Revisiting the Line Between Good and Evil

More than three decades ago, I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This short book brought him out of obscurity. Soviet Premier Krushchev allowed the novel to be published. It quickly made its way around the world giving a bleak picture of the reality of Soviet Gulags.  

In the years that followed I read many of Solzhenitsyn's books including Gulag Archipelago and his novels about the revolution beginning with August 1914. Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." I agreed. Until I didn't. 

The rise of Trump, especially after Charlottesville in 2017, moved the line from inside my heart to to outside my heart. The line was between Us and Them: between people who wanted American democracy and the Christian Nationalists, White Supremacists and their ilk who would trash democracy to make a Handmaid's Tale theocracy. 

It took me a while to realize the line had moved. I wrote about it here.

For the last few months I have been reading about forgiveness and recovering form unforgivable acts with a group at the Hannah Arendt Center. Germany had to move on after the Nazi era. The Balkan nations had to exist within European culture after the slaughter in the 1990s, as did Rwanda after the genocide. Societies have to deal with horror and the threat of violence and continue as societies.

On a political level, I will do whatever is necessary (and legal) to defeat Trump and everyone who supports him. But someday Trump will be gone and life will go on. We will all have to find a way to make a society after the attempted insurrection and its aftermath.  

The Line Between Good and Evil: A Confession

“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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