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WHY MURDERERS?
As part of my long time nostalgia for my home town, Chicago, which I left almost a half century ago, I read a Chicago newspaper on my computer screen almost daily. The paper reports four to five murders daily. I am astounded by the casualness of the report of such killings. Here in Israel we are unfortunately not free of such violence though at a much more infrequent level. Very recently we are witness to an American soldier wantonly killing seventeen Afghan civilians for no apparent good reason. Last week four Jews, three of them little children, were murdered in cold blood by a young Moslem Frenchman.
I am in the midst of reading a very chilling biography of the arch murderer Heinrich Himmler. It is very hard reading and I can only do so in sporadic bursts. Himmler uses the word “decency” over and over to describe his murderous policies. And what shall we think of the actual murderers, SS men and women, Wehrmacht soldiers, Ukrainian and Polish auxiliaries, the Sonderkommandos and the Einsatzgruppen battalions that performed the actual brutalities and killings? What made them such serial and ruthless killers?
I have always been troubled by this question. Is there no hope for humankind? Especially coming off of a century where over one hundred fifty million people were killed by war, governments and ideologues, I think that the question bears consideration. It goes to the basic nature and soul of human beings and should be the subject of serious thought and consideration of all of us.
Western man, since the days of the seventeenth century Enlightenment and the rise of democracy as an effective form of government, has preached a doctrine that proclaims that human beings are inherently good. Evil is caused by class disparity, economic unfairness, lack of tolerance, fanatical religions, oppression and exploitation of the working class, the violence of warfare and social disparities. All of this has certainly a grain of truth connected to it.
But all of these causes are outside of the individual human being itself. Because of this the Western world has a strong belief that if somehow these causes can be corrected or at least ameliorated the resulting violence and killing will also be diminished, if not even eliminated. There is no scientific proof that this theory is correct. But all of Western society and its governments subscribe to it anyway.
The many billions of governmental dollars thrown at these problems have not produced really sanguine results. But the basic mindset that propels these policies and programs is so fixed in our current society that it is almost unpatriotic and even not compassionate to think or say otherwise. Our society simply believes that human beings are good people at heart and that all of this violence and murder is simply a socially or ideologically driven aberration.
Thus legislative governmental policy, judicial reordering of society is the way forward to help us out of our murderous environment. That is the heart of secularism and its thought process. For secularism, at its base, believes that human beings are by innate nature good and fine creatures.
The Torah not surprisingly takes an opposite view on all of these matters. It states that mankind and individual humans are bad by nature. The inclination of humans from youth is evil and destructive. All humans are potentially wild donkeys that trample, bite and destroy.
The Torah was given to Jews to control this evil inclination and to counteract our base instincts. But, the Torah demands that we be trained in introspection, realizing that we are capable, each and every one of us, of murder and mayhem. That is what the great rabbi of the Mishna meant when he said that he truly desired forbidden foods and acts but that “my father in Heaven has decreed that I not behave in such a fashion.”
The truly religious person, not someone who is merely superficially observant or societally conformist to ritual observance, not someone who makes up one’s own definitions of decency and goodness, has a moral brake that counteracts one’s own evil instinct. The truly religious person realizes that he or she is capable of cruelty and violence, of cheating and stealing and of unjustified aggression towards others.
By admitting this to one’s self, then one can begin to take the steps to control such bad behavior. Our society is in denial about itself and its true nature. As a result, our international diplomacy and internal social projects are in such disarray. A better future is always predicated on an accurate assessment of the realities of the present.
Shabat shalom.
Berel Wein
