The Most . . . .?

We need to get small to get real. . . .

Flying back from Jerusalem one time I met an American Jewish leader of some repute, with whom I had a slight acquaintance. In casual conversation he referred to the Jews as “the most hated people in the world.”

I was taken aback. There is something vastly egotistical to take on an identity that begins with “the most,” even when followed by an attribute like “hated.” Of course Jews can find some reasonable evidence of being widely hated in a particular corner of history and society that spread from the rise of Christian Rome to the present day. A growing corner I might add, now that Israel is the focus of considerable worldwide displeasure for its policies toward the Palestinians.

But the most hated? My acquaintance might well consider Muslims, a group both larger by orders of magnitude and far more widely loathed. Also, I might add, a group far more likely in these last two decades to find its American members the target of deadly hate and hundreds of thousands of its adherents killed, primarily as collateral damage, through an almost continual war by the Western world against Islam in its more radical forms. Not to mention internal sectarian wars.

But whether the term “most hated” stands up to some kind of socio-political analysis of islamophobia versus anti-semitism is a moot point. Claiming primacy in victimhood has been done by a variety of ethnic, religious, and even business groups. As a political ploy to gain sympathy, court protection, or justify one’s actions I suppose it has its uses.

The problem is that any unrealistic self-assessment is ultimately self-defeating. To think of one’s self, or one’s people as the “most” anything is to lose touch with the vast and complex reality of the human world, a world in which there are no lasting exceptions, no lasting “mosts”, no thousand year empires and no perpetual victims. And sooner rather than later this exceptionalism (positive or negative) will lead to serious and possibly fatal political missteps, or to the crushing realization that one has staked one’s identity on a falsehood, and inevitably the experience of one’s own sense of self unraveling.

And, I note, both political unravellings and the dissolution of identities are major characteristics of the communities putting forth these exceptional claims.

At a recent lecture by a well known Vendata teacher, Swami Atmarupananda, I heard how his road to self-deconstruction and enlightenment began. It was with a simple question asked of his own conservative Christian identity. “Why am I so fortunate as to be born in the best form of the only true religion?” Put in other words, “how can it be that I, one of billions of humans on the earth over the course of hundreds of thousands of year, be so very special as to be one of ‘the most’ of anything?”

The swami finally drew the conclusion that Vedanta, with its teaching that all religions had equal potential as paths to the Divine, was truer than the claim of one sect of Presbyterianism to be the truest part of the one true faith. Vedanta represented for him a philosophical relativizing of all absolute religious claims. And it rang true to his own widening experience of the religious world outside his home town.

The book of Ecclesiastes (in the Christian naming of the Jewish Scripture) offers a wide historical view to undermine exceptional claims. “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.”  One supposes the preacher would have included himself and his people among those subject to this truth.

And of course Christians should place all identities built on claims to exceptional virtue or vice, admiration or spite, in the framework of universal sin and God’s unbounded love. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” And “if God be for us, who is against us?” Surely, Paul would say, no one whose vitriol can be of lasting consequence to our self-understanding and identity as God’s children.

Or, to step beyond philosophy, history, and theology consider the words of the physicist Richard Feynman. “It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all the atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil-which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”

It is hard for all of us to do what the teaching of Ramakrishna, or the Bible, or modern physics seeks to do for us: take a perspective beyond our limited experience and the powerful centripetal force of our individual and collective egos. But we all need to do it. We need to get small to get real.

And did I mention the wisdom of pop culture in this regard? Remember when Harry Potter throws away, for himself and everyone else, immortality? To become an ordinary wizard, neither the most hated, nor the most adored, but quite possibly the happiest. No, not the happiest. One of the more contented.