c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) In the movie “Munich,” Steven Spielberg tells the story of five covert hit men, recruited to avenge the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists during the Olympic Games in 1972. The film has been controversial because, blending fact and fiction, the avengers wrestle with the ethics of their mission and Spielberg appears to argue for moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian motives.
While he has been quoted in the media as being “always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened,” the director seems to believe that a righteous revenge is hard to pull off.
“A response to a response doesn’t really solve anything,” he said in a Time interview. “It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.” Conflict in the Middle East has created “a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?”
How can it end, indeed, if the impulse for revenge is so deep-seated that not only nations engage in it, but almost all of us feel it, think about it and sometimes act on it?
For the moment, set aside “Munich” and the violence that separates Israelis and Palestinians, and consider how revenge plays out in our everyday lives.
Revenge goes by many names: getting even, paying back, settling a score or restoring justice. Rarely does it involve claiming one life for another, or even an eye for an eye, but it can preoccupy us in school, at home, at work, even when we’re driving a car.
“People want justice,” says Tony Farrenkopf, a clinical and forensic psychologist in private practice in Portland, Ore. Many of his patients come to him for help in handling real or perceived slights that they believe demand revenge.
He says the desire for justice is something that human beings learn: As early as grade school, we begin to equate justice with fairness and develop the expectation that life should be fair. But add that expectation to anger, and the combination is often a desire for revenge.
Farrenkopf tries to help his patients see that forgiveness, whether or not they are religiously observant, is a way to help themselves get past the hurt and begin healing. Sometimes, he says, he urges patients “not to look for justice, but to live with what is.”
The concepts of justice and revenge may be as old as the human race, says William Ian Miller, whose book “Eye for an Eye” (Cambridge University Press, $28, 304 pages) examines the relationship between the law of the talion _ repayment in kind _ and the value of justice.
The law of the talion is what most Westerners recognize as the biblical passage “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” It’s found, in some form, in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But it shows up in many cultures, from the Aztecs to early Iceland, across time and around the world. Usually, Miller says, the law of the talion was not a license to seek any revenge one wanted, but a limit on what revenge the surrounding culture would consider appropriate.
“There is no meaningful distinction between revenge and justice,” Miller says. Both concepts go back to an understanding that any gift, whether it is positive or negative, must be repaid in order to restore justice, or equilibrium, between two parties, he says.
“How can we talk about justice anywhere without using the diction of paying?” he asks. In many languages _ English, Latin, German and Hebrew, for example _ the words for “peace” and “pay” come from similar roots, he says. Peace demands that we all pay our debts, he argues.
“Since when is it moral not to pay our debts?” Miller says. “Human beings do well when we keep revenge to compensative limits.” And, yes, there is a line that human beings can cross so that disproportionate revenge becomes something that no culture can support.
“Going postal is not revenge,” he says, referring to violent rampages that sometimes occur in the workplace when an employee feels mistreated. “Some of our most famous stories are about these lines,” he adds. “Achilles goes way over the line. That’s why his is a grand story and, in the end, a short life.”
The Greeks who gave us Achilles and the “Iliad” have influenced the way we think about revenge, says Kenneth Zanca, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Marymount College in Palos Verdes, Calif.
“Plato said that revenge is an unworthy act,” Zanca says. “It dehumanizes the person who is doing it. … In the Greek line of thought, back as far as the `Iliad’ _ the greatest story of revenge _ it dehumanizes and it escalates into more violence.”
From a religious perspective, he adds, the Judeo-Christian traditions have two ways to look at revenge. The lex talionis passage from the Hebrew Bible allowed revenge but restricted it, Zanca says. “If you had come into my village and killed my daughter, my village couldn’t go over and kill your village.” Revenge had to be proportionate to the original wrong.
“In the Sermon on the Mount,” he says, “Jesus turns away from the lex talion.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reminds the crowd of the “eye for an eye” passage, but calls on them to love their enemies and turn the other cheek when someone strikes them.
The human capacity for rationalization is the reason why personal revenge is not a good idea, he says. “We can rationalize anything; we can distort the hurt that we have received and we can distort the pain we give in return. When we are hurt, we are not in the best frame of mind to assess the harm that has been done to us or the harm that we can do.”
The capacity to step back and not react automatically is probably what stops most of us from acting on every hurt that we perceive, says Sandy Shulmire, a Portland-area psychologist in private practice who used to work at an elementary school.
She remembers teaching students that they had a range of responses to a situation in which they were hurt, from ignoring it, walking away or talking it over to getting an adult (or professional) to help.
“Revenge is one of the great themes of literature and history,” she says. “Between countries, revenge is really about who can look the biggest and the scariest, with the idea that if you are the biggest and the scariest the others will back down and you will feel safe.”
That may be the dynamic at work on a global level. For his part, Spielberg told Time magazine that the solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict is thinking rationally and talking “until you’re blue in the gills.”
A few months after its December release, “Munich” is fading from theaters and being replaced with other, less complicated tales of retaliation and revenge. Who knows whether we’ll see ourselves in those stories any better than we saw ourselves in “Munich”?
“We didn’t see ourselves in that story,” says Zanca, the philosophy and religious studies professor. “We are always blindest to our own deepest motivations.”
MO PH END HAUGHT
(Nancy Haught is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)
Editors: To obtain a photo of cover of “Eye for an Eye,” go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
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