Kevin Rudd's campaign was effective in telling three types of stories which helped to create positive emotions towards him and the ALP. These three types of stories are: Who am I? Why am I here? and My vision story.²

Kevin Rudd's first television commercials contained his 'Who am I?' story. We learned how Kevin grew up in outback Queensland, how his parents didn't even get a high school education and how he enjoyed going back to his home town and talking with the residents about what they wanted for the future. For many people in the electorate Kevin was just like us.

Kevin's 'Why am I here?' stories revolved around his focus areas of an education revolution, being a economic conservative, getting rid of work choices, ratifying the Kyoto protocol, and providing new leadership. And in talking about these focus areas Rudd set out his vision for the future--his vision story.

Rudd's campaign mastered the master narratives required to create the right emotions in the electorate. Interesting, however, both Rudd and Howard avoided recounting anecdotes of specific events and encounters as a way to illustrate what the candidates really value. I have been told by one political insider that both Rudd and Howard are worried the media will crucify them for using anecdotes as a mere trick to spin a particular message.

But we saw on election night how storytelling can be done with authenticity and impact when Maxine McKew gave a short speech on the news that she look like winning the seat of Bennelong. Maxine started by saying some general statements about the contest for Bennelong being on a knife edge, and how the seat will never be taken for granted again. Then she moved into storytelling mode, first remembering how she was at this town hall only a few months before and then recalling the many interviews she had done over the years and that some of the very special people she has ever met were actually in Bennelong, and this is where the mood changed as Maxine told three anecdotes.

I'm thinking of the 90-year old Sister Louise who's at St Catherines who I met just a couple of weeks ago. She's blind. But the day I talked to her she said, "Nobody is blind in heaven."

And I'm thinking of 6 year old Emily at Denniston East. She told me that she told her parents to vote for Kevin Rudd because Kevin Rudd would be a great Prime Minister for children. And you know, ... we need a great Prime Minister for children.

And I'm thinking as well of a boy called Ali who only recently completed his HSC exams, who—maybe Ali you are here tonight—who a few years ago was in a Pakistani refugee camp waiting for passage out, and Ali has found a safe home, and a welcome here in Australia ...

I'm sure many people felt goosebumps at the end of this speech--emotions were created.

We help leaders tell these types of stories, first by helping leaders learn how to find their stories (of course Maxine is an expert at this but we all can do it), then help them learn how to tell these stories and ensure at all times there is authenticity in what you say.

1. Westen, Drew. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007.

2. Simmons, Annette. The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and

Religion and democracy, politics; church and state Thought For The Day - 1 February 2008 As Rudy Giuliani pulls out of the race for nomination, the American presidential contest is hotting up, and it's fascinating to see the differences between American politics and ours. But there's one historic feature of American politics that I think has relevance to us too. Back in the 1830s a brilliant young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited the United States to see how this experiment in liberty was working out. The book he wrote, Democracy in America, remains one of the classics of political thought. What surprised him was how religious America was compared to Europe. And what he wanted to understand was how religion and democracy can coexist. 'In France', he said, 'I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions', but in America they walked hand in hand. How did it happen? The answer, he discovered, was that religious leaders were careful never to get involved with party politics. They knew that politics is of its essence divisive. And if religion got too involved with politics, it too would become divisive. So religious leaders focused on strengthening families, creating communities and charities, building schools and encouraging active citizenship. It created what he called 'habits of the heart' that were so essential in sustaining a sense of the common good. A democratic society needs two things: a way of mediating conflicts, and a sense of shared identity without which there is no society at all. Politics, said Tocqueville, must focus on the conflicts, religion on shared belonging. He added, 'In proportion as a nation assumes a democratic condition . . . it becomes more and more dangerous to connect religion with political institutions.' Those are wise words, for America and for us. Religious organizations must never become pressure groups for this or that contentious item of domestic or foreign policy. Their task, and I include myself, is moral: to strengthen the bonds of human relationship and the sanctity of human life; and to teach us to love our neighbours as ourselves, especially today when our neighbours belong to so many different faiths. When religion becomes politicized, or politics becomes religionised, bad things happen, and we must avoid that if we can. It's a hard distinction to keep, and neither America nor we have always succeeded. But that remains the challenge. Politics speaks to our conflicting interests. Religion should speak to our shared responsibilities. That's how religion and democratic freedom can walk hand in hand.

Music, Faith, story: survival, amnesia

Credo - Love can teach us to listen to our enduring melodies

In his new book, Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks (no relative, alas) tells the poignant story of Clive Wearing, an eminent musician and musicologist, who was struck by a devastating brain infection. The result was acute amnesia. Wearing was unable to remember anything for more than a few seconds. As his wife Deborah put it, 'It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment.'

It's a heartbreaking story. Unable to thread experiences together, he was caught in an endless present that had no connection with anything that had gone before. One day his wife found him holding a chocolate in one hand and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand, saying each time, 'Look, it's new.' 'It's the same chocolate', she said. 'No', he replied, 'look. It's changed.' He had no past at all. In a moment of awareness he said about himself, 'I haven't heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything. It's like being dead.'

Two things broke through his isolation. One was his love for his wife. Whenever he saw her he felt intense relief, knowing that he was not alone, that she was there, loving and caring for him. The other was music. He could still sing, play the organ and conduct a choir with all his old skill and verve.

What was it about music, Sacks asks, that enabled him, while playing or conducting, to overcome his amnesia? He suggests that when we 'remember' a melody, we recall one note at a time, yet each note relates to the whole. He quotes Victor Zuckerkandl, who wrote, 'Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.' Music is a form of sensed continuity that can sometimes break through the most overpowering disconnections in our experience of time.

There is something spiritual about music, and something musical about the human spirit. When the Israelites experienced redemption at the Red Sea, they sang. So did Hannah when she had a child. The Levites sang in the Temple. Every day, in Judaism, we preface our morning prayers with what we call 'Verses of Song' with their magnificent crescendo, Psalm 150, in which instruments and the human voice combine to sing God's praises. When language takes wing heavenward, it modulates from speech to song.
Mystics have gone further and spoken of the song of the universe, what Pythagoras called 'the music of the spheres'. This is what Psalm 19 means when it says, 'The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands . . . There is no speech, there are no words, where their voice is not heard. Their music carries throughout the earth, their words to the end of the world.' Beneath the silence, audible only to the inner ear, creation sings to its Creator.

And music may have something to do with the meaning of a human life. In 2006 Michael Mayne, Dean of Westminster, knowing he was about to die, published a journal of his last year and called it The Enduring Melody. In it he spoke about life as a melody. In early times liturgical music – 'plainsong' in the Church, nussach in the synagogue – consisted of a single dominant chant, the cantus firmus, the 'fixed song'. Gradually this became ornamented with counterpoint and harmony, but it was the underlying melody that gave unity to the whole. So, said Mayne, we can sometimes look back on our life and hear beneath the harmonies and dissonances, the 'enduring melody' of who we are and what we have tried to be.

Faith, I suspect, is more like music than like science. Science analyzes, music integrates. And as music connects note to note, so faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age in a timeless melody that breaks into time. God is the composer and librettist. We are each called on to be voices in the choir, singers of God's song.

Oliver Sacks ends his account of Wearing's illness with the words of his wife: 'Clive's at-homeness in music and in his love for me are where he transcends amnesia and finds continuum'. I was deeply moved by those words. Love and music redeem our solitude, mending the broken connections of our lives. Faith teaches us to hear the music beneath the noise.

Jewish Denominations Overview

A nice picture

http://www.cjp.org/page.html?ArticleID=165857

sermon

Must Jews Believe in God?
Sermon Delivered by Rabbi Evan Moffic
Chicago Sinai Congregation
January 27, 2008
I was recently discussing this evening's sermon topic--must Jews believe in God?--with a temple member, and she brought up the following story. When their youngest daughter was six and seven, she and her husband used to read to her before bed. A little conversation would follow. Then, before they turned off the lights, the daughter would ask them--do you believe in God? Dad would say, Yes, absolutely. Mom would say a bit more, talking about her various feelings and questions. This routine continued for several weeks. Finally, one evening the daughter asked the same question--do you believe in God?--dad said yes, mom started her winding and thoughtful explanation. After a few minutes, her frustration growing, this finally shouted: Would you just say you believe in God!!
This young girl desired a simple answer. This desire reflects a yearning for order and stability in this confusing world. Especially at a young age, we want to know that everything is okay and that the world makes sense. Sigmund Freud linked this yearning to the helpless infant's dependence on mother and father. Like a baby relies on his parents, Throughout life, he argued, every person yearns for an powerful and authoritative figure who can meet our needs and help us make sense of life. That figure becomes God. Some people maintain this view of God throughout their lives. Others develop a different--what we might call a more mature view of God--seeing God not as all-powerful but as some kind of force for goodness and order in the universe. Many of the theologians of liberal Christianity and Judaism fall within this camp. Others, however, are simply perplexed. They don't what to believe about God. I think many Jews--especially we Reform Jews--fall within this camp.
Statistical studies of American Jewry seem to bear this out. According to recent study, about half of the 5.3 million Jews in America identify themselves as "secular" or "somewhat secular." Whereas 95 percent of Americans profess belief in God or some kind of higher power, another recent survey indicated that about 60 to 70 percent of Jews claim such a belief (2003 Harris Interactive Poll).
What can we make of this? Does belief in God matter to Jews? Must it be something we embrace? My answer is Yes....But. God is central to who we are. Our Jewish approach to God has shaped Western civilization. Yet, Judaism does not ask us to believe in God in the way that belief is commonly understood.
First, in Judaism, to believe in God is not know everything about God. Indeed, the 12th century Rabbi Joseph Albo said that "If I knew God, I would be God." To believe in God is not say God does this, this and this. To believe in God is not say if I do "x" I will go to heaven, or if I do "y", I will be punished. That is not faith. That is hubris. Rather, the Hebrew word for belief--emunah--really means faithfulness. In Judaism, to believe in God is to be faithful to what God asks and demands of us. The Torah is our guide to discovering what these demands are. They include the Ten Commandments, which are part of this week's Torah portion and which Zach will discuss tomorrow. These demands derive from the underlying assumption of the Torah, which is that there is a moral purpose and order to the universe. We believe in God if we live our lives with faith in this proposition. We believe in God if we live as if there is more to life than the satisfaction of our own needs and desire, if we believe that there is something beyond ourselves that shapes how we live. One of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, Mordecai Kaplan, put it well when he said, "It matters very little how we conceive God, as long as we so believe in God that belief in Him makes a tremendous difference in our lives." In other words, actions demonstrate belief. Our deeds, rather than our words or logic, illustrate our faith.
A profound example of this type comes, interestingly, from a well-known Catholic figure--Mother Teresa. A few months ago a book of her letters was published. In it she revealed her profound doubts about God's role in her life. She described her feelings of emptiness at prayer and unfulfilled yearning to understand God's truth. Despite her doubts, many in the world continue to see her as an exemplar of faith. She lived her life in a way that responded to God's demands even if she didn't know exactly who or what God is. In a way, Mother Teresa's doubts humanized her and illustrated the way that genuine faith is within everyone's reach. Rabbi Irwin Kula, reflecting on Mother Teresa's legacy, put it well when he said, "Mother Teresa’s honesty about her spiritual emptiness is uncomfortable for us because we tend to see genuine faith and love as free of doubt. But nothing could be further from the truth. A mature faith and a rich love, a genuine relationship with God or with another person is born of the grit and insecurity of life." Belief, faith is not certainty. It is the courage to do what is right in a world of uncertainty.
Since Judaism sees belief expressed through action, it follows that the best way to understand God is not as a noun. Rather, God is a verb. God comes into being only as we act in Godly ways. This idea was first proposed by Rabbi Harold Schulweis, who called it predicate theology. According to Schulweis, the important question is not whether we believe that God is caring or that God is merciful, but whether we act in Godly ways by caring for and having mercy on others. This view fits well with the structure of the Ten Commandments. One of its peculiar features is that the first commandment is not really a commandment. If we read it closely we see that the first commandment is "I am the Lord your God, who brought who out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." That's it. It's not a commandment. It's a statement. Only when we get to the second commandment do we see an actual command: "You shall have no other gods before me." The familiar other commanments--you shall not steal, you shall not murder, etc--follow. Why this peculiar structure? It's not the same in Christianity, which counts "You shall have no other gods before me" as part of the First Commandment. Why does Judaism begin the Ten Commandments with a statement--I am the Lord your God? Because the ultimate commandment is to live up to that statement--to demonstrate that proposition--by following the particular commandments that follow. The relationship between the first commandment and the nine others is like the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Like the First Commandment, the Declaration of Indpendence sets out a vision--that vision of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like the other Ten commandments, the Constitution is our way of realizing it.
The statistics that measure belief in God use the wrong measurements. In Judaism, we don't illustrate belief by words. We demonstrate it by action. We don't see God as an old man in the sky with a beard and a lightening bolt. We see God when we see the pain and needs of another. We touch God as we reach out to help those in need. We demonstrate our belief in God through the details of our lives. Indeed, in my paraphrase and slight emendation of the prophet Micah: If we "do justly and love mercy, then we will walk humbly with our God."

1

Must Jews Believe in God?

Sermon Delivered by Rabbi Evan Moffic

Chicago Sinai Congregation

January 27, 2008

I was recently discussing this evening's sermon topic--must Jews believe in God?--with a temple member, and she brought up the following story. When their youngest daughter was six and seven, she and her husband used to read to her before bed. A little conversation would follow. Then, before they turned off the lights, the daughter would ask them--do you believe in God? Dad would say, Yes, absolutely. Mom would say a bit more, talking about her various feelings and questions. This routine continued for several weeks. Finally, one evening the daughter asked the same question--do you believe in God?--dad said yes, mom started her winding and thoughtful explanation. After a few minutes, her frustration growing, this finally shouted: Would you just say you believe in God!!

This young girl desired a simple answer. This desire reflects a yearning for order and stability in this confusing world. Especially at a young age, we want to know that everything is okay and that the world makes sense. Sigmund Freud linked this yearning to the helpless infant's dependence on mother and father. Like a baby relies on his parents, Throughout life, he argued, every person yearns for an powerful and authoritative figure who can meet our needs and help us make sense of life. That figure becomes God. Some people maintain this view of God throughout their lives. Others develop a different--what we might call a more mature view of God--seeing God not as all-powerful but as some kind of force for goodness and order in the universe. Many of the theologians of liberal Christianity and Judaism fall within this camp. Others, however, are simply perplexed. They don't what to believe about God. I think many Jews--especially we Reform Jews--fall within this camp.

Statistical studies of American Jewry seem to bear this out. According to recent study, about half of the 5.3 million Jews in America identify themselves as "secular" or "somewhat secular." Whereas 95 percent of Americans profess belief in God or some kind of higher power, another recent survey indicated that about 60 to 70 percent of Jews claim such a belief (2003 Harris Interactive Poll).

What can we make of this? Does belief in God matter to Jews? Must it be something we embrace? My answer is Yes....But. God is central to who we are. Our Jewish approach to God has shaped Western civilization. Yet, Judaism does not ask us to believe in God in the way that belief is commonly understood.

First, in Judaism, to believe in God is not know everything about God. Indeed, the 12th century Rabbi Joseph Albo said that "If I knew God, I would be God." To believe in God is not say God does this, this and this. To believe in God is not say if I do "x" I will go to heaven, or if I do "y", I will be punished. That is not faith. That is hubris. Rather, the Hebrew word for belief--emunah--really means faithfulness. In Judaism, to believe in God is to be faithful to what God asks and demands of us. The Torah is our guide to discovering what these demands are. They include the Ten Commandments, which are part of this week's Torah portion and which Zach will discuss tomorrow. These demands derive from the underlying assumption of the Torah, which is that there is a moral purpose and order to the universe. We believe in God if we live our lives with faith in this proposition. We believe in God if we live as if there is more to life than the satisfaction of our own needs and desire, if we believe that there is something beyond ourselves that shapes how we live. One of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, Mordecai Kaplan, put it well when he said, "It matters very little how we conceive God, as long as we so believe in God that belief in Him makes a tremendous difference in our lives." In other words, actions demonstrate belief. Our deeds, rather than our words or logic, illustrate our faith.

A profound example of this type comes, interestingly, from a well-known Catholic figure--Mother Teresa. A few months ago a book of her letters was published. In it she revealed her profound doubts about God's role in her life. She described her feelings of emptiness at prayer and unfulfilled yearning to understand God's truth. Despite her doubts, many in the world continue to see her as an exemplar of faith. She lived her life in a way that responded to God's demands even if she didn't know exactly who or what God is. In a way, Mother Teresa's doubts humanized her and illustrated the way that genuine faith is within everyone's reach. Rabbi Irwin Kula, reflecting on Mother Teresa's legacy, put it well when he said, "Mother Teresa’s honesty about her spiritual emptiness is uncomfortable for us because we tend to see genuine faith and love as free of doubt. But nothing could be further from the truth. A mature faith and a rich love, a genuine relationship with God or with another person is born of the grit and insecurity of life." Belief, faith is not certainty. It is the courage to do what is right in a world of uncertainty.

Since Judaism sees belief expressed through action, it follows that the best way to understand God is not as a noun. Rather, God is a verb. God comes into being only as we act in Godly ways. This idea was first proposed by Rabbi Harold Schulweis, who called it predicate theology. According to Schulweis, the important question is not whether we believe that God is caring or that God is merciful, but whether we act in Godly ways by caring for and having mercy on others. This view fits well with the structure of the Ten Commandments. One of its peculiar features is that the first commandment is not really a commandment. If we read it closely we see that the first commandment is "I am the Lord your God, who brought who out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." That's it. It's not a commandment. It's a statement. Only when we get to the second commandment do we see an actual command: "You shall have no other gods before me." The familiar other commanments--you shall not steal, you shall not murder, etc--follow. Why this peculiar structure? It's not the same in Christianity, which counts "You shall have no other gods before me" as part of the First Commandment. Why does Judaism begin the Ten Commandments with a statement--I am the Lord your God? Because the ultimate commandment is to live up to that statement--to demonstrate that proposition--by following the particular commandments that follow. The relationship between the first commandment and the nine others is like the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Like the First Commandment, the Declaration of Indpendence sets out a vision--that vision of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like the other Ten commandments, the Constitution is our way of realizing it.

The statistics that measure belief in God use the wrong measurements. In Judaism, we don't illustrate belief by words. We demonstrate it by action. We don't see God as an old man in the sky with a beard and a lightening bolt. We see God when we see the pain and needs of another. We touch God as we reach out to help those in need. We demonstrate our belief in God through the details of our lives. Indeed, in my paraphrase and slight emendation of the prophet Micah: If we "do justly and love mercy, then we will walk humbly with our God."

Jacob and Esau

Nice interpretation from shelley zimmerman: torah indicates jacob's fathering needs repair; that's why he never fully gains name Israel and torah switches between jacob and israel. Also it is Esau who initiates reconciliation. shows us that those who have been cast or hurt can become agents for reconcilation.