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GREED, HATRED, DEATH
In the United States the day after the Thanksgiving holiday is called Black Friday because the stores have the largest volume of sales for any one day of the year on that Friday. The merchants are therefore in the black as far as their ledgers are concerned, while otherwise they could be in the red with negative balances and sparse sales.
This year on Black Friday a large retailer advertised that it was going to sell large screen TV sets at a considerable reduction in price. The store would open its doors at 6AM to accommodate the expected large crowds of bargain hunters. A poor hapless part time employee opened the doors to the store at 6AM to allow a waiting horde of shoppers to enter the store. The mob of shoppers surged forward pushing the employee to the ground and trampling him to death.
The shoppers ignored the prostrate victim and the paramedics working to revive him and grabbed their TV sets and left the store in haste, stepping over the victim and his would-be rescuers. Greed conquers all, even at the cost of human life.
It is what feeds the murders committed by organized crime gangs the world over. It is what destroys families, communities and societies. It destroys any sense of relative values in society – no discounted flat screen TV set is worth a human life.
Yet we are witness to the fact that to many the relative value of a human life is far less than a flat screen TV set that can be purchased at a bargain price.
The very same day of Black Friday came the horrifying and tragic news of the massacre of innocents by fanatical Moslems in Mumbai, India. There also human life was of no value compared to some warped sense of fanaticism and hatred of the “other.”
There was no strategic or tactical gain possible for the Moslem cause from this attack. It was just cold-blooded indiscriminate murder. However the fact that a Jewish center was especially targeted and that its inhabitants were massacred is certainly not accidental or unplanned. For the Jew is always the ultimate “other.”
To ascribe any of this killing spree to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a misreading of the situation. India is a Hindu nation and the adjoining Moslem nation of Pakistan has been established as an independent entity – a two state solution – for sixty years.
Nevertheless hatred governs the Moslem street there, as it does in the Palestinian areas as well. It is senseless, base, self-destructive and very dangerous to all concerned. Hatred is a condition of the soul akin to greed. It places little value on human life.
It produces people willing to take their own lives as long as others are also killed thereby. It defies all logic and makes meaningful negotiation well nigh impossible. The rabbis of the Talmud taught us that hatred deranges any form of normal productive life. We are living witnesses to the truth of that observation.
The rabbis in Avot taught us: “Jealousy of others, hatred of others and uncontrollable desires (such as greed) remove a person from this world.” By this they meant that these evil instincts if left unchecked simply destroy human life and society.
Governed by greed, desire, hatred and jealousy, the person caught in such a trap of one’s own making values human life cheaply. All means, violent and murderous as they may be, are fair game for use by such a person.
Society must learn to protect itself from these vicious values. The current worldwide economic downturn may yet contribute to a reordering of priorities in today’s society. Thus Greed may yet become more tempered, though it is difficult to fathom a solution for unmitigated hatred.
All pacifist philosophies throughout the ages have run aground on the shoals of irrational hatreds. It is the tragedy of human history that hatred destroys all human values, certainly the one of any sort of reverence for human life or the right of the “other” to also live unharmed.
To educate a new generation to arise and forego ancient hatreds is a very challenging goal. But unless it is so attempted, the tragedy of Mumbai will, God forbid, continue to recur. All of history testifies to the truth of this assessment. Greed, hatred and their associated vices and evil truly drive people out of this world. The tragedy is that the victims of these weaknesses of character and behavior are also removed from this world. Perhaps we now are aware of a different, more somber, definition of Black Friday.
Shabat shalom.
