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The Chain of Concern
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14205 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1988 |
5,440 Words |
| Author
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Richard John Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor, is director of the
Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society, New York
City. Among his many books are The Naked Public Square:
Religion and Democracy in America and The Catholic Moment: The
Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. |
"My father said the whole world is one big chain. One little part breaks and the chain is broken and it won't work anymore." These are the words of Johan, a Dutch youth who in 1941 at age seventeen became a rescuer of Jews from Hitler's Final Solution. He is one of hundreds of voices heard in The Altruistic Personality. These rescuers had in common that they wanted the world to work again, and to work morally. They were convicted of the truth that each had an obligation to keep the chain together and to do what they could to mend it where it was broken.
The metaphor of a chain is apt. One is bound and held captive by a chain. A chain suggests a matter not of choice but of duty. What they did was a matter of ultimate duty, one might say of religious duty. The word religion comes from religere, which means "to bind together," as with a chain. Because the rescuers knew themselves to be so bound, they evidenced a remarkable freedom, including the freedom to act to free others from the horror of the Holocaust. The Altruistic Personality is about the seeming paradox of freedom through obligation.
In a book that should occasion lively debate, Samuel and Pearl Oliner tell a story, but they also make an argument. And the argument is the stronger for being embedded in a story. The story is about 50,000 to 500,000 (the figures vary widely) men and women who exhibited an astonishing capacity for self-transcendence in reaching out to help Jews who had been targeted for death by the Third Reich. The Oliners estimate that for every rescuer there were ten others who were more or less supportive in helping the rescuers do what they did. Add to this the number of people who knew what was going on and "helped" by not informing the
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