The sun is setting on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Rabbi Stein’s sermon is rattling around in my brain. Thoughts of Sarajevo seem to keep coming to the fore even though it was just one of many cities we visited in the land of the former Yugoslavia. Mix that with memories of my parents and I am wondering where this is going.

Start with the March from Selma AL to Washington DC that Rabbi Stein participated in and talked about today. It is a walk that passed though sections of the country that house large patches of hatred for Blacks, for liberals, for anything that is not them. Rabbi talked about being met by groups with rebel flags and yelling invective against the marchers who must have felt threatened, but unlike 50 years ago when the police joined in with the mobs at Edmund Pettis Bridge this time they served to provide good security for the marchers.

In our wanderings Carol and I have driven many of those roads. We have been to Selma and crossed the bridge. We have been to Montgomery and seen the plaques to Jefferson Davis and to the Marchers who met Bloody Sunday on the bridge. We even found Rev King’s church in Montgomery just two or three blocks down the main road from the Alabama capitol building. These are parts where it can sometimes feel lonely as a Yankee, as a Jewish Yankee. There are reminders of the hate.

Sarajevo may epitomize to me the general nature of hate. For over 40 years Marshal Tito kept a tight lid on the Yugoslavia he was instrumental in creating out of the pieces of the Balkans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The people were Muslim, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and apparently they didn’t care much for each other,  but they lived together in relative peace because Tito and his forces, mostly Serbian, didn’t offer them any choice. They intermarried and they lived next door to each other in mixed neighborhoods, or sometimes in separate communities separated by a river and united by bridges. When Tito died and his successors were not as wily or as tough as him, the country began to disintegrate and they tried to separate. As each sought his own land they resorted to violence and ultimately the hatred of the other won out. In Sarajevo there is to this day a broad diversity of people, from Muslim to Roman Catholic to Orthodox, fewer than a thousand Jews remain. The Serbs gathered their forces on the mountains surrounding the city and sought to subdue it and make it Serbian by force. It is strange to walk through “sniper alley” today and see the mountains that come down to within a couple of blocks of the main street and know that on both sides Serbian snipers were in fortified locations waiting for anyone to pass through their sights. How must a person hate to pick off an unarmed stranger just because that person is a stranger.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, the country, is a patched together republic that has an assigned flag and an assigned national anthem, wordless, and three leaders who alternate in running the country. A major piece, Republika  Srbska, is looking to breakaway in a referendum. The definition of this region is intolerance and hatred.

We find this same intolerance in the US. The violence is there, it is mostly hidden and it is physically expressed only by the outliers. But listen to the words of Kim Davis, ignore the subject, it is the language of hate for the other. Listen to the words of so many politicians taking sides with no thought that the only way to govern is to compromise, how can compromise be reached if the sides have promised no compromise, have taken stands that leave no room for backing down. I don’t need to name names, just pick up any newspaper (if you can find one) or turn on any news channel, both the flagrantly biased and the less biased. The language of hate permeates.

I have decided that I will abjure the language, even for those I find in my heart to be despicable. I do not need to restate what they say, they say it for themselves. I cannot listen anymore to the rhetoric, I will read about actual positions where they exist and make my own decisions based on that. It is hard to not hate when surrounded by the language.

Why my parents? They felt strongly about the political health of the country. My mother was as liberal as they come and Dad too was a strong supporter of minorities and the underdog. All I have to do is look at the charities they supported and the legacy they left me of concern and support for those not as fortunate as us.