The Infamy of Human Suffering
In five hundred words Franklin Delano Roosevelt provided a stark and incisive call for a declaration of war with the Empire of Japan in response to the brutal assault on Pearl Harbor that decimated the fleet and killed 2403 personnel, military and civilian . Of those five hundred words one is forever attached to the date of the attack: Infamy. In fact, Roosevelt had first intended to emphasize December 7th as a day which will “live in world history.” This emendation defined the war as more than just a matter of thwarting expansionist nations. With the words "date that will live in infamy” the fight against Japan and by extension Germany and Italy became a battle against the forces of evil.
Infamy is a jarring word in and of itself. Infamy is connected to reputation and public opinion. Why not open with a more direct condemnation of the act as reprehensible? Regardless of what inevitable political calculations went into Roosevelt’s policies and choice of words, he revealed something powerful about the nature of the conflict against the forces of naked aggression and racial superiority.
A citation of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel about the “infamy of wicked acts” may help understand the significance here:
Righteousness is not just a value; it is …God's stake in human history. Perhaps it is because the suffering of man is a blot upon God's conscience… Or is it simply because the infamy of a wicked act is infinitely greater than
we are able to imagine? People act as they please, doing what is vile, abusing the weak, not realizing that they are fighting God, affronting the divine, or that the oppression of man is a humiliation of God.
Infamy is not in the eye of the beholder but the eye of G*d. The reputation at stake is that of our Creator which acts of cruelty and malice by human beings besmirch. Well before Japan “suddenly and deliberately attacked” Pearl Harbor, G*d’s sovereign image was being humiliated under the brutal enslavement and slaughter perpetrated by the Empire of Japan upon its neighbors and by the Nazis in Europe. In one word embedded in a succinct, gun metal gray speech, Roosevelt finally made this affront against humanity impossible to ignore