|
“A MEDITATION ON VENGEANCE” A sermon by the Rev. Roger Bertschausen Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship 2600 E. Philip Ln. P.O. Box 1791 Appleton, WI 54912-1791 (920) 731-0849 Website: www.fvuuf.org
Preached at the First Universalist Unitarian Church of Wausau, Wisconsin, on May May 13, 2007
Reading From the Dhammapada 3-5 “He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me!” In those who harbor such thoughts hatred is not appeased.
“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me!” In those who do not harbor such thoughts hatred is appeased.
Hatreds never cease through hatred in this world; through love alone they cease. This is an eternal law.[1]
From Matthew 5:38-41, 43-46 You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go two miles… You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of God who is in heaven; for God makes the sun rise on the eivl and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your neighbors, what more are you doing than others?[2]
Sermon I’m a (possibly rare) guy who generally likes both “chick flicks” and serious movies. I like a lot of different kinds of movies—as long as they are reasonably well made. I like movies that provide little more than a few hours of escape. It can be lovely to find myself in a galaxy far, far, far away for part of an afternoon or evening, or observing a bumbling relationship in Seattle or Boston. I also like movies that lift my spirits, that put a smile on my face as I step out of the theater back into my ordinary life. I like movies like The Chronicles of Narnia, that put a smile on my face even as I’m watching them. And I like movies that disturb me, that pose questions profound questions that are hard to answer or that ultimately have no answer. While watching such films doesn’t put a smile on my face, they can be deeply illuminating. More than anything, they can illuminate the shadow side of the human condition—of my human condition. I think being aware of our shadow sides is an important part of living a spiritual life. The powerful medium of film can help us do this. Steven Spielberg’s Munich is one such disturbing movie.[3] Munich, which came out in 2005 and was up for Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director a year ago, is not at all an easy movie to watch. In fact, it may be the most disturbing movie I’ve ever watched. A rival for this claim is Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But in some ways that movie was easier because right and wrong remains crystal clear throughout the movie. Up on the screen we see perpetrators of unspeakable violence, and victims and survivors of the violence. We know who’s who. It is all horrific but clear. Not so in Munich: what we see on the screen is horrific, but anything but clear-cut. Munich is relentlessly foggy. Nothing and nobody is black and white. We see the good side and the bad side of every character. We see a lot of violence and evil on the screen, but not one of the perpetrators is presented completely unsympathetically. As a result of this ambiguity and the movie’s cinematic power (typical of Spielberg), Munich is a movie that haunts. For me, at least, Munich lingered in the mind for days and even spilled over into my dreams. And it’s horribly violent…[put this here? Yes…] Munich tells the story of the terrorist attack that killed eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the reprisals that followed. The movie is based on a book by George Jonas called Vengeance. As the movie informs the viewer at the beginning, it is “inspired by real events”—meaning that some fictional elements have been added to the story. For me, the Munich attack was a landmark event in my childhood. I was ten years old. It was the first Olympics I ever seriously watched on TV. I remember being so surprised and startled when this horrible attack intruded on what had been a picture-perfect Olympics. My family rarely watched TV news, so I hadn’t previously witnessed much on TV that was shocking and violent. The horrific attack was in many ways my introduction to the shadow side of humanity. Not coincidentally, the 1972 Munich Olympics was also the last Olympics I seriously tuned into. Spielberg’s movie opens with the attack. Spielberg intersperses historic footage from the television coverage of the attack with actors re-enacting it. He does this brilliantly, particularly when from the inside we see the back of a terrorist wearing a ski mask over his head standing on the Israeli athletes’ balcony—and we see the same terrorist from the front on a TV inside the apartment. Even more powerfully, Spielberg intersperses Israeli and Palestinian families watching the coverage. When it is announced (wrongly as it turns out) that somehow all of the Israeli athletes survived, we see the family of one Israeli athlete cry and hug one another in relief. When it is announced that most of the Palestinians terrorists were killed, we see the family of one of them immediately dissolve into wailing grief. Most striking for me was the knowledge that these two different worlds might have only been a few miles apart—one family in Israel, the other in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Next we see Israel’s military and intelligence leadership meeting with the Prime Minister, Golda Meir. She wants to show the Palestinians and the world that Israel remains strong and undaunted by the brutal attack. She believes that the air strikes she ordered against Palestinian camps aren’t enough to send this message even though they resulted in the death of some sixty Palestinians. In a soliloquy which reveals her struggles with what else to do, she says:
Some people say we can’t afford to be civilized. I’ve always resisted such people. But I don’t know who these maniacs are or where they come from…Today I’m hearing with new ears. Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. I’ve made a decision. The responsibility is entirely mine.
She has decided to order the Mossad, Israel’s version of the CIA, to assemble a top-secret team of assassins. This team will target eleven Palestinians who are alledgedly implicated in the Munich attack. The remainder of the movie tells the story of this team’s mission. The team is led by a low-level Mossad agent who formerly was one of Meir’s bodyguards. His name is Avner. The son of an Israeli war hero, he and his wife are expecting their first child in a couple months. Four others comprise the rest of his team. Their first target is a Palestinian intellectual who lives in Rome. He’s working on translating “Sheherazade” into Italian. After positively identifying him in the lobby of his apartment building, Avner and another team member hesitate a moment as they confront this apparently unarmed man. Hands shaking from the enormity of what they’re about to do, they finally shoot him to death at point-blank range. Afterward the team celebrates its first kill, though one is not sure that celebration is right. Then they target a Palestinian who lives in Paris. This time the team uses a bomb because they know that bomb attacks generally strike more fear into one’s enemies. The bomb almost blows up the young daughter of their target, but they avert this tragedy at the last possible second. After the daughter leaves the family apartment, they detonate the bomb and mortally wound their target. One of the team asks Avner what evidence there is against their victim. Avner replies, “Don’t think about it.” The movie continues to chart their progress as they methodically work their way through the list of eleven targets. They plant bombs in telephones, TVs and mattresses. The “collataral damage” wounded in their attacks continues to mount. They stray from their mission to assassinate the replacement of one of their first targets. Spielberg brilliantly shows the physical toll that their mission of vengeance slowly exacts from them. We can see them deteriorate before our eyes. This hints at the psychological and spiritual toll that is harder to see. Each time they kill, you can see that they feel a little less than the last assassination. They slowly transform into detached, numb killing machines. Spielberg juxtaposes the inhumanity taking over their souls with the increasing tugs Avner feels from his wife and infant daughter. Over the phone he hears for the first time his daughter make some sounds. The toughened assassin instantly dissolves into tears. It gradually dawns on the team that they are becoming targets, too. Of course this isn’t surprising given the endless cycle of violence the movie gives us a snapshot of. Avner meets a beautiful woman in a bar who comes onto him. Enormously tempted, he declines to go up to her room. But one of his comrades walks into the bar a short time later. He ends up naked and dead in her room, a bullet shot into the back of his head. The geopolitical vengeance at the center of their mission suddenly becomes personal: they decide to stray from their mission again and add the woman to their hit list. They find where she is living and enter into her house each carrying a lethal blow-gun. They savagely kill her. As she is dying, she slumps down in a chair. She is wearing a bathrobe with nothing on underneath. They reveal the barbarism they have descended to when they disrobe her, leaving her sprawled naked in the chair. In pursuing the collective vengeance of their nation, these men slowly lose their souls. One of the team members feels this happening and deserts the team as they set out to kill the woman. He says to Avner, “All this blood will come back to us. We’re Jews. Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong.” Avner replies with the same conclusion Golda Meir came to when she created the team: “We can’t afford to be that decent anymore.” The bomber replies, “I don’t know that we were ever that decent. Suffering thousands of years of hatred doesn’t make you decent. We’re supposed to be the righteous. That’s a beautiful ting. That’s Jeish. That’s what I know. That’s what I was taught. Now I’m losing it. If I lose that, that’s everything. That’s my soul.” We see each of the assassins lose their soul; before our very eyes they lose everything. Last week I talked about the corrosive power of fear; this week my theme is the corrosive power of vengeance. Munich really is a meditation on how vengeance destroys the soul. In the end the effectiveness of this mission of vengeance is highly questionable. They assassinate six of their eleven targets. Three of the five Israelis are also killed. The two surviving team members will for the rest of their lives look at every telephone and every TV and every mattress and every parked car with people in it as dangerous. Each assasintation costs hundreds of thousands of dollars since they have to pay handsomely for the information on the whereabouts of their targets. For each Palestinian they do do kill, another terrorist takes his place who is more extreme and violent than the first. In retaliation for the killings, Black September kills dozens in a series of letter bombs, hijackings and airport terminal attacks. Avner returns to Israel at the end of the mission and visits his mother. She has a vague idea of what he has done, and she is thankful. She tells about all of her relatives who died in the Holocaust, and how when she arrived in Jerusalem as a refugee she prayed and could feel of her dead relatives praying with her. “You were what we prayed for,” she tells Avner. “What you did you did for us. You did it for your daughter but also for us. Eveyone who died died wanting this (land). We had to take it beause no one would ever give it to us: a place to be a Jew among Jews, subject to no one. I thank God for hearing my prayer…Whatever it takes, we have a place on earth. At last.” But Avner comes to a very different conclusion. In defending Israel by assassinating its enemies, he loses his soul and homeland. He settles with his wife and daughter in New York City. The movie ends with Avner talking to Ephriam, his Mossad handler on the shore of the Hudson River. Ephraim tells Avner he should come back to Israel. Avner declines and says, “There’s no peace at the end of this, no matter what you believe.” Then Avner invites Ephraim to break bread with him and his family. “No,” Ephraim replies, and he turns his back and walks away. The last image of the movie is the most important one in the whole film. After two hours and forty-four minutes, we see what the movie is really about. We see Avner standing on the shore of the Hudson. The eye is drawn to two towers which used to dominate the skyline: the World Trade Center. With this last image, the whole movie is transformed from a historical work to a commentary on the present. The cycle of violence which created the Munich massecre and its bloody aftermath includes 9/11. And the question is raised: are we now engaged in a mission of vengeance much like Avner’s mission? And if so, to what end? Spielberg’s conclusion seems to be to no good end. There is no peace at the end of this path. We have to find a better way. Stepping off the vengeance merry-go-round seems like the only way. And this is the choice each of us faces. Vengeance is not just a force at the international level. It is a very human emotion—an emotion that each of us has no doubt felt and struggled with. Most of us, I would guess, have given into its siren call at least once or twice. But I would argue when do, we are not being who we truly are. In becoming a cold and calculated killer, Avner was not being who he is. The Palestinians who attacked the Israeli athletes in Munich were not being who they were. It is an article of faith to me that none of us is born to be an assassin or terrorist. We each have the capacity to do terrible acts, but I don’t believe any of us inherently and overwhelmingly evil. For me Munich is not just about a past historical event or our current global, post-9/11 situation. Munich is also about each of our lives, about how we deal with our own proclivity for vengeance, about how we do or do not embody the goodness within us. It is about each of our souls. The song we are about to hear is by Beth Nielsen Chapman. It’s about how all this plays out for a mother and her child.
Song: “Who We Are” by Beth Nielsen Chapman and Allen Shamblin
She says she hates me-
and not to call
|