiconductor fabrication plant, and become the basis for microprocessors in all of our advanced technology.

So, what changed?

Not the sand.

Innovation over time.

Everything we take for granted is the product of human ideas building on one another in organic fashion over the course of centuries.

We take for granted the fact that sludge that seeps out of the ground now powers nearly all of our economy.

We know that oil is valuable now, but for centuries, petroleum was used as adhesive for patching roofs.

What changed?

Innovation.

Lions innovate.

Innovation is a form of creative problem solving, and lions, first and foremost, solve problems.

Lions do not withdraw from situations they find unpleasant, nor do they respond with volatility to problems.

When faced with difficulty, their first response isn't flight, it's fight.

Problems, in the view of the lions, are merely obstacles that have not yet been surmounted.

Problems are not threats to identity.

They're not challenges to the very structure of the world itself.

Problems are inevitabilities to the lions.

As Marcus Aurelius writes, Is your cucumber bitter?

Throw it away.

Are there briars in your path?

Turn aside.

That is enough.

Do not go on to say, why were things of this sort ever brought into the world?

The student of nature will only laugh at you.

Lions understand that in order to solve any problem, the first move is to think about the problem thoroughly and from nearly every angle.

That means that withdrawal from problems makes problems worse.

What's more, the lion understands that there are rarely perfect solutions to any problem, merely a series of decisions that must be made.

As Robert Pierceig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writes, we just have to keep going until we find out what's wrong or find out why why we don't know what's wrong.

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We'll get some more on this in a moment.

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Because lines seek to understand and solve problems, they work from the fundamental assumption that problems are solvable.

If they fail, they blame themselves rather than others.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, breaks down the difference between the best and worst sales leaders.

The worst, when experiencing problems, looked out the window for someone to blame.

The best looked in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly.

Lions take the lead in doing the work.

The assumption all too often is that those who succeed in society work the least.

That is absolutely untrue.

Those who build societies work diligently at whatever they do.

Elon Musk famously slept on the factory floor at Tesla when production ran behind.

Bill Gates began working insane hours at the ripe old age of 13.

Thomas Edison supposedly worked nearly 20 hours per day and then, as he aged, cut back to a mere 18 hours per day.

That doesn't mean that every lion must work unhealthy hours.

It does mean, however, that lions value industriousness.

That's not just true of inventors and innovators.

It's true of parents who put their entire lives into raising their children.

It's true of employees who clock in and put their best into what they do.

As Psalms 128 says, when you eat of the labor of your hands, you will be happy and all will be well with you.

And finally, lions are audacious.

Innovators are willing to go forth into the wilderness.

As Abraham did in the Bible, they leave a land they know for one they have yet to be shown.

America as a country was built by innovators, pioneers who crossed mountains and forded rivers to settle on land they did not know.

The admonition, go west, young man, sounds romantic rather than insane, but for the risk averse, it would have been closer to insanity than romance to leave the civilization of New York City and embark on a journey across thousands of miles through hostile territory to plant the sprigs of new beginnings elsewhere.

Yet that is precisely what the pioneers did.

As historian David McCullough writes, they had finished their work, each in his or her own way, and no matter the adversities to be faced, propelled as they were by high, worthy purpose.

They accomplished what they had set out to do not for money, not for possessions or fame, but to advance the quality and opportunities of life, to propel as best they could the American ideals.

The pioneer spirit is not unique to those who forge into the physical wilderness.

Pioneers can be found in all industries, the pioneers of the mind and spirit.

The entrepreneurs and inventors are lions as well.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted just this attitude, what we might call the American spirit, in his democracy in America.

The people have all the wants and cravings of a growing creature.

It is not the ruin of a few individuals which may be soon repaired, but the inactivity and sloth of the community at large, which would be fatal to such a people.

Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness.

That American spirit has led to global economic domination.

Unchecked innovation, not altruism, is the jet fuel that powers the world.

As Ayn Rand put it, America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men.

Innovators do not jump at every foolish chance, but they do and must take risk.

Elon Musk told his biographer Walter Isaacson, I want to keep taking risks.

I don't want to savor things.

I guess I've always wanted to push my chips back on the table or play the next level of the game.

I'm not good at sitting back.

Steve Jobs encouraged Stanford graduates to stay hungry, stay foolish.

The best hunters are those who solve problems, who put their nose to the grindstone, and who think creatively and leap into action.

A worthy civilization nurtures and rewards such innovators.

A worthy civilization teaches its children constant curiosity, steadfast resilience, clever adaptation, courageous trailblazing.

A worthy civilization also allows failure because failure is the mother of success.

Failure isn't a punishment.

It's the reality that occurs when success isn't achieved.

The stick of failure is the catalyst toward further attempts.

Most of the time, the entrepreneur fails.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately one in four new businesses fail within the first year.

After 10 years, the number is closer to two-thirds.

But many of these failures are launched by those who later learn from their mistakes and launch more successful companies.

Most major entrepreneurs have failed repeatedly.

Henry Ford famously launched two automobile companies that failed before launching Ford Motor Company, leading him to supposedly quip, failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

Before my business partners and I launched the Dailyware, we attempted several businesses.

One was called Truth Revolt, and it was a political website associated with a mid-sized, conservative nonprofit.

I was the editor of the website, and my business partner, Jeremy Boring was the managing editor.

Jeremy, being an entrepreneurial sort, began to do research into how we could maximize our traffic.

He discovered that certain social media, particularly Facebook at that time, were tremendous engines for growth.

His proposal was simple.

If we spent money marketing our material on Facebook, we would be able to then send traffic to our website, generating advertising and subscription revenue.

This seemed to be quite a brilliant insight.

So Jeremy and I were excited to present his plan to the board of that nonprofit.

Unfortunately, the board of the nonprofit was largely composed of elderly people who didn't seem to understand the internet.

Now, between the two of us, Jeremy has become known as the Stupid Whisperer, a name acquired during a long meeting with a congressperson, a meeting during which I, as a fast-talking Jew from Los Angeles, signally failed to explain a relatively simple concept to the congressperson.

But Jeremy, being a slow-talking Texan, somehow explained precisely the same concept in nearly the same words, leading to a eureka moment from said elected official.

But in that meeting, Jeremy's stupid whispering wasn't working.

After nearly an hour of Jeremy explaining our business concept over and over and over, one of the board members finally turned to me and said, can you simplify this?

I have to admit, my irritation got the better of me.

I picked up a pen, grabbed a napkin, and wrote this, dollar sign, arrow, Facebook, arrow, website, arrow back to dollar sign.

We spend money on Facebook, I explained.

Facebook directs traffic to our website.

That generates money, which we then reinvest.

Easy.

The next week, they fired Jeremy.

The day after, I quit.

I quit because Jeremy was my business partner and good friend, and because we knew that our idea was good.

We knew that we couldn't succeed in a place where there was a lid on success, and we knew that we could succeed if conditions were right.

Now, this is a story of failure.

There are lots of things we did wrong.

We probably could have presented our plan better or more cogently.

We could have experimented and tried it out before making a big pitch.

But that's not the point of the story.

The point is that we then took that same plan, found investors, and built the Daily Wire, which became the largest online conservative media company in the world with hundreds of employees and millions of consumers.

The harshness of failure breeds success for those who keep trying.

If we had been placed sympathetically on the government doll, paid not to work, subsidized to abandon our idea, our business never would have been born.

Hundreds of employees would never have drawn a salary from us.

Now, we could just as easily have failed again, and we would have learned from our failures, but the lesson is clear.

Hunters can only improve themselves and the pride by entering the crucible of risk and reward.

A worthy civilization raises hunters.

The warriors.

The pride cannot survive merely thanks to the innovators.

That which is created must be protected.

No successful civilization can be built without those willing to stand atop the gates challenging its enemies.

Those who seek to harm the pride must be destroyed or at least credibly threatened with destruction.

Lions, therefore, are warriors.

Now, all cultures have warriors, and as we'll see, scavengers have their own brand of violence.

But the West is characterized by a particular type of warrior, the citizen soldier.

The citizen soldier is not a full-time soldier.

He is a man dedicated to the preservation of his civilization, who picks up arms when called upon, only to return to his life as a civilian citizen when a crisis passes.

And in battle, the citizen soldier defeats the scavenger on a consistent basis.

Western ways of war, as historian Victor Davis Hansen points out, have made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization.

Why precisely should that be the case?

Hansen says that the formal and often legal recognition of a person's sovereign sphere of individual action, social, political, and cultural, is a uniquely Western concept.

And such individualism gives people a stake in their own futures.

That freedom comes with responsibility.

Each man takes his place in the phalanx of his civilization, and he fights until the war is won.

This set of ideas, civic militarism, rooted in individualism and its attendant rights, determines whether warriors succeed or fail.

As Hansen says, abstractions like capitalism or civic militarism are hardly abstract at all when it comes to battle, but rather concrete realities that ultimately determine whether at Lepanto, 20-year-old Turkish peasants survived or were harpooned in the thousands, whether Athenian cobblers and tanners could return home in safety after doing their butchering at Salamis or were to wash up in chunks on the shores of Attica.

The language of civic militarism rings throughout Western history.

It can be found in the words of Pericles, who reminded his soldiers before their 432 BC battle against the Persians, We must resist our enemies in any and every way, and try to leave to those who come after us an Athens that is as great as ever.

It can be found in the words of Abraham Lincoln, who told soldiers of the 166th Ohio Regiment in 1864, it is not merely for today, but for all time to come, that we should perpetuate for our children's children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives.

I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours.

The nation is worth fighting for to secure such an inestimable jewel.

It can be most colorfully found in the words of General George S.

Patton, who famously admonished his troops before the D-Day invasion.

Americans love to fight.

All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle.

When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, and the toughest boxers.

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.

Americans play to win all the time.

That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war.

All right, you sons sons of bitches, you know how I feel?

I'll be proud to lead you wonderful guys in battle anytime, anywhere.

That's all.

This is individualist language applied to the common cause, citizens forged into a phalanx of fighting men.

And it is the language of victory, a language that lions must never stop speaking.

The tradition of the West, says Hansen, is to end hostilities quickly, decisively, and utterly.

Victory in war cannot be purchased cheaply.

Lions know this.

That's why Israeli Prime Minister Golden Meir lamented the costs of of war, not for Israelis, but for Israel's enemies, explaining in 1969: when peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.

War is hideous, and lions know that when it is necessary, it must be fought to the end without remorse.

The main question in war is precisely how to achieve the fastest and most bloodless victory possible.

All other questions are secondary.

In September 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman penned a letter to the politicians of Atlanta after occupying the city.

He wrote, You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

And those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success.

But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for anything.

The warrior ethos doesn't mean constant war.

In fact, it is the best guarantor of peace.

After examining every international conflict between 1700 and 1988, historian Jeffrey Blaney came to precisely that conclusion.

Anything which increases the optimism of the enemy is a cause of war.

Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace.

The credible threat of overwhelming force is an excellent damper to the optimism of the scavenger.

Donald Trump understood this attitude thoroughly as president.

Despite all the complaints about him, the first Trump administration's foreign policy resulted in the most peaceful world of any modern president.

That was not because of the complexity and nuance of his foreign policy positions.

It's because Trump made clear to the world that if he was pushed too far, the consequences would be disastrous for America's enemies.

During a fundraiser at the Trump National Dorale Club in Miami, Trump explained it to me this way.

Do you know why Vladimir Putin never invaded Ukraine while I was president?

He said.

It's because I said, Vladimir, if you go into Ukraine, I will bomb the shit out of you.

And Vladimir said, Mr.

President, no, you won't.

And, said Trump, completing the story, I said, well, Vladimir, I might.

And here's the thing.

If our enemies think there's a 5% chance that they will end up at war with the most powerful military in the history of the planet, they tend not to risk it.

The weavers.

A pride of lions requires more than entrepreneurial innovation and aggressive defense.

It requires social fabric.

No society composed entirely of hunters and warriors could survive intact.

Every society requires those who hold together families, who build communities, who care for the sick and the elderly.

Every society requires weavers.

Weavers are those who build the institutions of a society, who knit together disparate elements into a broader whole.

At the end of George Elliot's Middle March, the heroine of the novel, Dorothea, discovers that she need not strive for personal greatness in order to achieve happiness, goodness, and a beneficent effect on the world.

As Elliot concludes, the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

These are the weavers, those who go largely unnoticed, who do the daily work of childcare and teaching, of PTA meetings and social clubs, of local government and charity work.

These are the lions who pass on, through their daily activity, the wisdom of the institutions by which they are shaped and that they spend their lives maintaining.

They sweep the floors and pay the taxes and give the charity and visit the sick.

They rarely receive full-page obituaries in the major newspapers, but at their funerals, members of of the Pride testify to their self-sacrifice, their generosity, their goodness.

All of us know weavers, those who sew together the sinews of our society.

They appear throughout our lives at different times, almost providentially, spurring us forward and binding us together.

My wife is such a person.

She is brilliant in her own right, a family physician who earned her medical degree through hard work at UCLA Medical School.

She is a pillar of our community.

She involves herself daily in the local school, the synagogue, and a multiplicity of charities.

She ensures that our household, indeed our entire lives, run.

She comforts our children when they are upset and holds them to account when they misbehave.

She brings them to their medical appointments and helps them with their homework and plays with them and tells them bedtime stories.

She takes care of her parents and goes out of her way for her friends.

And then, after the kids go to bed, she listens to me grouse about my day and the travails of the world.

I knew my wife was a weaver from the time I met her.

It was built into her character.

The winds of life batter everyone, but the weavers ensure that the sails never tear away and that the ship of family and community can sail on.

Certain qualities characterize the weavers.

Weavers are prudent.

They respect wisdom and apply it to the real world.

They are often the people whom others go to for advice.

Because their focus is constantly on maintaining and fixing institutions, the institutions that serve as the foundation for both hunters and warriors, they inherently embody a certain prudence.

They are prudent because they know that change is difficult, and radical change tears the social fabric, no matter how positive the intentions.

This is why religious leaders often find themselves in the role of weaver.

They are representatives of ancient wisdom, defenders of a centuries-old legacy.

There's a reason Catholics consider prudence the first of the cardinal virtues.

As St.

Thomas Aquinas writes in Summa Theologica, prudence is right reason applied to action, the application of eternal principles to matters at hand.

As Jesus states in the book of Matthew, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house.

Yet it did not fall because it had its foundation on the rock.

Weavers protect the rock.

To the weavers, new threads may be added to the tapestry of community, but such an art must be applied with tremendous care.

As philosopher Russell Kirk writes, the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation comparable to the church.

It may even be called a community of souls.

Human society is no machine to be treated mechanically.

The continuity, the lifeblood of a society, must not be interrupted.

Burke's reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative, but necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.

Weavers are also merciful.

If prudence demands the application of justice, mercy demands that justice be balanced with forgiveness.

God promises Adam that if he eats of the tree of knowledge, he will surely die.

Yet God doesn't slay Adam after Adam sins.

Instead, God applies mercy.

He clothes Adam, shielding him from his own shame and nakedness.

Society would cease to exist were justice its only rule.

Forgiveness and empathy are the only way any societal institution can exist.

There is strength in forgiveness and in empathy.

Only lions can forgive.

In the Jewish Yom Kippur prayers, the so-called 13 attributes of God are repeated by the congregation.

Those 13 attributes can be found in Exodus 34, when God forgives the Jews for the sin of the golden calf.

God passes before Moses and describes himself, the Lord the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, anger, unbounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

According to the Talmud, repentance was created before the world was created.

Without repentance, without God's recognition that man would have to be forgiven, man could not have survived God's justice.

Mercy is a divine virtue.

In the words of Portia in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, rebutting Shylock's plea for a strict by the letter justice, the quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.

It is twice blessed, it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.

His scepter shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.

But mercy is above this sceptred sway.

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings.

It is an attribute to God himself.

And earthly power doth then show likest gods when mercy seasons justice.

It is no coincidence that throughout Western literature the qualities of prudence and empathy have been associated with women.

Prudence was frequently depicted in the Renaissance period as prudentia, a woman holding a mirror, a gateway to introspection and knowledge, and a snake, a reference to the book of Matthew's admonition to be wise as serpents.

The term for mercy in Hebrew, Rachamim, is the plural form of the noun rachum, which literally means womb.

God's love for us, as evidenced by his mercy, is even greater than that of a mother for her child, as it states in Isaiah.

Can a woman forget her baby or disown the child of her her womb?

Though she might forget, I never could forget you.

In Proverbs, the woman of valor is praised beyond all measure.

Her mouth is full of wisdom, her tongue with kindly teaching.

She oversees the activities of her household and never eats the bread of idleness.

Grace is deceptive.

Beauty is illusory.

It is for her fear of the Lord that a woman is to be praised.

The supposedly stereotypical association between prudence, mercy, and femininity is grounded in biological reality.

By available data, women tend to feel and show more empathy than men.

They are also, on average, more risk-averse and cautious.

But this does not mean that weavers do not take risks.

To invest one's life in building the institutions of society requires risk-taking.

Weavers simply take a different kind of risk, a quieter one.

In many ways, the risks they take are the greatest of all.

For instance, at every level, from the biological to the psychological, marriage is a risk.

As a genetic strategy, for example, sexual reproduction is inherently risky.

It means exchanging one half of one's genetics for the genetics of a stranger.

Yet that risk risk carries with it tremendous benefit.

Diversification of genetics leads to a more robust, dynamic, and durable gene pool.

In fact, according to the so-called red queen hypothesis, sexual reproduction itself evolved in order to avoid the risks of parasitism.

If parasites can replicate more easily than hosts and are evolved to take advantage of the weaknesses of their hosts, hosts are at an inherent disadvantage.

One possible evolutionary strategy then would be to diversify the host's genetic pool by abandoning asexual reproduction, reproductive reproductive strategies like cloning, which simply maintains the genetics of the original host, in favor of sexual reproduction, which changes the host's genetic offspring and thus avoids parasites.

This is a risk, but it is a calculated one.

The same is true of marriage as a biological risk.

A man risks giving up his ability to reproduce with a wide variety of females in favor of reproducing with one specific female who can provide only a limited number of offspring.

A woman risks her genetic offspring on one male.

This risk is the basic building block of society, though.

Without it, men remain promiscuous and irresponsible, children fatherless, and women unprotected.

Marriage is, most of all, a psychological risk.

It is a leap into the darkness, for even if we love someone, the someone we love will change and grow with time.

The nature of marriage is a commitment to something beyond the person we find in the moment, to an eternal bond that we wager will grow stronger and more meaningful over the course of decades.

As Shakespeare puts it, let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove.

Commitment to marriage is a commitment to an unknown future.

That commitment is what makes marriage a miracle and a blessing.

Who in their right mind would sign up for a decades-long commitment to another person knowing that human beings change over time?

Only a fool, only a person of faith, only a person who understands that love grows and deepens because of commitment itself.

As it turns out, the great risk of our lives, choosing one person and settling down with them, gives us back our greatest adventure, our greatest fulfillment, and our greatest calling.

And it results in an even greater task, bearing and rearing children.

Children are a mystery from the day they are born until they develop as adults.

What will our children be tomorrow, 10 years from now?

Initiating that journey is an act of faith, and it is the greatest risk of all, given that we invest everything we have into these beings over whom, in the end, we have little control.

My wife and I have four children.

Nothing about their behavior is guaranteed, even from day to day.

Who will they be a decade from now?

Two, we have no idea.

Yet we pour ourselves into our children, our love, our determination, our values, hoping that they will be the kind of people who better mankind.

Without taking such risks, mankind would fail by definition.

Being a weaver doesn't make a person weak, it makes a person strong, fully created in the image of God, with the power to build entire civilizations.

Weavers hold families, communities, and societies together.

In the words of the book of Ezekiel describing the kingdom of David, what a lioness was your mother among the lions, crouching among the great beasts, she reared her cubs.

Two years ago, my wife and I had our fourth child.

He was, as all children are, a squalling, ravenously hungry little creature.

Children at birth aren't truly cute yet.

As any visitor to a new mother will tell you, babies fresh from the womb are too vulnerable and scrawny to be adorable.

They're red, they're tiny, and they spend most of the day either sleeping, nursing, or pooping.

Children are not inherently good, either.

That assertion of inherent goodness, propagated mainly by those who have never met a child, is a total lie.

Children lie, they are selfish, they cheat, and they steal.

They have few concerns other than their wants and needs.

Children must be civilized.

They must become lions.

In the Jewish community, that civilizing process begins for boys at the age of eight days.

The Bible commands Jews to circumcise their children.

The so-called Britmilah, literally covenant of circumcision, springs from God's command to Abraham in Genesis.

As for me, this is my covenant with you.

You shall be the father of a multitude of nations.

As for you, you and your offspring to come throughout the ages shall keep my covenant.

Such shall be the covenant between me and you and your offspring to follow, which you shall keep.

Every male among you shall be circumcised.

Circumcision isn't exactly an emotionally easy ceremony.

It involves a surgical procedure in front of a large group of people on the most sensitive organ of the male body.

The obvious question, of course, is why?

And the simple answer is this.

Circumcision represents entry into Abraham's covenant, a covenant of commitment into a certain set of values.

into duty.

Upon the circumcision, the father says a blessing, invoking Abraham's covenant with God.

The entire congregation then responds: Just as he has entered into the covenant, so may he enter into Torah, into marriage, and into good deeds.

This is an extraordinary ceremony.

It's extraordinary because it recognizes a fundamental truth.

From the time we are born, we are born into a thick network of mutual obligation.

We are born into roles that predate us and will outlast us.

It is our job to grow into those roles, to become members of our family, of our community.

It is our job to become hunters and warriors and weavers,

to become members of the pride.

Every lion requires a pride, not just in celebration, but in hardship too.

In our Jewish community in South Florida, there was a family, a family struck by tragedy.

The family had a wonderful eight-year-old girl who died of brain cancer.

The entire community provided physical and emotional aid and support to the family during her decline.

A close friend of the family, a particularly brilliant and caring doctor, guided her medical care and went so far as to sleep in her hospital room to give her parents a break.

After her death, the entire community community mourned with the family, hundreds of people, coming to comfort the bereaved night after night.

In Genesis, upon creating man, God immediately states, It is not good for the man to be alone.

I will make a fitting counterpart for him.

Thus God creates woman, but woman is not given her name until she has children, whereupon she becomes Eve, the mother of all living.

And the society of God doesn't stop there.

From family God scales up to tribe and from tribe to nation.

In fact, the story of the Old Testament can be seen as God teaching man how to erect a society from the building blocks of families.

As Burke stated, to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle, the germ, as it were, of public affections.

It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

Family, community, nation, pride.

We must all be lions.

Our pride demands it.

But how can a civilization of lions grow and thrive?

How can a civilization of lions, a civilization filled with individuals who are strong, ambitious, and proud, keep from tearing itself apart?