Teshuvah on the National Level

As anyone who has ever attended a Rosh Hashanah service at Shelter Rock (or anywhere at all) knows, the core principle of the High Holiday season is the notion that, although done deeds cannot be undone (which would be something akin to unringing a bell or unsinging a song), they can be addressed purposefully and meaningfully through the process called t’shuvah in Hebrew and, slightly misleadingly, “repentance” in English. The Hebrew word derives from the verb meaning “to turn” and implies that one not only regrets a past act, but that one has specifically turned away from it and resolved, even should the opportunity present itself to repeat the deed, not to do that specific thing again. So that sounds simple enough, but the laws that govern the process are, to say the least, challenging. If you have wronged another, you have to ask that individual for forgiveness. But even if there is no specific other person from whom to ask forgiveness, you still have to exert yourself to right the wrong for which you are responsible nonetheless, thus addressing your own wrongdoing not merely internally or emotionally but practically and meaningfully. There can’t be too many of us who have actually read all 700+ pages of the Book of Repentance of Rabbi Menachem ben Shlomo Meiri of Perpignan, my favorite thirteenth-century Provençal scholar. But even without having the time or energy to undertake a reading project like that, the underlying principles that govern the process of seeking and attaining t’shuvah are available for all to contemplate in dozens of shorter works, including English-language ones like Louis E. Newman’s excellent 2011 book, Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah. (I read the Meiri’s book as my Elul reading project over the course of four years starting in 2013. Newman’s book will take considerably less time to get through.) But neither author asks the question that I’d like to write about today: can nations do t’shuvah or solely individuals?

I was surprised, but also moved, by the news that the German government has finally agreed to acknowledge that the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents, including children, undertaken by its armed forces in the country in southwestern Africa now known as Namibia was not just an overblown and unnecessarily harsh military action, but an actual act of genocide. But, just as the Meiri (and countless others) have noted with respect to individuals, the acknowledgement of wrongdoing is nowhere near enough and has to be followed by concrete action. Can an offer of something like $1.3 billion to the victims’ descendants count? I think probably so.

The backstory matters. The big colonial powers in occupied Africa were France, Britain, and Belgium. But the Germans were there as well and, starting in 1884, claimed as German territory four colonies: German East Africa (comprising today’s Burundi, Rwanda, and part of Tanzania), German Cameroon (comprising today’s Cameroon and parts of Nigeria, Chad, Gabon, Congo, and the Central African Republic), Togoland (comprising today’s Togo and part of Ghana), and German South-West Africa (today’s Namibia). All became League of Nations mandates following Germany’s defeat in World War I. But by then the newly-acknowledged genocide was more than a decade in the past.

The basic principle was that Germany itself was overcrowded and in need for room to expand—and how more simply to expand then by seizing other peoples’ countries and unilaterally declaring them part of a new German empire? Of course, the Germans were not alone in this approach to the non-white world. But the problem in German South-West Africa was that the natives were not willing to go along with having their land seized and their native culture obliterated and, as a result, two specific tribes, the Herero and the Nama, rose up in rebellion against their despised foreign overlords. It didn’t end well. Armed German soldiers killed tens of thousands, then pushed survivors into concentration camps where most died of starvation or sickness and in which at least some were subjected to ghoulish medical experiments. (Is this starting to sound at all familiar?) Hundreds of human skulls were shipped back to Germany for further experimentation. Some have been returned. The rest somehow disappeared, but the chances that they were respectfully buried appear to be zero.

No Jewish people can consider this without reference to the Shoah, of course. There are plenty of differences, also of course, between the plight of the Jews of Nazi Europe and the fate of the Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa. But the notion of a nation unleashing its army against civilians with the specific purpose of killing as many as possible is one detail they both have in common. (And, yes, there actually is a verified command by Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander in today’s Namibia, unambiguously instructing his men to kill every Herero tribesperson regardless of whether that individual is armed or constitutes some sort of threat.)

The dead, of course, stay in their graves; nothing can bring them back to life. But the willingness of a nation to confront its past is stirring to me—and I can assure my readers that I am more than aware of the irony in me saying that about Germany, the perpetrator nation per excellence. Our tradition teaches that the gates of t’shuvah are always open. It’s heartening to see a nation take a first step through those gates and begin the process of reconciliation and healing that can surely follow. And what’s happened between Germany and Namibia has echoes in other news I read about this last week too.

Just last week, for example,  French president Emmanuel Macron publicly acknowledged his nation’s role in the horrific events in Rwanda in 1994 in the course of which more than 800,000 innocents, mostly belonging to the Tutsi tribe, were slaughtered mercilessly by their fellow countrymen who belonged to the other large tribal group in the country, the Hutu. No one accuses the French of themselves having killed those poor people. Nor was Rwanda part of the French colonial empire in the nineteenth century. (See above; it was part of German East Africa.) But the French cultivated a strong, friendly relationship with the Hutu-led government and failed to step in vigorously in a way that they surely could have averted the slaughter. They were therefore bystanders rather than actual perpetrators—but they were bystanders who could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had they not chosen to do and say nothing while the killing went on. And it was that specific silence that President Macron was addressing in his remarks last week.

Also last week came the shocking revelation that a mass grave of hundreds of children had been found—not in formerly-Nazi-occupied Europe or in formerly German Africa, but in Canada…and not that far from where Joan and I lived in British Columbia. The remains of 215 children were found on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, where they had all died of some lethal combination of neglect, disease, and mistreatment. The Kamloops School, just about 200 miles northeast of Vancouver, was part of a large network of schools, mostly operated by various churches including the Roman Catholic Church, that indigenous children were forced to attend by their white overlords. These schools were apparently mini-gulags in all of which some combination of physical violence and brainwashing was brought to bear to make the pupils into “regular” Canadians, which is to say, citizens with no knowledge of or affinity for their own native culture. Nor is this an ancient story for Canadians—the last such school only closed in 1996. Shocked by its own history, the government set up a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one based on the similar commission set up in South Africa after the end of apartheid. And the Commission determined that at least 4,100 children died in these schools, almost all of them avoidable deaths, and that the children’s parents were never told anything close to the truth about what had happened to their own sons and daughters. As a father and grandfather, the suffering of those poor people feels incalculable to me. In 2018, Pope Francis declined to issue an apology for the Church’s role in this nightmarish story. But two different Prime Ministers of Canada, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, have formally begun the process of national t’shuvah by formally acknowledging their nation’s responsibility in failing to act swiftly and decisively once it was known what these schools were really like. One quote by P.M. Trudeau struck me especially: “For far too many students,” he said, “profound cultural loss led to poverty, family violence, substance abuse and community breakdown. It led to mental and physical health issues that have impeded their happiness and that of their family. Far too many continue to face adversity today as a result of time spent in residential schools, and for that we are sorry.”

Such simple words: “we are sorry.” Yes, easy to wave away as too little, too late. But something, a beginning, a start. When I hear my own countrymen debating the specific ways our nation could or should begin to confront the legacy of slavery in these United States, I find myself looking to the leaders of Germany, France, and Canada, as I wonder what shape that kind of honest engagement with the past could take. And last week I also  read with great interest the story about the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria beginning to make after-the-fact payments to the descendants of men and women forced to work there either for no wages at all (i.e., as slaves before the Civil War) or for minimal wages far below what they deserved to earn in the years that followed. Also easy to wave away as a mere gesture. But, it strikes me that we Americans could just as reasonably consider the school’s gesture a beginning, a start, a step forward towards both truth and reconciliation.