NEWS FEATURE: When `thou shalt not kill’ turns violent

c. 1998 Religion News Service OSWIECIM, Poland _ Samuel Pisar has trouble visiting Auschwitz. The first time he came here, during World War II, he arrived on a cattle car as a skeletal teen with a shaved head and gnawing hunger. Pisar went on to success as an author, international lawyer, adviser to world leaders […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

OSWIECIM, Poland _ Samuel Pisar has trouble visiting Auschwitz. The first time he came here, during World War II, he arrived on a cattle car as a skeletal teen with a shaved head and gnawing hunger.

Pisar went on to success as an author, international lawyer, adviser to world leaders and father of two successful children. At age 69, he shows such vigor that only the passion in his voice recalls his desperate fight to survive Nazi captivity.”To return to this altar of the Holocaust where once I died so many deaths, where everything I ever loved was reduced to cinders, is an experience that wrenches the soul,”said Pisar, who now lives in Paris.”What makes it bearable was that I felt this time it was a journey of hope.” Pisar drew that hope from a recent interfaith conference called”Religion and Violence, Religion and Peace.”The conference _ held May 18-20 in the shadow of humanity’s largest experiment in genocide _ drew Jewish, Christian and Islamic leaders and scholars.


The conferees confronted a bitter paradox: Religion, despite the commandment”thou shalt not kill,”has instigated violence from ancient times to the present.”How is it possible that people who believe in God could take the lives of people who hold different opinions?”asked Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, archbishop of Krakow, Poland.”That is why religion means intolerance to so many people.” The conference was held at the Catholic-run Auschwitz Center for Dialogue and Prayer and sponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding (CCJU) at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

Scholars presented plenty of scriptural calls to pacifism: the Bible’s repeated references to”peace,”the Torah’s emphasis on treating”strangers”respectfully, and the Koran’s explicit command to avoid”coercion in matters of faith.” Yet the proximity of the vast Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps _ where some 1.5 million people, almost all of them Jews, were killed by the Nazis _ rendered such statements almost abstract.

Most speakers agreed that while the Nazis were neo-pagans and suspicious of Christianity, their mass murder of Jews was made easier by”the tragic and shameful history of Christian anti-Semitism,”as Cardinal Cahal Caly of Northern Ireland called it.

Moreover, religious conflicts continue to claim lives in the Balkans, Israel, Algeria and elsewhere. And with India’s Hindu nationalist government having recently unveiled its nuclear potential to the horror of Muslim Pakistan, many fear future global calamities may even dwarf the one committed here at Auschwitz (the German spelling of Oswiecim).”Here we can discern a warning to mankind of what may lie ahead,”said Pisar, whose only previous return to Auschwitz occurred in the 1970s.”We must beware of what we preach and teach to our respective flocks. Hatred, fundamentalism and fanaticism can push us to a new delirium of violence.” Pisar said spiritual values are the only antidote to such a cataclysm.”When (mankind) leaves his moral compass, his faith in God, the unspeakable becomes possible.” Israeli Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, chief rabbi of the city of Efrat, said if religion promotes violence,”there is no need for religion.” He added:”In this bloodiest of all centuries, the unified religious voice must be a religion dedicated to peace and not to any single truth … with a capital T.” This unyielding promotion of a single”truth”is a common element in religious fundamentalism, said University of Chicago scholar Martin Marty, who spent years studying the phenomenon.

Fundamentalists often feel”threatened to the core of their personality”by modern changes in society and lash out to protect their position, he said.

But he cautioned against generalities: many fundamentalists avoid political conflicts, while the famously intolerant Nazis and Communists were hostile to religion.

Conference speakers were clearly preaching to a choir of committed pluralists, but they told of engaging in more challenging dialogues back home.


Riskin said he participated in a Muslim festival in a neighboring Palestinian village, where he swapped biblical stories with the local religious leader. The common roots of Judaism and Islam may yet provide a bridge between Jews and Palestinians, he said.

Amir Al-Islam, an African-American Muslim cleric from New York, said his cooperation with Jewish groups earned him the scorn of some anti-Semitic colleagues.

Al-Islam, secretary general of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, said he once held similar views.”I divested myself of my anti-Jewish sentiment when I met my first Holocaust survivor,”said Al-Islam.

Despite such breakthroughs, Rabbi Joseph Ehrenkranz, executive director of the sponsoring CCJU, said he felt”despair”over the powerlessness of even well-meaning religious leaders.”No religion is in a position to preach to the crazies not to use weapons of destruction,”he said.

But Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation in New York, countered that religious leaders can influence even dictators.”You’d be surprised what influence a Mother Teresa, a Dalai Lama can have on the political leadership,”said Schneier, who has advocated for religious freedom in dictatorial nations for decades.

Schneier, whose grandparents perished at Auschwitz, said he was haunted by the rattling of freight trains outside his hotel window the night before his speech. He wasn’t the only one, and many conference attendees were left in shock following a tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, which culminated in an interfaith prayer at the ruins of a crematorium.


But Pisar, who knew the place better than any of them and skipped the tour, cautioned against drawing the wrong lesson.”Auschwitz plays tricks on you,”he said.”You see it and you want to say it’s hopeless, but it isn’t. Life is a triumph.”

IR END SMITH

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