Humanizing the Enemy
10 Iyyar 5771 / 14 May 2011
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
Sitting in shul, there are a number of questions one might consider: Political questions. Societal questions. Existential questions. But, there is one question that I suspect is on the mind of many of us here in Baltimore this week: Can a 20-1 long shot repeat at the Preakness Stakes next Saturday?
“Animal Kingdom” is his name. As a kid, I always loved thoroughbred names. My family would take the occasional outing to Arlington Race Course and I would place my bet on the horse with the most intriguing name – no matter what the odds. I guess it’s a good thing my dad would only let me bet $2…. But there’s a serious reason why this particular horse’s name intrigues me. Because in the aftermath of Osama Bin Laden’s death, we are forced to wonder “how could a human being have done the things he did?” A common response to such a question is that Bin Laden was not fully human and certainly not deserving of humane treatment, that he was an animal who behaved in animalistic ways and, in the end, was shot like a rabid dog, or a horse. And that is the question I would like us to ask today when we consider men like Bin Laden, those who perpetrate evil acts. Can or should we allow ourselves to consider their humanity?
It is a debate that has raged over the years with regard to terrorists in particular. Films like Steven Spielberg’s Munich or Paradise Now elicit virulent reactions from those who feel that humanizing the enemy creates some sort of a moral equivalence between the acts of terrorists and those of, say, the Israeli army, or what Leon Wieseltier has called the confusion between terrorism and counter-terrorism, “the sin of equivalence.”
The Spielberg film has renewed relevance considering Tony Kushner’s collaboration on it and the recent questions surrounding his honorary degree. Reacting to Spielberg’s and Kushner’s propensity to depict the “humanity” of the Black September terrorists, Jonathan Tobin wrote, “So what?” What does it matter, he intimates, if they have families? They are killers. We need not know anything else about them. Others have suggested that those who behave inhumanely have lost their right to be understood as human beings.
The truth is that many of these potent reactions are justified. Osama bin Laden was not deserving of our sympathy. Yet, there is a real danger in dehumanizing our enemies. Actions, I would submit, can be inhumane. People cannot. Hitler, yemach shemo, or Bin Laden does not deserve our sympathy or our mercy, but it is not Bin Laden’s soul that concerns me; it is yours and mine.
Each year around Pesach we ask the question, who “hardened Pharaoh’s heart?” Who was responsible for his terrible choices? Was it nature or nurture or something in between? But today, I want to pose a simpler question when considering this great villain of the Torah:
Why does Pharaoh have a heart?
Ramses, Moses’ adversary, oppressor and tyrant, slayer of infant Hebrew children, seems like the kind of man who would not have need for a heart. Heartless, he seems, as he doubles the labor of his slave work force. Heartless, he seems, as he denies Moses’ request time and time again. Heartless, he seems, as, with each refusal, he sentences his own people to suffer the wrath of a relentless God. Bin Laden, too, seems heartless. A piece in last week’s New Yorker includes a description of how Osama encouraged his children to take up suicide bombing for the Taliban. “My father,” wrote Omar bin Laden, “hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”
But, before we decide whether humanizing the Hitlers, Bin Ladens or Pharaohs of the world is acceptable or even preferable, we should probably consider what humanizing our enemies is not.
First of all to humanize is not to morally equivocate. Since today is May 14th, the secular anniversary of Israel’s Statehood, we’ll use Israel as an example, but there surely are many others. Wieseltier rightly points out that often the death of innocents is, in his words, an “Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective.” There is a significant difference between the accidental death of innocent Arab civilians during a military operation and the deliberate slaughter of teenagers in a discothèque, or commuters on a bus – a distinction even Richard Goldstone has now admitted. In most cases, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) attempts to limit civilian loss of life. A most striking example occurred in Jenin on April 9, 2002, when 13 Israeli soldiers lost their lives in an ambush while trying to avoid civilian casualties by going door-to-door. Therefore, films or other media which attempt to draw false parallels between the actions of terrorists and the Israeli Army should be treated with an appropriate level of suspicion and their specious arguments dismissed.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that to humanize is not to forgive. It is illustrative to note that it was Simon Wiesenthal, the great Nazi hunter who, in his book The Sunflower, challenged the Jewish community to grapple with the humanity of a dying Nazi war criminal. In the end, his protagonist does not forgive; he simply walks out of the room in silence. Forgiveness is not a given, but the man left behind to die is no animal, and Wiesenthal does not view him as such.
And a related point: to humanize is not to justify acts of terror. On July 31, 2002, nine people lost their lives in a cafeteria on Har Hatzofim at the Hebrew University. One of them was a close friend of mine, Janis Coulter. Janis and I had been neighbors on kibbutz in 1996, traveled across Turkey together and had remained close throughout our time and studies on Mt. Scopus. Janis had real spunk. She was loyal and kind. She taught me how to cook and more – but most of all, she taught me how a blond Irish girl from Roxbury could bring an incredible passion to her chosen faith. Janis was a Jew by choice, and it was this choice, her love of Israel and the Jewish people, that ultimately led her to work as Assistant Director of the Hebrew University’s foreign students’ department. And it was this job that led her, on that fateful Wednesday, to have lunch at the Frank Sinatra cafeteria, and to lose her life in a fireball of hate and flying debris. She had danced at my wedding just one month earlier. She was thirty-six years old.
When I think about Janis, I am dismayed by the thought that the men who murdered her were human beings with hearts and minds and souls. Indeed, it is this humanity that makes their crime all the more gruesome, and perhaps all the more unforgivable.
Pharaoh had to have a heart, hardened though it may have been. If we have learned anything from the last hundred years, it is that human beings have a capacity for brutality that stretches far beyond anything in the animal kingdom. And we, those who mourn the victims of senseless crimes, do ourselves a disservice when we consider the criminals to be as senseless as their criminal acts.
So why is it so important to move beyond the impulse to dehumanize our enemies?
First, societies and states must bear a certain degree of responsibility for the actions of individuals. Let me be absolutely clear. I am not saying that one’s circumstances, economic or otherwise ever justify murder. But, to allow the descriptive to become prescriptive, to close our eyes to poverty, lack of education or deliberate ideological propaganda and corruption is to say that we care not for preventing the future death of innocents. And just as there are systemic, socio-economic and cultural (and not racial or genetic) factors why black kids in West Baltimore are statistically more likely to join gangs than white kids in Roland Park, so too there are certain conditions that help to breed terrorists. And if states, Muslim states in particular, but non-Muslim ones too, are not at least asking what those conditions are; if we are unwilling to see the heart of the potential killer before that potentiality has been actualized, we are only adding to the problem. This will be the first great test for whatever true democracies emerge from this year’s “Arab Spring.”
The second important point is that dehumanization removes accountability. Animals don’t know any better. Terrorists do, or they should. Each and every individual human being carries within him or herself a nitzotz, a spark of the divine. The Mishnah in Sanhedrin relates that one who destroys a single life, it is as if he has destroyed an entire world (San 4:5). Murder is the blotting out of the most sacred of God’s creations and, conversely, the preservation of life trumps all other mitzvot. To scorn that ethical imperative, to take a life, is abhorrent because we are human, not in spite of that fact. It would be more comforting to think that Janis’ killer had no mother or father, siblings or children. But, as I stare into my own children’s eyes, as I sing them to bed at night, I am forced to ask myself, how could they do it, knowing that she was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend?
And Pharoah, too, had a son. It is the final plague, macat bechorot, the one too terrible for parents to imagine, that finally convinces him to soften his heart and to let the Jewish people go free. Allah hu akbar, say the Muslims. God is great. Surely, the Master of the Universe could simply have destroyed Pharoah from the outset, freed the Jewish people and saved us the trouble of fleeing across the Sea of Reeds. But somehow that would have been less impressive. It is the God who can show me the heart of Pharoah, the humanity in the murderer, which gains my allegiance. And God, who is great, forces me year after year after year to confront that humanity, in all its terror. Bin Laden was willing to give up so many lives, his own son’s, for the sake of a false god whom he believed commanded such atrocities. This makes him not less of a human being, just a bad one.
The rabbis of the Talmud decreed that in order to adjudicate a capital case, each judge must, himself, be a father. The reason? Because, even a murderer is someone’s child. If we forget that, we do a disservice to our society, our God and ourselves. So, the next time someone dismisses a movie or book or newspaper article as just one more attempt to “humanize the terrorists,” perhaps we should consider the story of Pharoah where true justice was apportioned to a king who thought he was a god but, after all, was only a man.