Of time and evil
I entered the world of The Lord of the Rings through the movies that were made in the early 2000s. I watched them in a theater, in Paris, with a couple of friends who were already hooked because of the books. I rewatch them occasionally, mostly in the extended versions. We went through all twelve hours with my wife this past year, over a period of a few months, watching twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there, whenever we could sit and focus on something, usually while eating.
It’s only when I started reading the books that I realized how much the movies were just an adaptation, however truthful. I knew it was missing whole segments of the story: I remember my friends having a whole conversation about Tom Bombadil, and whether or not he was truly missing from the cinematic experience. But I didn’t realize that crucial points were taken out, for “dramatic reasons”, and thus missing out on a lot of meaning.
Case in point: in the movie, Frodo receives the ring after the party and leaves the Shire almost immediately. I was almost shocked to read that in the book, Frodo doesn’t leave then, not after a few days, or even a few weeks. In the book, Frodo leaves 17 years after the party!
I understand why they left that part out: nothing much happens during these seventeen years, which are summarized in just a few paragraphs. How tempting it is, on the silver screen, to use a cut to go from one scene to the other, so that the storytelling seems more fluid. But these seventeen years are important.
Because during this time, evil grows. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Most people are not aware of it, but small signs seem to appear, small indications that, to anyone in the Shire who would be paying attention, seem to point to the fact that something isn’t quite right: “There were rumors of strange things happening in the world outside”.
For one, Elves are gradually departing from Middle Earth. They pass silently through the Shire, and leave. Second, the evil that was in Mirkwood and that had been pushed further, in a faraway land, now uses it as a base to spread. But the distance makes it almost unimportant. Finally bad creatures are more and more numerous: “Orcs were multiplying again in the mountains. Trolls were abroad, no longer dull-witted, but cunning and armed with dreadful weapons. And there were murmured hints of creatures more terrible than all these, but they had no name.”
Most people in the Shire are oblivious of these changes, until “even the deafest and most stay-at-home began” to hear about them.
The silent and slow growth of evil is something that we can see in our world. For one, it can, unfortunately, happen in people’s personal lives. Something does not go well. There are some small signs, here and there, but, because they are small, it’s too easy to be distracted, and to not pay attention. And slowly, slowly, these small things grow, and gather, and what was something fairly reasonable to manage becomes, when it’s finally unavoidable, something fairly big to handle.
But il also happens at a collective level, the same way it happened, in the end, for even the most oblivious Hobbits of the Shire.
For anyone living in the South of Israel, it happened right next to us, in the Gaza strip. It started almost immediately after Israel pulled out of the Strip in 2005. There were elections in January 2006; h*mas triumphed. Very soon, they executed their opponents of the Palestinian Authority. And slowly, slowly they grew. They used the money of the foreign aid to build their infrastructure of terror. Tunnels, mainly, all across the Strip, extending into Egypt (for smuggling) and into Israel (for surprise attacks). The latest estimation I heard was 800 kilometers of tunnels. More than the London and New York subways combined. Built by patiently excavating the ground, meter after meter. 800 kilometers of it (that we know of), about twice the length of Israel, from Dan to Eilat.
Slowly, they built their organization, and their country, a whole society dedicated to jih*d against Israel and to killing Jews. They developed this culture through education, through media, through the arts.
In a way, October 7 didn’t happen overnight. It was the results of 17 years of slow growth of h*mas and its network of terror.
It shouldn’t have taken experts to figure out the menace: during these 17 years, h*mas started many wars and operations against Israel, and shot thousands of rockets against the South of the country and the kibboutzim and moshavim located on the other side of the border, in Israel, in the area called “the envelope”. Their latest innovation, before the start of the war, had been to send balloons, filled with helium, with razor blades attached, and set their tail on fire to try to destroy the crops growing on the border, while hoping a child would pick up the balloon and be wounded by the blades.
During these 17 years, hmas and the other terror organizations could have been stopped a thousand times. 6,464 times to be more precise, the number of days between the elections in Gaza that saw hmas win (January 25, 2006) and the day of Shabbat shroura (the black shabbat), on October 7, 2023.
6,464 times when the “international community” could have stepped in and stopped the infernal process from being deployed. When the security council could have voted resolutions to curb the power of h*mas, when UNRWA could have reformed its schools, and curricula, when any US administration (both republican or democrat) could have stepped in and say: “daï!”, enough.
6,464 times when the Israeli government, both in its left, center, and right version, could also have settled the matter once and for all, rather than relying on what was called “haConceptsia”, a completely distorted version of the reality on the ground, that was false, but convenient to deal with all the different sides of the Israeli society and the international players. All, except for people living in the South, who had to pay the price of living next to a genocidal organization who was slowly preparing for the next steps.
“There were rumors of strange things happening in the world outside.” When finally, the strange things are released, their destructive power is too strong to be stopped without paying a huge price.
As the Dao De Jing writes, more than 2,500 years ago: “That which is at rest is easily kept hold of; before a thing has given indications of its presence, it is easy to take measures against it; that which is brittle is easily broken; that which is very small is easily dispersed. Action should be taken before a thing has made its appearance; order should be secured before disorder has begun.” (Chapter 64, translation James Legge)