Freedom without responsibility is anarchy.

Sadly, Amherst has been getting repeated lessons that illustrate this maxim. The most recent incident: The Town Council’s attempt to get involved in global politics by passing a resolution on the horrendous situation in Gaza. Freedom of speech degenerated into a chaotic shouting frenzy.

Amherst has a history of expressing official town positions on issues over which it has no control. This is commendable, and many issues Amherst has taken on are vitally important. However, it might behoove the town to establish some deliberative body outside Town Council to debate and pass resolutions on issues not directly related to running the town.

Having townwide meetings on such issues, where opinions are expressed, debated and voted on to send a message about where Amherst’s majority stands is more than appropriate. That said, The Town Council is already overburdened. Saddling it with debates on extraneous resolutions only makes the town less able to deal with pressing budgetary and development issues that are directly impacting the town’s functioning.

Let’s have debate, Let’s pass resolutions. Let’s do it outside the Town Council.

As to the issue that so roiled the council’s March 4 hearing:

History is replete with political leaders cynically using religion to goad followers into action, including here in America. It is taken to apocalyptic heights in the Mideast. The fact that the Abrahamic religions share the same roots makes the situation ironic.

At the base of the problem is the irreconcilable belief that God promised the same land to different groups. Complicating this are the codices of the Old Testament, the bedrock of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Modern sensibilities have impelled most citizens to choose which rules to follow and which to ignore in the name of current concepts of fairness, equality and justice.

Tragically, fundamentalists are ruling the day in the Eastern Mediterranean, and dragging everyone else into their Armageddon.

Let’s leave aside the question of which God gave what to whom. The question has bedeviled the Middle East for a few thousand years. The opposing claimants would do well to remember that this real estate conflict was initiated in the same scriptures that proclaim that the universe was created in six days 6,000 years ago, Eve was molded from Adam’s rib, Noah packed every species on Earth onto his ark, etc. Reading the passages from Exodus on Biblical justice are equally problematic.

Exodus 21:23-24 figures prominently in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “If there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Advocates of nonviolence from Ghandi to Martin Luther King Jr. have pointed out that, “‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.’” Jesus went further, suggesting “turning the other cheek.” Even for adherents to the eye-for-an-eye code, however, it’s an eye for eye, not 10 or 20 eyes for an eye.

These verses immediately follow a repugnant passage on the propriety of, and the extent to which, one should beat one’s slaves (Exodus 21:20-21). Several other verses delve further into “justice”:

Exodus 21:14: “If anyone schemes and kills someone deliberately, that person is to be … put to death.”

Exodus 21:16: “Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death.”

Exodus 21:18-19: “If people quarrel and one person hits another with a stone or with their fist and the victim does not die but is confined to bed … the guilty party must pay the injured person for any loss of time and see that the victim is completely healed.”

How does the war in Gaza end? It will take magnanimous, courageous leadership on both sides standing fast against a lust for retribution that has polarized the entire world.

Will that miracle happen any time soon? No. Peace will require time, hard work, commitment, forgiveness. This conflict has pit Jews against Palestinians, Jews against Jews, fundamentalists against fundamentalists. How to transmute all the blood and suffering into peace and reconciliation is beyond our ken. Ultimately, it will not be force or reason, but millions of individual hearts on both sides, that must rule the day.

In the 1982 movie “Gandhi,” a climactic scene involves a Hindu man asking Gandhi how he should heal from the agony of losing his son to a Muslim murderer. Much to his horror, he hears Gandhi’s advice: Take in a Muslim orphan and raise that orphan to be a good Muslim.

Maybe this is what we must all do: take in the orphans of our enemies and teach them not to be us, but to be the best versions of themselves. Perhaps then we would truly develop enough understanding and compassion to expunge the hate. Heaven knows there are orphans enough to work with.

John Varner lives in Amherst.