Human Nature
We seem to be caught at present in a terrible battle of evil extremism. But the sad fact is that human beings have always been and continue to be this way. For all that Stephen Pinker might argue in The Better Angels of Our Nature
The problem of why we do such things as humans was tackled in the Talmud.
“When Adam was created he reached from the Earth to Heaven. But when he sinned God placed His hand upon him and shrank him.” (TB Hagigah 12a) You could not ask for a more simple and unequivocal expression of humanism. That humans have the potential to span the world, to make it a wonderful place. But because we have the capacity to make the wrong choices, we end up diminishing ourselves.
If this is true of humanity in general, it is equally true of the Children of Israel.
“Why are Israel compared to the stars of the heaven and the dust of the earth? Because when they rise they can rise to the heavens, but when they sink they sink to the dust.” (TB Megilah 16a)
And from the very start, the story of Adam and Eve in the primordial Garden of Eden, human beings always tend to blame someone else. Whether we blame evolution or creation, the very nature of human beings is one that Hobbes described as “nasty and brutish”. It is almost as if the Bible is telling us that this is the human condition, and it calls upon us to live with it, to try to ameliorate it, but not to expect it will be different. Not in this world anyway. This is probably why “life after death” seems to offer the only solution in rabbinic literature. But in reality that is both pessimistic and sad for us now on earth.
Indeed, what could be sadder than the debate between Beit Hillel and Beit Shamai in TB Eruvin 13b over whether it would have been better for a person not to have been born? They debated for two-and-a-half years before agreeing with the proposition, but added the conclusion that we have no alternative other than to check our own actions and try our best.
But we fighting humans use whatever means are at hand physically, whether it is a fist or a bomb, to impose our selfish wills on others. We start with personal antipathy, move on to tribal rivalry, and end up with national conflict. Indeed, we see some of this progression in the Bible. We start with spitting, throwing stones, beating up, go on to throwing acid, and then using guns.
Ideologies make matters worse. No matter whether they are political, religious, social, or even sporting, the idea that my ideology is better than yours has led to the greatest catastrophes and orgies of destruction that humanity has caused. Millions of humans are currently seeking an escape from hell, and many die in the process. It shows no sign of letting up. Historians debate the causes of world wars, and in the end one concludes, like Plekhanov, that the inevitable always happens through the accidental. Politicians are constrained by personal and political considerations, by constituencies, votes, trade-offs.
We are about to start a three-week period of mourning for the destruction of two temples and two thousand years of exile. The Talmud consistently blames the Jews themselves for what happened. They betrayed their spiritual traditions; they betrayed their social obligations; they made all the wrong political decisions, and the few good people were simply outnumbered by the selfish and the corrupt. It sounds exactly the same today. Fanaticism exists with our people just as much as tolerance and sensibility. We like to think we are better, that we set an example. In some ways we might. But the sounds of internal conflict and brutalism towards the other, be it a different gender, a different religious position, or a different people, is so painful one can understand why so many prophets fled to avoid having to deal with the impossible.
It does not help at all to say “the others” are worse than we are. Two wrongs do not make rights. Most of us desperately want to see an end to conflict, needless deaths, and occupation. I cannot see the light. We are like two punch-drunk fighters slugging it out until one drops or the referee separates them. Then after a few years of recovery we are at it again.
None of the so-called solutions I have seen, on the right or the left, work in practice. And it is not good enough to say that the Almighty will get us out of this mess. It did not happen in the past. So what can we do, we ordinary human beings who care about humanity and about our ways of life? We can pray, and that helps soothe. But practically? Nothing! The politicians will decide. We can only get on with doing our best, wherever we are, to increase the amount of goodness around us, and to try to shine a little light in a dark world.