Never Again or Nothing New Under the Sun? Humanity's humbling reality

"Who would have thought that this kind of thing could happen in the twenty-first century?"

“How can there be a brutal military invasion targeting civilians in 2022?”

My social media over the past month has been regularly punctuated by expressions of disbelief over the horrific events in Ukraine. The sort of events that many wanted to believe belonged to a bygone era. A less civilised past.

Students of history will be aware, however, that we are far from the first generation to imagine that we had put devastating wars behind us. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which was considered to have paved the way to universal peace; the 1814 Congress of Vienna which many hoped could create a new post-Napoleonic order which would end war in Europe. The League of Nations, set up in the aftermath of the “war to end all wars”, succeeded only in causing complacency and opposition to re-arming in the face of the subsequent Nazi threat. “Never Again” was adopted as a slogan following WWII and the Holocaust, while the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was acclaimed as “the end of history”.

Sadly, a recurring pattern throughout human history is shock and horror at the depths of cruelty and depravity to which fellow human beings can once again sink. Disbelief that people and societies, who were imagined to be civil and sophisticated, could still perpetrate and support acts of depraved brutality. How then are we to relate to the sudden reappearance of such evil which has invaded the comfort zone of our “post-war” Western world?

One very powerful message I took from Out Of The Depths, the memoirs of former Chief Rabbi of Israel and Holocaust survivor, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, is his sharp criticism of those who sought to portray Hitler and other Nazis as having been somehow crazy or inhuman. As if the Second World War came from some other planet – committed by aliens. He wrote that unless we internalise the fact that human nature can lead people down the route of evil, we will not recognise the warning signs and fail to stop it from happening again. Responding to one of the witnesses from the Eichmann trial, Rabbi Lau wrote:

“If Auschwitz were indeed another planet, it would be easier to accept the Holocaust. But in truth, the disaster of Auschwitz is that it happened on the very same planet where we had lived before, where we live now, and where we will continue to live. Those who carried out the cruel murders of the innocent were ordinary people, who returned home from their murderous acts to water the flowers in their manicured gardens. They tended the flowers lovingly and carefully so they would blossom, just after they had torn infants to pieces and shattered the skulls of men and women. Just after shoving thousands of people into the gas chambers to their deaths, they came home to play with dolls together with their little girls, and listen to classical music, eyes closed, engrossed in the uplifting spirituality of Bach and Beethoven…Those were people just like you and me, and that’s the whole problem. When you transfer all those horrors to another planet, you minimise the issue. You are saying that something like the Holocaust can never happen to us again. In my humble opinion, you are wrong…”

It is a natural human reaction to be so horrified by cruel atrocities that we want to entirely disassociate from those who carry them out. By considering such people to be completely different we no longer feel threatened by our potential to become like them. They are not viewed as the “regular people” that we perceive ourselves and our societies to be. Rabbi Lau – supported by the terrible lessons of history – teaches us that this is naive and can be highly dangerous.

Rabbi Lau’s warning parallels a criticism made by Rabbi S. R. Hirsch of the tendency in many quarters to depict leading religious figures as ever-righteous superhumans who are never subject to temptation – and certainly always distant from sin. As I discuss in Judaism Reclaimed, this approach leads to a disconnect. By implying that great people were naturally pre-ordained for greatness their followers are deprived of potentially potent role models who can inspire others to battle and overcome challenges.

Instead, as Rambam teaches in Hilchot Teshuvah (5:2), “each person bears the potential to be righteous like Moses our teacher or wicked like Jeroboam”. Rather than disassociate ourselves from powerful role models for the good or imagine that perpetrators of evil belong to a class of other-worldly demons, we must be aware of our innate ability – the very thing that makes us human – to follow either of these paths.

Ultimately it will not be well-meaning peace accords or institutions such as the Treaty of Westphalia, Congress of Vienna, League of Nations or United Nations which will alter the course of humanity. In Moreh Nevuchim (3:11), Rambam maintains that only way to truly change human society is to cure the underlying ills which drive people and nations into war:

For through awareness of the truth, enmity and hatred are removed and the inflicting of harm by people on one another is abolished. It [Tanach] holds out this promise, saying “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb…”. Then it gives the reason for this, saying that the cause of the abolition of these enmities, these discords and these tyrannies, will be humanity’s knowledge of God…

The primary and perhaps exclusive causes of warfare and misery are obsession with and competition over material possessions, power and pride. Only once humanity is taught or becomes aware of this folly and reaches for a higher, more refined goal, its energies and capabilities will be channelled towards achieving universal happiness, and people will “beat their swords into ploughshares…”.

First posted on 20 March 2022, here.