to not take...?
not to take...?

The first sentences don't do it for me at all.
How many subscriptions on the New Yorker do you have? One in every home?

There is always a context.

Dens

One.

Mieke

That’s undoubtedly true, and sometimes we need to be reminded of the context, but the point is a bit trite.

Mercy

The story is well written and thus moving, even though it's in fact a
metaphor, about mercy and it's opposite. So we have two archetypes,
the one the embodiment of humanism and mercy, the other a
spiritually maimed creature, whose mercilessness is to be blamed on
his cruel fate which reduced his humanity to the mere drive of
survival. But the metaphor is in some way biased, because if the
merciful is depicted in his daily life, the other in only presented
in extreme conditions, perhaps is he besides a loving husband, a
kind teacher. It seems like if the merciful has reduced the other's
personality to get a definitive answer on the questions raised by
their first confrontation. No doubt that mercy is a human and
Jewish ideal, but is it really desirable to apply it
indiscriminatingly? the sages of the Talmud state that who shows
mercy to the cruel will become cruel towards whose who deserve
mercy. It's never easy or clear-cut how to decide when to show
mercy or not, but something is clear : to be merely able to
exercise one tendency demonstrate a lack of "daath". the word is
currently translated as knowledge, but in fact it mean the capacity
to bind the emotions and the natural tendencies with the rational
understanding. So who can say that the perception of the professor
in this case wasn't more adequate (ask Andy MacNab). Perhaps is the
disabled one the other, whose indiscriminate mercy may bring as
well good deeds as disaster.

In A Guest In My Own Country – a very interesting book on the above subject - , György Konrad describes, for example, how a vicious act of treason by an enemy made him and his sister escape the holocaust.

Besides disturbing, it seems a lie beleving that there are people walking around who have NEVER experienced a single act of mercy.

Mike

Thanks for this analysis.
But in my reading the bias in the morality of this story is somewhere else.
The acts of the professor are explained by the cruelties done to him by the Nazi’s and especially by his Polish “friends”.
There is no connection between the Polish peasants and the Egyptian soldiers eating their lunch other than the professor himself.
The story tells us that we must forgive the professor because of all the suffering he endured.
This is the old and trite excuse for all aggression: suffering.

Arnon

You are right that the use of suffering to justify violence is perverse, it undermine the very notions of right and wrong, but this is only the rationalization made by the mercifull one. Of course if he embodies the ideology of the writer, it says something about a certain (relativist) humanism.