1. Intellectual Honesty:
Willingness to be wrong when confronted with error.
Courage to take the blow of our errors and move forward.
2. Skeptical optimism:
Embracing an idea new to your mind; trying it to see if it works. There is more failure in those who never try.
3. Refusal to deny reality:
Never hide anything from yourself you feel you aren't emotionally ready to accept.
Look facts right in the eye. Stand silent in the chamber of liars and shout loudest when your ears hear a lie.
4. Refuse to divide others into camps:
Every group thinks it is right. Those who would conquer us with evil must first divide us with fear.
5. What we Hate, we Become:
Do we see enemies or do we see people just like us who have lost their way? Will we wound them as they have wounded us, or will we seek healing and reconciliation? Can we take their blow and rise above it or will we become the thing we have learned to hate?
Will we wound them as they have wounded us, or will we seek healing and reconciliation? Can we take their blow and rise above it or will we become the thing we have learned to hate?
6. Defeat bad ideas with BETTER ones:
Saying someone is wrong means nothing. Insults mean nothing. Pointing to the better path, the higher ideal, the workable plan makes us a beacon and not a whimper. Living a better life than those who accuse us repudiates them one and all.
Pointing to the better path, the higher ideal, the workable plan makes us a beacon and not a whimper. Living a better life than those who accuse us repudiates them one and all.
7. A Better Life means World Repair:
Grasp the smallest opportunities for praise, encouragement; help and commonality. In Judaism, the purpose of life is to "repair the world."
Stoop to help someone smaller than yourself. Find the kind word and speak it; you might lift a heart when that lift means everything. You and I leave this world a better place than we found it while the empty-headed ones abandon ship only to drown in their own fears.
8. Ask yourself each day, "Am I the poison or the antidote?":
Commitments beat complaints like Aces beat a deuce. Have you ever heard the expression, If you aren't a part of the solution you are a part of the problem? Try thinking about that sometime.
Be the hand that builds and not the fist that bruises. The smile that encourages and not the scream that deafens. Hope is a rough sketch, but a life well-lived is a thing of great beauty.