New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman got off a line in a column this week about Iraq's Kurdistan that seemed to me to contain the essence of the religion of the Hebrew bible and its Christian appendices. Here is the line: "In the long run ... we can still hope -- as partially happened in Vietnam -- that our values will triumph where our power failed."

Our values will triumph where our power failed.

Friedman was recounting a commencement for which he was the speaker at an American university in Kurdistan and of the hope it gave him for that part of the otherwise still-riven country in which U.S. power did not ultimately win the day. He was saying that our founding of an American-style university left a set of values behind that will mean everything to students who attend and graduate from it.

Power and value. Gazing back across the landscape of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st, I can see Friedman's dialectic in play. However, I see power and its application in places other than the traditional battlefield. I see it here and there, now and again in ordinary places, but I see it as value.

Example: The motorist who has the right of way nonetheless beckons another to proceed ahead of him; the person who rises from his seat in a crowded bus and bids the older man take the seat; the spouse who musters the grace to forgive an unfaithful partner; the boss who takes a pay cut himself rather than dismiss an employee or two.

In these scenarios, the motorist, the passenger, the spouse and the boss had the right that power and possession confer, but chose not to exercise it. Rather, they chose to demonstrate the value of human kindness.

The other motorist on her way rejoicing, the older man now seated, the spouse forgiven and the employees still with jobs saw ones with power and the right to use it back away from that privilege and do unto others as they would have done to themselves.

That, as I have said, is the essence of biblical religion -- first enunciated in that tradition, insofar as we know, by Hillel the Elder, who is said to have summed up the 613 commandments of Torah thus: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn." Turned on its head by one of the Jesuses of New Testament fame, the saying is: "Treat others as you wish to be treated yourself." (My translation.)

Friedman was considering the power-value dialectic in global terms. I think he was saying that what we did in Iraq was largely an expenditure of power for power's sake -- as in George W. Bush wanting to make Saddam Hussein the scapegoat for 9/11. But how we helped the Kurds build that university was a value thing.

About Ukraine: President Obama is being criticized from the left and right for not being more assertive with Vladimir Putin. Certainly the U.S. could blunder into that fight with considerable military hardware and try to force a simple conclusion from a complex and conflicted set of conditions, from which conditions nothing simple has ever been known to emerge. Think of Vietnam and, of course, Iraq. The value aspect is always more difficult for the simple reason that Homo sapiens pays more attention to power and its might and main.

Sometimes value becomes power as in the case of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Both of those heroes put into everyday practice the turn-the-other-cheek, walk-the-extra-mile theories of human behavior. Both were assassinated precisely for the power of the value they invested. Only historians can name the man who shot Gandhi. A private, unscientific survey I took of 25 people of my acquaintance shows that only one of them -- and he a former journalist -- could remember the name of King's assassin.

Both assassins brought power to their deadly work. The assassinated brought value to their life-giving work, which is why they will be remembered saecula saeculorum.

A little book I wrote 16 years ago is entitled Seven Sayings of Jesus: How One Man's Words Can Change Your World. My own choice of a title would have been appropriate for an academic dissertation -- and would have doomed it to even fewer sales than resulted. My editor was right. The title she gave it says exactly what the book proposes.

The book explored the practical application of several of those sayings: turning the other cheek, walking the voluntary mile, forgiving as often as it takes and loving one's enemy. Taken together, they constitute value that any one, any clan, kith, kin or country can bring to any situation or set of conditions. All of those behaviors are passive or partake in passivity. Yet they are powerful in their own right. Friedman is right: Power fails while value endures -- unless, of course, the power is the value.

Maybe that is what will help us understand the rescue of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from the horrors of the Taliban. Certainly the United States could have rebuffed the idea of trading the release of those Guantanamo prisoners for Bergdahl. We could have beaten our national chest and brandished weapons because we have both the chest for beating and the weapons to fire.

Yet, the president of the United States decided to use his power as value: releasing prisoners from oppression and captivity (see Luke 4:18b). Surely the evangelical clergy who despise Mr. Obama will see the biblical connection.