At the heart of ARAS is the symbolic image and the mythopoetic imagination that is the source of the image and is nourished by the image. What can images offer us when our world is being turned upside down? Hopefully, we let them inform us with their wisdom and agony of the beauty and horror in the world.

My work over the decades in trying to understand the multiple ways in which cultural complexes express themselves—in politics, in psychology, in religion, in economics—has taught me that it can be hazardous to speak out when the collective psyche is inflamed. Highly charged emotions are instantaneously triggered and discharged. Black and white ideas couple with righteous judgements to replace any subtleties of reflection or measured understanding. The traumatic history of groups insures that only selective memories favoring a particular narrative surface that tend to filter all current events through their lens. Recently, the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT have all been caught in the brutal cauldron of trying to address the horrific and highly charged conflict between Palestine and Israel. It is dangerous but essential to address this conflict because it is so explosively violent in every way. Some like to exploit such conflict to promote further division while others mourn and search for healing. Some seek vengeance because their trauma is beyond imagination.

In this edition of ARAS Connections, Naomi Lowinsky gives passionate testimony in “The Muse of the Promised Land” to her multilayered response to the war in Palestine/Israel. Her words speak from her personal, cultural, and archetypal experiences of what is almost beyond words. And, it is the images that help ground her words in our essential humanity. Naomi writes:

I am flooded with the agony of the moment. My moral compass keeps spinning. My heart hurts for the Palestinians in Gaza who are being brutally bombarded day after day. They have no bomb shelters. My heart hurts for the mother in Jerusalem whose beautiful 23 year old son was at that music festival. His left arm was blown off by a grenade attack before he was taken hostage. Is he alive? My heart hurts for the mother in Gaza City, where the siege of Israeli bombing has begun. How can she find food and water for her little ones, without risking her life? Israel has stopped the transport of food, water, fuel and electricity. How will she and her little ones survive? My heart hurts for Tony Blinken, our American Secretary of State, who has a Shoah history much like mine. His grandfather fled from Russian pogroms. His stepfather survived Auschwitz and Dachau. He’s engaged in indefatigable shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, trying to calm the fevers of war. He too must be in a trauma vortex.

After reading about Naomi Lowinsky’s “spinning moral compass” that speaks to everyone grappling with the uncertainty of a conflict about which so many seem certain, the transition to Joseph Henderson’s musing in “On Creation Myths” about the nature of infinity as a young person may seem strangely comforting. How do we make sense of any of creation and all of creation when it confronts us with so many mysteries—wonderful and awful—that defy our capacity to understand? Once again, the symbolic image brings us closer to the mythopoetic imagination that attempts to conceive of what is beyond comprehension.

Sometimes we fish a bit to find a meaningful link between the articles in a particular edition of ARAS Connections. In this edition it hardly seems to be too much of a stretch to suggest that we are exploring through symbolic imagery the interconnected themes of destruction and creation in the world.