We must view each other with love instead of hate

“All Jews must die.” So shouted the Pittsburgh temple terrorist. Not the first time history has heard those profane words. What I saw in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., will forever be with me.

One display in particular — a children’s picture book, “The Poisonous Mushroom.” Published in Germany in 1938 it depicts a Jew on the cover in “mushroom form.” The stem being a hangdog face with an exaggerated nose — the Star of David on the “chest” — the cap of the mushroom making a hat.

In the book a mother is hunting mushrooms in the forest with her young son. He finds some that are poisonous and she explains there are “good mushrooms and poisonous ones.” She says, “… human beings in this world are like mushrooms in the forest.” She warns against the bad people and asks, “Do you know who these bad men are, these poisonous mushrooms of mankind?”

Little Franz exclaims, “Of course I know, mother. They are the Jews. Our teacher has often told us about them.”

After praising her son the mother lists different kinds of “poisonous Jews,” saying however nice they might seem “one must not believe them. Jews they are and Jews they remain. For our folk they are poison.”

Franz gets it. He responds, “Like the poisonous mushroom.”

And so the Nazi indoctrination — the true poisonous mushroom — spread among the children. I picture it in more recent history like that gigantic Alaskan oil slick that entrapped innocent water fowl, sticking to their feathers — matting and separating them, destroying their waterproofing, making the birds susceptible to temperature change, and bringing death by hypothermia in the cold sea. A place where they should have thrived, their home.

Obviously the 40-something Pennsylvania gunman did not grow up in Nazi Germany. But somewhere, from someone, he learned to hate Jews. It stuck to him. A poisonous slick, bringing death to him and those 11 others.

But he didn’t die, did he? I’ll argue that. Hate killed his soul long before he opened fire.

What is taught, what is learned, holds life in its hands. It builds or it destroys. I don’t always recognize how much I take in from others, or they from me. As human beings we continually influence and affect one another. Sometimes it stops me in my tracks. Because to be a builder of life day after day seems too much.

But then I encounter hate — that great destroyer. And I ask myself, “How can it ever be too much?”