The first room that one entered in the earliest Roman dwellings included a hole in the ceiling designed to vent smoke from indoor fires. Residents called this space the “atrium” because of the dull black ring of char—the Latin word for the color is “ater”—that accumulated at the edges of its primitive chimney. From “ater” came a more figurative Latin adjective, “atrox,” meaning savage or cruel—not literally dark, but metaphorically and morally so—and from “atrox,” in turn, derives our modern word “atrocity,” which has featured so prevalently in this week’s discourses about the utterly indefensible terrorist attacks and kidnappings perpetrated against the people of Israel on October 7.
That the Romans would embed darkness in their word for human savagery and cruelty would hardly have surprised the late sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, about whom I have written before, who acknowledges but rejects the ancient and durable conception of human beings as “dark angels in animal bodies.” Human aggression, Wilson contends in On Human Nature, “cannot be explained as either a dark-angelic flaw or a bestial instinct.” Rather, he argues, “human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats and to escalate their hostility sufficiently to overwhelm the source of the threat.” Our species is inclined, he writes, “to partition other people into friends and aliens, to fear deeply the actions of strangers, and to solve conflict by aggression.” These behaviors “have evolved during the past hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution,” Wilson asserts, and thus “have conferred a biological advantage on those who conformed to them with the greatest fidelity.”
How uncomfortable it is to accept that violent hostility toward “strangers” and “aliens,” to repeat Wilson’s terms, not only is encoded in our DNA but has proved evolutionarily advantageous—and yet examples from this week are impossible to refute, from the initial Hamas assaults on Sderot, Re’im, Kfar Aza, and other towns and kibbutzim in Israel, to the Israeli military response against Gaza and consequent civilian death toll, to a spate of random antisemitic attacks today that has synagogues and Jewish schools worldwide on high alert once again but that also risks engendering resurgent Islamaphobia. This week’s brutality, of course, happens to follow 20 months of sustained warfare between Ukraine and Russia, which is only one of six global conflicts that have claimed over 10,000 lives each in the last year alone, the others of which are being waged in Ethiopia, Mexico, Myanmar, the North African Maghreb, and Sudan.
Whatever advantages such barbarism may have conferred on our species over the course of its evolution, they are anachronistic to our modern era. “The learning rules of violent aggression are largely obsolete,” Wilson states. “We are no longer hunter-gatherers who settle disputes with spears, arrows, and stone axes. We must consciously undertake those difficult and rarely traveled pathways in psychological development that lead to mastery over and reduction of the profound human tendency to learn violence.” He suggests that to evolve beyond this tendency, “political and cultural ties can be promoted that create a confusion of cross-binding loyalties.” It occurs to me on reading this that, from a certain point of view, “a confusion of cross-binding loyalties” is an apt descriptor of the community we seek to build at MICDS. We are large—we contain multitudes—and we provide myriad opportunities for our students to connect and establish bonds and even friendships across ethnic, national, racial, religious, and other categories of human difference. “If the tangle is spun thickly,” Wilson says, “it will become difficult for future populations to regard each other as completely discrete.”
With an eye toward such a hopeful future, we must at the same time attend to those members of our community who are hurting immediately in the wake of this week’s atrocities—its frightening darkness—or whom events unfolding in the Middle East may impact adversely in the days and weeks to come. We enroll and care for many Jewish students at MICDS, including several with direct ancestral, familial, and cultural ties to Israel. We enroll and care for many Muslim students, too, including some with Palestinian ancestry and familial ties to the region as well. Still others in our student body have connections to war-ravaged nations and regions like those cited above—Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, and Ukraine, for example—and the prospect of hostilities between China and Taiwan, and its potential impacts on MICDS students with ties to both, warrants our consideration as well. We must support one another all the more insistently in the face and aftermath of violence, even as we do our small part simultaneously to help our species evolve beyond its violent proclivities. We must listen to and love one another ever the more intently.
In a few minutes, it will be my privilege to join the students and teachers at Saul Mirowitz Jewish Community School for Kabbalat Shabbat, which they celebrate as a time of song at the conclusion of each week of school. I am grateful to my counterpart there, Raquel Scharf-Anderson, for the invitation to be with them. As I anticipate our time together, I cannot help but recall these words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats: “Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” These lines are the refrain of his poem The Stolen Child, and they remind us of the essential role of schools through moments like the one that so many members of our MICDS community are presently enduring. Our own wonderful school must continue to be a place to come away, a place of ceaseless magic and discovery in a weeping world. We must commit ourselves to making it so, and spinning the tangle of mutual understanding and love among us thickly. I know that we can and that we will.
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you and your families for peace and hope in the days and weeks to come.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist is Mothers of the Disappeared by U2, the final track on The Joshua Tree (1987), which is cited here, here, here, here, here, and here as one of greatest albums ever recorded (Apple Music / Spotify).