Today, I really miss Nashville. For the last week, the weather here in Claremont has resembled December-weather in middle Tennessee - bullet gray skies, drizzly-misty-not-actually-rain-but-wetness-nonetheless, and cold enough to warrant more than my fair share of tea and hot chocolate to keep warm at work. It's the weekend of the Vanderbilt Divinity School reunion, too - I'm not one of those folks who jumps at the chance for reunions, but you can bet big bucks that I would be there if we lived close enough.
In the midst of my home-away-from-home-sickness, I called and left a message for Victor Judge, VDS's registrar, my senior project advisor, and one of the dearest people I have ever met. I took several classes with him, and for one of those classes he assigned the book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, by Philip Hallie. It's a book that I read for a required Christian Ministries class at APU, but my encounter with Hallie's work at VDS had a huge impact on my life and my thinking and how I understand my work in the world. So in honor of Nashville and Victor Judge, today's the day to write about Philip Hallie, number four on my list of most influential writers.
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed is the story of the French village Le Chambon, a small insulated community brought together by Andre Trocme, the local pastor. During the Holocaust, the people of this village were responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Jews, mostly children, who were trying to escape the tyrannical regimes working actively to kill them. The book points out that the people of Le Chambon did not see themselves as heros, or as people faced with a moral dilemma of how to respond to a violent political reality. They were people who saw other people who needed help, and they gave what they could in response. Their goodness - a bright spot in the midst of a very dark time - flowed out of the way they lived their lives, without thinking, without seeking credit, without anything other than genuine concern for the well-being of other people.
I've read some of Hallie's other work - he is an academic ethicist who initially started his work on the study of evil, which led him to devote his attention to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. As he studied the lives of people who committed some of the most horrendous acts of violence and dehumanization, he saw more and more that the lines between good and evil were perhaps not as clearly defined as he had once thought. Some people committed evil acts for reasons traditionally thought of as good - like the desire to provide for one's family. Others took part in good, lifesaving action for less-than-admirable reasons. For example, in a separate article, Hallie wrote about the Nazi officer responsible for overseeing the region in which Le Chambon was situated. He knew about the way the villagers were secretly harboring Jews, and he turned the other way - because he didn't want to shake up the system. He was benefiting by the state of perceived order in the region, and turning in Le Chambon to his superiors would bring chaos, which would disrupt his way of living. He wanted to appear capable in the eyes of his supervisors. Good things happened as a result of his desire to thrive in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.
Hallie has said that history is found in the study of proper names. A human life always contains both good and evil - each of us has within us the capacity for both. And as the stories of our lives unfold, we see that pushing people into stringent categories that separate and divide and label and quarantine ultimately does more harm than healing. Hallie's writing and approach to ethics has shaped the way I see the world. I'm someone who is far too comfortable with harsh judgment and black-and-white delineation of who is good and who is not. Hallie has helped me see that the people, not the ideas or abstract values, are what's really important, and that telling stories works to deconstruct the barriers we put up between each other.
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