Child Sacrifice, Hamas and "The Hunger Games"
For Hamas, as in The Hunger Games, cruelty toward children seems to be the point. And Judaism and Islam both recognize the dangers of this temptation to victimize our youngest and most vulnerable.
Children of the Killing Fields, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. From an the album of photos I compiled, Children of the World
As our attention turns to the release of children held captive by Hamas, and the news that the first group has been freed, we can only imagine what traumas these kids have endured. As “luck” would have it, this hostage drama is playing itself out at the same time the long awaited Hunger Games prequel is being released in theaters.
The appearance of a film depicting the senseless, ritualized murder of children was timed perfectly for a week where the senseless murder, captivity and abuse of children has been a most disturbing reality on our minds. Aside from the Israeli children terrorized, killed and held captive, we also grieve the many innocent children lost in Gaza, additional victims of Hamas’s disregard for innocent young life. We now know that Hamas not only stored weapons and fired rockets from hospitals, but also, according to Israeli sources, in playgrounds, children’s bedrooms, schools, an amusement park and at least one swimming pool.
It is easy to conclude that this callous disregard for the lives of children is not coincidental. It cannot be ignored. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but it seems like Hamas is following an all-too-familiar road map. The accusations of child abuse that conspiracists have directed against Jews all these centuries really need to be turned in the other direction.
In the case of Hamas, the sacrificial targeting of children appears to be intentional. It’s impossible not to conclude that the goal of this malignant ideology is to protect fighters underground while children huddle in exposed alleyways, classrooms and bedrooms above them. The craven disregard for children on both sides of the border by Hamas is now being massively exposed and documented, for the first time in vivid and troubling detail.
And we are all left wondering why? How could they possibly benefit by turning their own territory into a dystopian wasteland, which they surely knew would happen when they attacked with such ferocity on October 7? Historians will be left with that question long after the rubble has been cleared. Perhaps they expected the world to save them through their sheer hatred of Israel and Jews. Perhaps they doubted the resolve of President Biden or the Israeli people. Or perhaps whatever degree of restraint they may have had was overwhelmed by an ancient human instinct for revenge and mayhem, underscored by a lingering innate urge for violence toward children.
For Hamas, cruelty toward children seems to be the point.
There is something in human nature that seems to crave violence, a drive fufilled especially by brutality toward children. That’s why the Torah, before teaching almost any other lesson, makes it clear that God does not desire child sacrifice. Abraham learns that when he binds Isaac to the altar, and the Torah explicitly distances itself from Molech worship, which involved the killing of children. From its very first chapters, and throughout the Bible, Jewish writ directs its focus toward overcoming these primal urges.
So does Islam. To quote a 9th-century hadith collection that is one of the most valued books in Sunni Islam after the Quran:
Islam has not only exterminated the very idea of human sacrifice, but has completely ended all such inhuman practices which were very common with the people before Islam.
In his landmark theological analysis, “After Auschwitz,” Richard Rubenstein says that in the Bible and beyond, sacrifices allow people to channel our natural drives toward violence, hatred and subsequent guilt into an organized, contained ritual.
The classic short story “The Lottery” places these urges in a more modern context, as a community brings random, ritualized death on an innocent in order to placate the gods and channel their own destructive inclinations. These acts of violence don’t necessarily pinpoint children - or in the case of the Bible, humans, but lurking in the back of the psyche is a dark, suppressed fear that, we, like Abraham, are just one small swipe away from slaying Isaac or (in the case of Islam) Ishmael.
Several years back, I wrote about channeling violent urges toward children in an article describing the circumcision of my son:
No parent should be denied this experience, even vicariously, of inflicting upon his child a ritualized blow so intense as to make him both shake and recoil, yet so controlled that no damage is really done, to signify that this will be the worst the child will ever know from his parent's hand. For it is from the father's hand that Abraham's knife dangles, every moment of every day.
Five hundred years ago in Peru, an Incan child was born. We don’t know her name, but scholars later named her Juanita, the man who discovered her in 1995, Johan Reinhard. Juanita was taken from her parents in infancy, marked for a unique purpose in life. One day, when she was about 11 years old or a little older, she and her elders began a long trip on foot.
It was a journey toward a high mountain, not unlike the journey taken by Isaac.
Juanita was brought up to one of the highest peaks in the Peruvian Andes, Mount Ampato, at 20,700 feet. In places like Arequipa and Cusco, these volcanoes hover over the city like unwelcome relatives – or vengeful gods. So the gods demanded a child as their price for silence, their hush money, and Juanita was it. She was the lamb.
Scientists have learned a lot about Juanita’s last moments. She was given a highly intoxicating drink made of maize, still a staple for the mountain people to this day. At that high altitude, it was enough to put her to sleep. But she was not simply left there, on the mountaintop. No, scientists have shown that her death was caused by a harsh
blow to the head from a blunt instrument, most likely wood.
Juanita was left up there, wrapped in blankets, in a fetal position, as a gift to the gods. And there she remained for 500 years.
Some of Hamas’s victims may never be so lucky as Jaunita. They were burned in their houses or tossed into ditches, or, in the case of Gazan human shields, buried in rubble.
Unlike the Peruvian princess, they may never be discovered.
In The Hunger Games, God takes the form of a totalitarian government ruling what was once called North America – there is no religion, per se – and the leaders of Panem are sadistic in their normalcy. The level of their evil is so banal, so commonplace, as to barely be noticed. The people’s spirits have been beaten to a pulp after 73 years of ritualized child murder, or so we are led to believe.
This is what the Third Reich would have looked like had it lasted another half century. Its leaders no longer strike fear – the President is played as an adult by Donald Sutherland in the initial series, not the vicious Ralph Fiennes from Schindler’s List; the fashions are more bizarre than scary. No one screams in horror at the prospect of children being thrust into a nationally televised killing field. No one flinches when the kids are tortured with fire, starvation and genetically altered creatures that would have made Mengele proud. Only the snarls of the killer dogs sound remotely Nazi.
Into this world gone mad lands Katniss, the heroine of the main series, and Lucy Gray Baird in the prequel, whose moral compasses were set in gritty, dystopian District 12, far from evil’s ground zero, the Capitol. Put in the most extreme situations, Katniss and Lucy make all the right moral choices and never let that madness change them. They are forced to kill but never murder. They risk their lives to save others, rising above the “Lord of the Flies” jungle into which they have been thrust. In a world where Jews seem to have become extinct, they are worthy heirs to Judaism's most lofty values.
If there are Jews in Panem, we don’t see them crying out against the evil. Therefore, there are no Jews.
The theater where I saw the prequel was filled mostly with young adults and teens, primarily girls. No surprise, although the books have had much more crossover demographic appeal than the “Twilight” series. For most of the film, there was silence. The viewers were rapt – dare I say, reverential, as they watched kids killing kids.
In the original film, when Cato, the most vicious of Katniss’s opponents, met his bloody demise, there were no cheers of the sort you might hear when the Wicked Witch melts or Voldemort is finally overcome. There is something deeper going on here than a simple victory of good over evil, and the young people present were tapping into that. I’ve been to jingoistic political events where adults were far less attuned to the banality of bloodlust. It made me wonder just how much this group saw Katniss as fighting their fight and bleeding their wounds. Whatever the reason, this room filled with scores of young people was as quiet as a cathedral at the end.
There was little reason to cheer. Katniss and Lucy are not so much victors as survivors. The evil apparatus remains in place. The gods of the government will demand the blood of more children next year, as expiation for the sin of rebellion. The ritualized deaths of the innocent will once again be the price for staying alive. The controlled, abuse of the young will keep chaos at bay. The kids seemed to intuit that, to an extent, what they saw on those killing fields of the Capitol goes on around them every day. Not just in Gaza or Be’eri, but everywhere, everywhere where children become invisible and human life becomes expendable.
That’s not what Judaism is teaching. For although Abraham thought God was compelling him to kill his child, high on Mount Moriah, as he was about to lower his knife, an angelic voice called out and said, “Do not lay a finger on that lad! That is NOT what God wants, Abraham!
That is NOT what religion is all about, Abraham! That is NOT what Judaism is all about! We don’t kill children – we don’t abuse children! We don’t abandon children! We don’t teach children to hate! We love them! We protect them! We teach them to love their neighbors, that all children are children of God! That’s the punch line, Abraham! I nearly had you fooled, didn’t I?” sayeth the Lord.
That, my friends, is the Jewish ethos. I’m not saying that children’s lives haven’t been tragically cut short by Israeli weaponry these past several weeks. They have. Too many have. And one is too many. But just remember who those kids were shielding, where those rockets have been fired from and where they were targeted to land. When a child dies, any child, Jews mourn. To accuse us of deliberately targeting children is to demonstrate the cruelest and most venomous form of antisemitism that exists on this planet.
But perhaps that also is the point.
In the end, “The Hunger Games” celebrates the indestructibility of the human spirit and the unquenchable thirst for freedom. But it also pays homage to the darkest side of the Dark Side, the part of each one of us that can look at systematic brutality toward children and find it to be abhorrent - but perfectly plausible.
Of course it is. Hamas just committed it thousands of times. And the world barely flinched.