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"How would you have answered, Sylvia? Would you have said, get lost? Or would you have found this reaction remarkable enough that you want to find out what stands behind it? And that's what happened. No crime was committed. Love was committed. We live in a terrible loveless, hate-filled world, Sylvia. Every day that I open the newspaper it makes me sick for the atrocities that are committed in countless wars all over the world, and acts of terror, and economic looting. Every morning when I get out of our nice and comfortable bed and sit down for breakfast with bacon and eggs, I am shocked by the news that while I slept snug and warm, other people had their houses bulldozed to the ground in a rage of unutterable hatred, often with people still in them. That hatred seems to be acceptable, because we allow it to go on. It seems to be OK for a Jew to love another Jew, but never a Palestinian, who is 'easy to kill,' and vise versa. On the way to Germany I read in the plane that the brave Israeli soldiers had shot a thirteen year old little girl twenty times before she fell to the ground. Her relatives dug twenty bullets out of her body before they buried the child. This is now called peacetime occupation, Sylvia. What has become of love? How thin has it become that these things happen almost every day and are allowed to go on? And how small has our own loving become that it is measured as a mere contractual obligation? But what does the contract require? It states a principle that is obviously fulfilled, that I love you and cherish you and honor you for as long as I live. This requirement has never been vacated by me, or broken by intention or my actions."
"The contract includes the unwritten obligation to refrain from womanizing," said Sylvia, sharply again. "That's implied by tradition and is recognized as legal in social law. It is a moral doctrine understood to be included in the marriage contract, even to be fundamental to it. You broke the doctrine."
"Contractual obligations have routinely be subsumed to higher-level obligation throughout history, when they conflicted with human and social development," I said gently. "Whenever obligations were deemed false, dangerous, and counterproductive, they were let go, and in each case, with the resulting breakthrough a new world came into being. This is how the Golden Renaissance was created, and the Peace of Westphalia, and the founding of our American Republic, and also its Hamiltonian credit system for which a new Constitution was created that stepped the nation beyond contractual obligations that had become detrimental to its welfare. Life is dynamic. A civilization is dynamic, not contractual. Contracts are valid agreements to the point that they serve the advance of civilization, but when they put it in danger, it becomes a duty to society to uplift the contractual intent, to let the detrimental go, and instigate new platforms that fulfil the requirement of the uplifted intent. When one sees the world going to hell, there is a glaring requirement evident, to uplift the social intention, and thereby to vacate falsely assumed barriers against expanding our love, and to give it a wider scope. In this sense the assumed contractual bonds need to be subsumed to the nature of the Principle of Universal Love, on which civilization evidently rests. And so, the contractual world changes, and evolves, as the Principle of Universal Love comes to light evermore fully as an unavoidable impetus in civilization. Besides, how would it have honored you, if I had assumed that your loving is so small that it becomes a barrier against Love itself, and your sense of right is so narrow that it blocks the only logical response to the growing challenges in the world that threaten our very existence if they are not dealt with. Our world has become an ice house in which war has become normal, and torture legal, and genocide deemed a panacea. You say to me, don't you dare bring any warmth into it. But this is precisely what we must do, Sylvia, because no one can survive in this frozen world for long, which is getting rapidly colder. In this sense, the Ice Age is already here. I say, we need to take steps to protect ourselves, and our world, and one another, by reversing the trend. If our sense of contract becomes a barrier, we must deal with that too. Besides, what are contracts anyway? Contracts are basically nothing more than obligations in a lender to debtor relationship. Marriage isn't a lender to debtor relationship. Marriage is a love relationship with a promise that the flow of love will never stop, but become stronger and brighter. This promise hasn't been broken. To the contrary, I have tried to make its fulfillment brighter. It must become brighter, because we are rapidly loosing our humanity in society and for evermore-shallow reasons. I bet the IDF soldiers who shot the little girl twenty times as she fell to the ground, wouldn't have shot this scared little kid, while she was running away from them, if she had been a Jewish child. We have become locked more and more into a loveless world that is enabling deeper and deeper divisions between people, and for totally artificial reasons. The need for an expanding love has become almost an emergency requirement on this hopeless scene. Then this woman comes along in Leipzig and steps across the deepest division ever created between people, the sexual and marriage division, and bids me to follow. She asked with a smile, do you wish to learn what Love is, that the professor knows nothing about, whom I had a long conversation with about politics and history? Her invitation felt like a fresh wind, and the gentle rain in a parched hot land. I didn't tell her to get lost, Sylvia. How could I? She sensed my frustration in trying to find the person I was looking for, and my frustration with those stupid conventions that make it appear like a crime to accept the help that was so generously offered. But more than that she appeared like a ray of hope that those terrible divisions that are destroying our humanity, might yet be broken. She stepped across the deepest mote that I know of. I welcomed her with open arms. A New Hope for a New World seemed to be unfolding. If she could step across the deepest division with such ease, all the lesser divisions might yet be resolved. What a promise! And this process, in this case, necessarily involved a woman, or else it would have been theoretical only, Sylvia. As you said yourself, the sexual arena is where the deepest division exists. This is where we have to begin to rediscover our humanity."
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