Rabbi's Weekly Teaching
Friday, August 5th, 2011
Parashat Devarim
Along with millions of people around the world, my heart was shattered by the news of the murders in Oslo and Utøya, Norway two weeks ago. What was truly saddening, among the many acts of senseless violence and the incomprehensible news of so many young lives lost, was to also observe the Norwegian people struggling with the news that these acts of atrocity had been committed by one of their own. The terrible, heart-wrenching tragedy that was the evil act of Anders Behring Brevick's murderous rampage has been described as the works of a "Christian terrorist." As a Jew, I don't recognize anything Christian about Brevick, any more than I recognize the beauty and reverence of Islam in the evil acts of Muslim terrorists, or the twisted, perverted interpretation of Judaism that motivates the actions of a Jewish terrorist.
Any single individual may claim that their beliefs are anchored in ethical monotheism, but the horrific choice to commit murder literally negates the validity of such a claim. Once a life is taken; once a choice is made to take God's power of life and death into one's own hands; once an innocent soul is made to suffer, even as these perpetrators claim to be holy, there is no God present. And in our struggle to comprehend these actions, this is perhaps when we most keenly feel God's absence.
Brevick is without religiosity. His altar is hatred; his worship is a glorification of the self; and his holy texts are manifestos of violence and fear. He is as far from God as a human being can ever be. The ideals of Christianity; like the ideals of Judaism and Islam; teach us, in the seemingly simple three-word commandment love thy neighbor, that we share a fundamental understanding: all human beings are created in the image of God. Denial of this primary teaching and making exceptions to the universality of this teaching places those who choose these interpretations outside of the normative ethical monotheistic framework.
In the Hebrew bible, the creation story that is so much a fundamental part of every Abrahamic religion teaches us that all human beings are created "in the image of God." In Torah, we know this phrase as B'Tzelem Elohim. The mitzvah of seeing each and every human being "in the image of God" is the divine imperative of knowing that every individual life is precious, unique, and holy. It is not easy to master the skill of looking at a stranger and yet seeing a brother or a sister. And yet, Torah teaches us, in the commandment it most often repeats - more than thirty-three times - that we must love the stranger.
Loving the stranger means that sharing a human heritage of our Divine creation is - or should be - enough to enable us to see the spark of God's holy light in one another. Martin Buber taught that God exists in the space between human beings; God is found in the meaningful relationship we can create with each other. But there are still those who use the space between human beings to create wider gulfs, cultivating the darkness and hatred that can emerge so easily when we fail to acknowledge our common humanity - and our common divinity. And the fundamental idolatrous act of any individual is to deny the presence of God's image in another, or the Godliness that has the potential to exist between people.
Islamic, Christian, and Judaic texts all acknowledge our human needs and our frailties. The commandments to love God, to love the stranger and to love our neighbor all exist because they are challenging. And perhaps the commandment that we must love our neighbor as we love ourselves can be the most challenging of all. It is so easy to believe that we can live without love. Our modern world, with its instant access to every conceivable human need and desire, can push us to believe that we do not need real human connections to survive. But in losing our connection to others, we also lose sight of our own intrinsic humanity. When we have a true foundation in the lessons of love taught by our sacred texts, we learn how to perceive our own holy uniqueness. The love we show to God, to the stranger, to our neighbor and to ourselves is qualified and quantified by our every human action and interaction. Without these sacred interactions, we lose the ability to see and live in the world of God's creation, turning instead to the gods of ego, power, and satisfaction. In the worst instances of this terrible turning, there are those who learn how to hate. There are those who forget that every life is both human and holy. And there are those that destroy the divine potential in others, and in themselves.
Brevick's evil acts were grown in an incubator of hate and anger. His very being is a denial of the religious imperative to love and see the divine image in all human beings. And in the wake of his actions, we must not powerlessly fear further acts of atrocity, but instead, realize that God is present in the aftermath: in the responders who put their lives in danger every day in the service of combating terror; in the messages of grief and healing that we around the world share with the Norwegian people, and in the realization that we further prevent the growth of evil when we distance ourselves from hate. It is our divine and human duty to help others to do the same: to do our best to live at a distance from our own angry/hateful thoughts, and substitute in their place feelings of genuine friendship, fellowship, love and compassion, and most importantly, acts of loving kindness.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Mitch
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