ben-Ish

When first ordained more than thirty years ago, my sermons bristled with moral indignation at injustices, and the world is full of them. If a dog hurt a child, for example. If a drunk driver committed a hit and run. On September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 from New York City to Seoul, was shot down in the midnight blackness by a Soviet interceptor, killing all 269 persons on board, including Americans. The nation was outraged, and my sermon the following Sunday shocked our gentle Pennsylvania congregation with my statement that had I been president the Russian pilot would have had no place to land when he returned home because, I said, “that part of the earth would no longer have existed.” 

During the Hitler era the German people, later hiding behind the guise of "we didn't know, it was the Nazis," showed the world the brutality and cruelty of unaccountable power, as did on our part My Lai of the Vietnam War, and then Shock and Awe as we launched the Iraq Era. I have largely been able to suppress the urge to rail from the pulpit, but from time to time my writings still reflect that anguish, 

The merciless horrors of Al Qaeda and now even more so of ISIS, unspeakable atrocities in the name of religious certainties and cultural hatreds -- and the ensuing circle of vengeance -- no words are terrible enough to condemn them, and anyway perhaps the sword is mightier after all. But unless we are willing to let ourselves be driven to what the Nazis were and destroy a large segment of earth’s inhabitants, innocent with guilty -- and we seem already to have shown that we are willing -- we had to destroy the village in order to save it -- and now the world -- it goes nowhere to rage for nuclear vengeance when the target is imprecise. Or maybe down The Road it does go where.

When their so-called radical Islamist movements rear in our country it will have come time to set aside our obsession with civil liberties and suspend constitutional rights for all involved. Which will be all of us. Then, notwithstanding our opening dream, history will find us to have been no different from history. 

In the end we will have been but sons of Adam after all.

W