Language has two functions. One is to make communication between people possible. The other is the preservation of knowledge. Without language it wou… - Shulamith Hareven

If my only identity is that of the victim, the world's deterministic and doomed victim, I may (or so it seems) commit any atrocity, including exiling Arabs from their homes (excuse me, dear hawks, "relocating" them) and taking possession of their land, because I am the victim and they are not; because this is the only way I define myself and my identity-forever. But if I also define myself as the son, or daughter, of a people with a splendid four-thousand-year history of responsibility, of conscience, of repairing and improving, of appealing for social order and justice, of a legal system nearly unparalleled in the world, and of the protection of these traditions; if I have indeed learned and internalized all these, so that they define my identity; then even if often in history I have been the victim of others, I will never oppress those weaker than myself and never abuse my power to exile them (excuse me, dear hawks, "bus them out"). I will not have to define my uniqueness in terms of the past alone.

Under no circumstances are we to forget our tragedies. But whoever bases our identity on them and them alone, distorts the greatness of this people and keeps from its sons not only pride, but sanity itself.

Any given discipline contains a majority of priests and a minority of prophets, and the eternal question is who prevails.