Wednesday, August 31, 2005
The Pursuit of Purity
Almost four years ago, when terrorists struck the U.S., the question was often asked “Why do they hate us?” Having given this plenty of thought, I think a better question would be “Why do they hate?” What makes a group of people lose sight of the humanity in others? What makes them not only vocalize that hatred, but take action in fulfilling it?
These questions may not matter much for most of us. After all, the immediate purpose at hand is to go after those who do us – and wish to do us - harm. But, if we want to prevent future incidents, we need to see what’s behind the hatred.
I had just finished viewing the documentary called Shoah, a 20-year-old film about the Holocaust made by a Frenchman, Claude Lanzmann. It’s a long (10-hour) movie full of interviews of death camp survivors, former SS minions and local people who witnessed the events. Most of the film showed the death camps and ghettoes as they looked in the 1970s and 80s. (Shoah is the Hebrew term for “Holocaust”.)
Needless to say, the combination of testimonies and modern scenes was chilling. Sometimes, we can get jaded about such stories (“There they go again!”), but Lanzmann included the testimonies of SS officers, and the attitudes that they had would make one’s skin crawl. It wasn’t that these men still kept their racial attitudes about the Jews and the other camp inmates. It was how banal they were about the whole procedure.
There was the interview with the railroad officer who was responsible for taking care of the train transports throughout Eastern Europe. He casually said that he had to take care of regular trains and “special” trains. When asked what these “special” trains were, he stated that they included transporting diplomats and other VIPs across Europe. When he was further pressed, he admitted that these trains also included transports to the concentration camps in Poland and Czechoslovakia from places as far away as Greece. What he wouldn’t admit to was any responsibility in what the end result was of those transports. As far as he was concerned, he was just a typical petty bureaucrat who was just doing his job in keeping the trains running on time.
Another interview was of an SS officer who was second in command of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. He stated that his responsibility was to keep the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants healthy enough to work. He never said what work they were expected to do, nor did he say how the people in the Ghetto could be kept healthy if they weren’t given enough to eat since so many of them died of starvation. In his view, he too was a bureaucrat who was just doing his job.
After I watched Shoah, I saw another documentary on PBS about a son of Holocaust survivors who went back to Poland with his wife and two sons. (This was another example of Serendipity!) The reason for his trip was to try to open his sons’ minds. The family members were Orthodox Jews, mainly Hasidim.
Whereas, the filmmaker was more open-minded, his sons were very bigoted. Living in Jerusalem with their own families, they had the view that all gentiles (goyim) were evil, and that they must stay away from them. All a goy wants to do is get rid of the Jews (Yid); therefore, it’s best to get rid of the goy. (All these terms are Yiddish which was interspersed throughout the program.)
When the family arrived in Poland, they visited the filmmaker’s father’s hometown. There were no Jews left, and the local synagogue (shul) was now a vacant lot. Nevertheless, the protagonist left a piece of paper in the gap of a utility pole, just like many people leave prayers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. To him, the place was holy; therefore it was proper to leave a prayer note at that spot. Yet, his sons thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Since there was no shul anymore, why bother leaving anything? By the end of the trip, their attitudes would change.
The main purpose of the trip was to find the family who kept three local Jewish men hidden for 28 months. One of the brothers was the filmmaker’s father-in-law – the boys’ grandfather. After driving through the Polish countryside, they found the house, and they found the family who saved their grandfather!
The couple was quite old now, but they remembered the three men and wondered what had happened to them after all these years. They related the story when the Nazis almost found them in the barn. If they had pushed out another layer of hay, the men would have been discovered, and all of them, Jew and Gentile, would have been killed.
The two sons and their mother then went to the barn and did exactly what their father did at the vacant lot – placed a prayer note at another holy place. When they did this, they became very emotional and, probably, finally understood the real purpose of their father’s gesture. They understood that there really were Righteous Gentiles, and they became a bit less bigoted with that discovery.
(The names of the couple and their parents were placed on the plaque of Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel. Among the other names are Oskar Schindler and Corrie Ten Boom – other Gentiles who did their best to keep the world from totally falling into madness.)
The attitudes that the filmmaker’s two sons had were not that different from the attitudes of the SS officers interviewed in the film Shoah. What they and others like them want is Purity. It’s this Pursuit of Purity that begets much of the hatred in the world. It’s more than just distrusting the Other. It’s seeing the Other as someone who is less than themselves, not worthy of trust or respect. In the extreme, they’re not even worthy of life itself.
What the father did on their trip to Poland was to show his sons that the Other can be worthy of respect. Apparently, even after all those years, the SS officers didn’t quite get that lesson! If we think about it further, this Pursuit of Purity can be found wherever there are such atrocities. It’s easy to kill someone when we see them as less than human – as impure.
Obviously, we saw this in Nazi Germany. We also saw this during the Wars of Religion in Europe. Incidents like the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Thirty Years War, where people were slaughtered wholesale, show how easy it is to kill someone when we call them “heretic”. We also saw them in Russia during the Czars, as well as the days of the Soviet Union. All one had to do there was define – and redefine – the term “enemy of the state”. Again, we saw it during the Terror of the French Revolution and the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Somehow, evil things happen when the state decides to change calendars to the Year Zero! We still see it happening in the riots in Gujarat, India a few years back and the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan today. (Notice that the examples mentioned include both religious and secular perpetrators. Some people like to blame everything on religion for this evil, but all can be guilty of this sin.)
The Pursuit of Purity can be noble when it’s at the individual level. One might want to purge oneself of “impure” thoughts and habits. The Buddha (Siddhartha) is a famous example of such a quest. This pursuit may be expanded among like-minded believers as well. Throughout history, many a community, mainly religious, were formed with this attitude in mind. At its best, it’s seen as a noble effort worthy of admiration and respect. At its worst, it becomes a cult that does more harm than good to its adherents.
The real issue comes when this Pursuit of Purity moves from the individual or group level into the level of the society at large. This is when the adherents decide to push their agenda onto the rest of us, and find many of us wanting. This is when the danger arises since most of us can never achieve their expectations – nor do we want to. If the groups keep their pursuits to themselves, then there’s little problem outside of the occasional debate or argument. But, when they achieve some level of power – either through government or through other means, that’s when they do harm.
The Nazis, the Bolsheviks and the Khmer Rouge all gained political power, and all used that power to “purify” their land according to their image. Our problem today isn’t a group taking over political power – at least, not yet! Our problem is that the Pursuit of Purity is being done through the means of terror. Since these groups don’t have political power as such, they’ve decided to use criminal means with the added twist that they find it easier to kill when they believe that they’re doing a religious duty of “purification”.
The man who killed Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands had no remorse at all for doing it, just like the man who killed Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The hijackers of 9/11 and the psychopaths who film themselves chopping people’s heads off have an easy time doing it because they see their victims as nothing, as jahiliyya – as a people living in ignorance and darkness.
This is what we’re up against. It doesn’t matter if we give in to their demands. They’ll hate us even if the U.S. pulls out of Iraq today. They’ll hate us if Israel gets pushed into the sea. They’ll hate us if Pakistan gets not only Kashmir but New Delhi as well. They’re not just after these goals that are popular among certain segments in the world. They want to gain power so that we can live their dreams of a pure world, much like the people in Iran are living Khomeini’s dream to this day.
What can be done to stop this? What the filmmaker/father did for his sons is one example – show them the humanity in others who are not like you. Will that work? Maybe on an individual basis, but not on a grand scale.
What can be done on the grand scale is showing the humanitarian effort during disasters like the tsunami last year and the recent hurricane. Such disasters and their relief efforts show the common humanity in us all. The problem is whether those who hate us are willing to see that.
P.S. Like many of you, I’m worried about what’s happening in New Orleans and the surrounding area after Hurricane Katrina struck there. As I write this, the prospect looks grim if relief doesn’t come soon.
These questions may not matter much for most of us. After all, the immediate purpose at hand is to go after those who do us – and wish to do us - harm. But, if we want to prevent future incidents, we need to see what’s behind the hatred.
I had just finished viewing the documentary called Shoah, a 20-year-old film about the Holocaust made by a Frenchman, Claude Lanzmann. It’s a long (10-hour) movie full of interviews of death camp survivors, former SS minions and local people who witnessed the events. Most of the film showed the death camps and ghettoes as they looked in the 1970s and 80s. (Shoah is the Hebrew term for “Holocaust”.)
Needless to say, the combination of testimonies and modern scenes was chilling. Sometimes, we can get jaded about such stories (“There they go again!”), but Lanzmann included the testimonies of SS officers, and the attitudes that they had would make one’s skin crawl. It wasn’t that these men still kept their racial attitudes about the Jews and the other camp inmates. It was how banal they were about the whole procedure.
There was the interview with the railroad officer who was responsible for taking care of the train transports throughout Eastern Europe. He casually said that he had to take care of regular trains and “special” trains. When asked what these “special” trains were, he stated that they included transporting diplomats and other VIPs across Europe. When he was further pressed, he admitted that these trains also included transports to the concentration camps in Poland and Czechoslovakia from places as far away as Greece. What he wouldn’t admit to was any responsibility in what the end result was of those transports. As far as he was concerned, he was just a typical petty bureaucrat who was just doing his job in keeping the trains running on time.
Another interview was of an SS officer who was second in command of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. He stated that his responsibility was to keep the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants healthy enough to work. He never said what work they were expected to do, nor did he say how the people in the Ghetto could be kept healthy if they weren’t given enough to eat since so many of them died of starvation. In his view, he too was a bureaucrat who was just doing his job.
After I watched Shoah, I saw another documentary on PBS about a son of Holocaust survivors who went back to Poland with his wife and two sons. (This was another example of Serendipity!) The reason for his trip was to try to open his sons’ minds. The family members were Orthodox Jews, mainly Hasidim.
Whereas, the filmmaker was more open-minded, his sons were very bigoted. Living in Jerusalem with their own families, they had the view that all gentiles (goyim) were evil, and that they must stay away from them. All a goy wants to do is get rid of the Jews (Yid); therefore, it’s best to get rid of the goy. (All these terms are Yiddish which was interspersed throughout the program.)
When the family arrived in Poland, they visited the filmmaker’s father’s hometown. There were no Jews left, and the local synagogue (shul) was now a vacant lot. Nevertheless, the protagonist left a piece of paper in the gap of a utility pole, just like many people leave prayers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. To him, the place was holy; therefore it was proper to leave a prayer note at that spot. Yet, his sons thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Since there was no shul anymore, why bother leaving anything? By the end of the trip, their attitudes would change.
The main purpose of the trip was to find the family who kept three local Jewish men hidden for 28 months. One of the brothers was the filmmaker’s father-in-law – the boys’ grandfather. After driving through the Polish countryside, they found the house, and they found the family who saved their grandfather!
The couple was quite old now, but they remembered the three men and wondered what had happened to them after all these years. They related the story when the Nazis almost found them in the barn. If they had pushed out another layer of hay, the men would have been discovered, and all of them, Jew and Gentile, would have been killed.
The two sons and their mother then went to the barn and did exactly what their father did at the vacant lot – placed a prayer note at another holy place. When they did this, they became very emotional and, probably, finally understood the real purpose of their father’s gesture. They understood that there really were Righteous Gentiles, and they became a bit less bigoted with that discovery.
(The names of the couple and their parents were placed on the plaque of Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel. Among the other names are Oskar Schindler and Corrie Ten Boom – other Gentiles who did their best to keep the world from totally falling into madness.)
The attitudes that the filmmaker’s two sons had were not that different from the attitudes of the SS officers interviewed in the film Shoah. What they and others like them want is Purity. It’s this Pursuit of Purity that begets much of the hatred in the world. It’s more than just distrusting the Other. It’s seeing the Other as someone who is less than themselves, not worthy of trust or respect. In the extreme, they’re not even worthy of life itself.
What the father did on their trip to Poland was to show his sons that the Other can be worthy of respect. Apparently, even after all those years, the SS officers didn’t quite get that lesson! If we think about it further, this Pursuit of Purity can be found wherever there are such atrocities. It’s easy to kill someone when we see them as less than human – as impure.
Obviously, we saw this in Nazi Germany. We also saw this during the Wars of Religion in Europe. Incidents like the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Thirty Years War, where people were slaughtered wholesale, show how easy it is to kill someone when we call them “heretic”. We also saw them in Russia during the Czars, as well as the days of the Soviet Union. All one had to do there was define – and redefine – the term “enemy of the state”. Again, we saw it during the Terror of the French Revolution and the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Somehow, evil things happen when the state decides to change calendars to the Year Zero! We still see it happening in the riots in Gujarat, India a few years back and the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan today. (Notice that the examples mentioned include both religious and secular perpetrators. Some people like to blame everything on religion for this evil, but all can be guilty of this sin.)
The Pursuit of Purity can be noble when it’s at the individual level. One might want to purge oneself of “impure” thoughts and habits. The Buddha (Siddhartha) is a famous example of such a quest. This pursuit may be expanded among like-minded believers as well. Throughout history, many a community, mainly religious, were formed with this attitude in mind. At its best, it’s seen as a noble effort worthy of admiration and respect. At its worst, it becomes a cult that does more harm than good to its adherents.
The real issue comes when this Pursuit of Purity moves from the individual or group level into the level of the society at large. This is when the adherents decide to push their agenda onto the rest of us, and find many of us wanting. This is when the danger arises since most of us can never achieve their expectations – nor do we want to. If the groups keep their pursuits to themselves, then there’s little problem outside of the occasional debate or argument. But, when they achieve some level of power – either through government or through other means, that’s when they do harm.
The Nazis, the Bolsheviks and the Khmer Rouge all gained political power, and all used that power to “purify” their land according to their image. Our problem today isn’t a group taking over political power – at least, not yet! Our problem is that the Pursuit of Purity is being done through the means of terror. Since these groups don’t have political power as such, they’ve decided to use criminal means with the added twist that they find it easier to kill when they believe that they’re doing a religious duty of “purification”.
The man who killed Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands had no remorse at all for doing it, just like the man who killed Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The hijackers of 9/11 and the psychopaths who film themselves chopping people’s heads off have an easy time doing it because they see their victims as nothing, as jahiliyya – as a people living in ignorance and darkness.
This is what we’re up against. It doesn’t matter if we give in to their demands. They’ll hate us even if the U.S. pulls out of Iraq today. They’ll hate us if Israel gets pushed into the sea. They’ll hate us if Pakistan gets not only Kashmir but New Delhi as well. They’re not just after these goals that are popular among certain segments in the world. They want to gain power so that we can live their dreams of a pure world, much like the people in Iran are living Khomeini’s dream to this day.
What can be done to stop this? What the filmmaker/father did for his sons is one example – show them the humanity in others who are not like you. Will that work? Maybe on an individual basis, but not on a grand scale.
What can be done on the grand scale is showing the humanitarian effort during disasters like the tsunami last year and the recent hurricane. Such disasters and their relief efforts show the common humanity in us all. The problem is whether those who hate us are willing to see that.
P.S. Like many of you, I’m worried about what’s happening in New Orleans and the surrounding area after Hurricane Katrina struck there. As I write this, the prospect looks grim if relief doesn’t come soon.
