Protecting the "other"

Editorial

Our child doesn't do as well as they should have on an assignment, so we meet with their teacher and demand an adjustment. At our kids' soccer game, we spew invectives at the referee. We mutter under our breath that people from certain countries don't know how to drive or that they should learn to speak English.

What do such instances have to do with Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we commemorated this week? Everything.

As we recite in the Vidui on Yom Kippur, "We abuse, we betray, we are cruel...." In other words, we are human. While none of us has done every sin to which we confess, we admit responsibility collectively as a community – we acknowledge that none of us is perfect. At times, though, it seems that we think we are infallible and our judgments of others are severe – and the way in which we communicate those judgments is appalling.

There's truth in the song from the musical Avenue Q, "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" – the lyricist believes that, if we could admit it, "maybe it would help us get along." But from where does that racism come?

Not to be trite, but another musical offers one of the best explanations. "You've Got to be Carefully Taught," from South Pacific, includes the following verses: "You've got to be taught to hate and fear.... You've got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a diff'rent shade, you've got to be carefully taught...."

In her book Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide, Barbara Coloroso contends that, "Genocide is not outside the realm of ordinary human behavior. At the same time, it is not normal, natural or necessary. It is the most extreme form of bullying – a far too common behavior that is learned in childhood and is rooted in contempt for another human being who has been deemed to be, by the bully and his or her accomplices, worthless, inferior and undeserving of respect. The progression from taunting to hacking a child to death is not a great leap but actually a short walk."

Children learn by example, as do potential genocidaires. As Coloroso points out, Adolf Hitler "was emboldened by the impunity with which the Young Turks were able to pillage, rape, starve and slaughter the Armenians" – 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were killed from 1915-1918 – and, in Rwanda, the "Hutu extremists not only studied Mein Kampf, they modelled their 'Hutu Ten Commandments' on Hitler's writings, speeches and the infamous Nürnberg Laws" to kill approximately one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. She estimates that genocide and mass murders in the 20th century are responsible for killing approximately 60 million people, "more than were killed in battlefields in all the wars from 1900 to 2000."

Coloroso argues that genocide is predictable, that there is a basic script that genocidaires follow and that intervention at any point could prevent it. The problem is that the international community doesn't intervene. In Rwanda, for example, the United Nations chose to withdraw its peacekeeping troops rather than drop its peacekeeping mandate and defend the people getting murdered.

But all the human rights legislation and all the peacekeeping troops in the world won't prevent genocide and other crimes against humanity until we start to view hatred and injustice as unacceptable and act accordingly. In this regard, it is interesting to consider the types of people who stand up to bullies; the people who tried to protect the "other" in the midst of genocide.

In Conscience & Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust, Eva Fogelman concludes that, while you couldn't necessarily have predicted who would be a rescuer during the Holocaust, the people who did help "were not just a haphazard collection of individuals who chanced to rescue Jews, but people who have surprisingly similar humanistic values. It was not a whim that led these people to risk their lives and those of their families, but a response, almost a reflexive reaction in some cases, that came from core values developed and instilled in them in childhood. These childhood experiences and influences formed a leitmotif that played through the histories of most rescuers ... a nurturing, loving home; an altruistic parent or beloved caretaker who served as a role model for altruistic behavior; a tolerance for people who were different; a childhood illness or personal loss that tested their resilience and exposed them to special care; and an upbringing that emphasized independence, competence, discipline with explanations (rather than physical punishment or withdrawal of love) and caring."

It is not enough, as John Lennon, proposed, to "imagine all the people living life in peace." It is not enough to simply recite the Vidui one day a year, to admit our sins but not take steps to change our actions. If we can't fathom how we can help in far-off Sudan, then we must start closer to home, by looking within ourselves and at what behaviors and attitudes we are passing on to the next generation. We are not just part of klal Yisrael (the community of Israel) – we are part of klal humankind.

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