Courage or Cowardice

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Bill Maher, on his show, “Politically Incorrect,” uttered these words:

“We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.”

Maher defended himself later, saying that he had not intended in any way to slight the American servicemen. Truth be told, he had been a longstanding supporter for the American military. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long before several companies, including FedEx and Sears Roebuck, pulled their advertisements from the show, costing the show more than it returned. Inevitably, ABC decided against renewing Maher’s contract for 2002.

Emotions and corporate advertising power aside, did any of this answer the question? Here are people who believe strongly in what they are doing, convinced that they are fulfilling the will of the Almighty Allah and willing to sacrifice their lives for this cause. And here are American servicemen also putting their lives on the line for their cause, equally believing in the rightness of the American way that G‑d has blessed. What makes these warriors cowards and these heroes; these terrorists and these martyrs? Is it just a matter of which side they happen to be on, their proximity to their target, how much they’re willing to risk—or is there something more fundamental, a qualitative difference?

The question is not just whether we like Maher or dislike him. The question is without a doubt the most burning one of our era: If we are heroes, Western civilization can and will endure. If we are not, and they are, then there is nothing to prevent us from going the way of every other decadent society throughout history. The barbarian hordes are at the gates of Rome (having already staked out much of Europe) and it’s only a matter of time.

So to this I would like to present an answer quite simple, but of far-reaching implications: To be a martyr, you must want to live more than to die. There’s nothing heroic in giving away something you do not value. No, Bill, it’s not proximity to your target that makes you a hero, or your imagined proximity to G‑d that makes you a martyr. It’s the value you place on the life that G‑d created, including your own life that you are putting on the line.

“Often the test of courage,” wrote the French playwright, Alfieri, “is not to die, but to live.”

Let’s reach back a bit. Both Arabic and Western civilizations find their roots in a hero named Abraham. In the biographical vignettes presented to us in Genesis, we never see Abraham seeking out martyrdom. If it was demanded of him, he was prepared for that also. But his message was one of life. Life—here, now, his own and that of all other human beings. Abraham’s G‑d was not a distant, one-time Creator who had gone on to bigger things. Abraham’s G‑d was deeply connected to this world; a G‑d of life.

This is perhaps the most significant element to his daring barter with G‑d on behalf of Sodom and Gomorra: Just as he had put his life at risk before man for G‑d, so he now risked himself before G‑d for the sake of man. It was not simply that there is only G‑d in heaven and on earth, but that this one G‑d is the “Judge over all the earth” and therefore, must do justice. That He cares about what is happening with His creatures, and treats each one fairly and with compassion. That life, in other words, is valued by the One that created it.

Abraham’s discovery, then, was as much about humankind as it was about G‑d. Furthermore, for Abraham, the two, monotheism and humanism, were vitally intertwined: His concern for human life was because the One Creator of heaven and earth breathed that life within us and cared for it. And his iconoclastic monotheism was driven by that same belief that G‑d cared about His universe and about the lives He had placed within it, and therefore it was heresy to believe He had abandoned its administration in the hands of demigods. In other words, his monotheism was not out of some philosophical abstraction, but directly related to his conviction that G‑d cares.

As I wrote, neither Islam nor our libertarian Western civilization would be here without that legacy of Abraham. Nevertheless, somehow the message became parsed. Interestingly, the Zohar and other classic midrashim describe an eschatological battle between Abraham’s son, Ishmael (the Arabic world) and his grandson, Esau (Rome, and it’s descendent, Western civilization). To paint the story in very broad strokes, it seems to this small mind writing now that today Ishmael has taken G‑d to the exclusion of humankind, and Esau humankind without need of G‑d.

And yes, today Ishmael and Esau are at war. Which gets very confusing. Look at the irony of Maher, who put so much energy and daring into fighting for human rights, while simultaneously declaring Allah’s warriors to be heroes. The story repeats itself daily as the voices of civil liberties and universal justice blindly defend the ruthless, totalitarian regimes against Israel and openly lend a hand to the contagion of Islamofascism. It’s as though the two extremes seek to balance one another; yet rather than achieving a harmonious blend, cook up an incongruous goulash, a peppermint coated hot falafel.

That is why sterile, liberal humanism is a sitting duck before the chaos and terror that threatens civilization today. Not simply because it has no way to conceive of the threat that it faces, or because it has no immovable base to determine right and wrong, but because, above all, it is an impotent mule to breed heroism. Life, to the humanist, is valuable because humans value it. If that’s not a tautology, what is?

And the crude, regressive corruption of Islam with which we are faced today is by its very nature a force of absolute nihilism. Perhaps even the atheism of Stalin and Mao could not be as cancerous as worship of a G‑d for whom life begins only through death.

The truth is, America, at its roots, is a harmonious blend of both humanist and theist values, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Throughout its history, from its founding fathers until this day, it is built, in the words of Kennedy’s inaugural address, “upon the the belief that our rights do not come from the government, but from G‑d.” Harvard professor Eric Nelson argues convincingly in his latest book, “The Hebrew Republic: Jewish sources and the transformation of European thought,” that not America alone is heir to these values; these are the ideas that gave birth to all that we find most beneficial in Western civilization.

It’s within that harmonious duet of G‑d and man, the divine and the earthly, transcendence and life, it is there that true heroes arise—those who put their lives on the line because they value the rights and the lives of others, as our fathers and grandfathers did when they crossed the Atlantic to fight the world’s mightiest army so that we could live today in a free world. If we all want to be heroes, if we will dare to preserve our precious freedom before the onslaught of those who openly call for its destruction, if we will stand with courage as those previous generation did for us, so that our children as well can thrive in a free world, we need not die doing it. We need only strengthen the foundations upon which those rights are based, the harmony of G‑d and humankind that Abraham, the father of us all, first brought to the world.