Of Gods and Morals

I read a story recently that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. It was a reporter’s dispatch from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A woman was talking about what had led her to open a clinic for victims of the country’s civil war. Militia men had come to kill her husband. They cut up his body, she said, “like you would cut up meat, with knives.” He was alive. They cut him in pieces, body part by body part, starting with the fingers, moving to the genitals, then the intestines. He died when they punctured his heart. The soldiers, twelve of them, held her at gun point and, lying over the strewn about body parts of her husband, raped her. She lost consciousness. When she came back to she heard the sound of a girl crying; it was her daughter being raped in the next room over.

—

My grandma loves to spoon-feed me hot maztah-ball soup. She serves it with a disfigured claw of a hand. Each finger sits at an awkward angle to the next. She wobbles over from the kitchen into the dining room in a left-leaning limp, pot and ladle in hand, and spoons up a pool of broth, her hand trembling. She brings it to my mouth. “Eat, baby, eat” she coaxes, until every last bit is gone, because she knows what it means to be hungry. The limp is from a shrapnel blast she shielded her own grandmother from in misshapen hand is from shrapnel in World War II. It wasn’t long before she was separated from the whole of her family. When they were rounded up and taken to a camp her mother told her to flee. Blessed with blonde hair and blue eyes, she lived through the war years on that farm under the patronage of a farmer who thought he was helping a nice young Christian orphan. She went to church every Sunday and recited to herself every Friday the Jewish sabbath prayers. An S.S. officer came demanding meat for the motherland one day. But when the farmer confessed he had none, the officer struck the both of them. She fell on a farming instrument which mangled her hand.

Her husband-to-be was making due in the woods at the time, living in holes dug into the ground to house roaming bands of Jews that had escaped ghettos and labor camps.

In the woods my grandfather watched from a distance a man and his little boy be found by patrolling Nazi officials. They made the man lie down on the forest floor. They made his boy lie on top of him. The life of two Jews, they told him, was worth no more than one bullet.

They fired a shot through the boy’s head and into his father. But it didn’t make it all the way through. After what must have seemed an eternity of lying there motionless, the man lifted his child from his chest, stood and wept.

—

I was talking to an orthodox friend of mine not long ago. He asked me, without god, from where would you derive your morality? It’s a favorite deduction of there’s, that you can’t have one without the other, to throw at us non-theists.

For the orthodox, a certain rejection of this worldly existence is the highest moral virtue they can attain. They eschew social justice in this world in service to the next. Which, very conveniently, makes it a lot easier to watch the desecration of African lives. Or Palestinian lives. Or any of the other persecuted peoples in the world.

But their morality is based on a deeply exclusive understanding of a god whose meaning, whose intentions, and whose very existence can never breach speculation.

One thing that we can be certain of is that there are real people suffering real pain and injustice right now, in this world.