A Religious Perspective

In the aftermath of catastrophe, no empathetic human being can offer a whole or holistic response. We can only, in T.S. Eliot’s evocative phrase, shore fragments against ruins, and hope they will last until time and human resilience enable rebuilding.

What follows, then, are fragmentary thoughts about religion and community in the aftermath of the mass murder committed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania last Tuesday.

a) Enormous human evil should promote faith in G-d rather than dim it. There are only three options: the world is meaningless, human beings create meaning or G-d provides meaning. No one truly believes that the world is meaningless. The human capacity for unmitigated evil makes us implausible creators of meaning. All that is left is G-d.

b) While human beings cannot create meaning, we control its presence in this world. It is our responsibility to continue our efforts to pour meaning into this world even—especially—as others do their best to remove it.

c) It is the proper role of religion to promote continual and intensive moral introspection, whether in suffering or pleasure, in poverty or prosperity. It is legitimate and appropriate for clergy to ask ourselves and our congregants to search our ways and reconsider our deeds in the face of tragedy, to ask each of us to search for the extent of our own culpability for the creation of a world society in which evil flourishes.

But it is not the proper role of religion to absolve human beings of responsibility for their own evil actions. It is not the proper role of religion to absolve human beings of their responsibility to prevent the evil actions of others. The reality of ultimate Divine justice does not prevent human beings from being commanded to establish justice, as best they can, on their own.

d) It is an important and proper role of religion to provide comfort in the face of tragedy. As clergy, we seek where possible to engage in theodicy, in the justification of Divine ways to human beings. Chief among the Divine ways that require justification is the universality and often randomness of death.

But it is not the proper role of religion to provide comfort in the face of evil. Evil is the product of human choice, and religion should inspire, develop and channel burning outrage at human violations of the Divine creation. Religion should encourage and demand that human beings take responsibility for correcting evil rather than accepting it.

e) It is the proper role of religion to bring human beings to an awareness of the universality of sin. But this awareness must not be allowed to metastasize into a lack of sensitivity to the degrees of evil in this world. The desire not to be judgmental must not make judgement impossible, and thus make injustice inevitable.

f) Moral relativism is at least as dangerous as moral absolutism. Edmund Burke said “All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” I would rephrase: “All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do less than everything.” It is essential to realize that human beings who do nothing in the face of evil are not good; they are accomplices and enablers.

g) I am Jewish. I am American. For the past year, my identities have lived parallel lives. Every night I read the Israeli newspapers hoping that the names of my friends and families would not be listed as victims of the latest murderous act of terrorism. As a Jew, I knew that every bullet was aimed at me as well, that from the perspective of the murderers we were all targets.

As an American in America, I thought the danger to me unreal, that only the hate was real. Now my identities have been fused in the heat of battle. I am no longer safe, and as an American and as a Jew I have a single enemy. It is no accident that one of the pilots who flew passenger jets into crowded office towers was wanted for a bus bombing in Israel 16 years ago.

h) The vast majority of American Muslims oppose terroism. An unknown percentage of Palestinians opposes terrorism.

Ten years ago, I was in Israel when Saddam Hussein lobbed Scud missiles toward us (and toward U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia) in the hope that they would land somewhere populated, and kill many people. Then, thousands of Palestinian men, women and children danced openly on their rooftops as the terror missiles passed overhead. I see no reason to believe that the (thousands of) people (openly) cheering and the children handing out candy in celebration Tuesday and throughout the week were atypical.

Who in the Islamic and Palestinian communities will take responsibility for undoing the corrosive education these children have had and continue to have?

Who in the Islamic and Palestinian communities will say what must be said —that until that education is undone, the world can neither justify nor afford giving these children control of their collective destiny?

i) I believe in the Hereafter, in monotheism, in Revelation and in the authority of religious tradition. So did, it likely seems, the people who murdered thousands and themselves last week. That means that they and I belonged to the same subset of the human race, the community of the religious. It means that I have special responsibility for them. It means that, as a believing Jew, I must accept complete responsibility for the consequences of my own beliefs and, as a rabbi, of my own teachings. I must be eternally vigilant regarding both the implications of what I intend and the implications of how I am understood.

I pray this article meets that test.

Tuesday was the Jewish New Year, a day simultaneously of forgiveness and accountability, when the Books of Life and Death are open. May we merit inscription in the Book of Life.

Rabbi Robert Aryeh Klapper is the Orthodox Rabbinic Advisor at the Harvard Hillel.