Where were we when people learned to hate…?

Abraham Heschel asks, “Where were we when people learned to hate in the days of starvation?…We have failed to fight for right, for justice, for goodness; as a result we must fight against wrong, against injustice, against evil. (“No Time for Neutrality,” Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 210)

Twice in the last week, I have listened to people who have endured more hatred and injustice as young children than I expect to experience ever.  I am grateful they speak out, and grieved that we do not seem to learn, to care, to ask why human rights violations persist or to work to stop the violence and hatred.

Charlene Schiff participates in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHHM) Memory Project.  The 82-year old is the only living survivor among the 5,000 Jews in the town of Horochow who were imprisoned by the Nazis in 1939.  She was 9 years old.  Escaping the prison ghetto before the Nazis liquidated the camp, she lived in forests, sleeping during the day and foraging at night under the cover of darkness.  Ms. Schiff lived in these conditions for more than two years.  You can read more of her recollections at the Memory Project website.

Michael Kuany is in his early 30s now.  One of the Lost Boys of Sudan, he escaped his burning village in southern Sudan when he was 6 years old. I didn’t mistype, not 16 (sixteen) but 6(six).  The age when young American boys are throwing footballs, building with legos, fishing and playing video games. Separated from his family, Mr. Kuany joined other children he knew and walked to “safety” in a refugee camp in Ethiopia where he lived for four years.  When war came to Ethiopia, he fled again, forging the Gilo River and trekking hundreds of miles to Kenya where he lived for ten more years in a refugee camp. There he was educated by U.N. aid workers and eventually had an opportunity to come to the United States for additional education.  He now has his undergraduate and master’s degrees and has established a nonprofit, Rebuild Sudan.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to hear Paul Rusesabagina, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide whose story is told in the film “Hotel Rwanda.”  He tells his story in the book No Ordinary Man. Rusesabagina challenges us to live up to the world’s unfulfilled promise of “Never again.” But the reality is that we do allow these atrocities to happen. Again and again. 

My friend and seminary classmate Christine Cowan records her experiences as an Ecumenical Accompanier in Palestine with the World Council of Churches; there she bears witness to the human rights violations that happen every day in an occupied land. 

Why don’t we learn? Why don’t we care? Why don’t we ask why these horrors continue to happen? Why don’t we work to stop the violence?

Do we think it will never happen here? Do we not believe that the people in these far-away countries are God’s children? Or do we just not care? Do we believe their pain doesn’t affect my day, my commute, my family, my livelihood? Do we believe that there is no relationship between their scarcity and my abundance? Their war and our peace?

Where were we when people learned to hate?