Last night I went to a screening of Inglorious Basterds at the Tolerance Museum. It was a deeply moving event on a number of levels. First, through connections to the family of Holocaust survivor (now deceased), I am gaining a better understanding of the generational costs of that atrocity to the Jewish community--it's unlike any injustice in the Western world that I am aware of today.
Second, as I try to understand the Jewish culture and beliefs better, I had a conversation with a rabbi in the lobby of the Tolerance Museum that was private but telling. He said to me that the museum should be called the Museum of Intolerance. As an example, we were discussing the security and he talked about an extremist who came to LA to kill Jews and an immigrant, entered the Tolerance Museum and left, because he recognized that if he started shooting in there, he would not make it out alive. The rabbi said to me, "Jews cannot be tolerant of Muslims until every Muslim that wants to kill a Jew is dead." I heard similar comments later that evening about Nazis who killed Jews. It's an eye for an eye. Makes total sense if the goal is perfect justice, or as close to it as you can get.
So the screening was roughly 300 people, a packed house. Many in attendance were quite old and many of those had survived the Holocaust. Like other viewings of Basterds, there was cheering and audience enthusiasm when Nazis were scalped, tortured and beaten to death with baseball bats. It has seemed odd to me that our nation does not allow water boarding of totalitarian, Muslim extremists who are intent on killing innocents, but we cheer the horrific demise of "Nazis"--of these caricatures of German soldiers.
Granted, the Nazis are guilty of one of the worst (and best documented) crimes against humanity. Mao and Stalin may have killed more people, but Hitler kept records. He also did it systematically and to a race of people. The Holocaust has been documented and recreated so that most of us are well-aware of its horrors and moral terror. It has created a deep injustice and indebtedness between the Germans who participated or supported the Nazis and the peoples who were damaged by it, the Jews being the group that lost the most.
Here is what struck me: no one else is still fighting for their national injustices. My family is of Dutch ancestry. Many Dutch hid Jews and fought in the underground resistance. Many Dutch ended up in camps and died for the Jews and in their fight against the Nazis. The Dutch are not continuing to seek repayment. The Americans are not continuing to seek repayment. We ended the war and cleaned it up as best we could decades ago. I believe that process comes from a fundamentally different concept of rights, responsibilities and what justice demands.
After the showing a number of people involved in the film discussed it. It was primarily a Jewish affair. Eli Roth, who played Sgt Donny Donnovan in the film, the Bear Jew, the guy who beats Nazi's to death with a baseball bat and (spoiler alert) shoots and kills Hitler, said, "Jews are like money lenders (audience laughs), we charge interest on past injustices. . . I care more about an injustice that happened 50 years ago than I do about an injustice that happened yesterday."
It's unclear to me how you pay dividends on injustice. The Hatfield and McCoy model of seeking justice doesn't seem to work well. I don't think we'll ever get to peace in the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Middle East if we're all trying to rectify the injustices we can find between our fathers. As the evening wore on and the accounts of injustices against Jews by Nazis continued, a phrase popped into my head that we used to joke about in high school: "Remember the Hittites."
The Hittites, or the city of Ai, or other peoples of Canaan were largely wiped out, according to Biblical accounts, under the commands of God to the Israelites. In fact, with the city of Ai, God commanded that the Israelites not spare any man, woman, child or beast. The Israelis could not even keep any loot--it all had to be destroyed. Total genocide. Who is owed that debt and how much interest has accrued over the past few thousand years?
The concept of forgiveness does not seem to exist in the Jewish model I saw last night. Grace is entirely foreign. To not exact justice is an insult to the people who were killed for these Jewish friends. I get it, I understand the demands that Justice makes. Somehow though, it seems unyielding or enslaving to try to balance the scales. The great liberation of the Christian message, the message of giving an extra mile, more clothing and loving your enemy is that it sets you free from having to try to exact repayment for injustices against you and ones that you (or your past generations) may have committed. Truly, the Christian to response to personal injustice is to forgive and be forgiven, it is to simply reply, "I was told there would be no math." Christians have this right because they believe that their sins are against God primarily. Christians believe that God made a perfect sacrifice through his son, like Abraham nearly did with Isaac, which serves as a scapegoat for all the sins of man. Accepting this free gift of grace has a requirement that you also extend it. The freedom has a cost--give up the claims of injustice against you.
The revolution of grace to me is not that it requires anyone to give up their rights or privileges--it acknowledges them, it says, "You have every right to expect repayment, but the real bugger is that others have every right to expect repayment from you as well--and no one ever views their sins as badly as the person they've been done against. Release and be released. Take a mulligan and give one." I believe that the message of grace is one that recognizes that justice-based systems are doomed to failure, to create a world that is a harsh place to live and impossible to balance. It says that you can take a mulligan, but you've got to offer everyone else a mulligan as well. The greatness of a mulligan-based system is that it allows folks to move on, to be liberated from the slavery of attempting to exact justice.
Rabbi Hier was in attendance. He has won two Academy Awards for documentaries, most recently (2003) for Genocide. He mentioned that very few Holocaust films were made until the 60s and 70s--decades after WWII ended. Today we seem to have a proliferation of films, articles and other justice and social justice movements. My concern is that although the amount of injustice in the Western world seems to be diminishing, particularly between Jews and Nazis, the anger, outrage and cries for repayment seem to be getting louder and bigger. The crowd of people, particularly the younger folks in the audience, seemed more upset and angry about the Holocaust last night than the survivors were in 1950. I don't see that as a healthy trend.
Do I believe that we should have fought the Nazis? Of course. Do I think we should be surgically targeting and eradicating religious extremists who are a danger to innocents and our world? Of course. Do I think we should be building systems that count past grievances, costs and the interest due on those accounts? I don't think so--it seems to build a sense of entitlement for debts that will not and cannot be repaid, which simply leads to expanding expectations that cannot be fulfilled. As the Davies J-Curve demonstrates when the gap between reality and expectations grows too great, societies become unstable and revolution ensues. That does not enhance anyone's life--I'm not interest in justice at the hands of the Jacobins.
I think that I have a better understanding of the depth of the injustice that the Jews inherited through the Holocaust from the screening last night. Certainly, I understand their claims against Nazis that killed and exterminated Jews in camps. It makes sense that a film glorifying the Jews who fought back (and should have) is going to be popular and give the Jewish people a sense of getting some additional justice. I'm concerned that it also seems to enhance the belief that more is owed than can ever be repayed. As one Israeli soldier in the audience said [I paraphrase], "I went into the Israeli Army, not because I thought that I could fight the Nazis, but so I could fight others who want to kill Jews the way the Nazis did." I'm not sure that such visualization helps make the world a happier or better place.
growing debts still grow
how does one harvest that shit?
help a brother out
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