Coffee this Friday, February 23, at the usual time and place.
(1) American Ark: Just in time for Washington’s birthday, America’s Rabbi, Meir Soloveichik, takes a fresh look at Emanuel Leutze’s famous 1851 painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Soloveichik critiques alleged “errors” in the work and urges us to understand them “as deliberate artistic choices”:
Leutze, an avowed abolitionist, featured a member of the integrated 14th Regiment as a model for what America could be. The painting deliberately depicts a diverse group of rowers. In addition to the Black man, there is a man wearing a Scottish hat—apparently an immigrant, like Leutze—and a Native American on the other end of the craft. The boat, for Leutze, is America itself….
Putting so many soldiers in a tiny boat was also a symbolic choice. At a time when many in Europe were excluded from civic life and many in America were enslaved, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” urges Europeans to embrace democracy while reminding Americans, as Fischer put it, that they were all in the same boat.
As we mark the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln this year, Leutze’s remarkable painting shows us how not to idolize or idealize the past but to celebrate its best aspects, in order to inspire us as we face the future.
(2) Evil isn’t extra-ordinary: Summing up the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” At one level, the phrase encapsulates how ordinary people can commit, even justify, heinous atrocities. At another level, it describes how evil can be encoded in laws, processes, and algorithms such that it becomes endemic, programmatic, and normalized. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness,” the prophet Isaiah warned. In this spirit, Trevin Wax writes for The Gospel Coalition that “Evil Doesn’t Always Show Up Waving a Flag”:
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a deeply unsettling book about WWII. Browning reminds us of the sheer scale of the killing that took place in Eastern Europe, much of it outside the concentration camps and most of it done by ordinary people without much investment in the fight—simple men and women conscripted into Hitler’s killing machine. Browning claims the majority of individuals in this particular battalion weren’t zealous Nazis. They were ordinary, middle-aged, working-class men who nevertheless perpetrated heinous acts.
Browning’s book shows three distinct groups emerging within the battalion: a core of enthusiastic participants, a majority who executed their responsibilities reliably but lacked initiative, and a small minority who avoided involvement in the acts of violence but were engaged in other activities that did nothing to diminish the battalion’s overall efficiency in carrying out atrocities. Hardly anyone seriously resisted. Ordinary Men shows how easy it is for people to yield to the influences of those around them, leading to actions they’d never consider otherwise….
[Social critiques often imply that] evil individuals are monstrous, belonging to an entirely different class of humanity than the enlightened and good. But surely history teaches us it’s self-deception to believe that evil is confined to “monsters” or that malevolent beliefs reside exclusively in one political party or in a distinct class of humanity. The unsettling truth about evil is its pervasiveness, often manifesting in subtle and seemingly normal circumstances.
Community Haps
First Pres Lenten Lecture Series: Over the next five Wednesdays, starting this week (Feb. 21), First Pres hosts its Lenten Lecture Series exploring “what it means to love God and others as Jesus loved.” On Wednesday, March 13, Dr. Brad Hale will give the fourth lecture, “Love and Sex in a Time of Crisis.”
Hope to see you Friday.
Correction made! I'll get it right in future Two Things posts between now and then. Apologies, Dr. Hale!
Just a quick correction--Brad Hale's talk will be on March 13.