Crime and Punishment, PART II.

~ Walter ~ 2 Comments

In juxtaposing Kristallnacht, the epitome of evil and Veteran’s Day, the celebration of those who served in the US Armed Forces, we encounter a prime example of a clash between evil and goodness, the latter in form of human heroism and ultimate sacrifice in an effort to defeat evil.

Why the existence of evil? A perennial question, asked from the very beginning of civilization.

In my search for an explanation for the existence and persistence of evil three books helped me immensely toward an understanding of this phenomenon. Needless to say, my present comprehension is far from completely satisfying given the complexity of the problem.

Here are the titles of these helpful books in my quest to understand: James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide, Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler.

Thomas Merton, the Roman Catholic monk and poet, labeling the Nazi killers as insane, allows us to believe that normal people, people like you and I, could never commit crimes like the Nazis did. Merton’s way of thinking might make us feel comfortable because it puts distance between those murderers and us. It suggests that you and I could never sink as low as the Nazi German murderers did.

But couldn’t we really? Aren’t also we vulnerable to thinking and doing evil? Is not our DNA the same as that of those Nazi antisemitic war criminals? A frightening thought indeed… So where does evil come from?

Let us begin with a brief look at the Hebrew Bible. In Isaiah 45:7 we read:

“I form light and create darkness, I make shalom (peace/wholeness) and I create ra (evil). I am the LORD, who do all these things.”

Theologians have done mental somersaults to make this statement defensible and acceptable. I have never considered their effort sufficiently persuasive. When one realizes, however, that ancient Israel’s prophets radically departed from the multiple Middle Eastern religions’ dualistic theologies to come up with and follow monotheism, it became necessary to give credence to the existence of a single god only rather than to two or more competitive gods, and thus to the belief that this single god had created the universe and all that it contains, and so also the realities of good and evil. This explains Isaiah’s statement concerning the origins of good and evil.

The talmudic sages, in their post-biblical teaching, suggest that in each baby born there exists an equal amount of yetzer hatov and yetzer hara, an equal inclination toward good and toward evil. These sages knew that good and evil are not just acquired through life experiences but that we humans have an INNATE capacity for the good and for the bad. They taught that while the inclinations are in balance at birth, each person during her/his life must choose between nourishing or suppressing one or the other.

Both the rabbinic and the Christian church teachings, the latter explaining the existence of evil as original sin inherited via genetic continuity from Adam and Eve and their alleged first sinful act in the Garden of Eden, a teaching categorically rejected by Judaism, do have in common the belief that there is, in fact, a dark side to our human psyche.

Experiments at Yale University’s so-called Baby Lab, dealing with the phenomena of early childhood predispositions have demonstrated that babies not yet able to verbalize recognized and reached for a puppet showing kind behavior over a puppet exhibiting mean behavior. Experiments with older children suggested that when a wholesome socialization process had taken place, the children developed a healthy sense of altruism.

The good news is that our attitudes and dispositions are influenceable. We are not fatalistically determined. We are able to reorient ourselves depending on the quality of the influences we are exposed to. Let us reiterate here that inclination or predisposition must not be confused with irreversible fate. All that we have learned is that we all are capable of being good or becoming perpetrators of evil.

Primo Levi, brilliant author, keen observer of concentration camp life and survivor of Auschwitz writes:

“They (the guards) were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings averagely intelligent, averagely wicked. Save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces.”

Having been there myself, I have no choice but to agree with Primo Levi.

We all, human beings that we are, are capable of doing evil things. This our capacity is an inherited one from the drive for survival of our ancestors – so-called hunter-gatherers in the Pleistocene period (about 250,000 years ago) of development of homo sapiens.

Waller, one of the authors I mentioned above, sends the reader to the recently developed discipline of Evolutionary Psychology. He explains: Universal “reasoning circuits” drive our human behavior. These were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our ancestors. These circuits designed themselves in response to problems our ancestors faced, like detection of predators, decision making what is safe to eat, alliances for self-and tribal defense, selection of mates, etc. The development of these circuits took place gradually and experientially over very large periods of time. Waller suggests we think about this development as an unconscious process, something like a self-learning computer. This is not “intelligent design” that functions toward a predetermined goal and is driven in that direction by an intelligent mind or, say a deity.”

We should think of our brains as wired to deal with competition such as for instance competition for obtaining scarce resources like food. Competition of this kind led to conflict between individuals and groups. Collective defense became necessary.

This brings us to our human dark sides. We prefer kin to non-kin. Helping our kin by hurting our non-kin competitors can be advantageous. We all have needs and desires and so, to attain these, WE get into conflict with “them.”. It is “we” against “them.”

This is not to say that people are evil. This is merely to point out that we have acquired psychological mechanisms that make us CAPABLE of evil. When our reasoning circuits are activated by certain cultural, psychological and social triggers we can become evil.

What are some of these triggers?

Much depends on the society within which we live and that society’s world view. Societies hold world views which include presuppositions, intentions, meanings, rules, norms, values, principles, practices, etc. Societies hold core values which include judgments as to what is good and moral, evil, a-moral or immoral. Different societies provide us with a lens through which we look at our life and the lives that surround us. This lens enables us to make decisions for good or evil.

It is important to remember that cultural models do not dictate our human thought and behavior but can and do influence them.

Simplifying, it can be said that our American society values personal independence, freedom of choice, personal uniqueness and personal achievement. German Nazi society, on the other hand, focused on the group. In Fascism and Nazism the emphasis is on obedience, conformity, tradition, law and order. Here the group shapes the individual. Human identity is based on the group which defines itself as race, ethnicity, tribe, religion and nationality. Conflict arises when the self-definition of various groups produces in-groups which stand in tension with or oppose out-groups. It is again “we” against “them”.

The Nazis identified the Jews as the out-group that needed to be annihilated. The Jews’ cause was evil; the Nazis’ cause was sacred. Nazi Germany’s survival, Germans were taught, was dependent on the destruction of the Jewish race.

A rabbinic saying comes to mind: mitzvah goreret mitzvah ve-averah goreret averah – “A good deed leads to another good deed and a transgression leads to another transgression.”

When hatred of “the other,” i.e., the members of the out-group, is taught relentlessly from early age, lying and the doing of evil become what Hannah Arend in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem called “the banality of evil.” Lies and hatred become something that anchor themselves deep in the human psyche until brutality and murder become common activities. They become the “daily normal.” Euphemisms such as “ethnic cleansing, evacuation, resettlement, final solution” and others become part of daily conversation and nothing evil is imputed to these terms which, in reality, are facades for murder.

The descent into the hell of evil is gradual. But once arrived there it is very hard to escape. The process of dehumanization as witnessed in history and also by myself in the Holocaust, and how such dehumanizing of perfectly normal innocent human beings can be achieved by means of psychological manipulation and coercion, has been demonstrated experimentally by the “Milgram’s Experiment” at Yale University and the “Stanford Prison Experiment” and others.

James Waller makes the point that evil persons are very often not the product of WHO they are but of WHERE they are. They come gradually under the influence of evil social forces and are pulled into their vortex. By participating in evil, evil embeds itself in their very being and takes over.

This recognition does not excuse the doing of extraordinary evil. Perpetrators cannot be absolved by the notion that others under similar conditions have done or would be doing the same. It has been documented that there were men and women during the Holocaust who refused to be killers and stopped participating in their units’ murderous activities. Perpetrators retain full moral and legal responsibility for the atrocities they commit.

How can we, as individuals and as a society, cultivate the sensibilities that will counteract the forces that lead to the commission of brutalities, dehumanizing,  genocide and mass killings?

I believe that honest education has humanizing effects. When proper education is internalized and applied, such education can be a powerful antidote to personal and collective inhumanity. Without being able to go into the details of what such an education entails, let me suggest that helping young people think critically is the most important element of such an education. Encouraging students to ask “why” is, in my opinion, the first step toward endowing them with the ability to distinguish truths from half-truths and downright lies, the latter being something we are being subjected to on a daily basis, these days.

In my opinion, the only way toward eliminating evil thought and evil actions depends on a serious rethinking of our educational process with emphasis on the absolute necessity of ethical behavior.

Crime and Punishment, PART I.

~ Walter ~ 1 Comment

The commemoration of Crystal Night, (German, Kristallnacht), the night of November 9-10, 1938 with its anti-Jewish brutality continuing for a few additional days and this year’s Veterans Day, fall together on November 11. Because of this unusual coincidence of the anniversary of one of the darkest days in Jewish history and one of the most redeeming acts in that same slice of history coming together, let me invite you to reflect on both these historical events.

First, let me summarize what these two anniversaries commemorate. Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass was a pogrom against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany. The Nazis, more particularly the Nazi paramilitary organization SA, also called the Storm Troopers or Brown Shirts, torched over 1,000 synagogues, vandalized and looted Jewish homes, schools and 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed 71 Jews and arrested some 30,000 Jewish men. Because of this significant number of prisoners, the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen had to be expanded to accommodate them. The name Kristallnatch or in English, Night of Broken Glass, refers to the litter of broken glass left in the streets after these pogroms.

The pretext for the violence was the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jewish student. Grynszpan engaged in the murder as a retribution for the Nazi deportation of Polish Jewish residents in Germany to a no-man’s land at the border of Germany and Poland where the Jews were unceremoniously dumped. Grynszpan’s parents were among the group and so, understandably, he was very upset and worried.

German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, having consulted with Hitler on how the assassination could be antisemitically exploited, urged a group of SA during a large SA rally to engage in violent reprisals against the German Jewish population. The pogroms were to appear as spontaneous antisemitic demonstrations by the German population.

It is no exaggeration to state that this anti-Jewish violence was the overture to subsequent governmental bureaucratic anti-Jewish steps leading to the Wannsee Conference in 1942 and the decision taken there to end the so-called Judenfrage or “Jewish Question” by means of “the Final Solution,” i.e., the Holocaust or the systematic murder of the Jews of Germany and its occupied countries.

Veterans Day, to be commemorated and celebrated on the 11th of November, is an official United States public holiday, observed annually, that honors military veterans, that is persons who served in the United States Armed Forces.

This said, I personally feel deeply indebted especially to those American veterans who fought in World War II. Statistics inform us that 16.5 million men and women served in the Armed Forces during WW II of whom 291,557 died in battle and 670,846 were wounded. While I was liberated by Soviet Russian forces who, along with Great Britain, were our allies in that war, I am deeply grateful to all the allied forces who defeated the Nazis and liberated us, concentration camp prisoners, whose days were numbered. We, too, would have been murdered had it not been for these brave Allied soldiers who gave their all to defeat the Nazi enemy.

By juxtaposing the two historical events, grieving over one and celebrating the other, we touch upon something much deeper that meets the eye – namely the problem of evil, a problem that to this very day has not been resolved.

Why does it exist? Who is its author? Why does it continue to persist? What can and should be done against it? Etc. While for me it would be either pure foolishness or the height of human hubris to claim to have the answers to this quandary, a sober reflection might help us make some sense of it all.

In Part II of this blog, soon to follow, I will try to throw some light on the origin and continued existence of evil both from a theological, anthropological and psychological viewpoint.

 

I would like to take this moment to include my next public speaking engagements, which you can also view here: https://walterziffer.com/schedule/

Thursday, November 8 – in the evening
Asheville’s AB-Tech College
Excerpts from my Holocaust experiences and comments.

Friday, November 9 – Shabbat evening service
Bet HaTephila Temple in Asheville
Talk/Sermon regarding Veterans Day and Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass).

Le Chambon: A Potential Teaching from the Past

~ Walter ~ Leave a comment

Surfing the Net the other day Tim, my son, ran into the Travel website of the BBC which to his surprise contained an article on the little town of Le Chambon in the Cevennes mountains of south central France where my family spent five years. The article whose address I’ll share with you at the end of this blog is worth your reading because it is enlightening with regard to the immigrant crisis that we have been living with in this country for months under Mr. Trump’s regime.

While I must have shared with our congregation Beth Israel, here in Asheville, some of the highlights from our five year long adventure there, let me share some of this with you here in trying to whet your appetite for purchasing the new book about Le Chambon or reading the older classic one that tells the story best. Here are the authors and titles I am referring to, respectively: Peter Grose, A Good Place to Hide and Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.

The BBC Travel article by Anita Isalska (August 7, 2018) reports about a small museum recently built in Le Chambon, commemorating the town population’s heroic anti-Nazi non-violent resistance during WW II. Naturally, I was thrilled to see this article, having known the Chambon Christian heroes personally, most of whom are no longer among the living.

The Chambon story deserves to be read because of the unprecedented migrations nowadays of people fleeing their own countries in huge waves in search of safe havens from deadly dangers and horrible living conditions. While a good many relatively small countries in Europe initially opened their doors to refugees, the huge influx of these people on the run and their human needs turned out to be overwhelming and necessitated reconsideration. The enormity of the modern migration problems impacting the globe will only be solved by joint international action. Whether such action will be agreed and acted upon remains, of course, a big question.

The US shameful response to refugees from Latin America is familiar to us Americans. Trump’s border cruelty of separating children from their parents in order to discourage illegal immigration and force our financing of “his southern border wall” construction, is a moral outrage. While the disgraceful children-parent separation was eventually canceled under pressure from the population after having caused terrible suffering to thousands of parents and children, the act itself and the following incompetent and to this day only partial reunification of families remains a test of our national character. The damage was done and probably became irreversible to all these innocent folks. Shame on us who did not stand up united as a nation early enough to prevent this president’s ordered sham action!

And this is precisely where the lesson from Le Chambon confronts us. When during WW II refugees in large numbers from Germany and Nazi occupied countries arrived in Le Chambon, the small town of approximately 3,000 people offered these Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution and death, food, clothing and shelter in terms of a hiding place. By so doing, the Chambonais jeopardized their own lives. How so? Because they themselves lived under Nazi occupation both under the Vichy German puppet government, as well as under later direct German rule. There were German soldiers and para-military units in and around Le Chambon when under their very noses Jews lived in hiding.

The heroic behavior by the Chambonais, primarily members of their local church affiliated with the Eglise Reformee de France (Reformed Church of France), as well as a few Roman Catholic households and a group called Darbistes (named after a British missionary by name of Darby), saved approximately 3,500 Jewish lives on the run from Hitler.

The story of these heroic very humble women and men deserves to be remembered, retold, celebrated and learned from. This is the story of persecuted people under pressure, helping and saving the lives of women, men and children even more vulnerable than they.

It is shameful that we, a country of immigrants who live in a safe country of vast unpopulated expanses behave so shamefully.

I often wonder whether Mr. Trump, a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian, ever read the Bible and its mandate to welcome the stranger. I often wonder whether Mr. Trump ever read the US Constitution and its Amendments. I wonder whether Mr. Trump understands the meaning of the torch in the hands of the Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor.

And I wonder whether he will get away with it all. A test of our national character!

Finally, please go to http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180806-a-french-village-committed-to-deception.

The Danger of Selective Amnesia

~ Walter

THE FACTS

Shootings of children and teachers in our schools, an institution that for us should be holier and safer than any religious sanctuary. The irresponsibility of inadequate firearm legislation and execution on the part of our government, our people, as also that of the NRA (National Rifle Association).

The recent and ongoing scandal of our government’s separation of children from their parents at the US southern border, as a warning to refugees from Latin America and a means to stem illegal immigration from the south. The immorality of the US president, his government and the Attorney General in legislating such breaking up of families.

The scandal of our people’s quick forgetfulness that has followed all these outrageous acts perpetrated by the incompetent and immoral elected and appointed members of our government.

THE MANTRA

Our government: “a government of the People, by the People and for the People.”

So, where is the People?


I REMEMBER!

Also you, the reader, may remember that the Nazi legislation, often designated as the Nürnberg Laws or Nürnberger Gesetze, was passed in September 1935 after Hitler’s ascendancy to the German chancellorship. This “Law for the protection of German Blood and German Honor” prohibited marriages and extra-marital intercourse between Jews and Germans. This law institutionalized many of the racial theories present in Nazi ideology. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and rendered the Jews outlaws, people without protection or appeal to an official higher power.

The Nürnberg Laws resulted in arrests and the forced separation of Jewish spouses from their German Aryan counterparts. As far as I could ascertain, it was primarily Jewish husbands that were arrested and threatened with deportation to concentration camps.

The Aryan wives of these Jewish husbands did not take this lying down. They protested by means of letters sent to the German Ministry of the Interior and the various police organisms taking part in the arrests. As could be expected, this led nowhere. Were these protests received by the responsible persons, let alone read? In all probability not.

And so the women went on the offensive and staged an extended protest demonstration on the Rosenstrasse (Street of Roses) # 2-4 in Berlin. Why at this particular location? Because there, in a Jewish community building, 2,000 Jewish men, married to non-Jewish partners and the male children of these so-called mixed marriages, designated as Mischlinge (“mixed [race] persons”), were held.

The fear among the wives was that the Nazis would deport their loved ones to Auschwitz and similar killing centers. Only shortly before the womens’ protests, the German police had in fact rounded up 10,000 Jews in Berlin and sent them to Auschwitz! The women’s demonstrations taking place in bitter cold weather between February 27 and March 6, 1943, tell us something about the courage, the determination and the perseverance of these women.

The women involved were not aware that at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 – the conference that had decided on the Final Solution of the so-called Jewish Problem by extermination of the Jewish population – action with regard to the Jewish partners of mixed marriages was postponed until German victory in WW II.

German plans for the Jewish spouses and their “mixed birth” children were to send them into detention and work camps in Germany but not to extermination camps for fear of causing significant unrest among the German population during the war. These temporarily “exempted Jews,” roughly 2,000 in number, were now incarcerated in the Rosenstrasse building, waiting, uncertain of their fate. So also their non-Jewish spouses waited outside, freezing and with fear and trembling, but determined to stay on.

As the women continued their protest vigil outside the building, GESTAPO officials reviewed the identity documents of the internees inside. The first “mixed marriage” Jews were released on March 1. In the end the police deported only 25 of these 2,000 prisoners to concentration camps.

The released Jewish prisoners from the Rosenstrasse were watched, sent to work camps within Germany but otherwise, with a few exceptions, spared official murder.

Never before had a demonstration in favor of Jews taken place in Germany under the Hitler regime! The courage of these women who for the first time stood face-to-face with Nazi police in the hope that by doing so their action would bring about their Jewish husbands’ release is truly admirable. And while according to some reports the number of protesting women amounted to thousands – a well meant exaggeration – the courage of these 200 or so women is remarkable and teaches us a lesson.

The lesson taught is this: protesting for a day or two, even in large numbers, will not succeed bringing about change. Protests have to be prolonged in time and scope until they bring about serious societal disturbance. Protests limited to single localities such as local school walkouts for a day or two will not succeed. Organization is needed to show action in mass solidarity.

The multiple shootings in our schools brought about local protest marches and prayer meetings. With a few months of relief from these criminal acts, the tragedies seemed to have receded into the past. Not, of course, for the families affected but for us bystanders. The separation of children caused nationwide outcries of protest, even from the Republican side. Did it bring about result? The answer is YES. President Trump who initiated this shameful procedure backpedaled and called a halt to it.

As of this writing, alas, some 2,000 children still have not been reunited with their parents. Some of them probably never will, because of incompetence and lack of caring of the authorities involved. Imagine the resulting tragedies!

Let our united voices in protest be clearly heard until remedial action is taken.

Crossing a Red Line?

~ Walter ~ 2 Comments

I am surprised that our media have either not caught (impossible!) this recent news or have been reluctant for one reason or another to report the rather terrifying words spoken by Mr. Trump at the VFW Annual Convention in Kansas City, July 25, 2018.

Here is what he said:

“Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news…What you are seeing is not what’s happening.”

It seems to me unbelievable that a president of the US with cameras pointed at him, broadcasting his words to and beyond our own country would be making a statement such as this impugning our free press, one of the very pillars upon the freedom of our country rests.

It might just be worthwhile to take a second look at Trump’s statement and to interpret what the man really meant. As I understand his words, he advises his audience in front of him not to believe what they see or hear unless the news originates from and is being transmitted by him and/or his followers, i.e., the Fox News organization. News that does not have his imprimatur is fake news, not to be believed.

One of my intents for this blog is to compare situations and events from pre-Nazi and Nazi times in Europe as I remember them, to what we are living now in the US. In past blogs I brought to you a few such scary comparisons and here is yet another one that keeps me up at night.

One of the very first Nazi edicts that hit us Jews almost immediately after German occupation: all radios were to be handed over to the administration of the occupation forces, i.e., the GESTAPO. Adolf Hitler prevented us from knowing what was being broadcast in Germany and in the rest of the European countries, usurping to himself and himself alone the judgment of what is true and false and what should be and should not be known to us and, for that matter, the German people. Hitler alone knew the truth. Everyone else who doubted him and his pronouncements was a liar! It follows, of course, that everything being written and broadcast by the country’s non-Nazi media was fake news not to be believed. Before long the non-Nazi media in Germany were totally eliminated and their owners/sponsors sent to concentration camps where many of them perished.

So also Trump’s words are words of a would-be dictator who reserves for himself the ultimate right of knowing what is true or falsehood, what should be made known and what should not. The logical consequence of such a megalomaniac attitude, unless rigorously fought and successfully prevented by the country’s people, becomes rule by dictatorship – a police state.

This said, it seems to me that president Trump’s plan is to undo the legitimacy of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, the Freedom of Speech and of the Press, a key element that ensures that our system of checks and balances functions properly.

Much historical material could be quoted here to remind us of the crucially important role a free press plays in maintaining a democratic society. In discussing the shocking words of Trump with my wife Gail, she reminded me of the salient words of president Thomas Jefferson on the subject. He writes:

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first objects should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” – Thomas Jefferson to Carrington. 1787. ME 6:57

Elsewhere, Jefferson wrote:

“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary to keep the waters pure.” – Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette. 1823. ME 15:491

Seen against the background of this and other writings by the founders of our country, president Trump’s insulting words characterizing the press as producing “crap” and “fake news” should be censured in the most serious of words and actions.

This is a slanderous statement and attack by the president of a democratic country on the people who, often risking their very lives, report the truth honestly and to the best of their ability. That this truth reporting often contradicts words streaming from the White House these days is, of course, inevitable and that the president would wish to have it otherwise, is not to be doubted.

A free press, being the sine qua non for the existence of a free democratic society, must be defended, supported and praised. President Trump, by insulting our still free press has, in my opinion, crossed a red line and should be held responsible for his totally uncalled for, disloyal and downright treacherous words.