Acts of bravery and cowardice

As I write on Father’s Day Iranians are on the verge of rebellion. The odds are against the insurgents; they have neither the guns nor the organization, just Twitter and Facebook. They do have the moral authority, and sometimes that’s enough. I wish president Obama were more forthright in his support, just as I wished that president Reagan had been more forthright in his support of Filipinos when they took to the streets following their rigged elections in 1986, and I wish that president Bush (41) had come to the defense of the Tiananmen Square democracy advocates, but that didn’t happen either.

I envy the Iranian (and before them the Filipino and Chinese) protestors courageous enough to face the armed police without themselves resorting to violence. But it embarrasses me to see the brave of Teheran demanding an honest recount while in America we stood idly by as our presidential election was stolen in 2000. Yes, in Florida there were protests (Mary Matalin famously denigrated them as Jesse Jackson’s rent-a-riot) but the rest of us who were in the plurality did nothing. What a fiasco that election was. Buchanan won votes from myopic Jews of Palm Beach instead of to Al Gore their intended recipient; remember the hanging chads, and the confusion of the butterfly ballot, and the uncounted ballots, and the disenfranchisement at black polling places, and the fact that one candidate’s brother was in charge of the farce? Florida should have become the epicenter of a mass protest; instead one person (and four of his colleagues) gave the election to Bush, the fellow with the fewer votes, and what a swell job he did. And we did nothing as government became a shambles and the Afghanistan war was abandoned before victory was attained, and Osama bin Laden still taunts, and we still cower. Congress should have discussed scuttling the anachronistic 18th century Electoral College and substituting direct elections or some other way of approximating reality, but it too did nothing. In America, the self-styled land home of the brave we dared not oppose the coup. In Teheran, they are daring.

In shul last week we read about the ten spies Moses had sent into Canaan along with Joshua and his doggedly honorable friend Caleb. Yes the land was beautiful and flowed with milk and honey, but the people are giants, the ten wailed, and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves and so we must have looked like it to them, they groveled. And despite the contrary testimony of Joshua and Caleb the people refused to believe in themselves, refused to believe that they had the power to overcome the obstacles, refused to believe in God, if you will. The lesson of the Hebrew spies is that failure to do the right thing, the moral thing, failure to have confidence in oneself can be a recipe for disaster. I wish I had been braver in 1961 and again in 1967 when each time I had the opportunity of doing the right thing, but didn’t. In 1961 I didn’t join the Freedom riders as they boarded their integrated busses and headed southward. In 1967 I didn’t fly to Israel to work the fields or factories. I live with the shame and try to make up for it.

Then I read of Jihad Jaara who orchestrated the murder of an unarmed 71 year old American turned Israeli during the second Intifada, ironically a man who’d befriended Arabs. Jaara was part of the murderous crew trapped in the Church of the Nativity in the spring of 2002. After a five weeks’ siege U.S. officials of the Bush (43) administration arranged for the European Union to take the killers. Jaara was flown to Dublin where he cowers in fear of Mossad or CIA attack. When a reporter from the New York Times found him he was shocked and afraid. His physician told the reporter, “You must give up the name of the person who gave you this address. Jihad is terrified because his security has been so easily breached.” “You must help us," Jihad said, angry, moving toward [the reporter]. "They want to kill me.” Shakespeare put into Julius Caesar’s mouth the sentiment that cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. Jihad Jaara, who conspired in the murder of innocents now fears inevitable retribution and dies his thousand deaths one by one, day by day. Poor Jihad.

Filming the aftermath of the Rwanda Genocide

In a previous column I wrote of my friend Mark Grashow who has dedicated his retirement years to furnishing school children in Zimbabwe and Tanzania with books and school supplies and teachers. Now let me tell you about my step-nephew-in-law, Taylor Krauss.

A Yale graduate, Taylor began his professional life working for documentary film maker Ken Burns. On assignment in post-genocide Rwanda, he saw something that struck a chord. As a student at Yale he’d visited the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies. But in Rwanda, where during 90 days of hell, at least half a million minority Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were killed by fellow Rwandans, no one was recording testimonies, or even providing social services for survivors. He worried that the mistake of not listening to survivors of the European holocaust was being repeated, with potentially devastating results. After all, if the story was forgotten, it could happen again, there or elsewhere. So he founded “Voices of Rwanda,” to record on film survivors’ testimonies about the destruction of their families during the genocide, and of the lives they’d lived before.

This is psychological and historical aid he brings. It’s not food or school books, such as Mark is providing, but on another plane it’s just as vital. It’s an opportunity to make sure that no one forgets, that unlike our holocaust, which is denied by Nazis and their sympathizers. Now, while stories are still fresh they can be recorded, and by recording, perhaps the victims will achieve some sense that what they went through was something the world will care about. It’s therapy for us too; we can’t just ignore Rwanda, tucked away there in the middle of nowhere, as we tend to view central Africa, but it’s a land where savage murder occurred on a massive scale, one “master race” of blacks perpetuating it on another, as one “master race” of Europeans perpetuated it on us.

The parallel isn’t lost on Taylor. Unlike the Holocaust, after which survivors mostly fled to Israel or the United States, in Rwanda, he says, “you’re living next to the killer who killed your family. There’s no space to tell stories,” which must be told. Here’s where he, the outsider, the Jew, comes in. “The reason I can be doing this work is because I am a Jew.” Krauss graduated from a Catholic high school in Phoenix, in 1998. He says that being in such an environment forced him to confront his own Jewishness because he had to represent a whole religion. When he would explain to Rwandans that he was a Jew, they would respond, “Oh, OK, you understand.” His being Jewish made it easy to relate to the survivors, and easier for them to tell him their stories. He said that in some regard, they feel that there is a shared history. And obviously so does he.

Taylor and his colleagues sit for as long as each story takes, sometimes more than 12 hours, and they have collected hundreds of hours of testimonies. But numbers don’t matter, he says. “Even one testimony is priceless. The more people share their testimonies the more I realize the importance of being there. The act of listening is the most important thing.”

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Taylor has a credo, but if it does it might be this: “If you care about these issues [man’s inhumanity to man], then you have to make changes in your life.” He believes that it is a Jewish obligation to be listening to survivors in Rwanda. “We will be committing the same mistakes if we are not listening. The retelling of the [Rwandan] Holocaust is exactly the reason I am here.”

I was reminded of all this while reading president Obama’s recent speech—the one at Buchenwald.

“To this day,” the president reminded, “there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened... This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history. This place teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests.”

It is exactly in this spirit that my nephew Taylor is working in Rwanda, because he is a Jew.

You can read more about Taylor and his activities on his website: voicesofrwanda.org

President Obama’s comments can be found in their entirety at http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/06/05/1005677/obama-at-buchenwald