Most readers of the Gazette are somewhat familiar with the Bible’s story of Adam and Eve’s first sons, Cain and Abel. To fulfill a sacred ritual, each offered a sacrifice, according to their calling, farming and shepherding. It turns out that God found Abel’s more pleasing, which infuriates Cain to the point that he plots his brother’s death to take place out in his field, hidden from (almost) everyone’s sight.
When God sees him and asks of his brother’s whereabouts, the first born son disdainfully replies: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Whether this ancient account of the first act of violence is true or not, the point is that it exposes a deeper truth, today largely ignored. Cain was only partially right: he was not his brother’s keeper; he was his brother’s brother.
Know it or not, acts of violence of every sort and degree, are an assault on even the perpetrator’s family. Cain’s sin, if you will, is that he regarded Abel as an impediment to obtaining God’s good graces. It didn’t occur to him how unkindly God would come to look upon his fatally driven envy.
All of which fast forwards us to Whoopi Goldberg’s recent commentary on the genocidal scheme we know of as The Holocaust, insisting (as a African American) that “it was not about race. It was about man’s inhumanity to man.”
Within her misleading statement is the biological fact that there is only one human race starting with the story of Genesis, each of us having had Cain and Abel as brothers. This tells us that we collectively are one family, tragically flawed to be sure. This tells us that we are more closely related than we ever imagined. And this tells us that no one is “superior” to any other, regardless of man’s willingness to champion the greatest of lies: that there is a plural dimension to the reality of a singular race.
The spelling of this ugliest of views is: R-A-C-I-S-M. Throughout man’s sordid ethnic history, so-called leaders have had sickening success, convincing their willingly gullible followers that the other side presents a real and present danger; that these “inferior races” are the real source of all our problems. So, in 2016, one would-be king declared that not only must we be rid of the press and its corrupting “fake” news,” but also would-be terrorists, namely Muslims en toto, Latinos of all origins, Asians of every stripe; African Americans (for whom the North fought the first Civil War), all of which then spills over onto the virtual and nascent rise of antisemitism.
If I were the secretary of education, I would insist that lessons regarding the truth that humankind is one, be thoroughly taught from K-12, citing episodes of utterly senseless suffering, appropriate to age-levels, simply but tragically because racist lies have been the justification for the most heinously demonic sins man could conceive.
In the first century letters that reveal our earliest interpretation of the Christian faith, Paul of Tarsus (today’s Turkey) declared that “there is one Lord, one God, and Father of us all.” Of those who profess this to be so, it is high time we unite to cleanse the air of putrid, toxic, racist smog in order to breathe the life-saving fresh spirit of truth, to fill our lungs to speak out, and our hearts to stand, like young David, before the Goliaths even now advancing with deafening, ground-shaking tremors.
Whoopi’s mistake, in the final analysis, is to unwittingly cause us to confuse the profound reality of our one race with the malicious delusions of racism.
The Rev. Peter Kakos lives in Northampton.