The satisfaction of righteous indignation

Rethinking society's collective need to banish 'evil'

My home town of St. Louis made headlines across the country last week. Some of it was bad news; some of it was good news.

And some of it might have been fake news.

The bad news was the travesty of desecration: vandals toppled of 154 headstones in a Jewish cemetery during the night of 21 February. The Jewish community has far too much history of indignity and intimidation over decades and centuries to not react with horror, anger, and fear.

The good news was the community response.

Citizens of St. Louis from across the religious and political divide came together in an inspiring show of support. Hundreds showed up last Wednesday to participate in a collective cleanup effort, including Missouri Governor Eric Greitens and Vice President Mike Pence. A crowd-funding campaign initiated by the Muslim community raised $75,000. People responded to a profane act of hate with solidarity, compassion, and brotherhood.

But what if they were missing the point?

Virtually unchallenged was the presumption that this was an act of anti-Semitism. Perhaps it was. But where was the classic evidence of such motivation? Where were the swastikas spray-painted by racist thugs as brazenly testimony to their Jew-hatred?

And where was the national outcry in response to similar acts of desecration against Christian cemeteries in Arkansas and Indianapolis?

It seems curious that hate-crimes generate more notice when they are against Jews than when they are against Christians. It is also worth wondering why we prefer to attribute this kind of effrontery to racism rather than to malicious mischief.

THE WORSE THE BETTER

In a world filled with hate — so much of it directed against the Jewish community and the Jewish nation of Israel — it seems perfectly reasonable to blame the defilement of the St. Louis cemetery on anti-Semitism. All the more so when one act of hate appears to beget another: isn’t it likely that the vandalism in St. Louis is responsible for the copycat attack in Philadelphia, and for the recent bomb threats across the country as well?

Maybe so. But if we are too quick assigning hate to what might have been a much more prosaic act of wanton destruction, then we start to lose our ability to tell the difference between loutish indecency and true evil.

Our society is certainly moving in that direction. It has become common practice to brand any ideological adversary as a “Nazi,” thereby discrediting ourselves in the eyes of anyone who doesn’t reflexively agree with us and — more significantly — diminishing the abomination of real Nazis and the atrocities they perpetrated upon humanity.

Conflating levels of evil contributes to the intellectual and social scourges of groupthink, moral equivalence, and knee-jerk partisanship.

So why do we run to embrace the worst-case scenario? Because it’s easier to reduce every issue to black-and-white than to grapple with complicated shades of gray.

It’s no different with conspiracy theories. People would rather believe in some mysterious cabal of puppet-masters manipulating events from behind the scenes than confront the apparent senselessness of our world. We find it less disconcerting to blame a shadowy league of arch-criminals for the pain, suffering, and injustice that fills the daily headlines. Order is more comforting than disorder, even when it is pernicious.

SOMETHING TO HATE

And so it is with the recent cemetery vandalism. Anti-Semitism is a well-established institution of hate against a long-persecuted minority. Attacks on Christianity are hazier: the victim is less vulnerable, and the motivation is less clear. A band of teenagers toppling headstones for kicks is merely despicable.

In a perverse way, we may even feel cheated to discover that the affront was perpetrated not by neo-Nazis but by a gang of ruffians. Reacting to hate-crime fills us with the satisfaction of righteous indignation. An obscene prank has little drama, and leaves us with no clear direction for venting our collective outrage.

This is the problem with hate-crime legislation altogether. Motives may be reprehensible, but it is action that is criminal. By politicizing crime, we perpetuate the wrongheaded attitude that intention is worse than the act itself.

That may be true in terms of moral philosophy, but it has no place in jurisprudence. What’s more, it allows for the kind of Orwellian doublethink that makes Jews the victims in St. Louis because the perpetrators were Nazis, then transforms Jews into Nazis in the Mideast because a more sympathetic victim has tugged on the heartstrings of the media and the international community.

King Solomon asks, If the snake bites because it was not charmed, then what advantage is there to the charmer’s art? If we condemn every untoward act as evil without distinction, how can we expect to identify and confront evil in its truest form?

Of course we want to tame violence. But what if our efforts are merely an exercise in self-delusion that enables us to hide from the inconvenient complexities of life?

There’s no app for confronting evil. And we do ourselves no favors when we blame all acts of hatred on Nazis, on racism, or on Donald Trump. Sometimes people are just callous; sometimes people are just stupid; and sometimes people are truly evil. We have a duty to stand up to all of them.

But we can only do so effectively when we can tell one from another.

Rabbi Yonason Goldson is a professional speaker and trainer.  Drawing upon his experiences as a hitchhiker, circumnavigator, newspaper columnist, high school teacher, and talmudic scholar, he teaches practical strategies for enhancing communication, ethical conduct, and personal achievement. He is the author of Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for Success and Happiness from the Wisdom of the Ages is available on Amazon.