The Difference Between What You Hear and What You See

This will be long, but I promise that the ending will be worth your while.

Many from our class and I went to the ten minute play Seven Jewish Children: a Play for Gaza. Though there was some diversity in the attendance, the majority of the theatre-goers were of a Jewish background. After the play was over, the audience had a discussion about their feelings about the play and the nature of context. In my typical manner, I spoke up first to explain the nature of meaning as a product of what is taken out from a text.

With context in mind, a few people spoke of how they loved the depoliticalized/universalized version of the play while feeling the political context was anti-Semitic. It is important to note that a historian who voiced a negative view about universality got an applause. He believed that universality rather than being decontextualizing is putting the play into a Christian moral context. This leads to the claim of the impossibility for a production to both have a decontextualized message.

The historian also had a claim about Existentialism, stating that existentialism forces us to recognized our contextualized individuality. I responded to him by stating my story, which leads to a different existential version of universality. I prefaced by explaining my Christian context:
  [skip this indented part if you do not care about me]

During my Christian years, I believed that the individual had the responsibility for forgiveness, which contrasts with praying to god that he forgive on ones behalf. This sentiment is reflected by my attachment to verses from the Gospel of Matthew like "Forgive and you shall be forgiven," "Judge not, less ye be judged," "Those at the right hand of the Father have done upon me [Jesus] what he has done on the least of you."

Because of my pre-existing moral sentiments, I became attached to these beliefs in Christianity but not any of the others including belief in a god. When I was old enough to realize that I had these moral sentiments regardless of my belief in god, god became extra baggage in my belief system. Without god, I started justifying my morality in new ways, namely with the Existential ideas that I found in my readings of Camus and other philosophers.

This brings me to my criticism of the historians belief existentialism precludes us from universal sentiments. While the universality I found in my existentialism phase carried some unjustified notions from my Christian context, I think there is something to my following argument: To recognize that someone is human is to forgive them. The obligation to recognize humanity stems from my understanding of Camus's notion of integrity, the contrary of philosophical suicide. One has to forgive because we are all on the same absurd plane of human existence.

To demonstrate this point, I brought up the story of Wiesenthal from his book The Sunflower: On the Possibility and Limits of Forgiveness. Wiesenthal, a Jew in a concentration camp, encounters a Nazi asking him. The Nazi expressed that he had rediscovered god in his act of penitence. Wiesenthal reacts to the Nazi's religiosity very negativity. He believes that the Nazi disprove god everyday by committing atrocious acts without any intervention from god.

In my existential phase, I would have argued that Wiesenthal is misunderstanding the Nazi's humanity. He could discover this by reflecting on his own Jewish context. The Jewish holy texts tell us of a people who commit of acts of genocide as commanded by their god in order to have a place to live in the Promise Land. In other words, should it be very strange for Nazis to have a Gott Mit Uns belt and desire Lebensraum (literally, living room/space).

Through this act of reflection, humans develop a solidarity that recognizes the contextualization that occurs because we are both beings-in-the-world and beings-with-others. This solidarity acts like universality for me.

Not to long ago, I had my anti-existential crisis. While I found it easy to forgive others and was prepared to lose anything, I realized in my studies of the Algerian Revolution that this ideal was never going to be achieved by humanity. Not everyone can forgive because they are much more attached and prone to anger. For every saint who can forgive his or her torturers, there are thousands who cannot. The Algerian Revolution taught me that people do learn something else rather than humanity from suffering. I learned that some of the same people who tortured by the Nazis ended up using the same torturing techniques on people in Algeria and what is now called Israel. That when one hears that someone suicide bombed your family, even those confident in their liberalism will be moved to extremely dehumanizing measures like torture to protect those they love.


Sartre expresses this idea I believe in his introduction to Henri Alleg's La Question in an essay called A Victory:

“It is normal for us to kill each other. Man has always struggled for his collective or individual interests. But in the case of torture, this strange contest of will, the ends seem to me to be radically different: the torturer pits himself against the tortured for his ‘manhood’ and the duel is fought as if it were not possible for both sides to belong to the human race…. Anyway, if he accepts the Moslems as human beings, there is no sense in killing them. The need is rather to humiliate them, to crush their pride and drag them down to animal level.” (Sartre xxxix, xli)

With that said, many people started echoing sentiments expressed in my existential period, including a Muslim scholar and a Christian seminary student. Until the end of the discussion, people continued to express very pro-pluralism views. As probably you know, I am quite cynical. People often hide prejudices under the silencing effect of pluralism.

At the very end, we were allowed to stay longer and donate to three causes. One was for Palestinian children, another for Memphis children, and the last for the Jewish Community. I kept my eyes out, and I quickly noticed that someone had placed the Palestinian collection basket on its sign. Later I noticed that someone had moved the money out of the Palestinian bowl, which was low already. I waited to the end to put five dollars in the bowl, so that no one had the opportunity to take it out. In retrospect, I was cynical enough to notice the quiet prejudice in the room, but too morally weak to bring it to everyone's attention at the time the acts of mal-intent occurred. This regret is my burden for being rightly suspicious.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “A Victory.” Alleg, Henri. The Question. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2006. Print.