When I lead off in this way, it sounds like I’m talking about yesterday – but actually, this story took place exactly 31 years ago to the day. I can recall the date with accuracy because the significance of the encounter had to do with the fact that it happened on the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki: August 9th,1995.
Today is the 81st anniversary of that same dreadful event.
I can tell you this story as if it happened yesterday, because I wrote it all down as faithfully as I could as soon as I got home on that day 31 years ago.
It made quite an impression on me.
The sun was just beginning to set. Long and high horsetail clouds tapered as they were drawn in towards the deepest part of the horizon where the sun dipped into the earth. I rode my bike down Riverside Drive past Dominican lovers, up the rooted path past the mangled chainlink fence, past the skinny old men selling Italian ices.
I stopped at a balustrade overlooking the Hudson. The river lay beyond a row of warehouses and the flurry of the West Side Highway. I stopped for the view, but noticed immediately the presence of an old man with a cane.
“Isn’t it a beautiful sunset?” he said to me, as if he’d known me all his life.
“Yes it is.”
He pointed upriver towards the Palisades. “Here’s one to think about,” he said. “Do the folks looking at the sunset up at West Point see the same sunset?”
I offered a hypothesis about the relative angle of the sun and the curvature of the earth, but it wasn’t what he was driving at.
“I’ve been watching the sunset from here for more than fifty years,” he interrupted.
“Is that right?”
A billboard blocked much of the foreground, and projecting out into the water in front of us was a dock where garbage trucks spew their contents onto barges. The old man seemed to be looking into the past. His cane rested loosely in his hand and jiggled lightly in his palm as he spoke. His face was lean, and his teeth were false, but well cared for. His nose, with the rest of his face, was thin – and also in keeping was the shock of white hair that escaped from beneath a
worn out blue baseball cap. His face seemed used to smiling, but slyly.
“I grew up on this street,” he said. “Back then we had some hard times. People call it hard today, but back then we had something called “The Depression.”
“Sure, I know about it.”
“You know about it? You may have read about it son, but you wouldn’t know about it unless you lived it. Those were really tough times. If you want to hear some hard tales, I’ll tell you about those times. I mean they was rough. When the wolf came knocking, we ate the wolf!”
He paused long enough for both of us to smile.
“Yeah, I’ve lived up here on 135th street since I was a boy back in the nineteen-thirties.
Everyone knows me up here cause I’m the only Irish guy around now. Some people call me the mayor. They all know that I’ve lived here the longest. Most of the guys I used to roam around the neighborhood with when I was a kid – they’re either dead or gone. I still write some of them, but a lot of them died in the war.”
“Did you fight?”
“I certainly did.”
“In which theater?”
“In Europe. I was at Normandy, and at the Battle of the Bulge. I went all the way to Berlin!”
“No!”
He produced a card from his wallet. It said John Murray, Veteran of the Battle of the Bulge.
“I’ve lived many lives,” he said, smiling.
We were quiet for a moment and we looked down at the river.
“Sir,” I said, not taking my eyes from the water, “do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“No, go ahead.”
“On this day, fifty years ago, we dropped an atom bomb on Nagasaki. What do you think about that?”
“As long as I live,” he said to me, “I will never apologize for the bomb! That bomb ended the war! If they hadn’t a dropped it, we would’ve had to invade Japan, and I’ll tell you something son – we would’ve lost thousands and thousands of our boys. Those Japs were ruthless son, they were beasts – the most terrifying soldiers you could ever fight. They were just lining up to sacrifice themselves for their emperor. If we hadn’t dropped the bomb, they would’ve fought
down to the last man. I’m goddamn glad we dropped the bomb! If I could’ve, I would’ve dropped the bomb myself. I’m goddamn glad we dropped the bomb!”
The sunset had deepened to crimson. A barge was inching up the Hudson, making thick ripples in the otherwise calm water.
**
This evening’s scripture reading is a small but crucial snippet of a much longer cycle of stories that deal with one of the most prominent characters in the Bible – Joseph, the son of Jacob.
The moment described in this story is not pleasant. It is a painful turning point in Joseph’s destiny. Before this moment things were going swimmingly for Joseph.
After this… not so much.
This is the moment that Joseph is betrayed.
The moment that he is sold into slavery.
This story is particularly painful because Joseph is not betrayed by evil human traffickers. He is not betrayed by ugly foreigners. There are no sexual predators or criminal masterminds in this story.
He is betrayed by his kin – by his brothers.
How could such a thing happen?
You may recall that, earlier in the story, Jacob, the father of twelve sons, singled out young Joseph by giving him a beautiful coat. Jacob didn’t give any fancy clothes to any of his other sons. The father was pretty careless about the way he showed his affection. He did not bother disguising the fact that he loved Joseph more than his other sons. Jacob was the reigning patriarch. If he wanted to parade his preference in front of everyone, who was going to stop him?
So the hatred in the hearts of Joseph’s brothers was, at least partly, Jacob’s fault.
No doubt.
But Joseph took a bad situation and made it worse. Just like his father, Joseph ran roughshod over his brother’s feelings by bragging to them about his dreams – dreams in which all of Joseph’s brothers, and even his father and mother, bowed low before him.
The kid was a brat.
No doubt.
But did he deserve what his brother’s did to him?
**
After his fervent blessing of the use of the atomic bomb, John Murray, the Mayor of 135th Street, Veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, and I stood and watched the sunset for a few moments. Then he asked me a question:
“You are part Japanese aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother or your father?”
“My father.”
So the old man had known all along. I had wondered. But this knowledge had not diminished his forceful belief in the strategic necessity of “the bomb.” That never wavered. Still – though I may have imagined it, it seemed to me that his respectful silence affirmed my need. He seemed to understand that all of it – all of the gruesome history – was not only part of him.
It was part of me too.
But in the face of all this he could not offer anything more than a sigh. When he broke the silence, all he could say was:
“It was hell…”
Still, when I write about it now, it seems to me that the old man missed something important in my question, and maybe, if I had been brave, and perhaps a little less respectful, I might have pressed him on it.
When the old man talked he always talked about “the bomb.”
History has fixated on Hiroshima because, on August 6th 1945, it was the first city to be destroyed by an atomic bomb.
But there wasn’t just one bomb. There were two. Three days later, on August 9th, Nagasaki became the second populated city to be decimated by a nuclear weapon.
And it was Nagasaki that I had asked him about.
For the estimated 60 to 80 thousand people who perished in Nagasaki, this is not a minor distinction.
The cataclysmic power of America’s new weapon had already been demonstrated in Hiroshima.
And yet Harry Truman decided to drop a second bomb on Nagasaki on August 9th.
Two months after the bombings, when, in mid-October of 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer offered his resignation to the President, he confided in Truman that he was distraught about the “blood on his hands.”
Disgusted, Truman famously responded: “the blood is on my hands—let me worry about that.”
OK, mister President.
But was the second bomb necessary?
Was Hiroshima not enough to force the hand of the Japanese military? Was Hiroshima not enough to have the effect that John Murray, and every American so dearly desired – to halt a costly invasion of Japan?
These are questions that have been debated by military brass, historians, ethicists, theologians, and people of faith in the decades since the end of the second world war.
And they are questions that matter a great deal to me.
These questions are part of who I am.
**
Though on a far smaller scale, the question that we have just asked about the bombing of Nagasaki, is, in essence, the same question that we asked Joseph’s brothers.
The question, “Was it necessary?” is not that different from “Did he deserve it?”
Japan, too, was a brat. The latest arrival to the industrial revolution, the Japanese, during the Meiji Restoration (from 1868-1889) were intoxicated by the idea that they could beat the West at their own game, not only in terms of industrial production, but more significantly, in terms of military power.
The Japanese never forgot the rude awakening they experienced when, in July 1853, an American Admiral by the name of Matthew Perry, literally sailed four gunboats, unmolested, right into Tokyo harbor.
To some Japanese, this was the natural result of a national policy of isolationism. To others – those who ultimately prevailed – the appearance of Perry’s gunboats was a warning shot across the bow. It revealed how utterly vulnerable the nation of Japan was to imperialist invasion.
So when the age of feudalism collapsed in Japan in the 1860’s and power was “restored” to the Meiji Emperor, the nation jumped into high gear under the slogan Fukoku Kyohei (“Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Military”).
To the Japanese mind, at that time, militarism and prosperity were one and the same.
It wasn’t long before they were spoiling for a fight. What began as defense against imperialism, became a fever of aggression.
And when this awful transformation was taking place the core of Japan’s impressive new navy was centered in a southern port city by the name of Nagasaki.
**
A child was sold into slavery.
This is the painful outcome of the story we just heard of Joseph and his brothers.
In our contemporary terminology, we would say that a minor was trafficked.
It’s hard to put a good spin on this.
And yet, this story offers us an instructive human drama played out in miniature. We see clearly, both the dire forces of human psychology, and an illustration of moral courage – both of which might have influenced the decision making of President Truman.
When the brothers saw their kid brother approaching from a distance, they got carried away. They had been presented with a rare opportunity to deal with the little pest without their father knowing anything about it.
So they egged each other on.
They worked each other into a frenzied pitch, a “mob mentality” that made it possible for them to pursue a course of action that none of them, individually, would have had the guts to do.
“Come on, they said, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns. We can tell our father, ‘A wild animal has eaten him.’
But when the upstart actually arrived on the scene, and they grabbed him, one of the brothers, Reuben, was stricken with misgivings. He thought quickly and, interrupting the momentum of the mob, said:
“Why should we shed any blood? Let’s just throw him into this empty cistern here in the wilderness. Then he’ll die without our laying a hand on him.”
The text then clarifies that,
Reuben was secretly planning to rescue Joseph and return him to his father.
Reuben’s interruption did not halt the momentum altogether, but it did redirect it away from its murderous intent.
In this sense it was a divine interruption.
Any action that steers away from the shedding of blood is an action that chooses life…
It is an action – however small – that chooses blessing.
And is divine.
In June 1945 – two months before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, a scientist named James Franck, who had been involved in the Manhattan Project, released a report that was the collaborative work of a committee of scientists. They, like Reuben, sought interrupt the momentum toward bloodshed. They proposed that the new bombs be “demonstrated” to the United Nations, and that Japan be told that they would be used against them if they did not surrender.
Truman chose not to follow this recommendation. The demonstrations, when they came, took place over populated urban centers.
Two populated urban centers?
If Reuben’s interruption – voiced by the “Franck report” – had been heard in the heart of one man – Harry Truman – some 200 thousand lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, might have been spared.
Why should we shed any blood?
Reuben’s question is God’s question.
Why, indeed.
Amen.