By 2026, the world hardly
needed any convincing regarding the strident zeal for endless vengeance in the
Middle East, given the genocide still occurring in Gaza against the Palestinian
people. In 1945, the world had needed no convincing on just how severe, and at
what tremendous scale, state-sponsored (and engineered) hatred against a people
deemed “subhuman” could be. The 1959 film-version of Ben-Hur is saturated with
the desire for vengeance, with the antipodal motive of forgiveness only being
shown as a more powerful, and thus stronger, phenomenon at the end of the film when
Judah Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are spontaneously cured of leprosy at the
very moment in which Jesus dies on the Cross. Only in aiding Jesus with water
on his arduous way to the Cross does the Jewish man, Judah, realize the value
of the suffering man’s righteous, unmerited suffering, especially relative to
the value of even satisfied vengeance. At the moment of his death, Jesus, freed
of a mortal body, cures the two women as a result of Judah’s change of heart. The
message is that forgiveness wins over resentment and vengeance from a spiritual
standpoint.
The full essay is at "Ben-Hur."
