"For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come."
Hebrews 13:14
I honestly cannot remember a time... EVER... when it has felt so good to come home. I'm sure that those feelings were accentuated by fatigue and illness. And because of illness there was some serious doubt about whether we would be able to return as planned. But beyond this, there was such a feeling of frustration for me in so much of this trip. The safety and familiarity of home was a huge comfort.
Home is a simple pleasure, of course, that is not so readily available to everyone. A few of us were talking with a mom in Ramallah who was proudly displaying a graduation program from the United Nations School. Her son had recently graduated with honors, and was even one of the chosen speakers at the event. But on the back page where all the students were listed along with their nations of origin, the space after her son's name was blank. He is not allowed Israeli citizenship and Palestine is not a recognized nation.
But I am home now and trying to figure out exactly what to do with this astonishing, life-transforming experience I have just had. I am so glad that Pam was with me. I can't even imagine trying to share what I saw in words or pictures or anything else.
And I'm not sure that any of it will seem especially relevant for the people and pastors worshiping in our congregations. Certainly it will have an impact on those few individuals who have developed a special passion for this concern... but is that all? Will this translate into mission energy, commitment, faith, action, story-telling, stewardship on a local level?
For better or worse, most people respond to suffering that they can personally alleviate in some meaningful way. The problems in Palestine are so large and complicated and so far away. The hatred and grief run so deep...
But I will say that I am personally returning with a renewed passion for the importance of the Christian witness in all parts of this world. If our voice of peace with justice, confession and forgiveness, faith in things unseen, relentless engagement with real life problems despite their difficulty and ambiguity... if the light of truth and grace brought into this world by Jesus is allowed to flicker out, then there is only darkness.
So it is time to work, not only on a global political level, but also in a very immediate way. It is time to reawaken the sense of urgency and significance in our witness in every corner of our lives as well as every corner of the globe. It is time to stop trying to protect the small, provincial comfort of church as a private social club for middle class Americans and recognize that the world is going to DIE without the gospel of Jesus Christ to save it.
The icon is still up there on the chancel ceiling at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Old Jerusalem. His eyes are still searching, still probing into any eyes that are willing to be called open... "You shall be witnesses to these things."
"For it is the God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed..."
II Corinthians 4:6-9
wm
Monday, January 19, 2009
Friendship
"But speaking the truth in love, we must grow in every way into him..." Ephesians 4:15
Friday, January 16, 2009:
This was a travel day... a long, long travel day... and while I was sitting on the plane listening to people speaking Hebrew all around me, I started thinking about a lifetime of friendships within the Jewish community, 20 years of annual appearances at Holocaust Memorial Services, and all the ways that I have come to respect and honor this culture.
"Honoring" is a tricky concept, of course. I remember teaching a confirmation class years ago on the commandment to honor one's father and mother. I posed a situation to my students in which a teenage girl was living with her alcoholic father, who was once again drinking himself into a stupor on the sofa. He called out to her to bring him another beer from the fridge. "What," I asked the class, "does it look like for this girl to honor her father?" Clearly, "honor" involves more than uncritical obedience to enabling the destructive and self-destructive behavior of the one you love.
In Shakespeare's telling of the story of King Lear, the vain old king asks his three daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia to express their love for him in order to get their inheritance. The older daughters respond with effusive flattery and fawning and get rich in the process. Only Cordelia expresses her love honestly... and pays a price for it.
So now I have a big problem. My respect and affection for the Jewish people has not been altered by this trip, and I seriously doubt that it ever will be. But I have seen things in these days, and having seen I cannot unsee.
I suppose I could try to ignore what I have seen and just keep walking the safe path I have always walked before. Or I could follow the example of the US political establishment of both parties and its uncritical, self-serving compliance that masquerades as honor. Or I could step into the camp of the Christian Zionists whose fawning and flattery will, in the end, I fear, prove to be no true friend to Israel.
But, obviously, none of these choices will work. I will have to take my chances with honesty, and fairness, and listening, and speaking, and humility about the layers and layers of complication in this conflict, even as I continue to bear witness to my experience... And, even though this is the only way that I know how to love and honor with integrity, I am confident that I will pay a painful price for this choice.
"For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?" Mark 8:36
wm
Friday, January 16, 2009:
This was a travel day... a long, long travel day... and while I was sitting on the plane listening to people speaking Hebrew all around me, I started thinking about a lifetime of friendships within the Jewish community, 20 years of annual appearances at Holocaust Memorial Services, and all the ways that I have come to respect and honor this culture.
"Honoring" is a tricky concept, of course. I remember teaching a confirmation class years ago on the commandment to honor one's father and mother. I posed a situation to my students in which a teenage girl was living with her alcoholic father, who was once again drinking himself into a stupor on the sofa. He called out to her to bring him another beer from the fridge. "What," I asked the class, "does it look like for this girl to honor her father?" Clearly, "honor" involves more than uncritical obedience to enabling the destructive and self-destructive behavior of the one you love.
In Shakespeare's telling of the story of King Lear, the vain old king asks his three daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia to express their love for him in order to get their inheritance. The older daughters respond with effusive flattery and fawning and get rich in the process. Only Cordelia expresses her love honestly... and pays a price for it.
So now I have a big problem. My respect and affection for the Jewish people has not been altered by this trip, and I seriously doubt that it ever will be. But I have seen things in these days, and having seen I cannot unsee.
I suppose I could try to ignore what I have seen and just keep walking the safe path I have always walked before. Or I could follow the example of the US political establishment of both parties and its uncritical, self-serving compliance that masquerades as honor. Or I could step into the camp of the Christian Zionists whose fawning and flattery will, in the end, I fear, prove to be no true friend to Israel.
But, obviously, none of these choices will work. I will have to take my chances with honesty, and fairness, and listening, and speaking, and humility about the layers and layers of complication in this conflict, even as I continue to bear witness to my experience... And, even though this is the only way that I know how to love and honor with integrity, I am confident that I will pay a painful price for this choice.
"For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?" Mark 8:36
wm
Multiculturalism
"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and nations and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb..." Revelation 7:9
Thursday, January 15, 2009:
Today was a sick day. Actually, I got sick on the bus on Tuesday afternoon on the way back from seeing the site of some of the Palestinian housing demolitions in East Jerusalem. It was a pretty severe stomach flu that for some reason started with a sudden drop in my blood pressure. I wasn't particularly worried about it, but it scared my poor traveling companions a little bit... mostly because at the time, our bus was in a long line of traffic waiting to get through a check point in the wall. After hearing stories about people who had delivered babies in the car or watched their parents die of heart attacks trying to get to a hospital on the other side... well, it made the whole issue of access distinctly personal.
In any case, instead of touring the churches in Galilee and taking a boat ride on the sea, I stayed in the hotel on our last day, sitting in 70-degree sunshine on a balcony overlooking the beautiful inland lake where Jesus' ministry all began, gazing across toward the snow-capped mountains of Syria. Despite the sickness, it felt really good to stop running for a minute and just be here.
It was also a time to begin thinking about how all this connects to life at home. In particular, today I was thinking about the great divide here between nations, and the way in which it is an extremely exaggerated expression of some of the things we struggle with in our synod concerning "multiculturalism." We are trying. But I still don't really feel like we have got this one figured out.
The familiar pattern is for a dominant culture to incrementally digest, or assimilate a smaller and less powerful culture until the two become one flesh. The end result is a dominant culture that might be slightly altered by the process, but that looks mostly the same as it did before. And the subordinate cultural is almost completely lost.
The other approach is institutionalized segregation, where some congregations represent one culture and other congregations represent another and then we more or less compete for which culture is going to dominate the attention of the synod's energy and resources. The cultures are preserved nicely. But we end up with something that feels more compartmentalized than multicultural.
Clearly this is one face of the struggle here. Palestinians are looking for ways to preserve the integrity and autonomy of Palestinian culture in proximity with an Israeli culture that is becoming increasingly dominant. If Palestinian culture is sufficiently weakened, in order to survive, Palestinians will feel more and more pressure to allow themselves to be assimilated as a powerless underclass.
On the other hand, the two-state solution offers to compartmentalize the society, probably with a wall between the sides, that may preserve the individual cultures nicely... but that will make cultural exchange, trade, and even civil conversation increasingly difficult.
Looking for some third choice seems to be a major component of the work of the ELCJHL and our partnership with them. There are small but important signs that the work for peace with justice is making a difference in individual lives and neighborhoods. But the cultural history of hatred and violence is a formidable mountain to climb. Our sisters and brothers here really need our prayers, our support, and our advocacy.
Back home, I think that the key to a breakthrough on multiculturalism rests in finding ways to take the dividing walls of hostility between cultures, turn them on their side and transform the walls into tables... tables of grace where each discrete group brings something from their own culture to the table to pass... and so to nourish all who gather there. Can we do this?
wm
Thursday, January 15, 2009:
Today was a sick day. Actually, I got sick on the bus on Tuesday afternoon on the way back from seeing the site of some of the Palestinian housing demolitions in East Jerusalem. It was a pretty severe stomach flu that for some reason started with a sudden drop in my blood pressure. I wasn't particularly worried about it, but it scared my poor traveling companions a little bit... mostly because at the time, our bus was in a long line of traffic waiting to get through a check point in the wall. After hearing stories about people who had delivered babies in the car or watched their parents die of heart attacks trying to get to a hospital on the other side... well, it made the whole issue of access distinctly personal.
In any case, instead of touring the churches in Galilee and taking a boat ride on the sea, I stayed in the hotel on our last day, sitting in 70-degree sunshine on a balcony overlooking the beautiful inland lake where Jesus' ministry all began, gazing across toward the snow-capped mountains of Syria. Despite the sickness, it felt really good to stop running for a minute and just be here.
It was also a time to begin thinking about how all this connects to life at home. In particular, today I was thinking about the great divide here between nations, and the way in which it is an extremely exaggerated expression of some of the things we struggle with in our synod concerning "multiculturalism." We are trying. But I still don't really feel like we have got this one figured out.
The familiar pattern is for a dominant culture to incrementally digest, or assimilate a smaller and less powerful culture until the two become one flesh. The end result is a dominant culture that might be slightly altered by the process, but that looks mostly the same as it did before. And the subordinate cultural is almost completely lost.
The other approach is institutionalized segregation, where some congregations represent one culture and other congregations represent another and then we more or less compete for which culture is going to dominate the attention of the synod's energy and resources. The cultures are preserved nicely. But we end up with something that feels more compartmentalized than multicultural.
Clearly this is one face of the struggle here. Palestinians are looking for ways to preserve the integrity and autonomy of Palestinian culture in proximity with an Israeli culture that is becoming increasingly dominant. If Palestinian culture is sufficiently weakened, in order to survive, Palestinians will feel more and more pressure to allow themselves to be assimilated as a powerless underclass.
On the other hand, the two-state solution offers to compartmentalize the society, probably with a wall between the sides, that may preserve the individual cultures nicely... but that will make cultural exchange, trade, and even civil conversation increasingly difficult.
Looking for some third choice seems to be a major component of the work of the ELCJHL and our partnership with them. There are small but important signs that the work for peace with justice is making a difference in individual lives and neighborhoods. But the cultural history of hatred and violence is a formidable mountain to climb. Our sisters and brothers here really need our prayers, our support, and our advocacy.
Back home, I think that the key to a breakthrough on multiculturalism rests in finding ways to take the dividing walls of hostility between cultures, turn them on their side and transform the walls into tables... tables of grace where each discrete group brings something from their own culture to the table to pass... and so to nourish all who gather there. Can we do this?
wm
Trees
"For you shall go out with joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." Isaiah 55:12
Monday, January 12, 2009
Trees are a big deal for me. They always have been. It's hereditary. My dad was a huge lover of trees and believed firmly that each of his sons should have a tree of his own (he didn't have any daughters, or they would have gotten a tree too!) Mine was a peach tree that I planted with him by placing the mortal remains of a fresh summer peach into the ground out behind our garage. So it seemed oddly fitting that when my dad died, the memorial gifts were targeted for the Arbor Society.
Dad did not grow up Lutheran, but in this regard, he fell remarkably in line with the spiritual heritage of our tradition. Luther once said that if he knew the world were going to end tomorrow, he would spend today planting a tree as a sign of hope and trust in God's continuing love for the world.
For me, there is so much in trees... the way they give so freely to create an atmosphere that makes this planet habitable... the way their long lives stand above the brief span of time allotted to us mortals... the way they reach all the way down into the earth while at the same time reaching all the way up into the heavens. What's not to love? They are worth planting, worth saving, and worth protecting from the poisons that threaten to seep into roots and branches alike from the toxic environment all around them.
But this morning we focused on the nurture of a different sort of orchard: the seedling Palestinian children attending our Lutheran School in Ramallah. These kids are so beautiful inside and out that it takes your breath away. We watched as a large group of them danced for us; traditional Palestinian folk dancing, costumes and all... light as feathers, and yet so unbelievably deeply rooted in the soil and the history of this land. Afterwards, a seveth-grade boy from the troup, named Qusai, took a small group of us on a tour of his school. He showed me the class picture on the wall that included his older brother, now at the University, and told me of his own plans to become a doctor and then return to serve the people of Ramallah. Later, while our group was standing around talking and having tea, Qusai came and found me again. He had a key in his hand, and he wanted to take me on a private tour of the science lab. We are pen pals now. He left me with his e-mail address, and this is one correspondence I intend to keep up. I want to see how this young tree grows.
It isn't easy to grow tall and strong there, of course. Lots of poison in the air and soil. We came upon one high school student who was asking his teacher if they could take a field trip to the borders of Gaza. He wanted to smell the burning flesh of his sisters and brothers there so he would never forget...so much poison in the ground water...
Later in the afternoon we went to Beddo, where we each had a chance to plant a small olive tree along the Palestinian side of the wall. Of all the experiences of this trip, this day was the one that rooted itself most deeply in my soul... You see, when I was installed as a bishop in 2007, some very dear life-long friends, a Jewish couple that Pam has known for 50 years, decided to mark the occasion by having a tree planted in my name in Israel. It was a deeply moving gift at the time; now, even more so. So now, it seems, I have a tree on either side of the wall.
Grow, Qusai. Don't ever forget the soil you are planted in. Don't ever stop reaching for the sky above your head. Stretch your roots toward the pure water that will keep your soul strong and your heart open, and who knows? Maybe someday I will be able to come back. And you and I can take a walk together and see both of my trees growing in the very same orchard.
wm
Monday, January 12, 2009
Trees are a big deal for me. They always have been. It's hereditary. My dad was a huge lover of trees and believed firmly that each of his sons should have a tree of his own (he didn't have any daughters, or they would have gotten a tree too!) Mine was a peach tree that I planted with him by placing the mortal remains of a fresh summer peach into the ground out behind our garage. So it seemed oddly fitting that when my dad died, the memorial gifts were targeted for the Arbor Society.
Dad did not grow up Lutheran, but in this regard, he fell remarkably in line with the spiritual heritage of our tradition. Luther once said that if he knew the world were going to end tomorrow, he would spend today planting a tree as a sign of hope and trust in God's continuing love for the world.
For me, there is so much in trees... the way they give so freely to create an atmosphere that makes this planet habitable... the way their long lives stand above the brief span of time allotted to us mortals... the way they reach all the way down into the earth while at the same time reaching all the way up into the heavens. What's not to love? They are worth planting, worth saving, and worth protecting from the poisons that threaten to seep into roots and branches alike from the toxic environment all around them.
But this morning we focused on the nurture of a different sort of orchard: the seedling Palestinian children attending our Lutheran School in Ramallah. These kids are so beautiful inside and out that it takes your breath away. We watched as a large group of them danced for us; traditional Palestinian folk dancing, costumes and all... light as feathers, and yet so unbelievably deeply rooted in the soil and the history of this land. Afterwards, a seveth-grade boy from the troup, named Qusai, took a small group of us on a tour of his school. He showed me the class picture on the wall that included his older brother, now at the University, and told me of his own plans to become a doctor and then return to serve the people of Ramallah. Later, while our group was standing around talking and having tea, Qusai came and found me again. He had a key in his hand, and he wanted to take me on a private tour of the science lab. We are pen pals now. He left me with his e-mail address, and this is one correspondence I intend to keep up. I want to see how this young tree grows.
It isn't easy to grow tall and strong there, of course. Lots of poison in the air and soil. We came upon one high school student who was asking his teacher if they could take a field trip to the borders of Gaza. He wanted to smell the burning flesh of his sisters and brothers there so he would never forget...so much poison in the ground water...
Later in the afternoon we went to Beddo, where we each had a chance to plant a small olive tree along the Palestinian side of the wall. Of all the experiences of this trip, this day was the one that rooted itself most deeply in my soul... You see, when I was installed as a bishop in 2007, some very dear life-long friends, a Jewish couple that Pam has known for 50 years, decided to mark the occasion by having a tree planted in my name in Israel. It was a deeply moving gift at the time; now, even more so. So now, it seems, I have a tree on either side of the wall.
Grow, Qusai. Don't ever forget the soil you are planted in. Don't ever stop reaching for the sky above your head. Stretch your roots toward the pure water that will keep your soul strong and your heart open, and who knows? Maybe someday I will be able to come back. And you and I can take a walk together and see both of my trees growing in the very same orchard.
wm
Strength
"For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." I Corinthians 1:18
Sunday, January 11, 2009:
The signs of physical power are everywhere in Israel. Virtually all Israelis serve in the military between the ages of 18 and 21, so in all public places in Israel and in the Palestinian areas under military occupation, young uniformed soldiers carrying machine guns and various other weaponry are a looming presence.
I had brief interactions with a few off-duty soldiers, and, honestly, they just seemed like normal, happy teenagers. On duty, they take their jobs very, very seriously... so much so, that it became clear at a couple of points that the civilian officials leading our group had little or no authority over the soldiers... who operate by procedure and protocol only.
For average Israeli citizens, this manifestation of strength seems to be genuinely comforting and reassuring. I, however, am a baby boomer. My sensibilities about such matters were formed when I was 18 - 21 by events like Kent State and the Chicago Democratic Convention. I mostly experienced this display of force as terrifying. And even though its power was undeniable, for an outsider with my values and background, it felt more fearful than strong.
So what is strong and what is weak? It seems to me that the answer to this question is largely determined by what we believe to be the highest or most central virtue... the greatest good. If the greatest good is personal wealth and power, then all other virtues are "relative goods" whose value is measured by how well they serve my acquisition of wealth and power. I may still see generosity as a virtue... but only if I can use my generosity as a tax advantage.
If the greatest good is survival, as it probably is for most people in the world, then all other virtues stand in service to this ultimate value. Strength is represented by anything that insures or at least maximizes the probability of survival, including the use of violence. Things like freedom, economic opportunity, and education for those outside my community may still be seen as a good thing. But if members of those outside communities are seen as a threat to the survival of the inside community, then all those other virtues quickly fall to a place of no value at all until the perceived threat disappears.
This is a point where Christians from outside the social and political context of Israel and Palestine need to tread with caution. I have never faced a real experience or a real threat of personal or communal annihilation, and this very fact limits my ability to enter into the subjective reality of Jews and Palestinians.
Nonetheless, as a Lutheran Pastor, I have a responsibility to explain in every context and in every situation, that in a theology of the cross, physical survival is not and cannot ever be the greatest good. In a theology of the cross, the highest virtue is surrender, that is, the freedom to voluntarily release my attachments to possessions, land, ideologies, habits... even life itself, for the sake of Christ's vision of the Reign of God...
"Strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." Matthew 6:33
This does not mean that I don't enjoy my life or that I don't care to live. It does mean that if the only way for me to survive is to crush the freedom, the dignity, or the value of another human being, then my survival takes a back seat.
So this is pretty weird stuff. It is, as it has always been, just plain foolishness to some and a huge stumbling block to almost everyone else, but to those who are called to it, it is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Within the Christian community, being embraced by the "strength of the cross" calls us every single day into a new and often agonizing spiritual wrestling match with whether or not we actually believe and live by the vision of strength that we preach.
In our conversations with those beyond the Christian community, we should not be naive about the fact that our core ethical value sounds to almost everyone like weakness... and to most, pretty much like self-annihilating nonsense... so much so, that I am not entirely sure that rational debate on the subject is even possible. We simply have to live it, and then wait to see how others respond to the witness of our lives.
wm
Sunday, January 11, 2009:
The signs of physical power are everywhere in Israel. Virtually all Israelis serve in the military between the ages of 18 and 21, so in all public places in Israel and in the Palestinian areas under military occupation, young uniformed soldiers carrying machine guns and various other weaponry are a looming presence.
I had brief interactions with a few off-duty soldiers, and, honestly, they just seemed like normal, happy teenagers. On duty, they take their jobs very, very seriously... so much so, that it became clear at a couple of points that the civilian officials leading our group had little or no authority over the soldiers... who operate by procedure and protocol only.
For average Israeli citizens, this manifestation of strength seems to be genuinely comforting and reassuring. I, however, am a baby boomer. My sensibilities about such matters were formed when I was 18 - 21 by events like Kent State and the Chicago Democratic Convention. I mostly experienced this display of force as terrifying. And even though its power was undeniable, for an outsider with my values and background, it felt more fearful than strong.
So what is strong and what is weak? It seems to me that the answer to this question is largely determined by what we believe to be the highest or most central virtue... the greatest good. If the greatest good is personal wealth and power, then all other virtues are "relative goods" whose value is measured by how well they serve my acquisition of wealth and power. I may still see generosity as a virtue... but only if I can use my generosity as a tax advantage.
If the greatest good is survival, as it probably is for most people in the world, then all other virtues stand in service to this ultimate value. Strength is represented by anything that insures or at least maximizes the probability of survival, including the use of violence. Things like freedom, economic opportunity, and education for those outside my community may still be seen as a good thing. But if members of those outside communities are seen as a threat to the survival of the inside community, then all those other virtues quickly fall to a place of no value at all until the perceived threat disappears.
This is a point where Christians from outside the social and political context of Israel and Palestine need to tread with caution. I have never faced a real experience or a real threat of personal or communal annihilation, and this very fact limits my ability to enter into the subjective reality of Jews and Palestinians.
Nonetheless, as a Lutheran Pastor, I have a responsibility to explain in every context and in every situation, that in a theology of the cross, physical survival is not and cannot ever be the greatest good. In a theology of the cross, the highest virtue is surrender, that is, the freedom to voluntarily release my attachments to possessions, land, ideologies, habits... even life itself, for the sake of Christ's vision of the Reign of God...
"Strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." Matthew 6:33
This does not mean that I don't enjoy my life or that I don't care to live. It does mean that if the only way for me to survive is to crush the freedom, the dignity, or the value of another human being, then my survival takes a back seat.
So this is pretty weird stuff. It is, as it has always been, just plain foolishness to some and a huge stumbling block to almost everyone else, but to those who are called to it, it is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Within the Christian community, being embraced by the "strength of the cross" calls us every single day into a new and often agonizing spiritual wrestling match with whether or not we actually believe and live by the vision of strength that we preach.
In our conversations with those beyond the Christian community, we should not be naive about the fact that our core ethical value sounds to almost everyone like weakness... and to most, pretty much like self-annihilating nonsense... so much so, that I am not entirely sure that rational debate on the subject is even possible. We simply have to live it, and then wait to see how others respond to the witness of our lives.
wm
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Dehumanization
"For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." Ephesians 2:14
Saturday, January 10, 2009:
In a telephone interview with Jerome McDonnell of Chicago Public Radio for broadcast on Worldview, January 12, he asked me one question I was not expecting and that I did not want to answer. I have listened to the interview and, thankfully, he did not include my somewhat evasive answer. But I can't stop thinking about the question.
Mr. McDonnell had read of my recent trip to South Africa and asked if I thought that the situation in Palestine was the same as South African Apartheid. Many on the ground in Palestine believe and have openly said that it is an apartheid condition.
I am always reluctant to transfer labels like this from one situation to another. It isn't helpful. Words like, "apartheid" are not just words. They are emotional concept clusters, and the minute you use the word people stop listening to what you are saying, and instead they start relating to how they FEEL about the word. Words like apartheid, holocaust, genocide, Nazi, red neck, and even liberal all qualify as emotional concept clusters and should be used very, very sparingly in public discourse.
Beyond this, I am reluctant to generalize, and thereby trivialize, the experience of my sisters and brothers in South Africa under Apartheid as something that applies to every situation where people hate each other. Apartheid was an extraordinary if not unique social experiment in which the government of the dominant subculture blatantly legislated an elaborate social, legal, and economic system designed to crush the spirit of a larger but subordinate indigenous culture. There is no defense or security rationale for Apartheid that is equivalent to the genuine security concerns facing Israel. And the structures of oppression in Israel and Palestine though real and terrible have not yet been quite so openly and unapologetically hard wired into the legal system.
And yet... there is a relationship between the situations that is unmistakable.
It seems to me now that there is a continuum involved in the process of "dehumanizing" our perceived enemies with each step along the way making the next step possible. Even though dehumanization does not always express all the stages of the path, what is important is to realize the denial and desensitization that we are capable of.
The most common form of dehumanizing is STEREOTYPING which is simply making broad generalizations about members of a group based on a few perceptions of individuals; perceptions that, in and of themselves, may or may not be accurate. To say that Swedes are "tight" might apply to some of the members of my family... but not to my mother.
Sometimes stereotyping crosses over into a very egregious form called RACISM which brings prejudiced attitudes into the more elaborate social structure of exclusion and privilege that characterizes our own culture here in the United States.
Racism then leads pretty easily into a system of social SEGREGATION which can be formal or informal, as in the case of segregated schools, segregated churches, segregated neighborhoods, segregated athletic teams and country clubs, a segregated military, etc.
When segregation becomes a legal formality it often leads to SEQUESTERING or "ghettoizing," where groups are actually living within a walled or legally defined patch of geography that everyone knows about and that everyone can see. Sometimes "ghetto" is just a word for a poor racially segregated neighborhood. Actually the word applies more accurately to things like Native American Reservations, the Warsaw Ghetto of the Nazi era, or the interment camps that the United States developed during World War II to "keep Japanese Americans safe."
This, I think, is about the point at which APARTHEID enters the continuum as a legislative scheme that not only keeps the subordinate group away from the dominant group. It is designed to fragment the subordinate group into a hundred isolated sub-groups thereby making it virtually impossible for them to communicate or to organize for change.
By the time a society reaches the point of apartheid the "other" has been so dehumanized by the dominant system that GENOCIDE is only a small step away, because people in the dominant group can be fairly easily persuaded that genocide is really nothing more than the extermination of unwanted vermin. To some degree, wars require a genocidal mentality to be in place. Allied soldiers in World War II killed Nips and Krauts. No one killed Hans, whose two children were waiting at home for a letter from their loving dad.
For me, as an outside observer in Israel and Palestine the physical presence of the wall puts this society somewhere in the sequestering stage. From the point of view of the Israelis, who have so recently been the victims of genocide and who live every day under threats of genocide again by their radicalized neighbors, sequestering may perhaps feel like a relatively humane response. I don't know.
As I have tried to think of analogies to what I have seen, the closest I can find is the westward expansion of Northern European Americans across the prairies and plains of North America during the 17th-19th centuries... first explorers, then nomadic traders and trappers, then settlements, then towns, then cities... always needing more land and more resources and more security... until the indigenous people were crowded into geopolitical islands called "reservations," utterly surrounded by the dominant culture around them, utterly dependent upon that dominant culture, and yet isolated from it and from the cultures of other reservations...unable to create an autonomous economic, social, and political structure, too proud to acquiesce, too weak to establish independence, with resistance reduced to frightening but ultimately ineffectual uprisings (what we now call terrorism).
Whether or not my poor attempt to understand the situation here is accurate doesn't really matter. It does matter for people to see that once the trend toward dehumanizing the "other" has begun, there is a horrifying numbness that allows it to passively and uncritically move to the next stage. To stop or reverse the relentless progression of dehumanization requires tremendous courage, awareness, commitment and energy.
And what may matter most for Christians is to remember that whatever form dehumanization takes, and whatever stage it is in, our baptismal vocation requires us to be among those who stand against the demonic process of dehumanization and who work tirelessly to re-humanize those who have been dehumanized. In this particular case, our call to keep humanity fully human includes the delicate task of boldly confronting the dehumanizing structures that are being built WITHOUT DEHUMANIZING ISRAELIS IN THE PROCESS. If we allow ourselves to be polarized and co-opted in this way, the danger to us is that instead of being an expression of the solution, we ourselves will become a new expression of the problem.
wm
Saturday, January 10, 2009:
In a telephone interview with Jerome McDonnell of Chicago Public Radio for broadcast on Worldview, January 12, he asked me one question I was not expecting and that I did not want to answer. I have listened to the interview and, thankfully, he did not include my somewhat evasive answer. But I can't stop thinking about the question.
Mr. McDonnell had read of my recent trip to South Africa and asked if I thought that the situation in Palestine was the same as South African Apartheid. Many on the ground in Palestine believe and have openly said that it is an apartheid condition.
I am always reluctant to transfer labels like this from one situation to another. It isn't helpful. Words like, "apartheid" are not just words. They are emotional concept clusters, and the minute you use the word people stop listening to what you are saying, and instead they start relating to how they FEEL about the word. Words like apartheid, holocaust, genocide, Nazi, red neck, and even liberal all qualify as emotional concept clusters and should be used very, very sparingly in public discourse.
Beyond this, I am reluctant to generalize, and thereby trivialize, the experience of my sisters and brothers in South Africa under Apartheid as something that applies to every situation where people hate each other. Apartheid was an extraordinary if not unique social experiment in which the government of the dominant subculture blatantly legislated an elaborate social, legal, and economic system designed to crush the spirit of a larger but subordinate indigenous culture. There is no defense or security rationale for Apartheid that is equivalent to the genuine security concerns facing Israel. And the structures of oppression in Israel and Palestine though real and terrible have not yet been quite so openly and unapologetically hard wired into the legal system.
And yet... there is a relationship between the situations that is unmistakable.
It seems to me now that there is a continuum involved in the process of "dehumanizing" our perceived enemies with each step along the way making the next step possible. Even though dehumanization does not always express all the stages of the path, what is important is to realize the denial and desensitization that we are capable of.
The most common form of dehumanizing is STEREOTYPING which is simply making broad generalizations about members of a group based on a few perceptions of individuals; perceptions that, in and of themselves, may or may not be accurate. To say that Swedes are "tight" might apply to some of the members of my family... but not to my mother.
Sometimes stereotyping crosses over into a very egregious form called RACISM which brings prejudiced attitudes into the more elaborate social structure of exclusion and privilege that characterizes our own culture here in the United States.
Racism then leads pretty easily into a system of social SEGREGATION which can be formal or informal, as in the case of segregated schools, segregated churches, segregated neighborhoods, segregated athletic teams and country clubs, a segregated military, etc.
When segregation becomes a legal formality it often leads to SEQUESTERING or "ghettoizing," where groups are actually living within a walled or legally defined patch of geography that everyone knows about and that everyone can see. Sometimes "ghetto" is just a word for a poor racially segregated neighborhood. Actually the word applies more accurately to things like Native American Reservations, the Warsaw Ghetto of the Nazi era, or the interment camps that the United States developed during World War II to "keep Japanese Americans safe."
This, I think, is about the point at which APARTHEID enters the continuum as a legislative scheme that not only keeps the subordinate group away from the dominant group. It is designed to fragment the subordinate group into a hundred isolated sub-groups thereby making it virtually impossible for them to communicate or to organize for change.
By the time a society reaches the point of apartheid the "other" has been so dehumanized by the dominant system that GENOCIDE is only a small step away, because people in the dominant group can be fairly easily persuaded that genocide is really nothing more than the extermination of unwanted vermin. To some degree, wars require a genocidal mentality to be in place. Allied soldiers in World War II killed Nips and Krauts. No one killed Hans, whose two children were waiting at home for a letter from their loving dad.
For me, as an outside observer in Israel and Palestine the physical presence of the wall puts this society somewhere in the sequestering stage. From the point of view of the Israelis, who have so recently been the victims of genocide and who live every day under threats of genocide again by their radicalized neighbors, sequestering may perhaps feel like a relatively humane response. I don't know.
As I have tried to think of analogies to what I have seen, the closest I can find is the westward expansion of Northern European Americans across the prairies and plains of North America during the 17th-19th centuries... first explorers, then nomadic traders and trappers, then settlements, then towns, then cities... always needing more land and more resources and more security... until the indigenous people were crowded into geopolitical islands called "reservations," utterly surrounded by the dominant culture around them, utterly dependent upon that dominant culture, and yet isolated from it and from the cultures of other reservations...unable to create an autonomous economic, social, and political structure, too proud to acquiesce, too weak to establish independence, with resistance reduced to frightening but ultimately ineffectual uprisings (what we now call terrorism).
Whether or not my poor attempt to understand the situation here is accurate doesn't really matter. It does matter for people to see that once the trend toward dehumanizing the "other" has begun, there is a horrifying numbness that allows it to passively and uncritically move to the next stage. To stop or reverse the relentless progression of dehumanization requires tremendous courage, awareness, commitment and energy.
And what may matter most for Christians is to remember that whatever form dehumanization takes, and whatever stage it is in, our baptismal vocation requires us to be among those who stand against the demonic process of dehumanization and who work tirelessly to re-humanize those who have been dehumanized. In this particular case, our call to keep humanity fully human includes the delicate task of boldly confronting the dehumanizing structures that are being built WITHOUT DEHUMANIZING ISRAELIS IN THE PROCESS. If we allow ourselves to be polarized and co-opted in this way, the danger to us is that instead of being an expression of the solution, we ourselves will become a new expression of the problem.
wm
Walls
"As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat." Joshua 6:20
Friday, January 9, 2009:
Walls are archetypal images with layer upon layer of significance in the human psyche. In scripture they are a distinctly ambivalent symbol. A strong case can be made for seeing the "Torah" itself as a wall... the law of God that defends the order of creation under the dome of the sky from being overwhelmed by the chaos of the "deep" that threatens to crash in from beyond the dome. In the story of Noah, the flood is not exactly from a heavy rainfall. The heavens open, as Genesis tells us, as God's sin-corrupted handiwork is washed away in the primordial chaos.
In this sense, the image of a wall is not unlike the Lutheran notion of the "first function of the law," which becomes a bastion of protection against the forces of chaos that are always threatening to crash in and obliterate Christian society... or the individual Christian locked in a valiant struggle against sin. The strong wall of the law, placed as a sword in the hand of temporal authority, was a particularly important image in Luther's time, of course, as all of Western Europe trembled in the face of the gathering horde of "Turks" assembling at the gates of Vienna.
On the other hand, scripture often portrays walls as a hostile presence that either tries to hold the power of God out of the place where God needs to go (as in the case of the walls of Jericho) or as structures that vainly and naively try to limit and contain God, or hold the God of freedom in protective custody (as in the case of the room where the post-crucifixion disciples huddled in fear, or the tomb itself, that could not hold God captive for long).
In Bethlehem, the wall dominates the consciousness of everyone living on either side of it... a 25-foot gray concrete canvas upon which appears a continually growing mural of the anger, frustration, and fantasy life of the people who live here... an opaque curtain studded with towering bullet proof parapets that scream "Stay away if you know what's good for you." Standing in the shadow of this wall is, quite possibly, the ugliest and most terrifying structure I have ever seen. The only thing in my experience that even comes close was my visit in 2003 to the remains of the Berlin Wall and its vacated checkpoints, now transformed into a grim monument to human folly... well, no, I shouldn't forget about my reaction to the walls of the townships of South Africa that made every home into a detainment compound... and, well, I guess I might have the same response to the new wall being built on the southern border of the United States as sure defense against the tired and poor coming north from Mexico and Central America...
From the Israeli side, the wall is, I suppose, an image of necessity, power, protection, and a defiant cry of "never again" from a people who have known over and over again through history the real experience of being pushed back, pushed out, or even pushed into the sea. What is perhaps less conscious is the way in which this wall also perpetuates a culture of fear and hyper vigilance.
From the Bethlehem side; that is, the Palestinian side, the wall doesn't just stand; it moves... like a gargantuan trash compactor closing in and relentlessly squeezing all the fresh air, all the freedom, all the prosperity, all the joy, all the hope from the population trying to hold on there. In Bethlehem there is less and less room in the inn every day.
On Friday night we traveled by bus from Bethlehem to West Jerusalem to attend an evening shabbat service, which, of course, meant driving through the check point. In this particular case, the soldiers at the gate made the arbitrary decision that this bus load of Americans with purple shirts was suspicious enough to make us get off the bus and walk through the check point. Pam and I were at the front of the bus so we were the first ones into the building, which we could only enter one at a time through a remotely controlled, eight-foot steel turnstyle. It wasn't too crowded at 5 pm on Friday, so we could only begin to imagine what it would be like for hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians on Monday morning waiting in line from 2 or 3 am in hopes of getting through the checkpoint in time for work. We went to the first turret-- home to an 18 or 20-year-old soldier who checked our passports and decided to let us pass into another open room that looked sort of like a big public shower... with no showers. We ambled around a concrete block wall to another set of locked turnstyles protected by another uniformed adolescent with a machine gun who was arguing through the bullet-proof window of his own private cell with a Palestinian woman and her two children trying to get through. Pam and I decided to wait for the family to get through before we approached. The guard, and the woman, waved us on through. We deferred; they insisted; so we passed the gate in front of her, but then decided to wait and watch on the other side. By this time the guards had caught onto who our group was and opened another turnstyle allowing our group to pass through freely. Still we waited and watched. A line of other Palestinians came to the turret from the other direction presumably returning home, and they waited in line while the argument with the woman continued. I wanted to stay to bear witness to what happened next... but our bus was waiting, so we passed by on the other side of the road...the one designated for the children of privilege.
"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it." Matthew 7:13-14
The fascinating thing about walls is that it is not entirely obvious which side of the wall is the inside and which is the outside. From one side, the wall is a source of security that keeps the bad guys out and the good guys in...that keeps poverty out and prosperity in... that keeps oppression out and keeps freedom in. From the other side the wall is an instrument of oppression that keeps freedom out and despair in, opportunity out and poverty in. It was difficult on this journey to find Israeli officials who did not see the wall as a necessary bastion against annihilation. And it was impossible for me to talk for five minutes with any Palestinian who did not see the annihilation of the wall as the first step toward freedom and hope.
But, actually, who lives on the inside of the wall, and who lives on the outside? It is not always clear. The best answer I have been able to come up with is that the outside of the wall is always the side where the light shines the brightest...
Which brings me to the work of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land... and particularly the work of Pastor Mitri Raheb of Christmas Lutheran Church, Bethlehem, who is building the most astonishing mission of light and hope in an environment of anger and frustration and poverty and doubt, reminding people with every new advance that "the wall is not the limit; the sky is the limit." He does not mean by this that the wall is not a problem. He is merely redirecting the energy of his people from the problem to the solution. So they build schools and they work on job opportunities and they serve the poor and they build the community infrastructure wherever they can... The ELCJHL continues to build schools in Ramallah and Beit Sahour, and Beit Jala, and to strengthen the health ministry at Augusta Victoria Hospital...and simply listening to people like Mitri and Bishop Munib Younan of the ELCJHL brings up the candle power in the room by an order of magnitude...
But on the other side of the wall, we attended that shabbat worship and had conversation with a group of Israeli peace activists, and on another night we listened to the witness of an Israeli man, named Rami, who even though he lost his precious teenage daughter to a suicide bomber, spends his life fighting in the face of overwhelming popular derision to bear witness to the insanity of fighting violence with violence, and then later we were taken on a tour of Jerusalem by a young Israeli who works for an organization called Israeli Citizens Against Home Demolitions, who was one of the most thoughtful, compassionate, dedicated young adults I have met anywhere.
And gradually it became clear that there is no outside or inside to this wall. The darkness looms large on both sides. The light is shining on both sides. And it may well be that hope will come for this land as people on both sides learn to stop fleeing into the darkness of fear, cruelty and violence and instead turn their faces and their energy toward the light of peace, security and freedom for everyone... which will, of course, render the wall quite unnecessary.
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." John 1:5
wm
Friday, January 9, 2009:
Walls are archetypal images with layer upon layer of significance in the human psyche. In scripture they are a distinctly ambivalent symbol. A strong case can be made for seeing the "Torah" itself as a wall... the law of God that defends the order of creation under the dome of the sky from being overwhelmed by the chaos of the "deep" that threatens to crash in from beyond the dome. In the story of Noah, the flood is not exactly from a heavy rainfall. The heavens open, as Genesis tells us, as God's sin-corrupted handiwork is washed away in the primordial chaos.
In this sense, the image of a wall is not unlike the Lutheran notion of the "first function of the law," which becomes a bastion of protection against the forces of chaos that are always threatening to crash in and obliterate Christian society... or the individual Christian locked in a valiant struggle against sin. The strong wall of the law, placed as a sword in the hand of temporal authority, was a particularly important image in Luther's time, of course, as all of Western Europe trembled in the face of the gathering horde of "Turks" assembling at the gates of Vienna.
On the other hand, scripture often portrays walls as a hostile presence that either tries to hold the power of God out of the place where God needs to go (as in the case of the walls of Jericho) or as structures that vainly and naively try to limit and contain God, or hold the God of freedom in protective custody (as in the case of the room where the post-crucifixion disciples huddled in fear, or the tomb itself, that could not hold God captive for long).
In Bethlehem, the wall dominates the consciousness of everyone living on either side of it... a 25-foot gray concrete canvas upon which appears a continually growing mural of the anger, frustration, and fantasy life of the people who live here... an opaque curtain studded with towering bullet proof parapets that scream "Stay away if you know what's good for you." Standing in the shadow of this wall is, quite possibly, the ugliest and most terrifying structure I have ever seen. The only thing in my experience that even comes close was my visit in 2003 to the remains of the Berlin Wall and its vacated checkpoints, now transformed into a grim monument to human folly... well, no, I shouldn't forget about my reaction to the walls of the townships of South Africa that made every home into a detainment compound... and, well, I guess I might have the same response to the new wall being built on the southern border of the United States as sure defense against the tired and poor coming north from Mexico and Central America...
From the Israeli side, the wall is, I suppose, an image of necessity, power, protection, and a defiant cry of "never again" from a people who have known over and over again through history the real experience of being pushed back, pushed out, or even pushed into the sea. What is perhaps less conscious is the way in which this wall also perpetuates a culture of fear and hyper vigilance.
From the Bethlehem side; that is, the Palestinian side, the wall doesn't just stand; it moves... like a gargantuan trash compactor closing in and relentlessly squeezing all the fresh air, all the freedom, all the prosperity, all the joy, all the hope from the population trying to hold on there. In Bethlehem there is less and less room in the inn every day.
On Friday night we traveled by bus from Bethlehem to West Jerusalem to attend an evening shabbat service, which, of course, meant driving through the check point. In this particular case, the soldiers at the gate made the arbitrary decision that this bus load of Americans with purple shirts was suspicious enough to make us get off the bus and walk through the check point. Pam and I were at the front of the bus so we were the first ones into the building, which we could only enter one at a time through a remotely controlled, eight-foot steel turnstyle. It wasn't too crowded at 5 pm on Friday, so we could only begin to imagine what it would be like for hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians on Monday morning waiting in line from 2 or 3 am in hopes of getting through the checkpoint in time for work. We went to the first turret-- home to an 18 or 20-year-old soldier who checked our passports and decided to let us pass into another open room that looked sort of like a big public shower... with no showers. We ambled around a concrete block wall to another set of locked turnstyles protected by another uniformed adolescent with a machine gun who was arguing through the bullet-proof window of his own private cell with a Palestinian woman and her two children trying to get through. Pam and I decided to wait for the family to get through before we approached. The guard, and the woman, waved us on through. We deferred; they insisted; so we passed the gate in front of her, but then decided to wait and watch on the other side. By this time the guards had caught onto who our group was and opened another turnstyle allowing our group to pass through freely. Still we waited and watched. A line of other Palestinians came to the turret from the other direction presumably returning home, and they waited in line while the argument with the woman continued. I wanted to stay to bear witness to what happened next... but our bus was waiting, so we passed by on the other side of the road...the one designated for the children of privilege.
"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it." Matthew 7:13-14
The fascinating thing about walls is that it is not entirely obvious which side of the wall is the inside and which is the outside. From one side, the wall is a source of security that keeps the bad guys out and the good guys in...that keeps poverty out and prosperity in... that keeps oppression out and keeps freedom in. From the other side the wall is an instrument of oppression that keeps freedom out and despair in, opportunity out and poverty in. It was difficult on this journey to find Israeli officials who did not see the wall as a necessary bastion against annihilation. And it was impossible for me to talk for five minutes with any Palestinian who did not see the annihilation of the wall as the first step toward freedom and hope.
But, actually, who lives on the inside of the wall, and who lives on the outside? It is not always clear. The best answer I have been able to come up with is that the outside of the wall is always the side where the light shines the brightest...
Which brings me to the work of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land... and particularly the work of Pastor Mitri Raheb of Christmas Lutheran Church, Bethlehem, who is building the most astonishing mission of light and hope in an environment of anger and frustration and poverty and doubt, reminding people with every new advance that "the wall is not the limit; the sky is the limit." He does not mean by this that the wall is not a problem. He is merely redirecting the energy of his people from the problem to the solution. So they build schools and they work on job opportunities and they serve the poor and they build the community infrastructure wherever they can... The ELCJHL continues to build schools in Ramallah and Beit Sahour, and Beit Jala, and to strengthen the health ministry at Augusta Victoria Hospital...and simply listening to people like Mitri and Bishop Munib Younan of the ELCJHL brings up the candle power in the room by an order of magnitude...
But on the other side of the wall, we attended that shabbat worship and had conversation with a group of Israeli peace activists, and on another night we listened to the witness of an Israeli man, named Rami, who even though he lost his precious teenage daughter to a suicide bomber, spends his life fighting in the face of overwhelming popular derision to bear witness to the insanity of fighting violence with violence, and then later we were taken on a tour of Jerusalem by a young Israeli who works for an organization called Israeli Citizens Against Home Demolitions, who was one of the most thoughtful, compassionate, dedicated young adults I have met anywhere.
And gradually it became clear that there is no outside or inside to this wall. The darkness looms large on both sides. The light is shining on both sides. And it may well be that hope will come for this land as people on both sides learn to stop fleeing into the darkness of fear, cruelty and violence and instead turn their faces and their energy toward the light of peace, security and freedom for everyone... which will, of course, render the wall quite unnecessary.
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." John 1:5
wm
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