International Council of Christians and Jews

Try this for yourself as well as in a group

Break up – cut up this 65 word passage by Professor Buber into separate words and place them in an envelope. Repeat this so that you have as many sets of the passage – so that you have as many envelopes with the 65 words of the passage as the number of participants in your group.

But before beginning. Put the word 'Loyalty' on a separate empty page; have enough copies for all your participants. Or have the word 'Loyalty' written out in large letters either on a black/whiteboard or on a large piece of paper at the front of your meeting room. Ask people to devote a few minutes to thinking about what this word evokes, suggests for each person individually. Participants should be encouraged to jot down their ideas – just for themselves. After just a few minutes trying this, invite participants to share their first thoughts with one another in small groups of three or four. After just five or ten minutes of sharing in that way, give out the envelopes. And again, first ask individuals to try putting the pieces of the word puzzle together as it seems to work for each person – to begin puzzling the words together; and then after trying that for some six minutes, ask for just two or three reactions, responses, thoughts from people of how trying that was for them – and then return to the small groups of three or four – either the same or different ones – in which participants will work together on composing one of the sets of 65 words into a comprehensible passage – as best they can!

Another way to do this is by making a large size set of these words and then that one large set placed in a large size envelope is given to a group of three or four or even of five or six participants – to work on putting them together into phrases and sentences.

Then discuss what people came up with. What the exercise suggests. What ideas, possible perspectives it suggests.

And then pass out the passage as written by Professor Buber and see what that suggests in a reading and conversation now in your one whole group – after having explored its elements in via the words as puzzle, as make your own poem out of them – that preceded your close reading of the text as written!

As part of your discussion, consider what questions, what problems and challenges arise in trying to understand this text – and apply it in real life!

For instance, won't there be competing ideas about what the just demand of the group – what the group's true ideals demand – just as there will be the corollary – there will be competing ideas about what are false interpretations and applications of these demands? How does one distinguish between the just and the unjust, the true and the false, the more just and the less unjust, that which is more true and that which is less true? Are there criteria for determining these? If so, what are they are? Who determines them? What to do when there are within a group – let alone between different groups – competing ideas, perspectives, experiences, 'positions'?

Being loyal not only to what my group in any given situation says and does, but rather loyalty to my group involving loyalty to what I understand to be the ideals of my group! Hmm… ! Complicated! Not at all simple!