Sermon: What is Wrong with these People

[ previous | index | next ]

What is Wrong with these People?

By Charles Rush

April 2, 2006

are nearing the close of Lent, a time for reflection on those parts of ourselves that are contradictory and beyond our own comprehension. As St. Augustine said, 'I am a problem to myself.' This part of us is never entirely resolved throughout our lives. My grandmother, when she was 96, was standing in the middle of the living room one day with a pensive stare on her face. My sister asked if she was okay. She replied, "I've lost my brain and I can't think what I've done with it."… Yes, and neither can I.

Easter Island is located in the South Pacific, approximately 1500 miles from the nearest island. It was settled, according to oral tradition, by 150 people that were exiled from the Marquesas Islands about 1000 years ago.

That 150 people found this isolated spot, only several miles wide and several miles long, and settled, prospered, and grew. About a century or two later, dating is very inexact, another group of 100 people also landed.

The two groups were both Polynesians, both related distantly. They were distinguished by only one physical characteristic; the newcomers had short ear lobes, whereas the original settlers made a custom of fitting jewelry in their ear lobes that made them droop in an elongated fashion.

The newcomers were made to work for the original settlers, doing most of the heavy manual work and other work that the original settlers no longer wanted to do for themselves. The newcomers were given a space to reside in, set apart from the original settlers on land that was deemed low rent.

Together they made a life for a couple generations, prospering, we believe to the point that there were about 20,000 people that lived on the island. All during this time, the residents set up the statutes that they are famous for, these large stone images some 30 ft. tall, weighing over 40 tons, in tribute to their ancestors. Dozens of them, indeed, hundreds, were cut in the quarry, dragged across the island and erected.

At some point, a civil war began. We think that it pitted the new comers against the original residents, at least in the beginning. Why it began? We don't know. What were the grievances? We can only guess. How did they supply it? We can't tell. But, by the end of it, it appears to have engulfed every resident of the island. By the time it was over, nearly all the original trees on the island appear to have been cut down.

We do know that the war dragged on for a very long time. When it was finally over all the statutes on Easter Island had been dragged down, toppled, broken. The island lay in ruin, the few remaining inhabitants reduced to hiding in caves on the edge of the ocean. Probably only a few hundred were alive when the Europeans first made contact sailing around the tip of South America.

It is an enigma, why we are like that. If you stand on the highest point on Easter Island, a burnt out volcano several million years old, you look 360 degrees at ocean that spans to the horizon. And the ocean gets deep quick which means that it is also largely empty, as most fish live near land, the great expanses of ocean have big fish deeper, but there are no small fish on the surface, hence there are almost no birds either. It is a deep, haunting expanse in every direction, as far as you can imagine.

You stand there, wondering what it would be like to be a stone age person living on this island, so far removed from the rest of the world as to be completely cut off, like the Inuit girl in the Island of the Blue Dolphin. Isn't it curious that rather than band together and figure out a way to mutually get off the island itself, they chose to divide themselves along class lines, and that these divisions became so intense in their imaginations that they consumed most of their creative imaginations and turned to violence, retribution, destruction and that they stayed so focused on that they destroyed their civilization itself, utterly, destroyed their most precious sacred objects, their temples, everything? Why are we like that? What is wrong with us that we do this over and over and over?

Two years ago I had a long evening dinner with a couple that lived in Jerusalem. I was sharing with them an evening I spent there in 1976 in the Old City. It was an image really from a former era, an era when Teddy Kolek was the erstwhile Mayor of the city and both the Jewish and the Palestinian side of the city were bustling with intellectuals, generally more tolerant, and generally more secular than other cities in the region. It was late in the evening, I was playing backgammon at a Tea shop with a Palestinian kid that was in college like me, when I recognized another American I'd met earlier and invited him to join us, a Jewish college student from Brandeis University. The three of us sat there over drinks, long into the evening, sharing observations about the Middle East, with me something of an unofficial mediator between the Jew and the Muslim because I was an American…

They nodded with one of those far off, wistful looks. That Jerusalem is gone. I asked them what it was like to go to your local coffee shop in the morning once it had been bombed by a suicide bomber. That was literally the case for the neighborhood where they lived.

That answer began a long lament that lasted nearly ‘til the dawn. She had lived in Jerusalem for seventy years, he for 50. Her father was one of the original Zionists and had been in the government. They had raised their family there.

It was one of the more difficult conversations I've every participated in. Living with terrorism week in and week out is simply not tenable. What was stranger for them still was the way that they had begun to accept the abnormal as normal.

I had read in an article in The New Republic that more than 70,000 residents of Jerusalem had left in the past couple years. The author noted that with them went the Israel's intellectuals, their progressives, those most critical of their own religious zealots. Indeed, some people were actually moving into Jerusalem, but they are overwhelmingly Orthodox bent on reclaiming all of the Promised Land.

The precipitating event of this mass migration was sobering. Where East meets West in Jerusalem, there is a wide stretch in the wall that surrounds Jerusalem. It is wide enough that residents had erected a park there. In the early evening couples would stroll the wall, take in the vista of the city; children would play in the park, parents seated on the benches. The park was shared by Jews, Palestinians, and Christians. It was a symbol of the way that the residents of Jerusalem itself broke the mold that defined the fracture between the residents of the West Bank and those of Tel Aviv.

Until… a bomb went off in the area. The bomb itself wasn't the turning point, it was the discovery that the kid that set it off was a local resident from the neighborhood. Residents were stunned. 'One of our own has done this to us' they said. Up to that point, all the suicide bombers were from Ramallah, somewhere deep in the West Bank, and they came to Jerusalem to make their political point. But the idea that the neighborhood was unraveling proved a turning point.

Our friends told a series of stories that survivors of terror tell, how their son was supposed to be on a bus but missed it because of an illness and the bus blew up killing all of his friends, stories of how one person let another go ahead of them in line at the coffee shop, and that person turned into the human shield that died in the blast and the other one survived, how anarchy and terror pervade your consciousness all the day, leading some people to over-control, others to undifferentiated anxiety and worry, others still to a malaise ridden resignation to fate in the midst of the arbitrary. All, in their own way, are stifling, spiritually deadening.

But the most difficult part of the conversation came later. It was a reflection on the original purpose of Zionism, of the noble goals and the noble people that comprised the leadership of that movement, and a wider reflection on the state of Israel today. Both of them wondered out loud as to whether the whole thing was ultimately a mistake, whether the very founding principles that they embarked on a hundred years ago hadn't been tragically undermined and ironically inverted in such a way that all of this was for naught.

I was thinking to myself that this is exactly where you don't want to be when you are 75. It is so fundamentally threatening on a spiritual level to look back on your life's work- there in the early part of the summing up phase of your life- and question everything you have stood for. It is a spiritual worry beyond the articulation of it to speculate that the future for your grandchildren is fractured, violent, and full of contradiction. You are watching before you a culture engulfing… slow, spiraling vortex of malaise that you are helpless to stop. At the early phase of the 'summing up' phase of your life, what you hope to see is the semblance of coherence, integration, and- if you are blessed- to see the strands that will lead toward harmonious unity. You want to have a sense that your life is coming together, that your life had meaning, and that you will leave the next generation a foundation on which they can become strong and begin to actualize what is true, what is good, what is beautiful.

That is not happening in Israel. Increasingly over the past decade, we are witnessing two forces that are coalescing in competing versions of irredentism. Irredentism is the SAT word for the day that simply means the 'recovery of culture, history and land that is occupied by someone else.' Jack Miles wrote a pithy piece for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin last fall in which he said that today we have the religiously violent pitted against the violently religious.[i] The religiously violent are Hamas and the violently religious are the Likud colonists.

The violently religious we know all too well. Bill Moyers interviewed quite a few of the violently religious a couple years ago for PBS. He was on the West Bank, talking to settlers that were living around Hebron, trying to get a pulse on what is was like to live in an occupied area. Orthodox Jews have settled around Hebron because it is the reported burial place for the patriarch Abraham. The man was explaining to Moyers that they felt justified in developing the area because all of that land had been given to them by God in the Bible and that promise is still valid today.

At one point, Moyers got that screwed up face that Westerners get when they encounter this unqualified, uncompromising religious conviction. He says, "So you don't think the Palestinians have any legitimate claim to a homeland?" The guy says, "Of course they do"… and pointing out beyond the Jordan river he says, "It's over there… It's called Jordan."

Over the course of the last thirty years, the percentage of Orthodox has risen substantially in Israel, and the percentage of secularists that have a realpolitik approach to the Palestinians has diminished. Likewise, the religiously violent dimension of Palestine embodied in Hezbollah and Hamas, has substantially become mainstreamed, while the leadership of intellectuals gradually become marginalized, symbolized by the transition of political parties in the last few years. We are living through a period of polarization.

Miles points out that this polarization is actually broader and more subtle, the unintended consequence of the emigration to Israel by Jews from all across the Middle East over the past 50 years. Historically, there have been sizable Jewish populations in Damascus, in Baghdad, in Beruit, in Istanbul, in Teheran and they have been there for millennia. Today, they are almost all gone, thanks to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Slowly, they have almost all emigrated except for a few places like Sana in Yemen which remains culturally and politically isolated from the rest of the world. The effect of this is difficult to put into words, but it has generally encouraged a harder line between Muslim/Jew, a kind of us/them that contributes more broadly to the polarization.

Professor Miles suggests that the way beyond this impasse will likely go right through religion rather than around it and that will require a whole new way of doing diplomacy from the way that we have been doing it up until the present.

He says that generally people have looked at the issue of religion as divisive and have decided to avoid it, or to put it off until the end, when there were already in place a set of agreed upon points of negotiation. Generally speaking, we have encouraged negotiations to take place with more secular leaders that have focused ostensibly upon tangible items like borders, security, water access.

He points out the inherent limitations to this approach which we are beginning to understand across the Middle East. The first is that a secular approach is viewed by Muslims as

'Western', a concept that they are distrustful of and have been since at least the British colonization of the Middle East after World War I.

Whereas in the West, secularity is the lingua franca of the Enlightenment that allows us to converse across religious divisions, to the pious Muslim mind, it only signals a lack of religious rootedness that is morally dubious at best, and probably a charade behind which ulterior motivations are deflected.

He suggests that many of the early attacks by Arabs against the Kibbutzim that were established by Jewish Zionists are best understood as resistance to Western control, just as some of the terrorist attacks in Iraq today can be viewed that way, despite the fact that our press never has come to any clear articulation of who is what in these attacks. The point is that secularity and 'The West' are viewed with suspicion whether they are simply misunderstood or not trusted because of their legacy in the past century.[ii]

And secondly, he notes that Muslims generally view themselves principally as Muslims first and national citizens only second. In a Pew Research survey 63% of Jordanians claimed that they were Muslims first and Jordanians second; only 23% were first Jordanians and then Muslims.[iii] For us, it is the other way around. We are first of all Americans and only secondly Christians or Jews.

There are three implications of this going forward, the first being that we Americans think that we come to negotiations as neutral, religiously independent arbiters. But this assumption is probably not shared by anyone else but ourselves.[iv]

Second, "while Judaists and Islamists hate each other, they have a common enemy in doctrinaire secularity".[v]

And finally, some of the most powerful breakthroughs that have happened in the past several years have been between religious Jews and religious Palestinians, though these have not generally made news. It has been in retreats, camps and other events that have brought those religious people. What they have found is that shortly after people are able to voice their frustration, their rage, their sense of being misunderstood and mistreated, there is, just beneath the surface a deep spiritual hunger for reconciliation and repentance.

Miles actually suggests that for American diplomacy to become effective, we should start to support these religious peace making efforts and bring these events onto the radar screen. It would be creative in a way that our diplomatic stance as the World's only Superpower could never be. Beyond that, it may well be the means to address root causes of alienation that are the precondition to any substantial peace. It may also be, in other words, the most practical path of realpolitik, because as many people have noted about the recent unilateral moves embodied in the symbol of the Wall between Israel and the West Bank, the history of separation without reconciliation is not good. Typically, we have seen a cycle where violence ceases for a while under this guise only to re-emerge later in another, sometimes more virulent form.

Finally, there is always that faint hope that a third party will actually step to the fore, that of the Christians. The hope is that they would play the role most suited to their faith tradition, that of reconciler and bridge builder. I have often dreamt and prayed that a Christian native to the region would embody the moral way forward of forgiveness and reconciliation and justice in the manner that motivated Mohandas Gandhi 60 years ago. Born in the midst of violent conflict, routine injustice and humiliation, anger, and hatred, Gandhi figured out that the only genuine resolution was a Spiritual one and he formed that authentic Spiritual response into a social movement that had political implications.

The history of the Palestinian Christians to getting involved in this way is not promising but then neither would one have expected a Hindu who read the New Testament at Oxford to embody a post-Colonial humanity in South Africa and then in India. Probably the hope is that the Zeitgeist of our times will make the leader rather than the other way round. At any rate, I invite you to the 2nd hour where these and other matters pertaining to Israel and Palestine will be discussed further, in the recognition that while we only have partial information and the choices before us are all compromised and ambiguous, and our own motivations are tainted, we must, nevertheless, do something. That, it seems to me, is an appropriate way to bring to fulfillment the season of Lent, praying as we do, for the clarification of our souls. Amen.

[i] Miles, Jack. "Judaist Israel, Islamist Palestine" The Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Autumn, 2005) pps. 42-53.

[ii] Says Miles, "Worse, to the extent that secularity as a zone of religious neutrality is less well established in the Arab world than in the West, any statement beginning "I am neither a Jew nor a Christian nor a Muslim" may seem to approximate the statement "I am an unbeliever and an infidel" and therefore of dubious morality." P. 49.

[iii] P. 49. The survey can be found on www.pewglobal.org

[iv] ibid. p. 49.

[v] ibid. p. 50.