No Place for Hate?

The recent controversy over the naming of the spectacular new cable-stay bridge between Boston and Charlestown should serve as a reminder to all of us of the eternal need for vigilance in the face of intolerance, untruth, and hate. In case you have managed to miss it, Governor Paul Cellucci, in a compromise designed to appease some residents of Charlestown, has agreed to name the new bridge the “Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge” instead of the “Leonard P. Zakim Bridge” as he originally proposed. Before his untimely death from cancer, Zakim was director of the New England chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. Ironically, he spent his life trying to build bridges between racial and religious groups, and by all reports he succeeded mightily. But in light of the comments of some Charlestown and other Boston-area residents, we still have a long, long way to go..

One Charlestown resident, his anti-Semitism transparent for all except himself to see, claimed that the bridge should not be named after Zakim because, after all, no Jews fought at Bunker Hill. Wrong. Never mind the illogic of connecting the naming of the bridge for Zakim, a Jew, with the famous Battle of Bunker Hill. The fact is, a Jew did fight at the Battle of Bunker Hill. As Rabbi Cherie Koller-Fox reported in a letter to the editor in Wednesday’s Boston Globe, Abraham Solomon, a soldier in Colonel John Glover’s 21st Regiment, fought in the battle. His name, signed in Hebrew, is found on the muster roll for June 27, 1775.

As someone has famously said, in war truth is the first casualty. So too, all too often, in the war of words.

But there’s more. It turns out that the Bunker Hill monument was partially financed by a Jew! As the Globe reported on Monday, the monument was partially funded by a wealthy Jewish philanthropist named Judah Touro. Indeed, Bunker Hill Monument was actually hailed as a symbol of cooperation between Christians and Jews when it was dedicated in 1843. In a poem composed for the dedication ceremony, Oliver Wendell Holmes made note of the fact: the last two lines of his poem read, “Christian and Jew, they carry out one plan./ For though of different faith, each is in heart, a Man.”

I believe it was Jesus who is supposed to have said “the truth will make you free.” Jesus, we tend to forget or pretend to forget or prefer to forget, was also a Jew. In truth, I find the behind-the-scenes participation of Cardinal Bernard Law, in working-out a compromise on the new bridge’s naming, to be ironic and somewhat discomfiting. For we are only beginning to understand the deep roots of anti-Semitism which are planted within our own Christianity, and particularly within the Roman Catholic Church.

Personally, I would have preferred to see the Cardinal backing-up Cellucci’s original plan for a “Leonard P. Zakim Bridge,” and calling attention to the not-so-subtle anti-Semitism of that proposal’s opposers.

Of course, lest we think it is only the boors in Charlestown and its neighborhood who harbor a latent anti-Semitism, we are reminded of the recent anti-Semitic incidents of graffiti right here in our own community of Newburyport. Prejudice and hate, after all respect no boundaries of geography or economy.

I can only speculate that such hateful or thoughtless acts as those we have witnessed result from a deep-seated fear of the unknown, from ignorance and distrust, and from a total lack of self-esteem on the part of their perpetrators. However, the ownership of such views by intelligent people who should seemingly know better sometimes causes me to visit anew the whole question of the reality and existence of evil.

Why do some of us hate? What additive to or void in our psyches causes it? Is it as the great lyricist Richard Rogers once put it in a song, “You have to be carefully taught?” Or is hate simply a natural response to irrational fear, a reaction to imagined threats to our well-being? Is it, then, simply a survival mechanism, an instinct over which we, some of us at least, have little or no control? I wish I knew the answers to those troubling questions.

We sometimes say that love is stronger than hate. I want to believe it, I really do. Because I think that is why Jesus advocated loving our enemies and turning the other cheek. I think he recognized that whenever we return a blow we, too, become tainted by the hatred in our foes. It’s a calculated risk, of course, an early form of what some today call “tough love.” Only it’s tough love that we practice on ourselves. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it “redemptive suffering.” It’s not giving in; rather, it is refusing to participate in a behavior which can only end in reducing our own humanity.

Our community has been proclaimed “no place for hate.” What do we have to do to make that proclamation a reality? I say, begin with the truth: as in, Not only did a Jew fight at Bunker Hill, but the monument was financed in part by a Jew. Always beg the question. Refuse to accept the lie. Don’t believe what other people tell you, but find out for yourself. Follow the golden rule. And if you can’t love your neighbors, at least get to know them. Dismiss suspicion and I think you will be pleasantly surprised. That, at least, is my hope, if not my conviction.

This past summer, my wife Sabrina and I traveled in several Eastern European countries. We visited the cities of Prague and Budapest. We went to the beautifully restored synagogue in Pest, where over 100,000 Jews once lived and worshipped. Today, there are only a handful of Jews in Budapest. We went to the beautiful old Jewish quarter in Prague, which survived destruction only because Hitler planned to turn it into a great “museum to a vanished race” after the successful completion of his “final solution.” There, the names of over 87,000 Czechoslovakian Jews who perished during the holocaust have been inscribed on the interior walls of a former synagogue.

I like to believe that it could never happen here. But sometimes I wonder. If things ever got bad enough economically, if the gaps between the haves and the have-nots continued to widen, would the old irrational fears and sense of inferiority resurface to haunt us once again? When even in a prosperous community like ours such fears exist already, and occasionally will out? When even the act of naming a bridge brings them to the surface? I wonder.

Will our community truly be “no place for hate?” as we have proclaimed it to be? It’s up to us, because I believe that ultimately we must be God’s instruments of good in the world. But it’s still an open question, waiting for our answer.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock