Delaware Valley Interfaith Delegation to Israel/Palestine –

On Easter Week, I joined twenty Jews, Muslims, Christians, a Buddhist and a Unitarian Universalist, in a Delaware Valley Interfaith Delegation to Israel/Palestine to practice Compassionate Listening led by Leah Green, Director of the Compassionate Listening Project, and trainer Maha El-Taji.

Over the Atlantic on Easter Monday I read Evening Prayer. The lesson was the final verses of the Gospel of Mark, chapter 16, verses 1 – 8. Verse 7 is what stood out for me: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him, just as he told you.” It struck me that we would be going to the Galilee where Jesus has preceded us. We would see him just as he told us. Jesus told us that we would see him in compassion.

“In those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, Jesus called his disciples and said to them, ‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat.’… His disciples replied, ‘How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?’” (Mark 8: 1-2, 4).

In this desert of arid and harsh conflict, violence and retaliation cycling round and round, our Delaware Valley Interfaith Delegation came to give the bread of compassionate listening. This listening with the heart corrals differing experiences, pain from opposing causes, and holds them in a safe environment allowing for the appreciation of one another’s common humanity. This frees people to “express themselves and to go to the level of their deep concerns. It provides the basis of all meaningful relationships. It is the first step to reconciliation. It enables sustained dialogue. Dialogue then becomes the basis for problem solving and ultimately, for advocacy.”

The Theologian Paul Tillich wrote in a small book entitled, Love, Power and Justice, that in personal encounters creative justice entails listening, giving and forgiving. “In order to know what is just in a person-to-person encounter, love listens. It is its first task to listen. No human relation, especially no intimate one, is possible without mutual listening. Reproaches, reactions, defenses may be justified in terms of proportional justice. But perhaps they would prove to be unjust if there were more mutual listening. All things and all (people), so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen, they want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. They want justice from us. But we can give it to them only through the love which listens.” (p. 84)

Preceding our arrival, Roni Yechiah had been killed by an Hamas rocket fired down upon the southern Israeli town of Sderot on February 27. It was the first Israeli death due to these primitive rockets in nine months. In the fighting that followed, over 120 Palestinians and 2 Israeli soldiers were killed. 258 rockets were fired by militants having obviously little effect. B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied territories) that we would visit on Wednesday reported that “1,259 of the 2,679 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip (since September 2000) were not participating in hostilities when they were killed, and 567 were minors.” On March 6 in retaliation for the Palestinian deaths in Gaza, an Israeli Arab residing in Jerusalem opened fire on the Mercaz Ha Rav Yeshiva leaving eight students dead and eleven wounded. Rabbi Menachem Fromann whom we would see on Friday gave one of the eulogies.

Two and a half weeks after the Yeshiva shootings, on Easter Monday, we left Newark Airport on El Al for Tel Aviv. Tensions around the fighting in Gaza meant that some of the checkpoints we were near were very touchy. There were roads we could not use with our Palestinian driver. And when we visited with the Combatants for Peace on the West Bank, the Israeli party to that group did not feel safe meeting with the Palestinian side, so we only got to talk with the Palestinians.

The first day we had a three faiths tour of ancient Jerusalem that took us to the Temple Mount, the Noble Sanctuary. The Christian historian Eutychius wrote in 876 C.E.: “The Byzantines… neglected it (the Temple Mount) and did not hold it in veneration, nor did they build a church over it because Christ our Lord said in his Holy Gospel ‘Not a stone will be left upon a stone which will not be ruined and devastated.’ For this reason the Christians left it as a ruin and did not build a church over it.”

The tragic irony today is that some Christian Zionists want to rebuild the Temple. When I spent Thursday night in Hebron at the home of a Palestinian family, they invited a friend to join us. The religious question he wanted to ask was whether I believed that the Temple in Jerusalem needed to be rebuilt in order for the Messiah to return. The anxiety of course is the destruction of the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. I answered “no.” In fact, in the Christian tradition the resurrected Christ is the rebuilt Temple. The tradition refers to Jesus destroying the temple and rebuilding it on the third day, the day of resurrection. Israel, as you might imagine supports the Zionists. On Sunday we met with Daniel Seaman, Director of the Government Press Office. He expressed strong support for those he called evangelical Christians. These are really dispensationalist Christians who believe the world will experience a period of worsening tribulations until Christ returns. It is based on the biblical interpretation of the nineteenth century Anglican John Nelson Darby. The return of the Jews to Palestine is a key event in the preordained process that will lead to the second coming. In 2006 Michael Freund, former director of communications for Benjamin Netanyahu wrote: “Thank God for Christian Zionists. Like it or not, the future of the relationship between Israel and the U.S. may very well hinge far less on America’s Jews than on its “Christians.“

A week after our return to Philadelphia, CNN news reported on Pastor John Hagee’s march in support of Israel, and his Nights in Honor of Israel. His group, Christians United for Israel, raised more than $12 million to help settle new immigrants in Israel, including in settlements in the Occupied Territories. In 2006 John Hagee warned in his book Jerusalem Countdown, “The coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty. The war of Ezekiel 38-39 could begin before this book gets published.“ Hagee believes that Jews “have everyting but spiritual life,“ and that anti-Semitism is the result of the Jews’ “rebellion (against God)." Still the Anti Defamation Leagues’ Abraham Foxman declares there is a role for Hagee “because of his support for Israel." Though Pastor Hagee does not seem to say it directly, I think it is implied that he believes in the rebuilding of the Temple, prior to the Messiah’s return.


Next, we walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the holiest places in Christianity, said to be Jesus’ place of execution and burial.


Once inside one climbs a steep stairway 33 feet to the top of Golgotha where a Greek Orthodox chapel is built over the rock of Calvary itself. Under the altar at the spot where the cross stood is a silver disc through which one can touch the rock. The opening is not wide and it is not an easy reach.

The author Reynolds Price, in a short story entitled “An Early Christmas,” describes what a difficult reach it is to touch Golgotha. “‘Jesus – Christ – crucified – here’ … an Orthodox priest or monk… gestured hard toward the silver medallion…Then I bent to reach the disc. It ringed an actual hole, jet black; and one last break in my mind said no. But the monk said ‘Reach.’ I was half bent over. I put my right hand into the hole up past my wrist. The air inside was decidedly cooler than the odorous room; but when I felt around in the dark, my fingers touched nothing. The voice said ‘Reach.’ …I’d have to kneel to thrust deeper – why though, for what? I glanced to the monk. His hand was huge now and aimed me on. So I got to my knees nearer the hole, then reached till my elbow vanished inward. The voice said ‘Now. Golgotha – here.”

Compassionate listening means being vulnerable. Our minds want to say no and shut down. At Al Arroub Refugee camp, I felt the camp leadership wanting to impose their agenda on me (of course they did). My mind said no. My fingers touched nothing. Could I be vulnerable and let go of my defensiveness about being pushed or coerced? Could I hear in that the refugees own pain at being pushed and coerced by the occupation? I am not sure that I did very well at this, but the Voice says, “Reach.” And reach I shall. To do so, as at Golgotha I will have to kneel, that is I will have to practice being in a centered place. Then listening with compassion to the other in pain, I shall touch Golgotha.

Mazen Farraj and Rami Elhannan are members of the Bereaved Parents Circle (Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost members to the conflict). We are at the end of our first day. Their stories will also cause us to be vulnerable to a father who lost his daughter and a son his father. Can I be with them in their pain when to do so means setting aside my own fear of loss and pain? This is the challenge and glory of Compassionate Listening.


Rami’s Story

In the 1973 Yom Kippur War Rami served with a tank crew. All together there were 11 tanks. They ended with three and he lost some good friends. He came back from that war a very angry man. 10 years later Rami now married had a daughter who grew to be a vivacious and lovely girl. Then ironically a few days before Yom Kippur she with several other children were killed by two suicide bombers at the start of the Second Intafada in 2000. He spent the longest night of his life searching the neighborhoods for her, then the hospitals and finally the morgue. A husk of a man, during the seven days of Jewish mourning one thousand people came through his house. One man suggested a group for bereaved parents whose goal was peace, to whom Rami bitterly responded, “How dare you!”

Conversion

Eventually, Rami decided to attend a Bereaved Parents Circle even though he was sure that it would be a waste of time. He was still angry. As he watched parents and others with deep loss due to the conflict get off buses for this meeting, he saw people he considered Jewish heroes. He began to think there might something here. Then came a bus of Palestinians arrived. One mother wore a large circle pendant around her neck containing a picture of her deceased son. All shared their pain of loss. It was during this meeting that something inside Rami flipped. He is not a religious Jew and so does not have a language for describing or understanding what happened, but something changed. He felt newly broken open, able to see Palestinians as more than the laborers tat he passed in Jerusalem, or whom he shot at during the Yom Kippur War. They were human beings who also suffered.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela commenting on pain in South Africa wrote: “Empathy is a response to another person’s pain, even in the midst of tragedy, pain cannot be evil.” (p.100) And again, “there are internal psychological dynamics that impel most of us toward forming an empathic connection with another person in pain, that draw us into his pain, regardless of who that someone is.” (127) She adds that for many compassion “is deeply therapeutic and restorative.” (129)

Anger is double-edged

Part of Rami’s experience of “flip” was deciding what he would do with his anger. He began to think that vengeance would not bring back his daughter, another Palestinian death would not cause her return. Anger would just fester and eat away at him from within.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela writes that, hateful emotions “are a burden that prevent the victim from fully coming to terms with the trauma and moving on.” (96)

Anger also has been the energy to lift him above himself, to give his life purpose. He found that by telling his story he could bring awareness, the humanness of both sides, the need for an end to the killing. Rami spoke of the importance listening – Jew to Palestinian and visa versa.

Listening

Once when speaking to a Palestinian school, the principal warned the student body, “Don’t listen to him. He will make you weak.” The message is that a certain hardness is necessary for survival, let alone for fighting for what is right. The difference is between what Tillich called the reproaches of proportional justice, and the mutual listening of creative justice. It is possible to listen deeply without being less aggressive about pushing for what is right.


Mazen’s Story

Mazen Farraj grew up in a refugee camp outside of Bethlehem. His father always told him that he wanted a better life for Mazen and his siblings than he had lived. Mazen went to university. At a student protest Mazen was arrested and spent three years in prison. After release and returning home, Mazen and his mother got word one night that his father, her husband, had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier for being a Palestinian. Mazen wanted to go to identify the body and to say his final good-bye. He had loved his father whose only desire was a better life for his children.

The refugee camp has a curfew during which no one is allowed out of their homes. When Mazen explained the situation to a soldier and asked to go see his father’s body, the soldier replied that they would send an envelope by the next morning. Mazen was not permitted to go to his father’s body. It was he said the longest night. When day broke, the envelope arrived and the family could claim the father’s body.

Not Allowed

At the end of the story by Mazen, he was asked if he would like a glass of water. “Yes,” he said, “if it was allowed.” All of us listening showed a start of disbelief at his comment. When he noticed our reaction, Mazen realized what he had said. Then he talked of what it is like to grow up in an occupation where so much is not allowed. Even the simplest requests cannot be taken for granted but must be checked to be sure they are allowed.

“The Things They Carried”

Mazen began his talk by saying how difficult it is to carry the needs, hopes and feelings of the others at the refugee camp. They are deported and feel de-humanized. They are suppressed, and feel humiliated. It is hard to carry, he said. I asked him what gave him the capacity to carry all that? Like Rami, he spoke of anger as an energy that could lift him above himself, so that he could speak up for his people and to act in hope rather than get stuck in recrimination.

He said the Israeli soldiers also carried much. At a meeting with Combatants for Peace we listened by video to an Israeli soldier describe his doubt and fear. He had entered the Israeli army as a teenager and had now risen to the rank of commander. How does that happen, he asked. Once on patrol, he entered a house on the West Bank. Naturally there were children. His soldiers were behind him. A small girl about seven years old ran toward him. Was she carrying explosives? Were his men in danger behind him? He thought of shooting her. Then fired a warning shot to the ceiling hoping the round would not hit any one. The girl froze terrified, hands in the air. The Israeli soldier could not forget that little girl. He told his superiors that he would not do that any more. He could no longer carry the indiscriminate violence, the guilt was too much to bear.