Hell came out of the portal

John Podhoretz in Commentary:

Gehenna, a synonym for Hell, is a real place, or so the Bible tells us. You can see it today. It is a valley outside Jerusalem, the valley of the son of Hinnom, and it was where worshippers of the idol Moloch sacrificed children to sate their god’s hungers.

Gehenna was revived today in Newton, Connecticut, where as many as 20 children at last report were slaughtered in an elementary school this morning.

We learn in the book of Kings that in the seventh century BCE, the prophet Jeremiah demanded that King Josiah destroy the idolator’s temple in Gehenna to prevent more sacrifices to Moloch. We can presume from the newsworthiness of this act that child sacrifice was once a relatively common practice in the ancient Middle East, as we know it to have been in other pagan cultures.

The connection between the protection of children and the practice of monotheism dates back to the beginning. After Abraham becomes the first Jew, the first monotheist, he is tasked by God to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, the miracle child of his and his wife Sarah’s old age, and he takes up the task without complaint until God stays his hand. The story of Isaac’s binding, the akedah, is one of the most challenging of the Bible and is often taken to mean God was testing Abraham’s faith with the ultimate demand. But one might also say that at the very dawn of the worship of the One God, the Bible was placing the sacrifice of children outside the realm of the thinkable for the first time.

The idea that civilization is dedicated to the protection and preservation the weak and the innocent, and not about fulfilling evil impulses to defile and destroy innocence, is the root and core of the West. One cannot conceive of anything more monstrous than a person or persons who could look small children in the eye and systematically shoot them dead. Which is why this crime, among the worst crimes in American history, is not just an assault on the children, or their families, or the town of Newtown—though it is all those things.

What the killer(s) did today was nothing less than a contemporary sacrifice to Moloch, in whatever form Moloch manifests himself today—the appeasement of a voice in the head, most likely. Evil, even if it is loosed due to mental illness, is an effort to destroy the common good by making good appear powerless, ineffectual, weak. Today saw a horrifically effective effort to give evil a victory. It has opened a portal and brought Hell to earth.

Gehenna is real again.

Hell came out the portal yesterday, in Newtown. But the killer didn't open it. It's already open. Perhaps it's always been open, but it seems more open now. For the past century we have degraded human life. We discard our unwanted children before we've seen them or held them. We have sterilized the weak and 'terminated' the handicapped in the womb to breed better humans. We have contracepted and sterilized women and aborted and abandoned our babies by the hundreds of millions to control "overpopulation" in service to raw junk science. We have let preening ideological fanatics cripple insect-borne disease eradication programs in Third World countries, leaving tens of millions-- mostly children and pregnant women-- to die. We murdered six million of our brothers and sisters to "cleanse" humanity of their "race". 

Now most of us, blessedly, haven't played pivotal roles in bringing Hell to the world. But nearly all of us have stood back, excused, dissembled, rationalized evil, in one form or another. We do it in little ways, in our personal lives, in our smaller sins. Some of us do it in bigger ways, in our infidelities and divorces and greed and callousness. And sometimes that evil explodes, in Bergen-Belsen, or in a One-Child Policy clinic in Bejing, or in an anti-pesticide conclave in Stockholm, or in Planned Parenthood headquarters in New York, or in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. 

But, for most of us, we coax Hell in the small things we do, and fail to do.

We can fight back, each in his own way, against what erupted in Newtown. Evil is a simulacrum. Hell is linked-- great and small. We can defy it, each day. How are we, you and I, holding open the portal?