Death and Senselessness

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death, ethics, evil, God, Holocaust, Las Vegas shooting, religion, Stephen Paddock, Sylvia Hall

No doubt there’s nothing cosmic, or even important (except to me), about it, but I can’t help but be struck by the fact that within the last two weeks, and especially the last two days, I’ve needed to reckon with questions of God, evil, and death (on an individual and mass scale) – all closely related of course.

One of the mass-scale deaths obviously is last night’s Las Vegas shooting, about which so little is known for sure that any analysis is wildly premature – and frankly irresponsible. Not that that’s stopped the hateful partisans on all sides.

To be sure, there are details that seem significant, but they add up to nothing coherent yet. For example, shooter Stephen Paddock clearly planned this atrocity in great detail, but no reliable information has emerged yet about any political or other cause-related agenda he might have had. Similarly, no evidence of affiliation with any non-state actors has been found. For those reasons, it looks like the term “terrorism” doesn’t apply.

So are we dealing with a case of derangement? Nothing known yet warrants that conclusion, either – including the statements from his brother. And as has become so depressingly typical, he was taken utterly by surprise by this act of mass murder.

Moreover, I’ve balked at viewing these kinds of mass shootings as reasons to tighten greatly gun control laws, for reasons explained here and here. Today I’m not inclined to revisit this issue, but it does seem worth noting that audio of the violence seems to reveal that an automatic weapon of some kind was used, and that its capacities added greatly to the fatalities. So is it too much to hope that Las Vegas will lead to some meaningful improvements in gun control that fully respect legitimate gun-ownership rights?

But of all the reactions I’ve heard and read till now, the most moving for me came from a Twitter contact, producer Sylvia Hall of Fox Business News: “Worlds changed for families of 50 people without warning or reason.” For me, nothing has better described the shock – and the maddening senselessness – from the standpoint of the victims and their loved ones.

I strongly suspect her words affected me so deeply because just yesterday I learned that a good friend had passed away over the weekend. He had experienced some major health problems in recent years, but his death was jolting, and seems senseless, for at least two reasons. He seemed to be recovering from his syndrome. And before falling ill he was young for his age physically and in some ways in personality (in the best sense).

And I’ll be grieving actively for longer than usual, I’m convinced, both because it’s the first such loss I’ve experienced of a peer, and more important, because I have no doubt we could have been even better and closer friends. We’d been separated by geography for most of the time we’d known each other, but practically from the first it was clear we were on nearly all of the same wave-lengths. So I’m mourning a genuinely good soul and a relationship that ended long, and senselessly, before their time – along with a marriage that inspired and delighted everyone who knew him and his now devastated wife (also a good friend).

The other mass-scale death I unexpectedly encountered recently is the Holocaust – in the form of a lengthy conversation I (unexpectedly) had with a Christian clergyman during a train ride from New York City back to DC. He was Middle Eastern in origin, and therefore well acquainted with violence of all kinds, especially by dint of work with refugees, as well as very compassionate and learned both in theology (including of my own Judaism) and history.

Normally, I don’t broach metaphysical subjects right away with strangers, even if their business is metaphysics. But the ride would be a few hours long, I was curious about him and his beliefs, he seemed curious about me and mine, and it was only a matter of time before the subject of arguably the ultimate example of senseless (by any standards I at least regard as remotely ethical) mass violence came up.

My position is full of uncertainty. My late father, as mentioned here, witnessed the Holocaust’s effects first-hand, as part of a team of Yiddish translators sent to Dachau shortly after that death camp’s liberation. He told me that he was never able fully to square a belief in God with witnessing that sight. I have great sympathy for that view, though my faith remains more intact.

My interlocutor was much more certain – of the opposite. His position seemed an attempt to imbue this slaughter of innocents with sense. As I understood it, he argued that during the run-up, God became so dissatisfied with His creation, and apparently so despairing that faith was wanting, that He “absented” Himself from His role in and influence over human affairs.

I didn’t for a moment take him a claiming that the Holocaust’s victims in any sense deserved their fate, but my questions tumbled out anyway. Did the victims themselves displease God? What sins, on anyone’s part, could possibly justify such retribution? Why was the loss of faith (apparently the decisive sin) so important? Isn’t God’s top priority to foster loving hearts and behavior? Shouldn’t “results” like this count for more than theological allegiances? What of proportionality? Why so utterly indiscriminate? And since there’s so much evidence of a continued shortage of faith ever since, didn’t this divine decision fail to achieve its objective? Unless He’s still absent?

I can’t do the answers justice in this space. They were coherent and sophisticated and reasoned. They were also deeply humane. Yet I found them completely incapable of making sense of this abomination – a term I use in both the secular and Biblical sense – let alone strengthening the case for faith.

Still, a critical mass of my faith has continued through a sad weekend and a tragic day. I hope the reasons aren’t becoming increasingly senseless.

Im-Politic: Ensnared in the History Wars

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Confederacy, Confederate monuments, Holocaust, Im-Politic, racism, Staunton, Stonewall Jackson, Stonewall Jackson Hotel, Stonewall Jackson Memorial Highway, Virginia, Woodrow Wilson, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum

I finally had my own personal brushes with the History Wars this past week, receiving a first-hand reminder of the complications entailed in presenting the American past with accuracy and therefore with true integrity. Nothing I experienced has shaken me of the conviction that most of the nation’s Confederate monuments shamefully honor traitors (I discussed some of the exceptions here), and should be removed (lawfully) from public places. Ditto for displays of Confederate symbols on private property – although such displays should remain Constitutionally protected by the First Amendment. But what about dealing with these affronts on a personal level? That, it became clear to me, is another matter altogether.

My encounter with the History Wars resulted from a two-day trip my wife and I took to Staunton, Virginia, a picturesque town of about 25,000 located between the Blue Ridge Mountains and recent History Wars battlefield Charlottesville. We went to the area to check out a big regional book sale, and to take in two plays staged by the town’s renowned Shakespearean theater.

And we scored a deal: a package from a local hotel that included not only two nights’ stay, but two performances and a sumptuous breakfast. What could have been better? Here’s what. The hotel was the “Stonewall Jackson” – named of course after the famous Confederate general.

By the time we put one and one together, it was too late to cancel without a charge (yes, how convenient), so we held our noses and took the trip. The hotel was in all other respects exemplary – including a very friendly, helpful staff. It employed some African-American workers as well, and we saw no signs of dissatisfaction on their part. Moreover, the town lying beneath the (big) “Stonewall Jackson Hotel” sign seemed perfectly pleasant as well. True, we saw very few African-American pedestrians or working at local businesses. On the other hand, Staunton features tony restaurants with fashionable farm-to-table menus, as well as a (quintessentially progressive) fair trade products shop.  In other words, a hotbed of racism and reaction it isn’t. 

I thought of sharing (politely) my opinion of the hotel’s name with the staff, but wound up keeping my thoughts to myself. After all, it’s the owners’ views that really count. I probably will communicate my feelings on Facebook in hopes of persuading them to change – and will let them know (regretfully) that unless they do, I can’t in good conscience stay there again.

History Wars encounter Number Two was much easier to deal with – my visit to the town’s Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, located in Staunton because the 28th president was born in the town (and lived there briefly during his infancy before his family moved to Georgia).

Although Wilson held deplorable racial views even for his time, and although he is among my least favorite presidents (overwhelmingly because of his disastrously naive foreign policies), the decision was a no-brainer for me on moral grounds. For as I’ve explained previously – and as with similar figures like the Founding Fathers – Wilson’s role in American history far transcended his record on race. And he didn’t take up arms against his own country.

Moreover, the facility handled these issues very appropriately. In addition to the exhibits describing Wilson’s re-segregation of the Federal government and paternalistic – at best – views of his fellow black citizens, the guide who conducted the tour of the actual Wilson family home forthrightly told our little group that the former president’s parents employed three house slaves – rented from a local farmer for Wilson’s father, a minister, by his congregation. And she made plain as day how low the living standards of these slaves were.

Encounter Number Three came on our drive back, when we decided to take local roads (including one dubbed the “Stonewall Jackson Memorial Highway”) part of the way and came upon the kind of big antiques store that my wife can’t resist. I find these places eminently resistible, but as usual, gave it a quick once over. I wasn’t offended by the Nazi memorabilia I saw. (They can be genuine collector’s items – as with the Japanese sword a childhood friend’s father took back from his World War II service in the Pacific. That didn’t make him an Axis supporter.) Ditto for the “George Wallace for President, 1964” sign displayed in a side room. (The arch-segregationist then-Alabama governor made his first run for the White House that year.) For the record, my wife was much more creeped out by these items.   

What did offend me was the conversation I heard between the young man at the cash register (who was unfailingly polite toward both of us), and two other customers. On top of dredging up the usual canard about Confederate memorial opponents wanting to “erase history” (What? You never heard of history books or museums?), they made the kind of remarks about the Holocaust so ignorant that they were surely in part willful (though they obviously were not Deniers).

As I was in earshot, I was sorely tempted to interject. But I decided that no useful purpose educational purpose would be served. Indeed, far likelier that I would have reinforced any prejudices they had about rude, self-righteous Yankees. Or Jews. Or both.

Since I have no reason to believe that the employee owned the store, or that the owners condoned his views (or even knew about them), I don’t at this point have any issue with patronizing that store again. And getting the cashier in trouble seems way over the top – especially since he didn’t initiate that exchange and could well have been agreeing with his customers largely to be polite, and make sure he completed the sale.

My wife wound up getting some truly beautiful items there. In fact, she considers it one of the best antique stores she’s ever seen – both in selection and price terms. We also still love central Virginia – its countryside is mostly stunning. But as we continued back north on the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Highway, heading toward I-81 and home, we both realized more than ever, how long America’s History Wars, and the collective and individual challenges they pose, are bound to last.

#Auschwitz70

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Auschwitz anniversary, Holocaust

This 70^th anniversary of Auschwitz’ liberation inspires three sets of memories.

The first involves my father, who as a Yiddish-speaking GI was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1945 to serve as a translator for the American authorities working with the survivors. He didn’t speak about the experience much, but he did tell me, more than once, that he was never able fully to believe in God again.

Somehow, after this, and after his prior combat experience, he was able to lead what is called a normal life.  However, he did refuse to return to Germany for the rest of that life, even though he and my mother became big-time globe-trotters once they could afford foreign travel, especially in their retirements, and even though he was an avid student of European history.

I decided to leave Germany off my list of destinations, too, but wound up making a visit in 1992 anyway. I was asked by the State Department to give some speeches there and in England, and I convinced myself that this kind of business trip was a permissable exception to my rule. (My father, who never urged me to avoid the country, readily agreed.)

The memories that were created there were much happier. It was creepy to think that practically any German I saw over a certain age would have at best been a passive supporter of Nazism. But of course human biology had already dealt with much of that issue in the nearly five decades that had passed since VE Day.

Wholly unexpected was the reaction I got from Germans (overwhelmingly much younger, including college and university students) I met if my heritage happened to come out. The compassion was highly moving, along with what seemed practically an eagerness to learn about my own feelings about those long ago crimes and horrors, and to share theirs. Although the German State Department staff who hosted and worked with me didn’t have enough advance notice to arrange a side trip to a concentration camp or other Holocaust site, one was able to arrange a private tour of an exhibit titled “The Jews of Hamburg” that was about to open at that city’s local history museum. The facility was closed the only day my schedule permitted a visit, but the curator of the museum agreed to conduct it all the same.

I hope that this trip’s memories – along with those of other German friends I have made since – aren’t too sanguine. The same goes for this one – despite the notable uptick seen lately in anti-Semitism in Europe. It involves the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which I visited for the first time with my parents a few months after it opened. One room commemorates the innumerable European artists and scientists and scholars who fled Nazism before the war’s outbreak – along, I think, with the many who perished. (Although I can no longer bring myself to watch most Holocaust documentaries, I suppose it’s high time I went back.) Thinking that day at the treasure trove of genius they represented, and the knowledge and beauty that they have given us, it could not have been clearer that they defined every decent and noble impulse ever displayed by humanity.

My first reaction: Their oppressors meant to destroy all of this. My second reaction: They failed.