Back in 1984, Abba Eban’s PBS series, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, made an enormous splash, was viewed by 50 million people and won a Peabody Award and two Emmys. This nine-part series tells the Jewish story from ancient times in Mesopotamia, through Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages, through the Holocaust to present-day America and Israel.
Below are is the three-part seminar in which I discussed key points from the series and how they are relevant today.
Part 1
I was staring, just staring, at one of the fateful Epstein emails this week, about the many hours Trump spent with a victim at Epstein’s house1, wondering how we Americans could have let this man into our house.
Abraham Joshua Heschel said in a famous speech on racism in 1963:
There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepted.
A few years ago, I stood on the shores of Omaha Beach, where the forces of Nazisim were heroically overcome by so many courageous soldiers. I was in the American cemetery, overlooking those cliffs, perhaps the most tranquil place on earth - where today, the nearly ten thousand Americans resting there are not completely at peace.
Through our indifference, we are squandering away all that they died for. Their blood is crying forth from the earth.
Below are some photos that I took there.
There can be no doubt now (as if there could have been before this week) that we are facing an evil of nearly unimaginable proportions. The Epstein emails confirm the depths of the depravity that has desecrated the White House with a wrecking ball and a putrid stench. This is an evil capable of doing unspeakable physical harm to innocent immigrants (check today’s Orlando Sentinel for the latest abomination - a WW2 refugee who has lived here for over seven decades was hauled off to Alligator Alcatraz by ICE. His parents came here legally when he was five, and he was a retired optician - see the article below)2; incalculable psychological harm to young female victims and untold economic harm to midwestern farmers; someone who takes delight in denying food to impoverished American children while dangling their fates in front of people who, unlike Trump, possess the capacity to care. This is a man who has used our empathy as a weapon, since he has none. The great cavity of the soul that for most people is filled with love is for him lined with vengeance and retribution. Yes, there is Trump Derangement, but the derangement is his and his alone.
And yet, we see these actions normalized, constantly, in the press and on the pulpit, in conversation and even in derision. We see his atrocities somehow justified, as some possibly positive ends are used to justify catastrophic means. Even the jokes about him normalize him. Evil can take the shape of an elderly buffoon; but it is still evil and it is still lethal.
When we equivocate about evil we are enabling it. When we equivocate about hate we are enabling haters. A decision to remain silent because it is “political” is itself a political decision - and it is a moral decision.
Elie Wiesel once claimed to be able to condense the entire ethical teaching of the Bible into one sentence, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” Indeed, it’s been his life’s work. And it applies equally to Jews and non Jews. Wiesel, speaking at the Darfur Emergency Summit in July 2004, interpreted the ancient verse to highlight its contemporary global implications:
“Lo ta’amod al dam re’echa” is a Biblical commandment. “Thou shall not stand idly by the shedding of the blood of thy fellow man.” The word is not “achi’cha,” thy Jewish brother, but “re’echa,” thy fellow human being, be he or she Jewish or not. All are entitled to live with dignity and hope. All are entitled to live without fear and pain.
The code of Jewish law makes it clear that what we need now are honest, courageous whistleblowers. It states (Shulkhan Arukh Hoshen Mishpat 426) that if you hear informers plotting to harm someone, you’re obligated to inform the intended victim. If you can somehow stop the perpetrator from acting, but you do not, you have broken the law, “Do not stand by while your neighbor’s blood is shed.”
Miranda rights don’t apply to morality. We do not have the right to remain silent.
Heschel also wrote:
Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal and evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking.
The maximum of cruelty with a minimum of thinking.
Only a bare minimum of thought needs to go into calling out the racist, white supremacist agitators and domestic terrorists of Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and El Paso and the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. And the stain of hate inflicted on the people of Portland, Los Angeles and Springfield, Ohio. Antisemitic and racist invocations cannot be ignored and can never be tolerated. The murder of innocents cannot be forgotten. The fear felt by so many who hide from ICE in their basements can not go unheeded.
For our beloved nation, as we approach a time of Thanksgiving, we pray that an end to this agitation and hatred will be soon at hand - and for our communities, I pray that everyone, from all backgrounds and all points of view, will stand together in common cause, that we will never succumb to indifference and not thereby desecrate the graves of Omaha Beach.
This story could not be normalized, even by Politico, but the Daily News got it best:
Want to see the latest provocation? Check out today’s front page headline in the Orlando Sentinel:
