The Tragic Flaw
The events in Israel on October 7th, 2023, were indeed a tragedy. The culmination of a tragedy happens in a moment, but in that moment, it leaves behind a world now unrecognizable to those who have experienced it and survived to recount the story. “The time is out of joint,” Hamlet says at the moment of decision. Our sense of justice becomes inflamed; someone must set everything right again if the universe is to return to balance. We must act, but in acting, we too often forget to plan with reason and, guided only by our rage, end up only adding to our pain. If this is so for the victims of a single tragic event, what then becomes of those whose tragedies are perpetual?
I say again, the events of October 7th were truly a tragedy, but in the Greek sense, almost as if it were foretold, almost as if it were a prophecy, and like a prophecy, it went unheeded. In Greek tragedy, the great hero or heroine is struck down by fate due to a single flaw, one often unsuspected or unknown altogether. Oedipus has violated divine law, and he does not even know it. His city, Thebes, is suffering as a consequence. The blind prophet Tiresias reveals what even the sighted refused to see, that unknowingly, the king had stained his hands with familial blood. Even after his secret is forced out into the light of day and he pays the price, his children will go on paying for their father’s sins, though they are only but the indirect result of his crimes. Can this be fair? It is if you view justice slowly. If you understand we are all connected, whether we wish to be or not.
The ancients understood that actions have consequences far beyond the moment they are perpetrated, as even the Hebrew Bible tells us: “The Lord…by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Justice is communal; it is delayed but not denied. Either we or our children, or our children’s children, will suffer the results of deeds done long before us, but an accounting all the same will come. It is perhaps this long postponement we mistake for a forgetting. As once children ourselves, we all know if we can just prolong our parents’ knowledge of our transgression, the more there is time for their anger to cool. If we are truly fortunate, the time between the commission of the unruly act and the discovery of our guilt may be so great that punishment, we hope, would seem absurd, so we elude the rod of correction altogether. And just like children, the even greater progress of history that spans the often seemingly vast distances between the past and present blinds us to this truth. We arrogantly assume we have passed the border and escaped the land of consequences.
Here in the United States, this blindness is all-consuming. The vast majority of its citizens are benighted by ignorance so opaque that it might be considered a crime of governmental maleficence were it not so universally an ignorance that is self-imposed. Take just the example of immigration; even among those who should know better, it is a subject that is viewed myopically, never seeing the forest for the trees. It is either presented as a problem of not doing enough to aid and process those seeking asylum against crime and certain death (the truth, though not all of it) or as a great horde intentionally set upon destroying us. Few ask the reasons for such mass flight, but it would not be hard to answer if they did. For well over a century, the United States has treated the nations of Central and South America as pawns in a game of social engineering, the results of which are finally catching up to us. Much as with the influx of immigration to Europe, the West has repeatedly destabilized and undermined the nations of the global south for decades. Consequently, the people of those ruined states are naturally looking toward lands and governments that appear safer and more secure. These are the side-effects of empire that we now must accept if we are humble and endure even if we are not.
Again, as we are addressing a form of blindness that only a portion of the population, however large, has succumbed to, you must overlook the repetition of what seems obvious. The still-thriving legacies of slavery and segregation in the United States are another of these obvious blind spots. Slavery and segregation are gone, but racist animus and institutions remain to thwart upward mobility and equality for people of color. The law is a tool for stealthy subversion; its reasoning is intentionally made obscure, and its justice is often an unjust precedent. The police, too, hide their true purpose behind pretense. A badge and uniform meant to signify order and a commitment to peace are just costumes; the sheep’s skin meant to hide the wolf. There is no need to argue this further since those who read in good faith know already, and those who do not would not accept the facts presented regardless of their level of quality. But, once more, this too is part of the tragic consequence of having been delayed, left as an inheritance to us, their descendants, more or less.
Gambling is often characterized as a vice. It affects the gambler who bets the family farm on a “sure thing,” but it will also have effects on the spouse and child that live within if the gamble is unlucky. Imagine, betting on your grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s lives for the opportunity of immediate gain with no catch for you at all, and those are the seeds that so many nations in the West have sown and left to their posterity to reap, not with material rewards but with the world’s indignation and internal rot.
When people, or nations, invest in cruelty and selfishness, they place a wager that the final results will take so long to play out that they will not be around to pay them. Do we gamble now for our momentary prosperity and leave our children to pay the balance of our sins? Such, it appears, was the choice of those Zionists who, not so long ago, claimed a land not their own on spurious reasoning and, with the weight of empire behind them, cast out those who had made the desert bloom.
In the face of such a seemingly endless cycle of destruction, it would be easy to ignore the obvious solution and accept the world’s condition as just our “nature,” no more changeable than the tides or time. The obvious solution is the same one we will not allow ourselves to see as a solution — -forgiveness. Forgiveness, however, is reasoned to require us to give up too much, too much control in the event the other side is not so obliging in return, that they may treat us in the same fashion that we, for so long, treated them; and too little in the sense of satisfaction that we think revenge will provide.
But to forgive is not to forget justice; in the sense of the old English word from which it is derived, forgiveness means only to give up our desire to punish. We assign to the state the right to administer justice because, ideally, the state is impartial. Forgiveness is the gift we give ourselves when, after having grown weary of the drive to hate, we recognize the benefits of peace again. Justice will be done, but its final form is not for us to decide, and we may just discover, in the end, too late to change our course to avert disaster, that it is ourselves who have committed the greater wrong, and who will have the most to atone for.
When the tragedy of Hamlet ends, the stage is left in desolation. Horatio, alone of all the participants, is left to carry on with the burden of remembrance and the task of finding the method in all the madness. When the present tragedy in Gaza has played out its final scene, no Horatio will be left behind, but history will remain to offer up its verdict on the show. Recall how self-assured Oedipus was, how the vanquisher of the Sphinx felt chosen by God, and how he was confident there could be no doubt as to his righteousness until the fateful moment that all his crimes were laid out before him by the stroke of revelation. Recall, too, finally, his self-inflicted punishment — not to die, as that would be too easy — but to live on as a blind beggar, an example to all who saw him. Are we then more certain than the king of Thebes? Are we better prophets than Tiresias?
