Standing Alone in the Collective

In 1967 a history teacher in Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California was faced with a question by one of his students that he had difficulty answering. The question was, how come so many people, ordinary citizens, stood idly by when the Nazis and their helpers committed atrocities? Instead of an answer, Jones decided to conduct a social experiment, using his own students as subjects.  He created a movement which he called The Third Wave, a movement which would put Discipline, Strength and Community above all else. He came up with a strict code of conduct, uniform, symbol and a salute. To his astonishment, within days, the movement grew beyond his classroom and added a couple hundred more members. 

The symbols, salute and uniform began to appear everywhere. When he asked the students to inform him if they encountered anyone who failed to follow the rules or criticized the movement, around 30 students came forward to report fellow students, some volunteering to punish them. Some students even came forward to serve as bodyguards to the teacher, out of concern for his safety.

Within days the experiment and the movement began to lose control, the teacher announced a rally in which the members would finally meet their leader and where the announcement of a Third Wave presidential candidate would be televised. When hundreds of teens gathered for the rally they were faced with an empty screen. The teacher informed them that they were in fact participants in an experiment about the nature of fascism.

The experiment has since been dramatized and put into books, television and films. I myself became aware of it when my father, a theater director, directed it for the stage… in the TV movie called The Wave from 1981, when the students gather for the rally, the teacher reveals their true leader and the screen shows Adolf Hitler. 

I think that The Third Wave experiment delivers a teaching that is unfortunately still very relevant. The lonelier and more fragmented our society becomes, the more we feel the need to belong, to be a part of something, even if it means to conform. The rise in fascist tendencies and authoritarianism worldwide is not accidental. The need to belong and to find meaning becomes so crucial, that in some situations it would inevitably crush any resistance to it, any minority opinion, and with it, human rights.

Our Torah portion this week, Nitzavim, has a verse which beautifully describes this tendency.

In one of his last speeches to the Israelites in the wilderness Moses reminds the people of the covenant that they have with God, them and all generations which will come after them. But there will be among them those who will break that covenant and will be drawn to idol worship:
 

וְהָיָ֡ה בְּשׇׁמְעוֹ֩ אֶת־דִּבְרֵ֨י הָאָלָ֜ה הַזֹּ֗את וְהִתְבָּרֵ֨ךְ בִּלְבָב֤וֹ לֵאמֹר֙ שָׁל֣וֹם יִֽהְיֶה־לִּ֔י כִּ֛י בִּשְׁרִר֥וּת לִבִּ֖י אֵלֵ֑ךְ לְמַ֛עַן סְפ֥וֹת הָרָוָ֖ה אֶת־הַצְּמֵאָֽה׃

“When hearing the words of these sanctions, they may imagine a special immunity, thinking, “I shall be safe, though I follow my own willful heart”—to the utter ruin of moist and dry alike.”

This is a difficult verse to unpack and it was of course confronted by many commentators. The first part of the verse is easier to understand - I can be safe if I just follow my heart… the term שרירות לב used in this verse - refers to a stubborn and sealed heart, one that does as it wishes with no consideration of its surroundings.

The second part of the verse is a bit more confusing, and it could be translated in many different ways. I would translate it as “because the quenched will eliminate the thirsty.”

Out of the vast commentary on this, I thought I would bring two interpretations which, funny enough, directly contradict one another. Sforno, the Italian 16th century commentator explains that “The quenched will eliminate the thirsty '' means that the person who will follow his or her stubborn heart feels protected by the fact that the rest of the nation walk in God's way and are blessed. Directly opposite to Sforno is Chizkuni, a medieval French commentator, who explains that the person with the stubborn heart wishes not to be alone in his evil ways. That “the quenched will eliminate the thirsty” means that if everyone is evil, then no one could judge them for being evil as well.

To me these are two sides of the same coin. Whether you think you’d get away with something because everyone around you is righteous or everyone around you is evil, either way, you remove responsibility from yourself, you trust that you will be protected by the many whether they are right or wrong. 

When Hannah Arendt coined the term “The banality of evil,” she was referring to men like Adolf Eichmann (the orchestrator of the “Final Solution” - the man who was in charge of the deportations of millions of Jews to death camps) who was an uninteresting bureaucrat, a man whose main goal in life was not necessarily to exterminate the Jews, but to be promoted. In recent years and through the publication of the Eichmann Tapes, it became clear that Eichmann was more than just a bureaucrat, and that he did have a strong inherent hatred towards the Jews; but either way, in the terms of our portion, he felt that he was safe following his sealed and stubborn heart, because the society around him had protected him from judgment, even for the worst imaginable crimes.

In her Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt also stressed the importance of resisting conformism rather than relying on it: “... Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition…..” She continues: “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” 

The Third Wave experiment has sadly shown that in reality, given a similar situation, very few of us would actually be able to stand against the collective. It is very likely that almost all of us, had we lived as German citizens during the Second World War, would not have risked ourselves and the well being of our family in resisting the Nazis. Some of us would have probably joined them and the rest would have tried to survive the war quietly while taking care of their own needs.

Our Torah portion comes to remind us that the collective might choose one path or another, but that the responsibility is individual. And until we find within ourselves the ability to take that responsibility, regardless of the path that the collective takes, no one is safe.