Human conflicts are rarely simple, and few are more complex than the one we are seeing unfold before our aghast eyes right now in the Middle East. But it seems to me that the real enemy is one that we have been dealing with since the days of Cain and Abel – dehumanisation. When we cease to see each other as having been made in the Divine image, terrible things happen.
In the story we read just this past Shabbat, Cain has reasons to be angry at his brother Abel, and the first murder is committed. But the really fascinating conversation happens afterwards. G-d asks Cain – where is Abel, your brother? Cain responds sullenly: I don’t know, am I my brother’s keeper? Of course, things can only go downhill from there.
In a similar vein, one story that has stayed with me from the Rwandan genocide, in the summer of 1994, is of a Tutsi survivor who described how her baby was killed by a Hutu neighbour, who referred to them as cockroaches.
The atrocities of the residential schools in North America were made possible because the religious and government authorities saw the Indigeneous people as less human than they were.
Everywhere in the world, people do terrible things to each other, giving themselves permission because the other does not appear to be the same kind of human that they are. They are not their sibling’s keeper, in fact, the person does not appear to be their sibling at all. It doesn’t need to be as dramatic as a massacre – the same mechanism is at play when we avert our eyes from a homeless person on the street.
The rabbis asked, Why was Adam created singly? So that no person could say, my ancestors were greater than yours. It’s time we remembered that, and turn to fight the real enemy of all humanity – our tendency to dehumanise each other, to forget that we are all siblings. It’s time we started treating each other as such.
It doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything – conflict will still happen, and historical grievances, such as a century of two rights making a terrible wrong in Israel/Palestine, will need to be addressed. But we must make sure we see each other as equal humans, created in the image of the Divine.
May we see this realisation dawn on everyone, speedily and in our days.