the problem is twofold and each reason is dependent on the other. people dont want to believe that evil exists in this world because evil is a terrible thing to ponder; the idea that someone can murder six million people, or fly planes into buildings, or…rape a child…we dont want to believe it possible. but theres a cognitive dissonance where that is concerned because evil stares us in the face daily and challenges us, daring us to acknowledge and fight it; so what do we do?
so we explain evil away. we say that the victims of the holocaust died because someone spoke in shul. we say that leiby kletzky died because teenagers are being oiver negia, we say that kids and parents are lying when they call rape on a rebbi or a rav or a neighbor. and the, after discrediting the victims of these heinous crimes, we stigmatize it–we say that there is something wrong with the victim, that they either deserved it, or had it coming, or are now unclean and unfit for humanity because they suffered.
and then we throw them out of our communities because this just doesnt happen, “Not In My BackYard.” and we become the very evil from which we flee, constantly looking our shoulders with dread, with fear, with absolute terror, not for the actual evil, but for those who remind us of that evil–the victims of that evil.
and then somthing ironic happens. we run so far from the wrong thing, the thing that is not itself chasing us, that when we finally settle down, secure in our distance from that which we fear, we are actually closer to the very evil we think we have fled. and then it happens to us.