Create Hope

Today was the most emotional day so far for all of us. We started out going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. Needless to say, it is impossible to go through that museum and memorial without being profoundly moved. The museum is beautifully done – with photographs, video footage from the war, video footage of Holocaust survivors telling their stories, artifacts from the Holocaust – clothing, personal items, letters, passports and identity cards, prayer books, religious items from synagogues and homes, postcards, re-creations of the camps and the train cars. It is a wonderfully executed montage of the entire experience, starting with the rise of Nazism in Germany and going systematically through the years of the World War II through every country of Europe. Needless to say, it is heartbreaking to see the images of the camps, the ghettos, the anti Jewish propaganda of those years. It is tasteful, complete and bone chilling all at the same time. I have studied the holocaust in some depth, especially during my college years, and growing up in a very Jewish town, I saw hours of footage of film that the Nazis left behind as they so carefully documented their activities so I did not expect to be particularly impacted because I’ve done this before. But there is simply no way to immerse yourself in that experience for several hours without being profoundly saddened. What was so different for me was that this time, I kept seeing all that was done to the Jews in Europe through the lens of what is happening to the Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories now and had that sinking sense that history is repeating itself. Just yesterday we met with Omar Baghouti whose organization is calling for “divestment, boycott and sanctions” with respect to Israeli goods, and today we saw advertisements, photographs and film footage of calls to boycott Jewish businesses in Germany prior to the war. “Don’t buy Jewish goods” was all over Nazi posters plastered in pre war Germany, and here we are sixty plus years later saying “Boycott Israeli products.” It’s eerie, to say the least. (Of course it is possible to distinguish the two – the call for boycott now is aimed at Israeli political and economic policy, not at the Jewish people as a people or Judaism as a religion, but still, it made me pause.) Similarly, seeing the camps, the walls of the ghettos, was uncomfortably similar to the concrete wall dividing East Jerusalem from the West Bank and cutting through Palestinian territories, and the images of the camps bore an uncanny resemblance to the prison-like checkpoint that we walked through yesterday. Those who are abused grow up to become abusers, and that principle is being played out on a national scale in this conflict. I found myself grieving the endless cycle of violence that is being perpetuated from generation to generation – “the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons” in a very real sense.

The holocaust museum reinforced my own empathy for the Jewish commitment to the State of Israel and the desperation of many Jews to preserve it as a refuge and sanctuary for Jewish people the world over. But I found myself struggling to find a way for Israel to be that place of sanctuary and safety for Jews without becoming a place of destruction and annihilation for the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who also live in this place. Trying to find a way to bridge the narratives of pain that these different groups have is proving difficult for me.

The Holocaust Museum trip ended with a visit to the Children’s Memorial which is by far one of the most moving memorials I’ve ever seen anywhere. You enter into a darkened room lit by a candle which is reflected in mirrors that go from floor to ceiling. The effect is that of millions of single candles burning in the room. You walk around the room in darkness, pierced only by the flames of these candles and hear the names of the children who died in the camps (1.5 million of them) read aloud in English and Hebrew, with their age and country of origin. Listening to that litany of names was heartbreaking. Several members of our group collapsed in sobs against the wall and had to stay there for a while to recover from the experience. The slaughter of the innocents – such a painful part of human history – “Rachel weeping for her children” - the Biblical accounts of children slaughtered by Pharoah, by Herod, children dying today in Darfur, the children lost in other ethnic cleansing wars like Bosnia and Rwanda, the children of Iraq who have died in this pointless war – the list goes on and on. One wonders when we will stop creating a world in which our children die as a result of adult stupidity.

After that heart wrenching experience, we went for lunch in East Jerusalem and had a few moments to re-enter the modern world. Then we went to Sabeel, an ecumenical Christian organization that works for peace, justice and reconciliation between Palestinian Christians and Israelis. The word “sabeel” means “the way” in Arabic. Sabeel calls itself a Palestinian Liberation Theology center and it works hard to build bridges between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Christians and Muslims here in the holy land. The woman who spoke with us, Cedar, is a 62 year old Palestinian Christian (an Anglican to boot!) who lived in Haifa with her family and was forced to leave their home in 1948 when the Zionists took over what is now the State of Israel. Cedar is a passionate and articulate woman. She remembers vividly what the Palestinians call the “Nakba” (the catastrophe) in 1948 when they were forced to leave their homes because the country was being turned over to the Zionists. Her family fled to Nazareth and it was 10 years before they could get a permit to return to Haifa. When they went back to their house, there were three Jewish families, refugees from Europe living in it. She described the sense of loss and shock that Palestinians went through at that time. They had no idea when they left that they wouldn’t be back in a matter of days or maybe weeks. They never dreamed they were leaving their homes forever. Her childhood home had been built by her grandfather and it was simply taken by Jewish settlers after she and her family fled. And they fled because they feared for their lives. She described for us vividly what it felt like to go through that experience – she said, “In May of 1948, one night I went to bed in Palestine and woke up in Israel.” She added that upon Israeli independence, she and all other Palestinians became “present absent people.” Their history, their narrative was removed from history books and not taught in school. They had no rights, they could not move freely about the country, they could not return to their homes and in many cases their jobs, they who are citizens of this land suddenly are not citizens because they are “non-Jews.” Her story was particularly poignant as she spoke about the theological and faith struggles she had after the Nakba. Did God really want the Jews to have this land? Did God want the Palestinians to leave? Does God favor one group of people over another? How do I read the Bible, which seems to say that God gave this land to the Jews as “the promised land for the chosen people.” She spoke eloquently about her struggle to integrate her identity as a Palestinian, with cultural and ethnic roots in this land, with her identity as an Anglican Christian. She struggled for many years to discern whether she could be both Christian and Palestinian. As she spoke and described the British missionary schools in which she was educated and raised, I realized that she had been subjected to a considerable amount of Christian Zionist theology and that much of her spiritual and theological struggle centered around working that out for herself.

Cedar echoed what every other Palestinian we have met so far has also said – before 1948 Christians, Muslims and Jews in Palestine lived peaceably with one another. They were friends, they lived in the same communities, shopped in the same markets, socialized with one another, respected one another’s differences. It was only with the advent of the Zionist Jewish State that these groups became enemies in this region of the world. She believes it is possible for the three groups to co-exist peacefully with one another as they once did, but not until Israel recognizes the rights of the Palestinians as whole people with rights equal to those of Israeli Jews. She repeated what others we have talked to this week also said, that they have a hard time swallowing the fact that they have fewer rights and privileges as citizens of Israel than do Jews who have never lived here. Rights and privileges do not go to “citizens” in this state but to “nationals” which means anyone, anywhere in the world who is Jewish.

Cedar spoke so eloquently and passionately about her hopes for a country where everyone is treated equally and where Palestinian Christians could live their faith and their secular lives on an equal par with Jews. She admits that the situation is deteriorating but holds on to hope that somehow God can bring people who long for peace to find a way to get there. When she finished speaking our group gave her a standing ovation. She inspired all of us with her words of hope and compassion.

Then we went to the offices of Rabbis for Human Rights, an activist organization of rabbis in Israel and around the world who work hard to protest and address human rights violations committed by the Israeli government and by Palestinians. These folks are the ones who stand in front of bulldozers that are threatening a Palestinian home, who accompany Palestinian farmers into their olive groves at harvest time so that the right wing Jewish settlers don’t shoot them or otherwise interfere with their ability to harvest their crops, who go out and rebuild demolished homes and fight in court for the Palestinians who are suffering human rights abuses. Rabbi Avit Ascherman, the Executive Director of RHR spoke to us and he was an eloquent speaker about his cause. He spoke theologically about his vision of a Judaism that operates out of the prophetic tradition of social justice. He was very passionate about God’s call to Jews to be people who care for those in the world whom no one else is caring for, to be hospitable to strangers and neighbors, to work with God to bring about “tikkun olam” the healing of the world. He reminded me so much of Rabbi Michael Lerner. So very passionate and committed both to the State of Israel and his Jewish faith, but also to doing the right thing by all the people who live in this land. He brought me and many others in the room to tears as he described an incident where he was called to a checkpoint where a Palestinian boy, 13 years old, had been grabbed by Israeli soldiers and tied to a military vehicle as a human shield. He went up to those soldiers and ordered them to release the child, which they did not do immediately but ultimately he prevailed. He recounted how later, when the child who was traumatized by the entire experience was interviewed about it, he said that he didn’t hate Jews despite what happened to him, because “a tall man in a kippah came and saved me and told me not to be afraid.” Rabbi Ascherman wants to spend his life being “a tall man in a kippah” who “saves” people who are being threatened and helps them not to be afraid. He is truly someone who walks the walk. He’s been arrested and jailed numerous times and has gone to court many times suing the Israeli government for human rights violations. He concluded his talk by exhorting all of us to “create hope” in whatever way we can in our own communities so that someday Israel can be the land it is called to be by God and all people can live in peace with one another. When he was done, he too got a standing ovation from our group, and, as the saying goes, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

All in all, this was an emotionally draining day. The sadness and grief at the perpetuation of violence from one generation to another is almost enough to make one want to give up and just live for the moment, forget about all this stuff and retreat into our cocoon of safety, which we privileged Americans can certainly do. But talking to people like those we met today is a reminder to me that God calls all of us to be better than that, to reach out to help bring healing and reconciliation to our world in whatever arena we happen to be living and working in. The work of “tikkun olam” calls us to work with God and for the brief time we have on this earth we have a job to do. In Christian terms its called “bringing in the kingdom” – or as the words of the Lord’s Prayer put it “your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” We have work to do for that “on earth” part. Along with my travel companions I hope for the courage and commitment to share in this struggle with the amazing people we are meeting over here. This land is the birthplace of three major world religions, including my own. We cannot allow it to simply disintegrate into a theater of violence and oppression.

Create hope. That’s the job description.

Amen.

(Note: Tomorrow we leave Jerusalem for Nazareth for an overnight stay. We are told there is wi-fi in our guest house, but if there are connectivity issues, I won't be able to post again until Sunday night.)