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Deborah Lipstadt - Wiki
p193 "... In the Talmud we read: 'In a place where people who have... [repaired their relationship with God and man] stand, the purist... (righteous person) cannot stand...' [Maimonides] Citing the verse from Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden fruit, God says: 'Now Adam is like one of us... knowing the difference between right and wrong.'"The simple explanation that after humans have sinned they become Godlike seems puzzling. In the Mishnah Torah Maimonides reads the verse differently... 'Now Adam is... unique... From within himself, he knows the difference between right and wrong.' The human species is unique in the world, in that humans use their own intelligence and reason to distinguish good and evil. [Or we invent "good" and "evil." As we have invented the days of the week and the hours of the day which have no reality independent of us.]
"So too those who have done wrong and then... [repaired their relationship with God and man] have reached a new level: from within themselves, they know the true difference between right and wrong. It is this unique human ability to know the difference between right and wrong which makes... [repairing their relationship with God and man] transformational...."
If you are reading the book while reading my blog, you are aware that I'm leaving out all the -- to me tiresome -- examination of the process of forgiveness and contrition and penance and atonement, and the details of each cult's views on these subjects. While religions provide valuable insights into the moral instincts of humans, I'm more interested in the root of these instincts than I am in how many Acts of Contrition you need to say for a Crime Against Humanity. In fact, I see this focusing on the minutia of the various beliefs as a sort of coping mechanism -- you don't have to think so much about what the Holocaust says about man and God if you are calculating exactly what your religion requires from the sinner in this unusual case.
Why aren't there publication dates for these commentaries? You really need to know when they were written.
Cynthia Ozick - Wiki
p213 "The SS man had a Catholic education..."Does the habit, inculcated in infancy, of worshiping a Master -- a Master depicted in human form yet seen to be Omnipotent -- make it easy to accept a Fuhrer?
p214 "... The commandment against idols [the Second] is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity.
"Molock springs up wherever the Second Commandment is silenced. In the absence of the Second Commandment, the hunt for victims begins...
"In Germany, did the Church say, 'Hitler is Moloch'?
"Moloch's appetite for victims cannot be stemmed. Begin by feeding it only Jews, and in the end it will eat even the little boys who are servers in their church.
"There are no innocent idols. Every idol suppresses human pity. That is what it is made for...
p216 "...forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to his own life. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim...."
I'm not sure Ivan Karamazov's "Grand Inquisitor" understood the Second Commandment in quite this way, but it is an interesting interpretation. The Church -- especially the Roman Catholic church -- has historically been quite fond of sacrificing victims to its own idols. And, again, sociologically sacrificing a few victims of other groups (or even the laggards of your group) has always made Darwinist sense.
I thought Ozick was finished but she continues,
p219 "The intelligent man of conscience also shovels in the babies [to feed Moloch, just as the brute does], and it does not matter that he does it without exaltation. Conscience, education, insight -- nothing stops him. He goes on shoveling. He knows what wickedness is. By now he has been shoveling for so long that he knows what Moloch is, he is intimate with Moloch. He is a morally sensitive man, and he shovels babies to glut the iron stomach of the idol...
p220 "I discover a quotation attributed to Hannah Arendt: 'The only antidote to the irreversability of history is the faculty of forgiveness...' She is the greatest moral philosopher of the age, but even she cannot make a Lazarus [not sure if this is meant to be Luke's Lazarus or John's Lazarus] of history.
"Graham Greene explains the Catholic idea of hell -- no longer the medieval site of endless conflagration; instead, an eternal separation from God.
"Let the SS man die unshriven.
"Let him go to hell.
"Sooner the fly to God than he."
One thing we can say for Ozick is that she doesn't equivocate. But you already know my sociological interpretation of all this, so you should guess that I see Ozick as being desperate to defend the moral order of her God. The God who was so evidently "on leave." She can't forgive "the SS man" because if it wasn't his fault it must have been part of God's plan. Or, worse, there is no plan. What we have here in the Holocaust is not men feeding Moloch but a Twilight of all Idols (play on English translation of a title by Nietzsche) including her own.
But I really do like the way she tore into this question. And what she says about how Karl's sins are actually worse because he is sensitive and educated is an interesting echo (echo in reverse?) of the notion that the repentant sinner has a special status and understanding of both God and sin.
Which reminds me of something I forgot to mention when Deborah Lipstadt was talking about that "unique" understanding of good and evil possessed by the recovered sinner. This special status of the sinner was brought up repeatedly in The Brothers Karamazov. The prime example is Father Zosima himself, but there's also his mentor from when Zosima was in the process of leaving the military for the Church, and even Dmitri -- though that transformation is still in doubt, and I have little faith in it. (Ha! to "little faith.")
Dennis Prager - Wiki
I'm not going to quote him, but he does a wonderful job of describing the differing views of Jews and Christians when it comes to forgiveness. Christians -- and their God -- forgive everyone regardless. Jews -- and their God -- cannot forgive a murderer... only the victim can forgive a crime and in the case of murder the victim is dead.
Having recently read The Brothers Karamazov, I fully understand the Christian position. But as a person outside both religious communities, the Jewish view makes more sense to me, just as Draco's Code makes more sense to me, as I've written about before (yes? I didn't label it so I can't find it now. Briefly, Draco's aim was to end honor killings in ancient Greece, so his laws called for the death of anyone -- or anything, trees that dropped a limb on a person had to be cut down as well -- whose actions resulted in another's death, regardless of intent.)
Having recently read The Brothers Karamazov, I fully understand the Christian position. But as a person outside both religious communities, the Jewish view makes more sense to me, just as Draco's Code makes more sense to me, as I've written about before (yes? I didn't label it so I can't find it now. Briefly, Draco's aim was to end honor killings in ancient Greece, so his laws called for the death of anyone -- or anything, trees that dropped a limb on a person had to be cut down as well -- whose actions resulted in another's death, regardless of intent.)
Joshua Rubenstein - Bio
I'm going to quote his quote of Heinrich Himmler, speaking to a group of Nazi officers, in 1943, p237 "Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, when 500 are lying there or when 1000 are lying there. To have stuck this out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions due to human weaknesses -- to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard."
Himmler addresses the difficulty of individuals serving the best interests of their social group. As Marius's Roman legionnaires could have told the Nazi's, massacring even unarmed women and children is hard work. (I just realized how apt this is as the Roman victims were the Nazi's Aryan ancestors... or related to them.)
Himmler addresses the difficulty of individuals serving the best interests of their social group. As Marius's Roman legionnaires could have told the Nazi's, massacring even unarmed women and children is hard work. (I just realized how apt this is as the Roman victims were the Nazi's Aryan ancestors... or related to them.)
Sidney Shachnow - Wiki
p242 "...Karl managed to overcome the voice within him that said a person cannot murder innocent men, women, and children and still call himself a human being. He allowed himself to be changed into a foul beast who did the unforgivable. He gave up his moral life -- his soul -- to his leader and his state. He believed it when he was told that his victims were less than animals an that he was a superior being who was obligated to torture and annihilate them. What he did was the ultimate and irreversible denial of his humanity...."
This is all the more damning coming from a career military officer and Green Beret. However, I return again to what I said about the U.S. (and U.K.) bomber crews in both Europe and Japan, who participated in fire bombings and nuclear attacks on civilian targets. How you would distinguish between Karl and these airmen I really can't imagine.
This is all the more damning coming from a career military officer and Green Beret. However, I return again to what I said about the U.S. (and U.K.) bomber crews in both Europe and Japan, who participated in fire bombings and nuclear attacks on civilian targets. How you would distinguish between Karl and these airmen I really can't imagine.
Autumn...
...is coming. The Japanese maple has gotten the news, there's not that much green left up near the top, but the poor, nearly naked tree in the alley is in full denial. The days are getting shorter but, what with it's having been shifted from place to place the past several months and all the damage it has suffered, perhaps it hasn't been able to compare the morning and afternoon light as trees are said to do and arrive at the correct inference. It really should be bare of leaves by now, but instead the few leaves that remain look more like June leaves then almost September leaves.
The scaffolding came down yesterday across the alley, so the tree -- and the entire end of the alley -- is suddenly getting more light. And in a week or two, we may even have some fog free mornings and afternoons. So far, August has managed only a single day when the temperature rose as high as 70F, but September tends to be our warmest month. Things should be changing soon.
The scaffolding came down yesterday across the alley, so the tree -- and the entire end of the alley -- is suddenly getting more light. And in a week or two, we may even have some fog free mornings and afternoons. So far, August has managed only a single day when the temperature rose as high as 70F, but September tends to be our warmest month. Things should be changing soon.
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