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Our Rabbi's Message
January 2008
MISPLACED CONCERNS
By Rabbi Aaron Kriegel
People have a propensity to look at the wrong side of issues, and I am not writing about presidential politics (although I could). People just seem to show their concerns for the wrong sets of people. There are countless shows on television that describe life inside of prisons. On any particular day you can see what the inside of a count, state and federal prison looks like. On any particular day you can examine the mind of a serial killer. Usually you can find a program or two where serial killers are interviewed. It's always easy to find out what kind of lives they lived as children, and what events caused them to begin their murderous sprees.
But who ever speaks of the victims? Do we ever get the opportunities to visit their houses? Does anyone speak to their families? Does anyone want to explore their pain and suffering? Is their excitement when families of the tortured and murdered are interviewed? What would those kinds of programs do to the Nielson ratings?
Do you remember that day when Saddam Hussein was captured? The world wanted to know all about him. They wanted to learn about his home town of Tikrit and about those who were involved in torture and killing with him. There is almost as much excitement about Saddam as there is about Osama Bin Laden, and as there is about the lives of those suicide bombers who brought destruction to the World Trade Center. We know everything about them. We know where they grew up and where they went to school. We know where they lived in America and what they ate in the last days before they killed themselves. We know about their friends, their parties and their last written words.
Have you ever seen a program about the victims of their actions? Did you ever go into the homes of the survivors? Has anyone watched programs about the orphans they created? Would anyone watch that kind of program? Would anyone read a biography of the killed instead of the countless biographies of the killers?
Every day in another part of the globe, genocide and holocausts are taking place. Usually we are oblivious to them because such events are not newsworthy, especially if the victims do not speak English or are Black or Asian or do not share our culture. And when we do hear of the horrendous acts that people can perpetrate upon people on the evening news, we have the strength to slog through those stories until the really interesting stories about Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton are told and at great length.
I can think of enough holocaust and genocide victims in the past two or three years to number in the hundreds of thousands. I cannot think of even one name. Has anyone heard the story of even one victim of Rwanda? Does anyone recall the name of one martyr from Serbia? With all the news from Iraq and Afghanistan, does anyone remember one story about the families of those who were killed at weddings and at funerals? Does anyone, save the survivors, care about those who were killed by suicide bombers on buses in Israel?
The History Channel is filled with documentaries about World War I and World War II. Watch them and you will see more bombs dropping and more explosions than you will wee of the shattered lives of the survivors. The Civil War is presented as a series of wars, but the long suffering of people on both sides is only expressed in the numbers of soldiers who were killed in individual battles.
We are taught more about slave masters than about slaves, more about pirates than about the honest crews and passengers they butchered. We learn more about killers than about the killed, and that is the fare of the human kind in almost every country and on almost every television. Cowboy movies do not tell about dead Indians. When Clint Eastwood killed in those spaghetti westerns, the sadness of his actions was never investigated. Rambo and the Terminator are about man's capacity to kill. Man's capacity to save is but a footnote to history.
Why is there so much unrest, so much murder, and so much war in the world? People are just not interested in issues of peace. All we want is an easy chair where we can watch others bring suffering, torture and death to the world.
Until we change our habits, why should the killers change theirs?
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