Confederate Monuments-Alabama

In this Aug. 25, 2016, file photo, a a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis sits on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. The Alabama Legislature has approved a bill Friday, May 19, 2017, that would prohibit the removal of historic monuments that have stood for more than 40 years. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves, File)

(Jay Reeves)

Rabbi Jonathan Miller

By Jonathan Miller, Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham

I am trying to understand the affection many Southerners have for the monuments and symbols of the Confederacy.

Our first home in the Birmingham area was in a neighborhood named after Civil War battles more than 150 years ago. During these battles, America lost 2 percent of its population to battlefield casualties. If we consider the wives and sisters and children and parents who grieved for these soldiers on both sides of the war, the number of people who personally suffered grows exponentially. And considering the fact that the Southern states seceded from the Union in order to preserve its way of life which was dependent on the institution of slavery and built on the backs of cruel taskmasters parading as gentle men and women, it is astonishing to think of this war as a moment of honor.

Why would people living in Alabama want to memorialize the Civil War, let alone remember these battles as moments of Southern glory?

The South lost.

And as painful as that was for people living in Alabama so many decades ago, I am glad about that. We kept our place in the United States of America. We abolished the stain of slavery, even though the legacy of slavery and its later bigotry and racism still make life hard for the people whose ancestors were bought and sold as chattel.

And slavery, it should be noted made life far more complicated for the slave owners and traffickers and bounty hunters who were sucked into the vortex of exploitation and violence against human beings. Slavery was and is morally wrong, and its discontinuance should be celebrated by every person of every color and religious faith. So why are some in the South in love with the symbols of the Confederacy, particularly when they are symbols of people who lost their war and who inflected pain on their fellow human beings?

I am a Jew. I am sensitive to symbols which haunt my historical memory. The Nazi symbol of the swastika evokes fear and terror for me. When I see it, I feel the pain of the terrible cruelty that Germany and Europe inflicted on their citizens and my people. It makes me shudder.

I have traveled to Germany. At first, I did not want to go. I did not want to hear the German language or admire German architecture or German culture. It brought back too many painful images for me. But I have found my travels to Germany to be healing to some degree.

The German people regret the Holocaust when they slavishly followed history's cruelest madman and perpetuated the worst crimes against humanity. While they may exist in dark alleyways, I did not see any swastikas or jackbooted soldiers or Hitler look-alikes trying to recapture the imagined glory of the Third Reich at its most powerful.

Instead, the German people preserved their history without trying to whitewash it. On the streets of Berlin and Frankfurt and Munich are small monuments of remembrance. "Behind this wall was a Jewish school." "Here was a Jewish home/business." "On such and such a date, Jewish people were gathered in this spot and deported to (name the concentration camp) where they were killed."

Monuments like these, monuments of remembrance remind the people of Germany of the evil their forbearers perpetuated in a brief but devastating period of historical lunacy. In Germany today, the goal of the monuments is not to celebrate German power or to romanticize the period when the German Volk reigned supreme. Instead, the goal is to remember, to acknowledge responsibility, and then to pledge that this kind of hatred will never be perpetrated in the future against other human beings.

I believe that we Southerners should insist that we erect new monuments. We should not revere the generals and soldiers who lost their battles and died for an immoral cause. Of course we should remember the casualties and dignify their losses to their family and community. Of course we should remember the families who mourned for the dead sons and husbands and brothers who suffered terribly wearing the Confederate uniform and acknowledge their bravery and sacrifice. But we should not honor the cause for which they gave the ultimate sacrifice. That cause was unjust.

We should erect monuments of places where slaves were bought and sold. We should erect monuments to the unnamed men and women and children whose back breaking work built our economy and sustained the privileged few. We should erect monuments to the men and women of faith who resisted slavery and worked for reconciliation and wholeness and peace.

The South has many heroes. We should be proud of them and celebrate them. We should also be wise enough to know who our true heroes are.