Elul 27, 5766
There is no excusing it. There is no
understanding it.
But there may be something healthy in
it.
There is no way of knowing why a Holy Father would say such a
thing. There is no conceivable advantage in a Pontiff who preaches respect
for the symbols and sensitivities of other faiths, to cite the statement -
even as he distanced himself from it - "Show me just what Mohammed brought
that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such
as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
Here,
after all, is the man who less than a year ago, issued an eloquent
condemnation of the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Here is the Pope who said
"the Catholic Church continues convinced that, to foster peace and
understanding between peoples and men, it is necessary and urgent that
religions and their symbols be respected".
There is no way of
explaining why the Holy See, having sparked Muslim ire worldwide, and
having already decided to issue an unprecedented apology, would content
himself with an expression of regret worthy of the most Polish of Jewish
mothers, the equivalent of "What kind of person reacts this way to things
like what I said?"
Unless, somewhere inside, he meant what he said
in the first place.
A senior official of the Islamic Movement in
Israel said Sunday that all the Pope had to do to end the affair was to
say two words, "I apologize."
But Yitzhak Minervi, a former Israeli
envoy to the Vatican and an authority on papal relations with other
faiths, said the Pontiff was unlikely to take any such step.
"The
man has a clear line, a firm stance toward fundamentalist Islam, he rules
out in its entirety violence based on religion, and this is the message
that he wants sounded clearly in Europe."
"He's no fool. I assume
that he foresaw exactly what the results and the reactions would
be."
The Church, meanwhile, knows exactly how bad this is. In a
remarkable use of a Hebrew expression unusually reserved for suicide bomb
masterminds who inadvertently blow themselves up, Franciscan Friar David
Jaeger said of the current affair "It's clear that there was a work
accident here."
"It was a very serious sort of work accident,"
Jaeger told Israel Radio. "Now the Pope and his people, and the entire
church are laboring very hard in order to repair the damage."
On
the face of it, no possible good could have come of this.
On closer
inspection, however, we all of us have a number of things to learn from
this affair, and from a number of other recent instances of a public
figure sparking controversy with opinions seldom aired in
public.
Take, for example, the case of rightist MK Effi Eitam, who
said last week that "We will have to expel the great majority of the Arabs
of Judea and Samaria.
Experience showed, Eitam continued, that
Israel cannot give up the area of the West Bank. "It is impossible with
all of these Arabs, and it is impossible to give up the territory. We've
already seen what they're doing there."
Turning to the subject of
Israeli Arabs, Eitam said, "We will have to take another decision, and
that is to sweep the Israeli Arabs from the political system. Here, too,
the issues are clear and simple. We've raised a fifth column, a league of
traitors of the first rank. Therefore, we cannot continue to enable so
large and so hostile a presense within the political system of
Israel."
Racist and inflammatory? Certainly. Worth hearing?
Absolutely.
All public figures, like all actual human beings, have
a little box of horrors squirreled away somewhere. It is full of the
horrors that they think in their heart of hearts and only let on to those
who are close to them, those, in fact, who think the same.
For
public figures, there is something healthy about letting the venom drain.
Putting it out in the open, so that people on both sides can discuss it.
Lancing the abscess so that, in the process, we can all of us begin to
heal.
The modern world has made us experts at a personal form of
political correctness, consigning our dark impulses, designs, and views to
the securely secreted little box.
It's only natural, this double
life of the intellect. We practice it at work, even at home. It keeps us
safe. But it also keeps us lying.
Maybe it's time we opened up the
little box of horrors inside every one of us. The one full of what we
truly believe.
"Hold on," I hear the irate reader protest at this
point. "How can you say that, when at the same time you impose censorship
on the very people who let it hang out, all of it, all the
time?"
Opening the box, in this sense, does not mean simply
collecting the venom in order to throw it into the face of those who vex
us, annoy us, oppose us, believe in other faiths or political movements.
It does not mean, for example, firebombing churches to defend
Islam from charges that it is a religion of violence. It does not mean
advocating the wholesale slaughter of Muslims in order to make sure that a
Holocaust does not recur.
It means opening the box so that we can
examine what's in there, for good and, often, ill. Expose it, for once, to
light and air.
And to courage. And to self-esteem.
A large
part of having the courage of one's convictions, is a willingness to see
how they actually stand up to the other side, in the context of discussion
in which both sides listen at least as intently, as they talk.
As
equals.
For the rightists among us, courage, in this sense, means
examining your own actions and views and fallibilities as critically as
you do those of your rivals.
For the leftists among us,
self-esteem, in this context, means looking with the same appreciation and
understanding of your own side's virtues, as you would those of the other
side.
Understanding between peoples who have a history of war going
back hundreds of years, begins this way - opening the little box of
horrors within each of us.
Not, for once, as weaponry and
ammunition, but as the bent mirror urgently in need of repair.