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שלום לקנאים

Book by Amos Oz · 11 quotes · Dear Zealots, Extremism, Fanatics

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שלום לקנאים Quotes

“A prominent israeli writer, Sami Michael, once told of a long car journey with a driver. At some point, the driver explained to Michael how important, indeed how urgent, it is for us Jews “to kill all the Arabs.” Sami Michael listened politely, and instead of reacting with horror, denunciation, or disgust, he asked the driver an innocent question: “And who, in your opinion, should kill all the Arabs?” “Us! The Jews! We have to! It’s either us or them! Can’t you see what they’re doing to us?” “But who, exactly, should actually kill all the Arabs? The army? The police? Firemen, perhaps? Or doctors in white coats, with syringes?” The driver scratched his head, pondered the question, and finally said, “We’ll have to divvy it up among us. Every Jewish man will have to kill a few Arabs.” Michael did not let up: “All right. Let’s say you, as a Haifa man, are in charge of one apartment building in Haifa. You go from door to door, ring the bells, and ask the residents politely, ‘Excuse me, would you happen to be Arabs?’ If the answer is yes, you shoot and kill them. When you’re done killing all the Arabs in the building, you go downstairs and head home, but before you get very far you hear a baby crying on the top floor. What do you do? Turn around? Go back? Go upstairs and shoot the baby? Yes or no?” A long silence. The driver considers. Finally he says, “Sir, you are a very cruel man!” This story exposes the confusion sometimes found in the fanatic’s mind: a mixture of intransigence with sentimentality and a lack of imagination.”

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“Contending with fanaticism does not mean destroying all fanatics, but rather cautiously handling the little fanatic who hides, more or less, inside each of our souls. It also means ridiculing, just a little, our own convictions; being curious; and trying to take a peek, from time to time, not only through our neighbor's window but, more important, at the reality viewed from that window, which will necessarily be different from the one seen through our own.”

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“The fanatic loathes an open-ended situation. Perhaps he does not acknowledge such situation. He always has an urgent need to know what the 'bottom line' is, what the inevitable conclusion is, when we will finally 'come full circle.' Yet history, including the private history of each of us, is usually not a circle but a line: a winding line with retreats and bends, which sometimes changes course and intersects with itself and occasionally draws loops, but nevertheless, a line and not a circle. Being immune to fanaticism entails, among other things, a willingness to exist inside open-ended situations that do not come full circle and cannot be unequivocally settled. A readiness to live with questions and choices whose resolutions hide far beyond the hazy horizon.”

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“There are varying degrees of evil in the world. The distinction between levels of evil is perhaps the primary moral responsibility incumbent upon each of us. Every child knows that cruelty is bad and contemptible, while its opposite, compassion, is commendable. That is an easy and simple moral distinction. The more essential and far more difficult distinction is the one between different shades of gray, between degrees of evil. Aggressive environmental activists, for example, or the furious opponents of globalization, may sometimes emerge as violent fanatics. But the evil they cause is immeasurably smaller than that caused by a fanatic who commits a large-scale terrorist attack. Nor are the crimes of the terrorist fanatic comparable to those of fanatics who commit ethnic cleansing or genocide. Those who are unwilling or unable to rank evil may thereby become the servants of evil. Those who make no distinction between such disparate phenomena as apartheid, colonialism, ISIS, Zionism, political incorrectness, the gas chambers, sexism, the 1 percent's wealth, and air pollution serve evil with their very refusal to grade it.”

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“One of the distinct hallmarks of the fanatic is his fervent desire to change you so that you will be like him. To convince you that you must immediately convert, abandon your world, and move into his. The fanatic does not want there to be any differences between people. He wants us all to be as one. He desires a world with no curtains drawn, no blinds shuttered, no doors locked, no shadow of a private life, for we must all be one body and one soul. We must all march together in threes on the path ascending to redemption, whether this redemption or the opposite one. The fanatic strives to upgrade and improve you, to open your eyes so that you, too, can see the light. Indeed, in that sense the fanatic is a wondrously altruistic and extremely unselfish creature: he is interested in you far more than he is in himself. Day and night he yearns to save your soul, to unshackle you, to take you out of darkness into the light, to redeem you once and for all from error and sin. Here he comes to hug you, sick with worry about your condition, bubbling with goodwill to change your prayer habits (or lack thereof), your voting or smoking habits, your eating habits, your preferences, your entire lifestyle, which is so harmful to you. All the fanatic wants is to take you in his arms and hug you, to raise you from the lowly spot you are stuck in and place you in the sublime place he has discovered, where he has since been basking and to which you must ascend immediately. For your very own good.”

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“In addition to curiosity and imagination, another effective antidote to fanaticism might be humor, and especially the ability to make fun of ourselves. I, for one, have never met a fanatic with a sense of humor. Nor have I ever known anyone capable of making a joke at his own expense become a fanatic. Humor engenders a curvature that allows one to see, at least momentarily, old things in a new light. Or to see yourself, at least for a moment, as others see you. This curvature invites us to let hot air out of any excessive importance, including self-importance. Moreover, humor usually entails a measure of relativity, of abasing the sublime.”

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“Like all types of zealotry, violent Islam is not limited to a gang of sadistic, bloodthirsty fanatics. At its foundation stands an idea. A bitter, desperate idea, a distorted idea. However, it is worth remembering that one can almost never vanquish an idea, twisted as it may be, simply by using a big stick. There must be a response; there must be an opposing idea, a more attractive belief, a more persuasive promise. I am unopposed to using a big stick against murderers. I do not believe in turning the other cheek, nor do I share the prevalent opinion whereby violence is the absolute evil. To me, the most extreme evil is not violence but aggression. Violence is the manifestation of aggression. It is often essential to curb aggression with a big stick, as long as the stick is accompanied by an appealing, convincing idea. Absent such an idea, fanatics of one kind or another will step in to fill the void.”

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“Fanaticism ... is contagious: a person may catch it even as he fights to cure other people of it. There is no shortage of anti-fanaticism fanatics in the world. All sorts of crusades to stop jihad, and jihads to subjugate the new crusaders. This includes the zeal so prevalent in Israel and in the West these days to deliver a knockout blow that will finish off all the bloodthirsty fanatics and anyone like them once and for all. To eradicate every last bastion of zealotry.”

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