31 December 2010

Xenia and humility

For Israel to find a stable place in the Middle East she must solve the problem of xenia for the dispossessed peoples of the former Ottoman Empire just the way the Western Europeans would not find peace until they solved the problem of xenia for the dispossessed peoples of the former Hapsburg and Romanoff and Hohenzollern Empires. 
The service of the gods depends on the leadership's knowing it must resist hubris domestically and it must promote xenia internationally. When we speak of self-restraint among the ruling elites, it is with respect to these two domains of values that we mean it. Xenia – being kind to the stranger in the strange land – is the cognate of humility – caring for the fertile core of what is alive; where everything that is alive has a fertile core that is given to a people as a beneficence from Providence.  

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