Whenever a crime is committed, especially one on such a scale as the Holodomor, our very being calls out for justice. This is almost a default position in humans – the answer to injustice and evil is more evil and retribution. But there is a counterweight to this – what about mercy?

Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause Against an ungodly people;
from deceitful and unjust men deliver me! For Thou art the God in whom I take refuge; why hast Thou cast me off? Why go I mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy? Psalm 43:1,2

It almost seems incongruous to speak about justice when reflecting on the Holodomor because this word would seem to have no place in what occurred in 1933. What justice are we talking about when the events are so horrendous that the mind cannot come to grips with them.

We look for justice, but there is none. Isaiah 59:11

What may help us is to realize that there are different conceptions of justice. Man’s justice often appears as tit for tat, of making the punishment fit the crime. Always, lurking just below the surface, is that thirst for vengeance. This is quite ‘normal’ for fallen man but what is normal for fallen man cannot be used as a guide and measure for people trying to live their faith.

Despotism and violence try to instill in us a myopic vision. They tempt us with the idea that justice means avenging and paying back injustice. The bloodied history of mankind shows what follows from this type of thinking – more injustice and more violence in a never-ending downward spiral. We do not change injustice through violence and repayment in kind.

We are so enamored with the view of justice being recompense for injustice – whether perceived or actual – and yet, this is but a mere shadow of the deep meaning of the concept of justice. Justice incorporates many facets: fairness, care for the needy, charity, and love, even for murderers. These are the essential ingredients for what our faith teaches about justice and the tit for tat that is often passed as the meaning of justice is that defined by a fallen world.

You…have neglected the weightier matters of the law,
justice and mercy and faith. Matthew 23:23

We often isolate justice as if it were sufficient unto itself – but that is a grievous error. We are told that justice is inevitably yoked to mercy for it protects us against the temptation of vengeance for which man has such a high proclivity. David says:

I am in great distress, let me fall into the hands of the Lord for his mercy is very great; but let me not fall into the hands of man. 1 Chronicles 21:13

He knows what lies in man’s heart and fears that he will fall into ‘man’s justice’, of retribution which does not include mercy. We must beware, as well, of seeking man’s justice as opposed to emulating God who always tempers justice with mercy. We must

…keep justice and do righteousness. Isaiah 56:1

We are often reminded that we cannot stand before God in expectation merely of justice. We have no defence for our behavior and throw ourselves completely onto God’s mercy. Justice without mercy is a caricature of what our faith teaches us.

All unjustified suffering is redemptive. Martin Luther King Jr.

The suffering that occurred in the Holodomor was unjustified but in a deep sense, it was redemptive, in the sense that it redeemed the Ukrainian people. It opened the doorway to freedom, a beautiful word and, according to Orthodox theology, one of the defining gifts conferred onto mankind.

A people who had been in bondage eventually were freed – hopelessness has been replaced by hope. Our best reply to those who call for justice is to ensure that the memory of those who perished is not erased by time and our negligence, but to ensure that their suffering continues to bring forth a harvest of goodness. It is not to point an accusing finger – oh, how easy it is to do that – at those we deem to be guilty. Our main role is to ensure that good comes out of evil, that evil deeds are repaid with deeds of good.

But let justice role down like waters,
And righteousness like an everflowing stream. Amos 5:24

Even during the bitterest of times, we must remember that,

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
His mercy never comes to an end. Lamentations 3:22-24

But there is also a warning to us that justice is important, it is not something to be ignored and cast aside as if of no importance. We must strive to spread justice and fairness in our world but we must also have God’s understanding of justice continually before us or we will descend into the maelstrom of human vengeance.

One of the lessons that we learn from the Holodomor is the futility of recompense, of vengeance. Let me illustrate this with an example. Suppose that we track down, what? – a hundred or even a thousand of the perpetrators of the Holodomor. They are brought to trial, tried, and found guilty of crimes against humanity. And we would have the self-satisfying feeling that we have brought about justice. But, underlying this is the fact that we give the impression to ourselves and to others that somehow, the lives of those found guilty balance out the deaths of millions. This kind of thinking would be a travesty and indicates to us the conclusion that for a crime as horrendous as the Holodomor, no trial comes close, no prosecution even approaches, the possibility of compensating for the crimes committed in that terrifying year – 1933.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,
and we should leave the matter in His hands. Deuteronomy 32:35

There is an impression that somehow mercy betrays weakness and negates justice. Mercy is not the way of the world where might dominates and is the common currency of governments and, too often, of inter-personal relations. What mercy points to is another way of seeing things – that the actions we experience in the course of history are not as final and decisive as we may imagine them to be. By seeking for vengeance, we are in fact immortalizing evil as if to say it has something of universal and eternal importance for us.

We learn through our faith that mercy indeed is the action through which God interacts with His creation and if this is His mode of activity, should we not, also, emulate Him? Should we not also be merciful?

What is a merciful heart? It is a heart which is burning with love for the whole creation; for humans, for birds, for beasts, for demons – for all God’s creatures. St. Isaac the Syrian

With God there is no limit to mercy and this comes from the fact that there is no limit to His love for all of His creation and for all of His creatures. This is how we are to love and this is how we are to express our mercy. We have been forbidden to judge but we have been commissioned to heal and this is what we are to do in order to properly honor the victims of the Holodomor.

I discerned the face of the Lord in everything. Psalm 16:8

Of one thing we can be sure. As the psalm says, the face of God is everywhere particularly in the faces of the victims who were killed on the fertile fields of Ukraine in 1933. They may be anonymous to us but their very names are embraced by the God who created them and loved them in spite of the evil deeds of men who tried to erase their very memory.

One of the terrible questions that confronts us in the Holodomor is meaninglessness. When we encounter the thought of so many people dying needlessly, we are struck by the seeming monolithic power of evil which denies meaning. Our cosmos dissolves into chaos and we are bereft of the basic need all humans have – meaning in life. This is the germ of the troubling feeling we have when faced with violence that obliterates meaning. But, at the very heart of the Gospels, is a description of a ‘senseless’ death, of an innocent being murdered. What we see, especially in the light of the Resurrection, is that there is no longer any ‘meaningless’ death. All these supposed meaningless deaths have been absorbed into the death of Christ who has transfigured death from a dead-end into a passageway, into meaning, into life eternal. Death has become Pascha and this is the ultimate answer to our cry for justice.

On the occasion of the eighty-fifth anniversary of the tragic man-made famine in Ukraine in 1933, we will continue to explore various thoughts on what this horrific event teaches us and what our faith says about it.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas