Honoring Memorial Day in all its Complexity

This week’s portion, B’Chukotai contains a section of blessings and curses. The Torah sets it up as an either-or; either we will be good and be blessed or we will be bad and be cursed. I think as modern people, we know that blessings and curses don’t come so neatly separated in our lives, but often blessings and curses come at us together and in ways that are deeply entangled.  

As I’ve shared before, one of my favorite lines from any movie is from All About Eve. In that fantastic film, Bette Davis plays Margot Channing, an aging superstar of New York Theater who is in love with Bill Simpson, a director who is younger than she. It is clear they are deeply in love, but Margot refuses to agree to get married out of fear that he will one day leave her. Her jealousy almost derails the entire relationship, and in the middle of an epic fight about young Eve’s audition to be Margot’s understudy, Bill, played not so skillfully by Gary Merrill, Bette’s actual love interest at that time, answers Margot’s question “Do you love me, Bill” (a set up line if ever there was one) with this classic line: “I love you for some qualities and in spite of others.”  

I’ve always admired his answer because it is so profoundly true. His answer pushes back against the idea that we either love everything about a person or we can’t love them. It asks Margot to hold complexity, which is something she can do as an actor but not in her real life. I think in Bill’s answer, there is a profound wisdom and it always struck me as a Jewish perspective, which makes sense when I learned that the film was written by Joseph Mankiewicz.

Judaism as shaped by the rabbis asks us often to hold complexity, to avoid either-or and all-or-nothing approaches to questions and problems. I’ve spoken many times about how the characters in the Bible force us to confront just how complicated human beings are, and that we can love and hate at the same time, and we can be heroes and villains at the same time.

Of course, we all know this in our private lives, but more and more it seems that we are losing our ability to hold this sort of complexity in our communal and political lives.  More and more there is pressure to pick a side, to see an issue in stark either-or terms.  A policy is either good or evil, racist or anti-racist, and leaders and artists either pass our litmus tests or they are quickly relegated to being the enemy.

Of course, we see this in the way people approach everything from Israel, to abortion rights and gun control. The recent shootings have once again brought up this fault line in our public discourse, as has the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

I have noticed more and more that this trend is now applied to the US military. Those on the progressive side so often portrays our military with a broad brush, as a tool of Imperialism and White Settler Colonialism, one that has served to oppress Native Americans and African Americans.  In similar ways, the conservative movement can too often see any criticism of our military as unamerican, traitorous, and respond with lines like, “If you don’t love it, leave it.”

Both of these views leave me cold, and so I keep going back to that line, “I love you for some qualities and in spite of others.”

To be sure, the American military has been responsible for things that I for one am not proud of and feel are antithetical to America’s core values. But our military has also done things I am profoundly proud of and grateful for, not the least of which is WWII. 

Russia’s recent expansionist nationalism has reminded us painfully of why a military is necessary, even for people who want peace more than anything. Of course, I have never really been a pacifist, since it is hard to look at Jewish history in the 20th century and be comfortable with the consequences of pacifism. Even Ghandi finally had to admit that satyagraha, or non-violent soul—force would not have stopped the Holocaust because the Nazi’s had already determined the people they were killing were not human beings.

So much of today’s gun violence also seems rooted in a strange modern version of not seeing one another as human beings. Whether it is caused by radical individualism, TV and movie violence, violent video games, extreme language and hate on social media, the excessive number of weapons in our homes, or the lack of community and social connections that so many young people experience especially during the pandemic, the shooters have to see their victims as less than fully human, as characters or props in order to carry out such crimes.

This tendency to dehumanize those we disagree with is a spiritual disease that its own epidemic, and so while we won’t agree on policies to address the terrible levels of violence in our country right now, I hope we can agree that one way to avoid such senseless killing is to strive to see other people, especially those we disagree with, as full human beings with loves and complexities and connections and pains like all of us.  

This feels particularly true when it comes to Memorial Day and our military. Whether we agree with each action of our military, I hope we can hold the complexity that without our military our lives would be very different and worse, while also holding that the military has done things we find reprehensible. There is no need to choose; both are true and we are wiser when we are able to hold those contradictions. I love America and our military “for some qualities and in spite of others.”

This is Memorial Day weekend we are asked to remember those who have served in the military, and those who have given their lives in service of the military. I get very angry when people quickly dismiss Memorial Day as just another propaganda tool to shore up the imperialist American machine.  

I get angry because the people serving in the military are just that- people, not policies or pawns. They are complex people that might have agreed with some of their mission and disagreed with other parts, and regardless of their political opinions, they are people who love others, who have families, who have children and regrets and hopes, people who do terrible things and beautiful things – like all of us.

On Memorial Day, we need to remember those human beings in all their complexity, in all their humanity, and mourn them as such. The Talmud teaches us that to destroy a single person is to destroy an entire world. Each marker in Arlington, each soldier that has died was an entire world, and on Memorial Day we remember, mourn, and honor those lost worlds that have given us our world.

Shabbat Shalom.