Radical Torah

Editor’s note: This week we have another new contributor. Elyssa Joy Auster, a Hebrew College rabbinical student, spent summer 2006 in Chicago doing social justice work with other rabbinical students through theJewish Council on Urban Affairs. She received her B.A. from Brandeis Universityhas a Masters of Theology from Boston University. Elyssa believes that finding a way to express one’s thoughts is one of the deepest ways a person can connect to God, and finds teaching one of the most important forms of social justice.

Throughout human history brutality has been entertainment. In every generation, there are philosophers, theologians, and everyday folk who question its purpose. I am not satisfied with biblical answers, pointing at Cain. I am not satisfied by evolutionary or scientific answers, reminding me that we too are animals. The only thing that gives me hope is my own desire to keep others from pain and know that I am not the only one.

So then why is it that people dance in the streets and celebrate the death of a human being? I have pondered. Being a Jew, I think about Hitler. Would I have wanted him dead? Yes. Would I have found joy in his death? No.

The death of Saddam Hussein should be mourned as the pinnacle of brutalities done by his own hands. If we could all mourn, even his death, then we could recognize our own capacities for compassion and pain. His death, perhaps necessary for a people to feel free from the shackles of oppression, must signify the sadness of why a society chose death as his punishment. As soon as joy is found in someone’s death, we allow violence to be at our fingertips. Pain and death start to infiltrate our own hearts.

For Saddam’s family, mourning would be real. Concerns of mutilation to his body show their need to find comfort in life and tradition. He is dead, so the family really asks for respect for themselves – that they may feel emotion and mourn as they need. To disregard the family no longer takes revenge on a single human life, but becomes a ripple effect of many revenges. How quickly people get wrapped up in hurting each other and ourselves. The Justice by which we will all be measured should have been his alone. Instead, the pleasure with which masses came to watch his death by hanging, and are interested to see the event posted on the internet teems with deprivation. Curiosity can become grotesque.

I cry at the face that holds a blank stare, unable to account for the countless atrocities that he did, or the one that would be done to him. We should all be afraid. I fear a society that gloats at death with revelry.

I wonder: how can murder and violence ever cease as long as celebrations like this survive? I urge you, turn away from the visuals that make death commonplace. Know Saddam Hussein as a human being even if also as a malevolent dictator.

Let this new year be one of peace for us and for the world.