A few years ago, I attended a
friend’s installation as head of a Quaker elementary and high school. (Schools heads are not inaugurated,
sworn in, or crowned, they are installed.
“Made me feel like a plumbing fixture,” another friend observed.) Describing why she was so enthusiastic
about her new school, my friend mentioned the interesting questions posed to
her by members of the community during the interview process. She singled out one question in
particular; a teacher had asked “What makes your soul soar?”
Yes,
when said out loud that’s a doubly ambiguous question, but she accompanied it
with gestures that dispelled any confusion.
I
spent the remainder of the ceremony half attending to the event and half
pondering the question for myself.
(She never said what she answered, and I never asked her later.) By the time we marched out, I had
settled on three things: music,
the sea, and righteousness. Of
these, the last is the only one that can actually bring me to weep.
It
started a long time ago. As a boy,
I wept when Robin Hood shot an arrow out the window from his deathbed, and told
his men to bury him wherever it landed.
I wept more than once and in more than one version, when King Arthur went
to his last battle, hoping that, in T.H. White’s words, “There would be a day –
there must be a day – when he would come back to Gramarye with a new Round
Table which had no corners, just as the world had none – a table without
boundaries between the nations who would sit to feast there.”
I
couldn’t have given it a name then, but I believe I was moved by the
righteousness of these men, and by the failure, or death, that ended their
striving.
Later
on I found myself moved as much when righteousness won its little victories as
when it suffered its big defeats. One story in particular exemplifies for me
the experience of witnessing righteousness.
After years of research on genocide
and cruelty, scholar Philip Hallie described his reaction to reading about a
small town in France which, under the leadership of its Protestant and Catholic
ministers, determined to rescue its Jews:
“About
halfway down the third page of the account of this village, I was annoyed by a
strange sensation on my cheeks.
The story was so simple and so factual that I had found it easy to
concentrate upon it, not upon my own feelings. And so, still following the story…I reached up to my cheeks
to wipe away a bit of dust, and I found tears on my fingertips. Not one or two drops; my whole cheek
was wet.”
That night, he says:
“Lying there in bed, I began to weep again. I thought, why run away
from what is excellent simply because it goes through you like a spear….To the
dismay of my wife, I left the bed, unable to say a word, crossed the dark
campus on a starless night, and read again those two pages on the village of Le
Chambon-sur-Lignon. And to my
surprise, again the sear, again the tears, again the frantic, painful pleasure
that spills into the mind when a
deep, deep need is being satisfied, or when a deep wound is starting to
heal”
-- Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed; see also the film “Weapons of the Spirit”
Just
last week, I encountered a very similar moment in Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Science of Evil. The incident described comes from the
autobiography of Thomas Buergenthal, a Holocaust survivor who became a
cofounder of UNICEF and a judge at the Hague:
“At just nine years old, Thomas was rounded up with thousands of Jews
and taken to Auschwitz. There he had to watch while an inmate was forced
to hang his friend who tried to escape. An SS guard ordered the inmate to
put the noose around his friend's neck. The man couldn't fulfill the
order because his hands were shaking so much with fear and distress. His
friend turned to him, took the noose, and in a remarkable act, kissed his
friend's hand and then put the noose around his own neck. Angrily, the SS
guard kicked the chair away from under the man to be hanged.
Nine-year-old Thomas and the other inmates, watching the man kiss his
friend's hand, rejoiced at that simple act that said (without words) ‘I will
not let my friend be forced to kill me.’”
I hope others
will share here their stories of righteous acts read about, in fiction or
history, or witnessed in person.
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