A Few Shiny Pebbles

As usual, Dennis Prager had an interesting talk radio show Tuesday. In his third hour, he discussed the difference between morals in the private sector and those in the public sector, or between the micro and the macro in life. His point is that there are (or should be) meaningful differences in the way we behave in private and public. For instance, the fact that something is all right in private, such as wearing comfortable clothes, does not necessarily mean that it is right to wear shorts and a tank-top to a public church or synagogue, or to an important meeting. Prager compared several of the moral obligations of life in their micro and macro aspects.

One of the points he made is that “turning the other cheek” makes sense in the micro, in private life, because accepting some “slaps”—some disagreement—is required to maintain life’s necessary relationships. However, he insisted, you cannot do this in the macro world because groups and governments would never survive if they truly “turned the other cheek”. In arguing this way, Dennis Prager has always been adamant about the dangers of pacifism and the groups who march and claim that Peace is always better than war or even violence. Last year he wrote:

Pacifists are often personally sweet and endearing people who advocate "peace," and therefore their doctrine is usually spared the moral contempt it merits. Among its many moral and intellectual weaknesses, pacifism ensures that cruelty will prevail on earth. . . . . That is the consequence of pacifism -- far more cruelty and death.

I completely agree with him about this. I find it morally repugnant to “turn the other cheek” when someone is being beaten or raped or lynched, for example, or being loaded into cattle cars. In the larger spheres of existence, turning the other cheek is an open invitation to bullies and thugs and worse. People who do embrace pure pacifism, such as the Amish, for instance, or the Quaker communities, rely on laws, courts, and armed police officers in the surrounding society to protect them. If they were transported en masse to a place such as Somalia, or to Darfur in Sudan, they would be destroyed, ruthlessly and immediately.

Now, Dennis Prager has also always taught that that it is important to clarify your thoughts. It seems to me that this issue of turning the other cheek, which has been part of the vocabulary of life for two thousand years, is an important issue about which to be clear. I have always had trouble with the idea of “turning the other cheek” because it seems to me that where the injunction makes sense, in the micro world and where it impinges on the macro, people learn the rules quite early in life. Throughout the world people have to adapt quickly to the rules of survival, including those of social survival. When we transgress them, we face things such as being shamed, being fired, being shunned, being imprisoned, even being murdered. We learn the limits early.

So I wondered, why would Christ have bothered to say something if it was only meant in clear-cut circumstances were no one needs to be told to do something they already do for social and physical survival? Moreover, when beyond a pretty clean-cut line, the injunction to turn the other cheek falls by the wayside and we fight or call for enforceable help. So what was going on?

And then it occurred to me that there was an arena of life, a major, macro arena, wherein it is important, even imperative, to “turn the other cheek”, wherein we allow evil to go unavenged and force heart-breaking despair on the innocent. It is a moment when history changes direction, where great wrongs go unredressed, and yet it is also a great moment of peace, of decency, and worthy of the attention of the Prince of Peace.

It is a moment when human beings must reach deeply inside themselves to find the spark of the transcendent within them that Jesus addressed.

Throughout history, a conquering army looted and otherwise devastated the peoples it conquered. At the time when Christ lived it was the norm for the winning side to execute a large number of the vanquished and to enslave the rest. It has been the norm throughout history up to and including today that most wars are savage, and ravish the land and people. Even today, there is slavery by conquest in this world. Most famines are politically created by forcing people to become refugees. There are people throughout the world who are suffering genocide, oppression, torture, dispossession, starvation, terror. If their conditions change, it is usually because of war.

I have a newspaper photo of a young man in Bosnia who has shot three middle-aged neighbors on a city street and has his leg drawn back preparatory to kicking a dying woman in the head. As has been recognized since time immemorial, the veneer of civilization is frighteningly thin, and terribly fragile. One day in Sarajevo the Olympic torch is carried into a cheering stadium; another dawn, and executions are summarily carried out on the same grassy expanse. To me, it is an important photo.

As is the picture I saw once when I sat in one of the libraries at UCLA and idly went through a stack of Life magazines from their first issue to one in 1939, where there was a farm field in Poland where two sisters had gone to dig up potatoes for their dinner. The older sister was huddled where she had fallen, dying. The younger was looking up at the German plane that had just strafed them. I stopped going through the magazines. I knew the rest of the story and, knowing it, was unwilling to look any further that day. But when I later found out that the father of a friend of mine had served in the Luftwaffe during World War II, I gave no thought to the picture, or to the fact that my paternal grandfather was born in Poland. I had no sense of enmity.

At the end of World War II, as a civilized people, we victors turned the other cheek. Our conquered opponents were had to do so too. Both sides agreed to let evil go unavenged, unredressed. Except for a few especially egregious barbarians who were tried and executed or imprisoned, we sought to rebuild the world we had just been destroying, sought to establish freedom where there had been war. Brave men flew the Berlin Airlift to bring life-giving supplies to people they had been fighting to the death just a couple years before.

As Americans, we think of it as normal. At the end of our wars, we help set up viable governments and even when we still station troops in foreign climes, they are not an occupying army. But this behavior is so far from being the norm in the world that the countries who do the same as we do form a tiny group. What is the norm? The Soviet Union spent 50 years occupying and controlling by cruel force the countries it conquered in World War II. We repatriated prisoners of war back to the countries we fought, but Russians didn’t. A forest called Katyn bears mute witness of Soviet usage: in 1940 over fourteen-thousand polish officers and government personnel—men who had surrendered to Russia after Poland was conquered, men who were prisoners of war—were executed there and buried.

So one part of the answer for “turned cheeks” is after a war that is ended by a surrender, even an unconditional surrender. It is still an area in the macro world were Christ’s simple statement is rarely followed, and desperately needs to be. Consider how extraordinary the end of the American Civil War was. Reading about Appomattox, one feels the presence of something great and good. Some of the most egregious evils went unredressed when at the end, both the Blue and the Grey left the fields of battle and went home. But because Grant was generous in his conditions, and Lee reciprocated by refusing to start a guerilla war as many in the South were clamoring for, our country was able to mend its wounds. Because they both turned the other cheek.

And here we have an important caveat to this macro turn of the cheek, a warning that must be recognized and to which there must be absolute adherence. The transcendence invoked when a macro situation demands that people turn the other check, demands it of both sides. It must be mutual. Both sides must deliberately and explicitly leave some evil unavenged. Sometimes it even happens that a war is averted because a person in a position of power finds the greatness of soul to join with another kindred spirit in a mutual turn of the cheek. This takes a greatness on both sides of the matter. It takes a Sadat and a Begin. It takes a Martin Luther King, Jr. writing a letter from the Birmingham jail, while people throughout the country looked at scenes of police turning dogs and fire hoses on people and decided that the time had more than come for justice.

To avert a war or end a history of evil, it takes great courage and the leadership of those of giant soul for a such bitter conflict to be so ended, for two peoples to agree to turn the other cheek and allow some evil on both sides to go unavenged. At the end of a war, it takes a great people to win an unconditional surrender and yet return prisoners of war and liberate the conquered land. In each macro arena, it takes carrying the noble spirit of words uttered in hope two centuries ago.

And it gives a special way to measure the sides of great schisms in the human race. Consider that If Israel “turns the other cheek” alone, it will be destroyed. If the Palestinians truly “turn the other cheek”, Israel will immediately do so too. There would be peace. If the American Coalition in Iraq “turns the other cheek” alone, if it withdraws, Iraq will turn into a killing fields with all that means, just as Vietnam and Cambodia did when the American government turned the other cheek alone and ran away from Southeast Asia. If the insurgents in Iraq truly turned the other cheek and lay down their arms, the Coalition would turn its cheek to help Iraq rebuild its civilization, its government, and its dignity. There would be peace.

Thus, for me at least, it is easy to determine my allegiances. The side which has a deep yearning for a mutual cheek-turning and freedom is the side that has my heart and mind. The side that would view a mutual turning of the other cheek as a weakness, and would take advantage of any such one-sided action to destroy the other side, is my enemy.

Sometimes it’s just that simple.