Merry Minuet -- 2007

Mon., December 25, 11:09 AM

Remember the Merry Minuet? "The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles... Sometimes I think those were the good old days.

Think about it. In Iraq, the Sunnis and the Shiites continue to kill each other. In Gaza, Hamas kills a Fatah, and gunmen attack a Hamas convoy. Meanwhile, there's an international conference in Iran to prove that the Holocaust never happened. "Because," they say, "if the Holocaust never happened, then there is no reason for Israel to exist."

That's it, you see. Every Muslim sect hates every other Muslim sect, and the only thing they agree on is that they hate Israel. It is such a depressing mindset. About a hundred years ago, when they were organizing the Arab League, there was question about including the Egyptians -- "they are Berbers, not Arabs." I don't know where that puts the Persians.

An Israeli I know once put forth a solution: bomb all the Arab areas until there are none left. "Just think," he said, "in fifty years there will be very few who remember. And those who do will claim that it never happened." (I chose not to take him seriously.)

Last weekend, Mark Auerbach, a man in our community, died. He was a survivor of the Death Camps, and he lived a full life. He often lectured about his experiences, because he was not going to let anyone teach that the Holocaust had not happened. The rabbi said that, when such a person dies of natural causes, it is a privilege to bury him. "It is something we took away from the Nazis."

It always seems to me that hatred is such a wasteful emotion. Resources, mental and physical, that could be used to fix things are used instead to destroy them. When you then teach that hatred to succeeding generations, the problem is compounded until no one knows even how to start to remedy the situation. It makes me feel so helpless.

What I can do, however, is refuse to join in -- not just the large group debates, but the petty personal ones as well. I do not want to hear that A doesn't like B, nor do I intend to stop talking about one in the presence of the other. I am tired of trying to remember that C doesn't want to hear about the successes of D, or vice versa. All of it! I always said this is not my fight, but as long as I recognize its existence, I am enabling it. So I won't do it any more, and that is as close as I have come to making a resolution in at least twenty years.

Let me instead include a poem my mother used to quote. There seems to be some question as to how old it is; however, Mother learned it in grade school, which had to be at least seventy-five years ago.