This Timeless Musical Poster is Impossible to Tear Down
Love is timeless because its source is infinite beyond the human mind.
Throughout this hostage crisis, posters of kidnapped Israeli hostages have been torn down by self-appointed vigilantes whose minds have been made mad by their hate.
Thomas Hand is an Irish national living in Israel. Hamas kidnapped his nine-year-old daughter, Emily. Initially, Hand was told that Emily was dead. He imagined the horrors she would be suffering were she alive and felt her death was “the best news of the possibilities [he] knew.”
When Hand learned Emily was alive, he began hoping Hamas would release her. Surely Hand was sickened to learn "depraved" protesters in his home city of Dublin were tearing down posters that called for the release of Emily and the other hostages.
Emily Hand is now with her father after her release.
Focused on caring for Emily, Thomas Hand probably doesn’t care what the Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, had to say about her release: “An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned.” In the world of cowardly leaders, a child kidnapped because she is Jewish is merely “lost.” Instead of being exchanged as a part of a deal with terrorists she has been “returned.” With leaders like Varadkar, it is no wonder that some Irish citizens display no moral decency.
Londoner Gavin Heller is “inconsolable with grief.” He will never see his children grow up. Heller’s 12-year-old twins, Yannai and Liel, were killed in the Hamas massacre. Hamas incinerated the bodies of Yannai and Liel, and it took forensic archaeologists to identify them. In Heller’s words:
There are no words that can ever or will ever explain this pain and brutality. The unfathomable, unimaginable, unspeakable has happened to my gorgeous children, and the world has turned against humanity. It's something that is such a shock that people can do this to other human beings just because they were Jewish.
Imagine Heller’s anguish as he sees other London residents tear down posters of the hostages and march in support of Hamas.
There are still almost two hundred hostages being held captive by Hamas. Hamas turned over a ten-month-old hostage, Kfir Babas, to a Marxist-Leninist terror group in Gaza. Kfir and his brother Ariel have not seen daylight in over 50 days. Yet, depraved protesters, blinded by hate, tear down their kidnapped posters in Western cities.
History will treat the videos of protesters tearing down posters and calling for the genocide of Jews in the same way it has treated adoring throngs at a Hitler rally shouting Nazi slogans.
Hate must be recreated moment by moment in a person’s mind and eventually extinguishes itself. Love is timeless because its source is infinite beyond the human mind.
In 2017 the UK’s Missing People Choir, whose singers have missing family members, touched Britain’s Got Talent audience with an emotional version of their 2014 original song, “I Miss You.” Today, their song can be for us a musical poster connecting us to those yearning for the return of their loved ones.
With the help of social philosopher Erich Fromm, we can reflect on love as an orientation to life:
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.
What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other—but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other's sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him.—Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Yesterday, I posted a Holocaust story that is also a love story. Yesterday’s Nazis are gone, but Nazism as an orientation to life is being chosen today.
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