Ismail R. al-Faruqi > Quotes > Quote > Mohd liked it

“..Jesus was not to recapture for the Jewish vacuous ethos, the original value of the community on which it had wagered its whole life and weight. Rightly diagnosing Jewry's disease, he rejected not only their failure to comply with their ethic but the very foundation of that ethic. Piercing the walls of community survival, Jesus opened a whole new vista of genuine, properly ethical values, namely, the values of the individual person. The value of the community, no matter how 'surviving' and prosperous it may be or become, Jesus found inferior to that of the individual person. It is the latter that the community must serve. In respect to it, the value of the community can be only instrumental. The value of the individual person, the values which pertain to his inner self, are far more important than those which attach to community survival. For, what is the worth of the whole world and all mankind if the individual souls that compose it are ethically sick, if they do not realize the values of purity, of chastity, of sincerity, of charity, of forgiveness, of loving kindness and goodness? The ethical individual person is the end of moral life itself. How can community survival have anything but elemental worth? Even on this level of instruments and means, how can it have the first position? Are not the conditions of life and existence , which readily conduce to the cultivation of the moral person, of greater importance and therefore, of higher value? Would not the family with its ultimate self-sacrifice and love-cultivating atmosphere prove of higher worth than the community where everything must be impersonalized ,legalized, and exteriorized? Pursuing this same insight further, would not even solitude rank higher than community, where the person can turn his eyes inward and , as it were, focus attention on what his self actually is , on what it ought to be which it is not, and on bringing that self around to become that which it ought to be?”
― Ismail Ragi A.al Faruqi