In one of my incarnations I am a podcaster. Not That Kind of Rabbi is the name of my offering. But, I have always wanted to do another podcast called WHY. It would be quite simple really. Start with something that has happened. An unemployed youth joins a paramilitary militia. Why? Because he saw little hope to realize his dreams and this seemed to ooze meaning and purpose. To belong he had to commit acts of violence. Why? Because it would create a covenant between him and the others that if done alone would have landed him in jail. He has broken the social contract to show that he can be trusted by the group. They choose a target. A scapegoat population that is a convenient 'other'. Why? Because, as his world fell apart, the one with hopes and dreams, he needed simple answers to complex problems and someone had to take the blame. He and his group picked the Jews. Why? Well, two thousand years of Christ Killer rhetoric and a stiff necked population that refused to assimilate coupled with an insidious likeness to the majority population made them seem dangerous. They, the brown shirts as they are now called throw a rock through a Jewish storefront, many storefronts,. No one seems to mind. Why? Because it's not happening to them. Blame is relief. Things go wring, blame the other, blame God and occasionally, blame yourself.
Evil as Hannah Arendt points out , is not the purview of monsters , it is, in its presentation, banal. Ghettos follow, trains leave stations, Canada, like so many others turns it's back on the fleeing Jews. The rest is horrific beyond belief. We are left to remember six million murdered innocents, and more, slavs, LGBTQ's,Roma, dissenters. With te Arteis mission in to space Astronauts flew far enough away to see the blue ball that we call home. There were no lines on that globe, their was just the blackness of space to envelope us. Still we war, still we hate. Why?