On April 17, 1961, Gideon Hausner stood to address the members of the court assembled in the Beit Ha’am auditorium in Jerusalem.
“When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel, to lead the Prosecution of Adolf Eichmann,” he began, “I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards him who sits in the dock and cry: ‘J’accuse!’ For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, and are strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman and in their name I will unfold the terrible indictment.”
Hannah Arendt, in her extraordinary report on the Eichmann trial, coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” “Banality,” she wrote, “is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.”
Every single day, Eichmann went to work and supervised a system of mass murder. It is almost impossible to fathom the evil he devised all in a day’s work.
But what was striking about Eichmann was that he did not present as a madman or a bloodthirsty monster. Eichmann wasn’t crazy. He was … normal. The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him.”
And, as Arendt writes, “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
In Nazi Germany, what should have been considered intolerable became tolerable. What was inconceivable was made real. What was monstrous became mundane. What was utterly evil became utterly normal.
German society began to worship power and pride above all else. They sacrificed every principle on its altar – justice, compassion, freedom, humanity. They allowed fear and willful ignorance to absolve them of their complicity.
And so in the name of restoring German power and pride, Germans normalized the dehumanization of Jews.
German society painted the Jew as the embodiment of everything it detested and feared. The Jew was a communist, a conniver who sought to rob Germans of their freedom. The Jew was a capitalist, a parasite who sought to rob Germans of their wealth.
They justified the demonization and persecution of Jews with antisemitic conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. They told themselves Jews were less than human. They separated them out so they wouldn’t engage them as equals. They taught their children to hate.
A society that puts power on a pedestal, that worships wealth and glorifies greed, that offers scapegoats to blame for all its woes, that belittles integrity and overlooks falsehood, that chooses ignorance, celebrates arrogance and shrugs off dehumanization is a society in which the impossible becomes possible, in which the unfathomable becomes real, and in which evil becomes normal.
If we truly want to honor and sanctify the memories of those millions who died in the midst of normalized evil, then we have to insist that our society turn its priorities back toward that which is holy and right and good.
In a country that is grounded in the ideal that all are created equal, we cannot allow bigotry and dehumanization to be normalized.
In a country that is grounded in a commitment to “liberty and justice for all” we cannot allow the erosion of the rule of law to be normalized.
In a country that is grounded in the ideals of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion, we cannot allow the squelching of dissent or the stifling of free expression to be normalized.
We cannot allow our consciences to be abolished. We cannot allow our principles to be compromised. We cannot allow our values to be erased.
We must be the voices for those millions who perished at the hands of those who made evil banal. We must be the voices that cry out and condemn evil made normal. We must be the voices who stand up and shout: “Never again.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Dan Levin
Temple Beth El of Boca Raton
