Guns

In November, 1938, Mahatma Gandhi published a statement in his paper, the Harijan, in which he suggested that Jews in Germany use satyagraha, or “strength-of-soul”, in reply to Nazi hate crimes. In a letter to Gandhi, Martin Buber replied:

I cannot help withstanding evil when I see that it is about to destroy the good. I am forced to withstand the evil in the world just as the evil within myself. I can only strive not to have to do so by force. I do not want force. But if there is no other way of preventing the evil destroying the good, I trust I shall use force and give myself up into God’s hands. . . . If I am to confess what is truth to me, I must say: There is nothing better for a man than to deal justly – unless it be to love; we should be able even to fight for justice – but to fight lovingly.

Virginia Tech

I taught a course on religion and violence this term. Today was the final exam. I made these remarks before the exam.

It seems appropriate, having come to the end of this course, that we take a moment to think about what happened yesterday in the state of Virginia.

Aristotle says somewhere that a life of virtue and goodness is never safe from uncertainty. All life is fragile; chance plays a large role in our lives regardless of our character.

Many lives were ruined yesterday in horrific circumstances, in an institution not unlike this one. Once again we saw how chance and luck can affect both good people and bad people, and how even the most virtuous life can be shipwrecked by a strong enough ill-wind.

However, the reverse is also true, namely, that good people might influence the locations occupied when the winds of fate blow.

So right now, when I think of the horrific events of yesterday at Virgina Tech, I think of Liviu Librescu, aged 76, an engineering science and mathematics lecturer. Librescu was a survivor of the Nazi death camps of WWII. After hearing shots fired, this old man is reported to have physically blocked the doorway to his classroom while he ordered students to leave. Some of them left by jumping out the classroom’s second story window. Librescu was eventually shot and killed, but as long as he could, he influenced the locations occupied both by the gunman and his students, and he saved the lives of at least some of his students.

So what I’m thinking about, in addition to the sadness and evil, is how this old man, this Holocaust survivor, acted when he had the chance. Aristotle had a word for that, too: Courage.