Seeing the Thou in Everyone

Rooting out our inner terrorist.

Rachel Goldberg’s son Hersh is a hostage in Gaza. In an N. Y. Times essay I  Hope Someone Somewhere Is Being Kind to My Boy she concluded, “And I would say this, then, as mother to other mothers: If you see Hersh, please help him. I think about it a lot. I really think I would help your son, if he was in front of me, injured, near me.”

Would you, like Rachel Goldberg, see the humanity in your “enemy?”

When you consider Israelis and Palestinians, do you want the same for both—the freedom to flourish, fulfill their needs, and thrive? In his essay “Freedom is No Illusion,” sociologist Frank Furedi wrote, “We should be celebrating freedom as the medium through which the human spirit can express itself and develop its capacities.”

I’m not asking you for a policy solution. I’m not asking you to whom to assign blame. I’m asking if you can see Israelis and Palestinians as “Thous” and not “Its.”

In I and Thou, the best-known work of philosopher Martin Buber, the author describes two fundamentally different ways of seeing people: “I-Thou” or “I-It.”

Looking through the “I-Thou” lens, we see our connectedness and common humanity with others. Through the “I-It” lens, others are seen as less than us, either as objects to use or obstacles to get out of our way. Identity politics, with its constant search for victims and victimizers, looks at the world through “I-It” eyes.

Few reading this essay are capable of heinous crimes. Yet, have we been contributing to a world where some are seen as “Its”? Are their people whose humanity doesn’t matter much to us?

Is there a little bit of Hamas in each of us?

On Monday, I quoted Rose Wilder Lane, “Men who behave as if the brotherhood of man were not a fact, are alive to do so only because it is a fact.” Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom is one of the most important and riveting books you can read.

The great Muslim reformer Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently described her experience growing up in Somalia. For Ali, at one time, brotherhood was not a fact:

The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called a 'Jew', not that any of us actually knew one. To be called a 'Jew' was so abhorrent, some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonoured them with this 'slur'.

As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends.

I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful 'two-state solution': we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map.

And in a 2022 Wall Street Journal podcast, Ali gave this powerful warning:

I'm just stunned to watch what I thought was the greatest nation in the world abandon its institutions, abandon its history and adopt these farcical theories that are now summed up in wokeism… if these ideologues get what they want, they're going to transform the world that we thought was civilized, America and the rest of the West, to look like the world that I fled.

All suffering begins with forgetting our True Nature and humanity. Hamas is a philosophy at odds with Reality. And philosophies at odds with Reality only die when more people are willing to align themselves with Reality.

Throughout history, there have been tribes and individuals who have loudly and often violently proclaimed their specialness, failing to recognize that everyone else who has ever lived on this planet is made of the same basic stuff.

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius observed:

Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy; none of its parts are unconnected. They are composed harmoniously, and together they compose the world. One world, made up of all things. One divinity, present in them all.

Aurelius wrote Meditations to give himself reminders. Like all of us, his thinking would take him in the wrong direction. Aurelius was building mental discipline by setting out his principles so that he could fall back on them when his thinking was off.

Realizing his tendency not to see connectedness, Aurelius admonished himself, “Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other.”

What is a fallen leaf? Yard trash? What is a wave separated from the ocean? A small puddle that evaporates? Can we understand that “everything is interwoven?”

In modern times, quantum physicist David Bohm called this interconnectedness the implicate order, where “everything is enfolded into everything.” We cannot fully comprehend or see the implicate order. However, knowing there is an implicate order is a valuable guide for living.

Like Marcus Aurelius, we can watch our antics. We can notice when we place the “story of me” above everyone and everything. We can feel the pain we cause ourselves and others when we believe we are not connected. We can catch ourselves behaving as if our tribe is superior. With awareness, we can make a different choice.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas founder, wrote, “As long as we continue to search for enemies anywhere but inside ourselves, there will always be a Middle East problem.”

We are sitting in the comfort of a safe place. What can each of us do to root out our inner terrorist?

Auschwitz survivor and psychologist Dr. Edith Egger, who witnessed her mother being sent to death by Josef Mengele, has written two outstanding books, The Choice and The Gift. In The Gift she describes the time, “a fourteen-year-old boy came to his court-appointed therapy session wearing a brown shirt and brown boots, leaned his elbow on the table, and started ranting about how to make America white again, about how to kill all the Jews, niggers, Mexicans, and chinks.”

Egger continues, “Fury swept through me. I wanted so badly to shake him, to say, ‘How dare you talk like that? Do you know who I am? My mother died in a gas chamber!’”

Egger wrote, “Just when I thought I might reach out my hands and throttle him, I heard a voice within say, ‘Find the bigot in you.’”

Egger’s ego spoke first: “Impossible, I thought. I’m not a bigot. I’m a Holocaust survivor and an immigrant. I lost my parents to hate. I used the ‘colored’ bathroom at the factory in Baltimore in solidarity with my African American coworkers. I marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I’m not a bigot!”

Then Egger saw there was more to learn about letting go of judgment. (Note: To let go of judgment does not mean you don’t discern evil and intervene to do something about it.)

Eger realized, “But to stop bigotry means you start with yourself. You let go of judgment and choose compassion.”

Egger learned, among other things,

Even a Nazi can be a messenger of God. This boy was my teacher, guiding me to the choice I always have to replace judgment with compassion—to recognize our shared humanity and practice love.

It’s tempting to hate the haters. But I feel sorry for people who are taught to hate.

We’re not all descendants of Nazis. But we each have a Nazi within.

Freedom means choosing, every moment, whether we reach for our inner Nazi or our inner Gandhi. For the love we were born with or the hate we learned.

Eger shared another story of learning to let go of her inner Nazi:

I had lunch the other day at a fancy country club with women looking like a million dollars, every one of them. Why am I spending an afternoon with people who look like Barbie dolls? I thought. Then I caught myself in the act of judging others, engaging in the same us-versus-them mentality that killed my parents. When I put my prejudice aside, I discovered that the women were deep thinkers, that they’d experienced difficulty and pain. I’d been ready to write them off out of hand.

Eger’s conclusion: “When we live in the prison of judgment, we don’t just victimize others. We victimize ourselves.”

We can’t solve Middle East problems, but we can be accountable. In our daily encounters, we can see others as Thous and recognize the common humanity we share with them.