The Hole in our Boat

A tale from the Talmud tells of a boat at sea which has several passengers on it.  After a while, one of them becomes bored.  He takes out a drill and begins to peel away layers of wood as a threatening hole begins appears at the bottom of the boat.  The other passengers suddenly become alarmed and shrieked, “You are going to make the whole boat sink.  Stop!”   The man, undisturbed, replies, “Don’t worry I am only drilling under my seat.”

Sounds like a joke but it is not.  It is a two-thousand year old parable.  What the story tells is that the things we do impact others.  Nothing we do; no act performed, is done in a vacuum.  One person decides they want to sink the boat and will have an impact on others.

Cries of “Save us!” have been screamed across the Atlantic Ocean aimed at us through the past decades.  Throughout the African continent, voices have gone unheeded from the Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria….  Defenseless against the onslaught civilians cry to be heard.  No response.  And so the murderous assaults continue even as the world dithers about what course of action to take.

Ever wonder why suicide is against the law?  If the general rule of thumb is that what one does in the privacy of one’s home is only their concern, then suicide ought to be not bother anybody.  And yet we, as a society, roundly condemn such acts against the self.  The only reason for the prohibition of suicide is the cessation of life; the very act of ending, affects the rest of us. 

In our time we have an international gathering of some fifty-three countries we call the United Nations.  In the aftermath of a massive war that enveloped the world, the most influential countries gathered to form the League of Nations.  Powerless to prevent the next World War, the League of Nations disbanded only to be reborn and renamed the United Nations.  Its rightful mandate is to make the world more humane.

Is the world more humane than it was?

Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of one-third of his country in the 1970’s.  The term “Ethnic Cleansing” was only introduced recently in Yugoslavia.  Then there was the brutal half million murders that happened in Rwanda.  Each time these acts of genocide were being done, the world knew.  It was widely reported and subsequently ignored by the world just as news of the Holocaust was turned aside fifty years before.

The United Nations has yet to take a meaningful position on the horrors of our day.   A hole is being drilled as we sit in our small boat.  Someone needs to shout a warning that we are all in danger.