THE WASTE OF A LIFETIME

What a waste of a lifetime.

People will find a thousand ways to analyze why a hateful 88-year-old man tried to shoot up a museum devoted to the lessons of man’s greatest inhumanity. We have already heard minds small and large prognosticate about the causes being in a climate of national misanthropy to Freudian traumas dating back to toilet training. I prefer the theory that sometimes evil is simply evil; it plainly transcends psychological or sociological explanation – “two parts Hitler,” my Holocaust-survivor Talmud rebbe, would call it.

In all the rightful questioning, there also resides a bitter lament – please don’t quote me out of context – that we should recite over Erik von Brunn: What a waste of a lifetime. Look at all the good that a man could have accomplished were his mind not preoccupied with hate.
He was obviously a capable man. His vituperative writings are at least intelligible, even articulate – subject, predicate, object. He knows the language that musters the rabble. He carefully thinks through his twisted slurs and paranoia. He’s not a dope. This is not some Cro-Magnon Klansman, but a hatefully intelligent man.

So I repeat, despite my own hate for him and his deed: What a waste of a lifetime. What a crooked evil that led him to the waste of others. Think: Those skills of his, were they rightfully motivated, could have written provocative essays or books, even an illustrative memoir of his apparently tormented childhood. How many people searching for meaning might he have enlightened? How much misanthropy might he have quelled? What if his advocacy were for childhood cancer or illiteracy? What a pity. What a waste of all the good he could have accomplished over 88 years.

The lament is not von Brunn’s alone. It extends to each of us. Every one of us, to a greater or lesser degree, brings some passion or skill to the table. To what good? The physician, bringing compassion to people in need, along with book-learned and clinical skills? So, too, the attorney, the accountant, the craftsman, the skilled and unskilled laborer, the homemaker, the retiree, the rambunctious teenager, the precocious child? What shall we say to defend nonsense, just-for-me-ism, couch-potato-ship, text messaging, apathy, while so much yet good begs to be done?

What a waste of a lifetime.

Once I asked a mechanic what he did for fun. “Go home and kick the **** out of my dog,” he answered. It needn’t be a mechanic, does the answer need to be so horrid, but to some greater or lesser extent, what does it mean to “kick the ****” out of ones lifetime? What a waste.

Each of us has the capacity for evil. Of this, we know only too well. For each of the impulses for evil we harbor, something humane – God or even atheism – cries out with some countervailing potential for good.

Reb Moshe Leib Sassover asserted that every human attribute, however base, could be converted into a virtuous deed. Once upon a time, Reb Moshe was taunted by a disciple to explain how atheism could become honorable. “Even that,” Reb Moshe proclaimed. “For if someone comes to you in hurt, you may not say, ‘Take your problems to God.’ No, at that moment, you must become an atheist, act as if there is no God; that there is only one force that can help this man. YOU!”

The question of whether one wastes a lifetime lived at evil or oblivion is too easily pushed off on demons like von Brunn. It could well be said of each of us who yawn at or desecrate a magnificent, but needy, world. Let not von Brunn’s epitaph become our own.