Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Neuroscientists have discovered that Buddhist monks who have practiced this compassionate meditation assiduously have physically enhanced those centers of the brain that spark our empathy. Jains cultivated an outstanding vision of the community of all creatures. Muslims achieved the surrender of islam by taking responsibility for one another and sharing what they had with those in need. In Paul’s churches, rich and poor were instructed to sit at the same table and eat the same food. Cluniac monks made lay Christians live together like monks during a pilgrimage, rich and poor sharing the same hardships. The Eucharist was not a solitary communion with Christ but a rite that bonded the political community. From a very early date, prophets and poets helped people to contemplate the tragedy of life and face up to the damage they did to others. In ancient Sumeria the Atrahasis could not find a solution to the social injustice on which their civilization depended, but this popular tale made people aware of it. Gilgamesh had to come face-to-face with the horror of death, which drained warfare of spurious glamour and nobility. The Prophets of Israel compelled rulers to take responsibility for the suffering they inflicted on the poor and lambasted them for their war crimes. The Priestly authors of the Hebrew Bible lived in a violent society and could not abjure warfare but believed that warriors were contaminated by their violence, even if the campaign had been endorsed by God. That was why David was not allowed to build Yahweh’s temple. The Aryans loved warfare and revered their warriors; fighting and raiding were essential to the pastoral economy; but the warrior always carried a taint. Chinese strategists admitted that the military way of life was a “way of deception” and must be segregated from civilian life. They drew attention to the uncomfortable fact that even an idealistic state nurtured at its heart an institution dedicated to killing, lying, and treachery. In the West secularism is now a part of our identity. It has been beneficial—not least because an intimate association with government can badly compromise a faith tradition. But it has had its own violence. Revolutionary France was secularized by coercion, extortion, and bloodshed; for the first time it mobilized the whole of society for war; and its secularism seemed propelled by an aggression toward religion that is still shared by many Europeans today. The United States did not stigmatize faith in the same way, and religion has flourished there. There was an aggression in early modern thought, which failed to apply the concept of human rights to the indigenous peoples of the Americas or to African slaves. In the developing world secularization has been experienced as lethal, hostile, and invasive. There have been massacres in sacred shrines; clerics have been tortured, imprisoned, and assassinated; madrassa students shot down and humiliated; and the clerical establishment systematically deprived of resources, dignity, and status. Hence secularization has sometimes damaged religion.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Iliad was a poem about death, its characters dominated by the compulsion to kill or be killed. The story moved inexorably toward inevitable extinction: to the deaths of Patroclus, Hector, Achilles, and the beautiful city of Troy itself. In the Odyssey too, death was a black transcendence, ineffable and inconceivable.73 When Odysseus visited the underworld, he was horrified by the sight of the swarming, gibbering crowds of the dead, whose humanity had obscenely disintegrated. Yet when he met the shade of Achilles, Odysseus begged him not to grieve: “No man has ever been more blest than you in days past, or will be in days to come. For before you died, we Achaeans honoured you like a god, and now in this place, you lord it among the dead.” But Achilles would have none of this. “Don’t gloss over death to me in order to console me,” he replied, in words that entirely discounted the aristocratic warrior ethos. “I would rather be above ground still and labouring for some poor peasant man than be the lord over the lifeless dead.”74 There was a fearful void at the heart of the heroic ideal. In the Iliad, the violence and death of the warrior is often presented as not only pointless, but utterly self-destructive. The third person to be killed in the poem was the Trojan Simoeisios, a beautiful young man who should have known the tenderness of family life, but instead was beaten down in battle by the Greek hero Ajax: He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar Which in the land low-lying about a great marsh grows Smooth trimmed yet with branches growing at the uttermost tree-top: One whom a man, a maker of chariots, fells with the shining Iron, to bend it into a wheel for a fine-wrought chariot, And the tree lies hardening by the banks of a river. Such was Anthemion’s son Simoeisios, whom illustrious Ajax killed.75 Homer dwelt on the pity of it all; the young man’s life had been brutally truncated, cruelly twisted from its natural bias, and transformed into an instrument of killing.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  10 Secular nationalism seems unable to cultivate a similarly universal ideology, even though our globalized world is so deeply interconnected. Gandhi could not countenance Western secularism: “To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest creature as oneself,” he concluded in his autobiography. Devotion to this truth required one to be involved in every field of life; it had brought him into politics, for “those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.” 11 Gandhi’s last years were darkened by the communal violence that had erupted during and after partition. He was assassinated in 1948 by a radical nationalist who believed that Gandhi had given too many concessions to the Muslims and had made a large monetary donation to Pakistan. As they forged their national identities in the peculiarly tense conditions of India, Muslims and Hindus would both fall prey to the besetting sin of secular nationalism: its inability to tolerate minorities. And because their outlook was still permeated by spirituality, this nationalist bias distorted their traditional religious vision. As violence between Muslims and Hindus escalated during the 1920s, the Arya Samaj became more militant. 12 At a conference in 1927, it formed a military cadre, the Arya Vir Dal (“Troop of Aryan Horses”). It declared that the new Aryan hero must develop the virtues of the Kshatriya—courage, physical strength, and, especially, proficiency in the use of weapons. His principal duty was to defend the rights of the Aryan nation against the Muslims and the British. 13 The Arya was anxious not to be outdone by the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (“National Volunteer Association”), usually referred to as RSS, founded in central India three years earlier by Keshav B. Hedgewar. Where the Arya had adapted the British idea of “religion” to “Hinduism,” RSS had fused traditional religious ideals with Western nationalism. It was primarily a character-building organization designed to develop an ethos of service, based on loyalty, discipline, and a respect for the Hindu heritage, and it appealed particularly to the urban middle classes. Its hero was the seventeenth-century warrior Shivaji who, empowered by his fidelity to traditional Hindu ritual as well as his organizational skills, had led a successful revolt against the Moghuls. He had managed to weld recruits from disparate peasant castes into a unified army, and RSS vowed to do the same in British India. 1 4 Thus a new religiosity was coming to birth in India, one that cultivated Hindu strength not by evoking ahimsa but by developing the traditional warrior ethos. Yet this combination of the Kshatriya ideal with secular nationalism was dangerous. For RSS, Mother India was not simply a territorial entity but a living goddess.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  So Drona stops fighting and sits down in his chariot in the yogic position, falls into a trance, and ascends peacefully to heaven. In terrible counterpoint, the chariot of Yudishthira, which has always floated a few inches above the ground, comes crashing down to earth. Krishna is no Satan, tempting the Pandavas to sin. This is the end of the Heroic Age, and his dark stratagems have become essential because, as he tells the desolate Pandavas, the Kauravas “could not have been slain by you on the battlefield in a fair fight.” Had not Indra lied and broken his oath to Vritra in order to save the cosmic order? “Not even the world-guardian gods themselves could have killed by fair means those four noble warriors,” Krishna explains. “When enemies become too numerous and powerful, they should be slain by deceit and stratagems. This was the path formerly trodden by the devas to slay the asuras; and a path trodden by the virtuous may be trodden by all.” 110 The Pandavas feel reassured and acknowledge that their victory has at least brought peace to the world. But bad karma can only have a bad outcome, and Krishna’s scheme has appalling consequences that resonate horribly with us today. Crazed with sorrow, Ashwatthaman, Drona’s son, vows to avenge his father and offers himself to Shiva, the ancient god of the indigenous peoples of India, as a self-sacrifice. Entering the Pandava camp by night, he slaughters the sleeping women, children, and warriors who are “exhausted and weaponless” and hacks horses and elephants to pieces. In his divine frenzy, “his every limb doused in blood, he seemed like Death himself, unloosed by fate … inhuman and utterly terrifying.” 111 The Pandavas themselves escape, having been warned by Krishna to sleep outside the camp, but most of their family are killed. When they finally catch up with Ashwatthaman, they find him sitting serenely with a group of renouncers beside the Ganges. He fires off a magical weapon of mass destruction, and Arjuna retaliates with a weapon of his own. Had not two of the renouncers, “desiring the welfare of all creatures,” positioned themselves between the contending weapons, the world would have been destroyed. Instead Ashwatthaman’s weapon is diverted into the wombs of the Pandava women, who will bear no more children. 112 So Yudishthira is proven right: a destructive cycle of violence, betrayal, and lies has rebounded on the perpetrators, resulting in destruction for both sides. Yudishthira reigns for fifteen years, but he has incurred the ancient stain of the warrior. The light has gone out of his life, and after the war he would have become a renouncer had not his brothers and Krishna strongly opposed it. The king’s rod of force is essential for the welfare of the world, Arjuna argued.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  I held back my tears when I was with Peter, laughed uproariously with the van Daans as we drank lemon punch and was cheerful and excited, but the minute I was alone I knew I was going to cry my eyes out. I slid to the floor in my nightgown and began by saying my prayers, very fervently. Then I drew my knees to my chest, lay my head on my arms and cried, all huddled up on the bare floor. A loud sob brought me back down to earth, and I choked back my tears, since I didn’t want anyone next door to hear me. Then I tried to pull myself together, saying over and over, “I must, I must, I must. . . “ Stiff from sitting in such an unusual position, I fell back against the side of the bed and kept up my struggle until just before ten-thirty, when I climbed back into bed. It was over! And now it’s really over. I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know I can write. A few of my stories are good, my descriptions of the Secret Annex are humorous, much of my diary is vivid and alive, but. . . it remains to be seen whether I really have talent. “Eva’s Dream” is my best fairy tale, and the odd thing is that I don’t have the faintest idea where it came from. Parts of “Cady’s Life” are also good, but as a whole it’s nothing special. I’m my best and harshest critic. I know what’s good and what isn’t. Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is; I always used to bemoan the fact that I couldn’t draw, but now I’m overjoyed that at least I can write. And if I don’t have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can’t imagine having to live like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me! When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In order to neutralize the effect of Aswatthaman’s missile, Arjuna immediately fired off a brahmasiris of his own, and it too blazed up like the fire at the end of a yuga. 72 There was a deadly impasse, and yet again, the fate of the world was in the balance. But two of the renouncers with Aswatthaman positioned themselves between the contending weapons. In the Axial spirit—“desiring the welfare of all creatures and of all the worlds”—they asked both warriors to recall their missiles. Arjuna had observed the “holy life” of a warrior: he practiced a form of yoga, and carefully observed the sacred kshatriya virtues of truth and fidelity. 73 He could control his anger, and because he had not fired his weapon in wrath, he was able to recall it. Aswatthaman, however, had hurled his brahmasiris in rage. He could not restrain it but could only alter its course: the weapon would now go into the wombs of the Pandavas’ wives; they would bear no more children, and the Pandava line would become extinct. Krishna cursed him: for three thousand years Aswatthaman must wander the earth alone, a renouncer manqué, living in the forests and uninhabited tracts of land. Yudishthira ruled for fifteen years, but the light had gone from his life. He could never reconcile the kshatriya’s violent vocation with the dharma of ahimsa and compassion that he found in his heart. There are innumerable passages in the Mahabharata that defend the warrior’s vocation and that exult in fighting and killing, but fundamental doubts remain. The epic shows the unsettling effect of the Axial spirituality on some of the laypeople in India, who felt thrust into a limbo. Trapped in a worldly dharma, they could not join the renouncers and yogins, but found that the old Vedic faith could no longer sustain them. Indeed, it sometimes seemed demonic: Aswatthaman’s ecstatic “self-sacrifice” had almost destroyed the world. The story of his night raid— with its evocation of massacre, martyrdom, escalating retaliation, and the reckless firing of weapons—has almost prophetic resonance for us today. A destructive cycle of violence, betrayal, and economy with the truth could lead to tragic nihilism: The goddess Earth trembled and the mountains shook. The wind did not blow, nor did the fire, though kindled, blaze forth. And even the constellations in the sky, agitated, wandered about. The sun did not shine; the lunar disc lost its splendour. All confounded, space became covered with darkness. Then, overcome, the gods did not know their domains, the sacrifice did not shine forth, and the Vedas abandoned them. 74 The only thing that had saved the world from destruction was the Axial spirit of the two sages, who desired “the welfare of all creatures and of all the worlds.” Somehow this spirit had to become more accessible to the ordinary warrior and householder, some of whom were in danger of falling into despair.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal tracts, and the works of Ibn Taymiyyah, Qutb, and Maududi to Muslim communities in the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States, and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques, creating an international aesthetic that broke with local architectural traditions, and established madrassas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. At the same time, the young men from the more disadvantaged Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who came to work in the Gulf, associated their new affluence with Wahhabism. When they returned home, they chose to live in new neighborhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. In return for their munificence, Saudis demanded religious conformity. The Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faith traditions would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan, or Syria, everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism. The West played an unwitting role in this surge of intolerance, since the United States welcomed the Saudis’ opposition to Iran, and the kingdom depended on the U.S. military for its very survival. 17 The Saudis’ experience of modernity had been very different from that of the Egyptians, Pakistanis, or Palestinians. The Arabian Peninsula had not been colonized; it was rich and had never been forced to secularize. Instead of fighting tyranny and corruption at home, therefore, Saudi Islamists focused on the suffering of Muslims worldwide, their pan-Islamism close in spirit to Azzam’s global jihad. The Quran told Muslims that they must take responsibility for one another; King Feisal had always framed his support for the Palestinians in these terms, and the Saudi-based Muslim World League and the Organization of Islamic Conferences had regularly expressed solidarity with member states in conflict with non-Muslim regimes. Now television brought images of Muslim suffering in Palestine and Lebanon into comfortable Saudi homes. They saw pictures of Israelis bulldozing Palestinian houses and in September 1982 witnessed the Christian Maronites’ massacre, with the tacit approval of the IDF, of two thousand Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. With so much suffering of this kind in the Muslim world, pan-Islamist sentiment increased during the 1980s, and the government exploited it as a way of distracting their subjects from the kingdom’s internal problems. 18 It was for this reason too that the Saudis encouraged the young to go to the Afghan jihad, offering airfare discounts, while the state press celebrated their feats on the frontier. The Wahhabi clerical establishment, however, disapproved of the Afghans’ Sufi practices and insisted that jihad was not an individual duty for civilians but was still the ruler’s responsibility.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The unfortunate father died under the anathema in misery at Liège (Lüttich), Aug. 7, 1106. The people of the city which had remained faithful to him, lamented his death; but the papal agents commanded the bishop of Liège to remove his body from consecrated ground to an island in the Maas. Henry V. had not lost all feeling for his father, and complied with his dying request for burial in the imperial sepulchre at Spires. The clergy and the citizens accompanied the funeral procession to the cathedral of St. Mary, which the departed sovereign had himself built and richly endowed. He was buried with all honors. But when Bishop Gebhard, one of his fiercest persecutors, who was absent at the time, heard of it, he caused the body to be forthwith exhumed and removed, and interdicted all services in the church till it should be purified of all pollution. The people, however, could not be deterred from frequent visits to the unconsecrated chapel where the dishonored remains of their monarch and patron were deposited. At last the pope dissolved the ban, on the assurance of Henry V. that his father had professed sincere repentance, and his body was again deposited in the cathedral, Aug. 7, 1111. By his moral defects and his humiliation at Canossa, Henry IV. had promoted the power of the papal hierarchy, and yet, by his continued opposition after that act, he had prevented its complete triumph. Soon after his death an anonymous writer gave eloquent and touching expression to his grief over the imperial lord whom he calls his hope and comfort, the pride of Rome, the ornament of the empire, the lamp of the world, a benefactor of widows and orphans, and a father of the poor.95

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Not a dissenting voice was lifted against the sentence. Even John Gerson voted for it. One incident has left its impress upon history, although it is not vouched for by a contemporary. It is said that, when Huss began to speak, he looked at Sigismund, reminding him of the safe-conduct. The king who sat in state and crowned, turned red, but did not speak. The order of degradation was carried out by six bishops, who disrobed the condemned man of his vestments and destroyed his tonsure. They then put on his head a cap covered over with pictures of the devil and inscribed with the word, heresiarch, and committed his soul to the devil. With upturned eyes, Huss exclaimed, "and I commit myself to the most gracious Lord Jesus." The old motto that the Church does not want blood—ecclesia non sitit sanguinem — was in appearance observed, but the authorities knew perfectly well what was to be the last scene when they turned Huss over to Sigismund. "Go, take him and do to him as a heretic" were the words with which the king remanded the prisoner to the charge of Louis, the Count Palatine. A guard of a thousand armed men was at hand. The streets were thronged with people. As Huss passed on, he saw the flames on the public square which were consuming his books. For fear of the bridge’s breaking down, the greater part of the crowd was not allowed to cross over to the place of execution, called the Devil’s Place. Huss’ step had been firm, but now, with tears in his eyes, he knelt down and prayed. The paper cap falling from his head, the crowd shouted that it should be put on, wrong side front. It was midday. The prisoner’s hands were fastened behind his back, and big neck bound to the stake by a chain. On the same spot sometime before, so the chronicler notes, a cardinal’s worn-out mule had been buried. The straw and wood were heaped up around Huss’ body to the chin, and rosin sprinkled upon them. The offer of life was renewed if he would recant. He refused and said, "I shall die with joy to-day in the faith of the gospel which I have preached." When Richental, who was standing by, suggested a confessor, he replied, "There is no need of one. I have no mortal sin." At the call of bystanders, they turned his face away from the East, and as the flames arose, he sang twice, Christ, thou Son of the living God, have mercy upon me. The wind blew the fire into the martyr’s face, and his voice was hushed. He died, praying and singing. To remove, if possible, all chance of preserving relics from the scene, Huss’ clothes and shoes were thrown into the merciless flames. The ashes were gathered up and cast into the Rhine.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In August 1996 he issued his Declaration of War on the United States and Israel, the “Crusader-Zionist Alliance,” which he accused of “aggression, iniquity, and injustice” against Muslims. 37 He condemned the American military presence in the Arabian Peninsula, equating it with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and denounced American support for corrupt governments in the Muslim world and the sanctions led by Israel and the United States against Iraq, which, he claimed, had caused a million Iraqi deaths. In February 1998 he announced the World Islamic Front Against Zionists and Crusaders, stating that all Muslims had a religious obligation to attack the United States and its allies “in any country in which it is possible to do it” and to drive American troops from Arabia. 38 Three entirely new themes were emerging in Bin Laden’s ideology. 39 The first was his identification of the United States as the prime enemy rather than Russians, Serbs, or “apostate” Muslim rulers. Second was his call to attack the United States and its allies anywhere in the world, even in America itself—an unusual step, because terrorists usually avoided operations outside their own country, which cost them international support. Third, even though Bin Laden never wholly abandoned Qutb’s terminology, he drew chiefly on pan-Islamic themes, focusing particularly on the suffering that Muslims were enduring worldwide. This last was the core of Bin Laden’s message and enabled him to claim that his jihad was defensive. 40 In his Declaration of War he exploited the culture of grievance that had been developing in the Muslim world, insisting that for centuries “the people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed upon them by the Crusader-Zionist alliance.” 41 In al-Qaeda’s propaganda videos, this verbal message is relayed against a collage of pain. They show Palestinian children harassed by Israeli soldiers; piles of corpses in Lebanon, Bosnia, and Chechnya; the shooting of a Palestinian child in Gaza; houses bombed and bulldozed; and blind, limbless patients lying inertly in hospital beds. A survey of men recruited by al-Qaeda after 1999 revealed that most of them were still primarily motivated by the desire to assuage such suffering. “I did not know exactly in what way I would help,” said a Saudi prisoner in Guantánamo, “but I went to help the people, not to fight.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The persecution was begun by the skeptical sect of the Sadducees, who took offence at the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ, the centre of all the apostolic preaching. When Stephen, one of the seven deacons of the church at Jerusalem, a man full of faith and zeal, the forerunner of the apostle Paul, boldly assailed the perverse and obstinate spirit of Judaism, and declared the approaching downfall of the Mosaic economy, the Pharisees made common cause with the Sadducees against the gospel. Thus began the emancipation of Christianity from the temple-worship of Judaism, with which it had till then remained at least outwardly connected. Stephen himself was falsely accused of blaspheming Moses, and after a remarkable address in his own defence, he was stoned by a mob (A.D. 37), and thus became the worthy leader of the sacred host of martyrs, whose blood was thenceforth to fertilize the soil of the church. From the blood of his martyrdom soon sprang the great apostle of the Gentiles, now his bitterest persecutor, and an eye-witness of his heroism and of the glory of Christ in his dying face.284 The stoning of Stephen was the signal for a general persecution, and thus at the same time for the spread of Christianity over all Palestine and the region around. And it was soon followed by the conversion of Cornelius of Caesarea, which opened the door for the mission to the Gentiles. In this important event Peter likewise was the prominent actor. After some seven years of repose the church at Jerusalem suffered a new persecution under king Herod Agrippa (A.D. 44). James the elder, the brother of John, was beheaded. Peter was imprisoned and condemned to the same fate; but he was miraculously liberated, and then forsook Jerusalem, leaving the church to the care of James the "brother of the Lord." Eusebius, Jerome, and the Roman Catholic historians assume that he went at that early period to Rome, at least on a temporary visit, if not for permanent residence. But the book of Acts (12:17) says only: "He departed, and went into another place." The indefiniteness of this expression, in connection with a remark of Paul. 1 Cor. 9:5, is best explained on the supposition that he had hereafter no settled home, but led the life of a travelling missionary like most of the apostles. The Later Labors of Peter. Afterwards we find Peter again in Jerusalem at the apostolic council (A.D. 50);285 then at Antioch (51); where he came into temporary collision with Paul;286 then upon missionary tours, accompanied by his wife (57);287 perhaps among the dispersed Jews in Babylon or in Asia Minor, to whom he addressed his epistles.288 Of a residence of Peter in Rome the New Testament contains no trace, unless, as the church fathers and many modern expositors think, Rome is intended by the mystic "Babylon" mentioned in 1 Pet.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  six, at which time I started first grade. In sixth grade my teacher was Mrs. Kuperus, the principal. At the end of the year we were both in tears as we said a heartbreaking farewell, because I’d been accepted at the Jewish Lyceum, where Margot also went to school. Our lives were not without anxiety, since our relatives in Germany were suffering under Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws. After the pogroms in 1938 my two uncles (my mother’s brothers) fled Germany, finding safe refuge in North America. My elderly grandmother came to live with us. She was seventy-three years old at the time. After May 1940 the good times were few and far between: first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use street-cars; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3 and 5 P.M.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish- owned barbershops and beauty parlors; Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8 P.M. and 6 A.M.; Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, movies or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields; Jews were forbidden to go rowing; Jews were forbidden to take part in any athletic activity in public; Jews were forbidden to sit in their gardens or those of their friends after 8 P.M.; Jews were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes; Jews were required to attend Jewish schools, etc. You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, but life went on. Jacque always said to me, “I don’t dare do anything anymore, ‘cause I’m afraid it’s not allowed.” In the summer of 1941 Grandma got sick and had to have an operation, so my birthday passed with little celebration. In the summer of 1940 we didn’t do much for my birthday either, since the fighting had just ended in Holland. Grandma died in January 1942. No one knows how often I think of her and still love her. This birthday celebration in 1942 was intended to make up for the others, and Grandma’s candle was lit along with the rest. The four of us are still doing well, and that brings me to the present date of June 20, 1942, and the solemn dedication of my diary.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The doctrinal divisions created by the Reformation became especially important in states aspiring to strong, centralized rule. Hitherto the traditional agrarian state had neither the means nor, usually, the inclination to supervise the religious lives of the lower classes. Yet those monarchs striving for absolute rule had developed a state machinery that enabled them to supervise their subjects’ lives more closely, and increasingly confessional allegiance would become the criterion of political loyalty. Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) and Elizabeth I (r. 1558– 1603) of England both persecuted Catholics not as religious apostates but as traitors to the state. When he was Henry VIII’s chancellor, Thomas More had passed harsh sentences on politically dangerous heretics, only to be himself executed for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy that made Henry head of the church in England. 47 In France the Edict of Paris (1543) described Protestant “heretics” as “the seditious disturbers of the peace and tranquillity of our subjects and secret conspirators against the prosperity of our state, which depends chiefly on the preservation of the Catholic faith in our kingdom.” 48 Although the Reformation produced fruitful forms of Christianity, it was in many ways a tragedy. It has been estimated that as many as eight thousand men and women were judicially executed as heretics in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 49 Policies differed from region to region. In France judicial proceedings had given way to open warfare, massacre, and popular violence by the 1550s. The German Catholic inquisitors were never overly zealous in pursuing Protestants, but Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain (r. 1555–98) regarded Protestantism in the Netherlands as a political as well as a religious threat, so they were unwavering in their attempts to suppress it. In England policy changed with the faith allegiance of the monarch. Henry VIII, who upheld his Catholicism, was unswervingly hostile to Lutherans, but regarded fidelity to the pope as a capital offense because it threatened his political supremacy. Under his son Edward VI (r. 1547–53), the pendulum swung in favor of Calvinism, then veered back under the Catholic Mary Tudor (r. 1553–58), who burned some three hundred Protestants. Under Elizabeth I, England became officially Protestant again, and the main victims were Catholic missionary-priests, trained in seminaries abroad and living in England clandestinely, saying Mass and administering the sacraments to recusant Catholics. We cannot expect these early modern states to have shared the outlook of the Enlightenment. Civilization had always depended upon coercion, so state violence was regarded as essential to public order. Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme. 50 Executions were usually carried out in public as a ritualized deterrent that expressed and enforced state and local authority.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The sacred geography of Israel also had a strong moral and political dimension. While Israelis lauded Jerusalem as the city of shalom (“peace,” “wholeness”), the Psalms had insisted that there would be no shalom in Jerusalem without justice (tzeddek). The king was charged by Yahweh to “defend the poorest, save the children of those in need and crush their oppressors.”64 In Yahweh’s Zion there could be no oppression and violence; rather, it must be a haven for the poor (evionim). But once the “holiness” of Jerusalem had been fused with the secular nation-state, its Palestinian inhabitants became a vulnerable minority and their presence a contamination. On the night of June 10, 1967, after the signing of the armistice, the 619 Palestinian inhabitants of the Maghribi Quarter beside the Wall were given three hours to evacuate their homes. Then, in contravention of international law, the bulldozers came in and reduced this historic district—one of the earliest Jerusalem awqaf—to rubble. On June 28 the Israeli Knesset formally annexed the Old City and East Jerusalem, declaring them part of the State of Israel.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Atrahasis may have been intended for public recitation, and the story seems also to have been preserved orally.32 Fragments of the text have been found spanning a thousand years, so it seems that this tale was widely known.33 Thus writing, originally invented to serve the structural violence of Sumer, began to record the disquiet of the more thoughtful members of the ruling class, who could find no solution to civilization’s dilemma but tried at least to look squarely at the problem. We shall see that others—prophets, sages, and mystics—would also raise their voices in protest and try to devise a more equitable way for human beings to live together. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] The Epic of Gilgamesh, set toward the mid-third millennium, when Sumer was militarizing, presents martial violence as the hallmark of civilization.34 When the people beg the gods for help, Anu attempts to alleviate their suffering by giving Gilgamesh someone of his own size to fight with and siphon off some of his excessive aggression. So the Mother Goddess creates Enkidu, primeval man. He is huge, hairy, and has prodigious strength but is a gentle, kindly soul, wandering happily with the herbivores and protecting them from predators. But to fulfill Anu’s plan, Enkidu has to make the transition from peaceable barbarian to aggressive civilized man. The priestess Shamhat is given the task of educating him, and under her tutelage, Enkidu learns to reason, understand speech, and eat human food; his hair is cut, sweet oil is rubbed into his skin, and finally “he turned into a man. He put on a garment, became like a warrior.”35 Civilized man was essentially a man of war, full of testosterone. When Shamhat mentions Gilgamesh’s military prowess, Enkidu becomes pale with anger. “Take me to Gilgamesh!” he cries, pounding his chest. “I will shout in his face: I am the mightiest! I am the man who can make the world tremble! I am supreme!”36 No sooner do these two alpha males set eyes on each other than they begin wrestling, careening through the streets of Uruk, thrashing limbs entwined in a near-erotic embrace, until finally, satiated, they “kissed each other and formed a friendship.”37

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The poem indicates that already young men were chafing against the triviality of civilian life that, as Chris Hedges explained, would lead so many of them to seek meaning on the battlefield. 47 The outcome was tragic. There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour. Humbaba turns out to be a very reasonable monster, who pleads for his life and offers Gilgamesh and Enkidu all the wood they want, but still they hack him brutally to pieces. Afterward a gentle rain falls from heaven, as though nature itself grieves for this pointless death. 48 The gods show their displeasure with the expedition by striking Enkidu down with a fatal illness, and Gilgamesh is forced to come to terms with his own mortality. Unable to assimilate the consequences of warfare, he turns his back on civilization, roaming unshaven through the wilderness and even descending into the underworld to find an antidote to death. Finally, weary but resigned, he is forced to accept the limitations of his humanity and return to Uruk. On reaching the suburbs, he draws his companion’s attention to the great wall surrounding the city: “Observe the land it encloses, the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and market-places, the houses, the public squares.” 49 He personally will die, but he will achieve an immortality of sorts by cultivating the civilized arts and pleasures that are enabling humans to explore new dimensions of existence. Gilgamesh’s famous wall was now essential for the survival of Uruk, though, because after centuries of peaceful cooperation, the Sumerian city-states had begun to fight one another. What caused this tragic development? Not everybody in the Middle East aspired to civilization: nomadic herdsmen preferred to roam freely in the mountains with their livestock. They had once been part of the agricultural community, living at the edge of the farmland so that their sheep and cattle did not damage the crops. But gradually they moved farther and farther away until they finally abandoned the constraints of settled life and took to the open road. 50 The pastoralists of the Middle East had probably become an entirely separate community as early as 6000 BCE, though they continued to trade their hides and milk products with the cities in return for grain. 51 They soon discovered that the easiest way to replace lost animals was to steal the cattle of nearby villages and rival tribes. Fighting, therefore, became essential to the pastoralist economy. Once they domesticated the horse and acquired wheeled vehicles, these herdsmen spread all over the Inner Asian Plateau, and by the early third millennium, some had reached China. 52 By this time they were formidable warriors, equipped with bronze weaponry, war chariots, and the deadly composite bow, which could shoot with devastating accuracy at long range.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Crazed with sorrow, Ashwatthaman, Drona’s son, vows to avenge his father and offers himself to Shiva, the ancient god of the indigenous peoples of India, as a self-sacrifice. Entering the Pandava camp by night, he slaughters the sleeping women, children, and warriors who are “exhausted and weaponless” and hacks horses and elephants to pieces. In his divine frenzy, “his every limb doused in blood, he seemed like Death himself, unloosed by fate … inhuman and utterly terrifying.”111 The Pandavas themselves escape, having been warned by Krishna to sleep outside the camp, but most of their family are killed. When they finally catch up with Ashwatthaman, they find him sitting serenely with a group of renouncers beside the Ganges. He fires off a magical weapon of mass destruction, and Arjuna retaliates with a weapon of his own. Had not two of the renouncers, “desiring the welfare of all creatures,” positioned themselves between the contending weapons, the world would have been destroyed. Instead Ashwatthaman’s weapon is diverted into the wombs of the Pandava women, who will bear no more children.112 So Yudishthira is proven right: a destructive cycle of violence, betrayal, and lies has rebounded on the perpetrators, resulting in destruction for both sides. Yudishthira reigns for fifteen years, but he has incurred the ancient stain of the warrior. The light has gone out of his life, and after the war he would have become a renouncer had not his brothers and Krishna strongly opposed it. The king’s rod of force is essential for the welfare of the world, Arjuna argued. No king has ever attained glory without slaying his enemies; indeed, it is impossible to exist without harming other creatures: “I don’t see anyone living in the world with nonviolence. Even ascetics cannot stay alive without killing.”113 Like Ashoka, who was also unable to stem the violence of imperial warfare, Yudishthira focuses on kindness to animals, the only form of ahimsa that he is able realistically to practice. At the end of his life, he refuses to enter heaven without his devoted dog and is congratulated for his compassion by his father, Dharma.114 For centuries, the Indian national epic has compelled its audience to appreciate the moral ambiguity and tragedy of warfare; whatever the warrior’s heroic code maintained, it was never a wholly glorious activity. Yet it was essential not only to the survival of the state but also for civilization and progress and, as such, had become an unavoidable fact of human life.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Auguste van Pels (Petronella van Daan) was transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, from there to Buchenwald, then to Theresienstadt on April 9, 1945, and apparently to another concentration camp after that. It is certain that she did not survive, though the date of her death is unknown. Peter van Pels (van Daan) was forced to take part in the January 16, 1945 “death march” from Auschwitz to Mauthausen (Austria), where he died on May 5, 1945, three days before the camp was liberated. Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel) died on December 20, 1944, in the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he had been transferred from either Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 6, 1945, from hunger and exhaustion. Margot and Anne Frank were transported from Auschwitz at the end of October and brought to Bergen Belsen, a concentration camp near Hannover (Germany). The typhus epidemic that broke out in the winter of 1944-1945, as a result of the horrendous hygenic conditions, killed thousands of prisoners, including Margot and, a few days later, Anne. She must have died in late February or early March. The bodies of both girls were probably dumped in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves. The camp was liberated by British troops on April 12, 1945. Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive the concentration camps. After Auschwitz was liberated by Russian troops, he was repatriated to Amsterdam by way of Odessa and Marseille. He arrived in Amsterdam on June 3, 1945, and stayed there until 1953, when he moved to Basel (Switzerland), where his sister and her family, and later his brother, lived. He married Elfriede Markovits Geiringer, originally from Vienna, who had survived Auschwitz and lost a husband and son in Mauthausen. Until his death on August 19, 1980, Otto Frank continued to live in Birsfelden, outside Basel, where he devoted himself to sharing the message of his daughter’s diary with people all over the world.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In many ways, the Zhou stepped straight into the shoes of the Shang. Like the Shang, they enjoyed hunting, archery, chariot driving, and extravagant parties. They organized their cities on the old Shang model, worshiped the nature gods and ancestors, and cast oracles. They also continued to worship Di but—in a way that was typical of ancient religion—they merged Di with their own Sky God, whom they called Tian (“Heaven”). But here they ran into a difficulty. The Shang had ruled for hundreds of years with the apparent blessing of Di. If they were to win over the Shang nobility who still lived in the great plain, continuity was essential. The Zhou wanted to worship the deceased Shang kings alongside their own ancestors. But how could they worship the Shang spirits when they had destroyed their dynasty? The duke of Zhou found a solution. Di had sometimes used enemy tribes to punish the Shang. Now, it seemed, he had made the Zhou his instrument. On the occasion of the consecration of the new eastern capital of Chengzhou, the duke made an important speech, which was recorded in the Shujing, one of the six great Chinese classics.81 The Shang kings, he said, had become tyrannical and corrupt. Heaven had been filled with pity for the sufferings of the people, so he had revoked the mandate that he had given to the Shang, and looked around for new rulers. Finally his gaze had fallen upon the Zhou kings, who thus became the new sons of Tian Shang Di, Heaven Most High. That was how King Cheng had become the son of Heaven, the duke explained, even though he was so inexperienced. It was a heavy responsibility for the young man. Now that he had received the mandate, Cheng had to be “reverently careful.” He must be “in harmony with the little people . . . prudently apprehensive about what the people say.” Heaven would take its mandate away from a ruler who oppressed his subjects, and would bestow it on a more deserving dynasty. This was why the Shang and Xia dynasties had failed. Many of the Shang kings had been virtuous rulers, but in the last years of the dynasty the people had been miserable. They had called out in anguish to Heaven, and Heaven “too grieved for the people of all the lands,” decided to give the mandate to the Zhou because they were “deeply committed” to justice. But the Zhou could not afford to be complacent.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In the book of Numbers, Israel’s history, which had been so brutally disrupted, was presented as a stately procession from one place to another. Adding his own priestly lore to the JE narrative, P recast the history of his people, showing that the exile to Babylon was just the latest in a long series of tragic migrations: Adam and Eve had been forced to leave Eden; Cain had become a perpetual wanderer after killing his brother; human beings were scattered over the face of the earth after the rebellion at the Tower of Babel. Abraham had left Ur, the tribes had migrated to Egypt, and Yahweh had liberated them from captivity. But he had “tented” with his people in the Sinai desert for forty years, and—the implication was—he was still living in the midst of his people in this latest migration to Babylon. The community of exiles probably went in for quite a lot of grumbling and complaining. In his narrative, P developed the stories about Israel’s “murmuring” against God in the wilderness. 50 The exiles were also a “stiff-necked generation,” but P showed them the way forward. Even in exile, they could create a community to which God’s presence could return, provided that they all lived according to the ancient priestly laws. This was a startling innovation. P was not reviving old legislation that had fallen into disuse. The ceremonial laws, purity regulations, and dietary rules that had governed the lives of the priests who served in the temple had never been intended for the laity. 51 Now, P made an astonishing claim. Israel, whose national temple had been destroyed, was a nation of priests. All the people must live as though they were serving the divine presence in the temple, because God was still living in their midst. P’s legislation ritualized the whole of life, but he used these ancient temple laws to initiate a new ethical revolution, based on the experience of displacement. Even though the exiles were living in an impure land, P insisted that there was a profound link between exile and holiness. In the Holiness Code, God had told the Israelites: “You must be holy, because I, Yahweh your God, am holy.” 52 To be “holy” was to be “separate.” Yahweh was “other,” radically different from ordinary, profane reality. The law proposed by P crafted a holy lifestyle based on the principle of separation. The people must live apart from their Babylonian neighbors and keep the natural world at a distance. By imitating the otherness of God in every detail of their lives, they would be holy as Yahweh was holy and would be in the place where God was. Because exile was essentially a life of alienation, Babylonia was the perfect place to put this program into practice. In Leviticus, Yahweh issued detailed regulations about sacrifice, diet, and social, sexual, and cultic life.