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June 2006

With Stephen Spielberg’s film Munich now available on video, many of us may be watching it. I watched the film this week. It was, in fact, such a painful film to watch that I had to watch it in installments over three days. Louise couldn’t watch it at all.

From the reviews I’d read, I had expected that the idea of the film was, somehow, to provide justification or sympathy for those who perpetrated the massacre of Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics. I’d expected a film libeling Israel and humanizing Palestinians.

Jim Levinson, Sh'liach Tzibur, and immediate past president of BAJC, Rachel Prabhakar
 

That isn’t at all the message I got from the film, one which focused primarily on the Israeli force seeking retaliation for that massacre. The primary message which did come across to me is that, whether we believe such retaliation justified or not – whether we consider it effective deterrence or not – the individuals carrying out this retaliation will never be the same again. Killing does that to people. We weep for all the innocent who are killed in terrorist acts and in retaliation. But we also weep for Avner – the film’s protagonist – and everyone like him who has killed, and will never again be at peace.

Perhaps the most compelling moment in the film is a dialogue between Daniel, a member of the Israeli retaliatory team – he used to be a toy maker, now he makes bombs – and Avner. It goes like this:

Daniel: We’re Jews, Avner. Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong.

Avner: We can’t afford to be that decent anymore.

Daniel: I don’t know that we ever were that decent. Suffering thousands of years of hatred doesn’t make you decent. But we’re supposed to be righteous – that’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish. That’s what I knew. That’s what I was taught…And now I’m losing it. I lose that, that’s everything. That’s my soul.

I find that poignant beyond words. And I can’t stop thinking about it…

B’Shalom,

Jim