“The
line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” says
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his book The GULAG Archipelago.
Until
this year I agreed with Solzhenitsyn, at least I believed I did. Then I read Not in God’sName: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks agrees
with Solzhenitsyn. The line between good and evil cuts through each of us—until
it doesn’t.
Sacks
said seeing good and evil as an inner struggle is the mark of the major
monotheistic religions. Other cultures put the line between good and evil at
the at the border of their settlement, village, state, country—outside
themselves.
Sacks
is well aware that even if the line between good and evil can cut through the
heart of each person, the line easily moves outside. Before I read Sacks’ book, I could have
testified under oath that I agreed with Solzhenitsyn. But Sacks showed me that my ideal was
history, and probably had only existed in my better moments.
Since
2015, the site of every Trump Nuremberg Rally was certainly, in my view, a line
between good and evil—inside evil, outside good. Then after November 2016, the line between me
and the 63 million Trump voters became the good and evil line. I would not have asserted the claim at that
moment, but it was true.
I
would ask, rhetorically, how anyone but a racist could vote for a Birther. That’s not a question. Those who vote for a
Birther are racists or are idiots who do not know they are racists. The march
of Trump tweets and policies just made my belief deeper: the Muslim ban,
attacking POWs, attacking Gold Star parents, saying Nazis are fine people,
Trump’s whole Addams Family bouquet of hate, the bouquet of thorns without
roses that define his character and his actions.
And
so to my confession. If I ever truly believed the line between good and evil
cuts through every human heart, I don’t know.
The lists of community and personal sins of Yom Kippur confession are,
to me, almost quaint. What do the Ten Commandments mean in a nation where the
head of state brags about breaking those commandments, brags about being
entitled to break those commandments, and is cheered by people who claim to be
believers?
When
the President backed by all of his cabinet and by his propaganda ministers at
Fox News declares me and those I love and admire “enemies of the people” we
live in a nation that officially says good is Us and bad is Them. In Nazi
Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Rwanda, and Serbia after Yugoslavia,
people like me became Them. And the
record of those slaughtered says they did not know it or could not believe it.
German Jews after Kristallnacht thought Hitler could go no further. Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 went to Easter services with Hutus. Starting the next week, the same Hutus slaughtered Tutsis in those Churches. The Russian Jewish émigré Masha Gessen says when a tyrant tells you what he is going to do, believe him. Timothy Snyder says the same in his book OnTyranny. Trump has been calling the news media the enemy of the people since his campaign started. Sooner or later, journalists will be killed by people wanting Trump’s approval. When that happens, the killing won’t stop with journalists. There is no end to a list of enemies of the people: professors, protesters, comedians, the deep state, democrats, anyone who criticizes the Dear Leader.
I know Trump supporters who tell me they will defend The Constitution of the United States if Trump or anyone goes against it. I think they are sincere. But they are deluded.
When
Trump used his office to extort an ally for political gain, he could not have
more thoroughly violated the Constitution, yet they defend the Dear Leader more
fiercely. Those pathetic patriots will swallow every excuse Trump makes for
every violation of The Constitution and cheer at his next Nuremberg Rally.
I
aspire to believe that the line between good and evil cuts through my heart,
but for now, for as long as America is marching toward the end of democracy, I
believe good and evil is Us and Them. I
want to see every Republican defeated and out of office beginning with Trump
and McConnell and the Freedom Caucus. I want them utterly without power.
When the government does not officially hate the people I admire most, when the government does not attack the weakest, when the government does not turn away refugees, in other words when the Republican Party is utterly out of power, maybe I can return to the view of Rabbi Sacks. But for now, I am going to do what every Jew in Germany should have done in 1933. I am going to assume that when the President will point at American citizens in public and call them the enemy of the people, that same President will soon point at me and say the same thing.
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