Seek the Peace of the City

November 24, 2008

I. Introduction

“Seek the peace of the city,” wrote Jeremiah to the exiles in Babylon. The exiles, he knew, would be there an indefinite time. It would be best that they seek the city’s welfare. One might even say that here is an intimation of Jesus’ “love your enemy” (Matt. 5:44). In addition, the exiled, economically dislocated Israelites are to worship and pray to God there. The God of Israel is to be met beyond borders, even beyond the borders of Jerusalem. Seek the peace of the city.

This morning a funeral mass was held at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul for Sergeant Timothy Simpson who was killed a week earlier. He became the fourth Philadelphia police officer killed in the line of duty this year. His partner had been killed less than seven months ago. Violence against police in our city runs counter to the national trend of a one-fifth decline in officers’ deaths in the line of duty. Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said, “he had never witnessed such a toll on police in his 41 years on the job” (Inquirer, 11/19/08, p. A11). While police deaths are up, homicides in the city though still numbering 300 are considerably lower than in previous years. According to Lawrence Sherman of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, the conditions for violence include the high number of illegal guns on the streets, broken families and concentrations of poverty. Mayor Nutter addressed our Diocese (The Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania) on the issue of hand guns and safety. Sociologist Elijah Anderson in his book Code of the Street emphasized economic dislocation and the alienation and weakening of the family structure that goes with it as the condition for a street code of violence.

As much as anything the violence in Philadelphia was my motivation to join a Delaware Valley delegation of Jews, Muslims and Christians to visit Israel and the West Bank during this past Easter Week for the purpose of peace-making. Would a journey to the center of the world’s most intractable violence provide any insight for seeking peace at home? Upon return we have formed the Interfaith Community for Middle East Peace (ICMEP) in order to bring the faiths together in their capacity to be vehicles of peace.

This year’s violence in Israel included the death of Roni Yechiah in a rocket attack at the Israeli town of Sderot on February 27. It was the first death by rocket in nine months. In the fighting that followed over 120 Palestinians and 2 Israeli soldiers were killed. After only a week, 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. On Easter Monday (March 24), two weeks later, we left for Jerusalem. In the air over the Atlantic I read the final verses of Mark’s Gospel appointed for the day: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that (Jesus) is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16:7). After the crucifixion of exile, officers killed in the line of duty, hundreds of homicides, rocket attacks and a revenge killing, I was going to see Jesus in whom there is that “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding…” (Phil. 4:7).

II. Listening

As a delegation we travelled with the purpose of listening. Our leaders were Maha El-Taji, an Israeli Arab, and Leah Green, the founder and director of the Compassionate Listening Project. Our thesis was that 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. The process of compassionate listening would create a shift from an attitude of defensiveness or a fixation on woundedness to what is at our heart – our loves, our deep desire for peace, and our empathy for others. The only way to help another get to this heart or core of empathy is for us to be in our own heart. By changing ourselves, by being more heart-ful, we can help another to make their own transformation. This was the idea.

Listening is at the heart of personal justice for Theologian Paul Tillich. In a small book entitled, Love, Power and Justice, he wrote, “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)

Rami, a Jew who lost his daughter in a suicide bombing, beset with outrage, was able to utilize that energy creatively by speaking for peace through the Bereaved Parents’ Circle. 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 contrast 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 assertive about what one believes to be right.

When listening is unexpectedly practiced at a checkpoint real human interaction and healing take place. There are about eighty checkpoints within the West Bank. Their purpose is to restrict the movement of Palestinians and so thwart terrorist attacks. In addition there are as many as 150 to 200 “flying checkpoints” that are set up for a few hours every day. Army vehicles stop along a road to check all Palestinian vehicles as well as Israeli cars carrying Palestinian residents. B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) observes that, “Cases of direct physical violence by soldiers against Palestinians wanting to cross the internal checkpoints have become an almost daily occurrence since the beginning of the second Intifada.”

We met with leaders of a Creativity for Peace camp held twice each summer in New Mexico for Israeli and Palestinian girls. After an experience there an Israeli came of age for military service and was a soldier assigned to a checkpoint. One day she noticed a small Palestinian boy waiting and terrified with a paper airplane in his hand. She made herself a paper airplane and together they played for a bit and he began to laugh. On another occasion, a man with severe diabetes came to the check point. He did not have the proper permit. It is hot and as he stands, he is suffering. She gets up and takes her chair and has him sit down while he waits. Her fellow soldiers give her looks and wonder what is wrong with her!?! She is listening to the needs of those who wait in line. In her small way giving them justice.

III. Dialogue

Dialogue or lack of it is seen in contrasting views of a Jewish spokesman for the settlement at Hebron and a Sufi Sheikh in Jerusalem. Hebron is the only Palestinian city on the West Bank (other than East Jerusalem) with an Israeli settlement in its center. B’Tselem explains, “Over the years, the army has created a contiguous strip of land in the city along which the movement of Palestinian vehicles is absolutely forbidden… At the present time (2007), the only persons allowed to move about freely along this strip are settlers and Israeli security forces. The center of this strip contains many sections of street on which even Palestinian pedestrians are forbidden.”

We asked David Wilder, a spokesman for the settlement, if he had any personal relationships with Palestinians. “You can’t converse with people who are trying to get you to leave,” he responded. “If you let down your guard they’ll slit your throat. Israel is at war. The only give-and-take we’ve seen is ‘we give/you take.’ People like Bin Laden will do barbarous things to you.” When asked what was his greatest disappointment, I was interested to hear him reply that he did not achieve enough. He seemed to me someone very much motivated by achievement. Though achievement is a fine motivation, it can lead some people to view others as obstacles and to be authoritarian as leaders. They may look at situations as a zero sum game – it’s either them or us. Compassionate listening provides an alternative to this expression of the achievement motive. Here is Sheikh Abdul Aziz Buchari, the direct descendant of Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (810 – 870). Muhammad al-Bukhari compiled collections of traditions (hadiths) in Sunnite Islam.

Sheikh Buchari said, “The Crusaders’ war was carried out under the name of religion. In reality it was not religion but conquering. When people say they are fighting over religion, it’s really over power that they are fighting. People are upset today over the dividing wall Israel is building, but the real wall is in our heads. If we want to overcome that separation we need to talk to one another. There are plenty of Muslims and Jews here, but we never talk to each other! Some people say, ‘Well, we might talk, but we have to find people in the other group who really want peace – then we’ll have something in common. We can’t expect to talk with extremists.’ But those are precisely the people we need to bring into the talks – extremists from both sides. If we do not include all the people of faith in the peace process, they’ll speak out in other, less constructive ways. We need to specifically include the ‘extremists.’”

IV. Anger

Rami, referred to earlier under “listening,” served with a tank crew in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. All together there were 11 tanks. By the end there were three. Rami 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 a few days before Yom Kippur at the start of the Second Intafada in 2000, she with several other children were killed by two suicide bombers. 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 visitor suggested a group for bereaved parents whose goal was peace, to whom Rami bitterly responded, “How dare you!”

Anger, he discovered, is double-edged. Rami had to decide 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 in a book about the legacy of apartheid in South Africa writes that, hateful emotions “are a burden that prevent the victim from fully coming to terms with the trauma and moving on.” (96) On the other hand, anger was the energy to lift him above himself, to give his life purpose. He found that by telling his story through the Bereaved Parents’ Circle he could bring awareness, the humanness of both sides, the need for an end to the killing.

At the Creativity for Peace Camp an Israeli girl tells her story of losing two friends in a suicide bombing. It made such a difference to her to tell this story in the presence of the enemy. This is deep, emotional work. The process might start with a paper bag filled with twenty words such as Holocaust, checkpoint, suicide bomber and so on. The girls will write what they feel about those words. Then the fur flies! If a girl can say, “I hate you;” “I don’t trust you,” then it is possible for her to move toward love. But first there needs to be listening with compassion and authenticity. When there is the breakdown, then there is the possibility for break-through. Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela in her book, A Human Being Died That Night, explains “there are internal psychological dynamics that impel most of us toward forming an empathic connection with another person in pain, that draw us into (her) pain, regardless of who that someone is” (p. 127). After the Camp one Palestinian student in university listened as her professor said terrible things about Israelis. She stood up and said, “I have a different experience of Israelis,” and she told her story.

After visiting with leaders of the Peace Camp we went to Taghba on the Sea of Galilee which is where the trauma of Peter’s three-fold denial is confronted with Jesus’ three-fold question, “Do you love me?” (John 21: 15-17) It struck me that here was the same catharsis: breakdown, breakthrough and transformation.

V. Forgiveness

Esther Golan was born in 1923. She escaped the Holocaust with the Kinder Transport. Kinder Transport was a British response to the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938 in Germany remembered as Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”). German and Austrian Nazis burned and destroyed 267 synagogues, killed 100 people, smashed 7,500 Jewish stores (all that remained in the Reich), and incarcerated nearly 30,000 in concentration camps. Sponsored by the British Jewish Refugee Committee, 10,000 children left Germany in sealed trains to find refuge with foster families in homes, or on farms, group homes and orphanages throughout Great Britain Later Esther emigrated to Israel, and we met her at her home in Rehavia, Jerusalem. She says that in her natural family the word “hate” was not allowed. She concludes that, “hate brings hate brings self-hate.”

When asked about the Nazis and forgiveness, Esther replied, “Forgiveness can only be given to those who did the harm. The perpetrators in this case are all dead, so there is no forgiveness.” There is truth to what Esther says, and it is part of the case I might make against capital punishment. Still I wonder whether it is not possible for the victim to forgive a perpetrator who is no longer present. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela suggests that perhaps it is. She says forgiveness “is a choice the victim makes to let go of the bitterness” (p.97). She observes that forgiveness can open up for the victim a new path of healing and conversely not to forgive can mean closing the door to transformation.

Nevertheless, Esther noted the conversations that are currently going on between Israel and Germany. “If we can have conversation with Germans, then why do we not sit down with Palestinians?” The goal is not to ignore our disagreements. Rather, she said, what is necessary is to live under creative tension, to live with difference. Our aim of Compassionate listening is to move toward this experience of dialogue. Dr.Gobodo-Madikizela explains that this dialogue “is critical if victims (of whatever side) are to live again with perpetrators in the same society, or indeed if they are to live in greater harmony with themselves” (p.119).

VI. Hope

Combatants for Peace is an organization with both Palestinian and Israeli counterparts. They are Palestinians who have served time in Israeli prison and Israeli soldiers. Both have sworn off violence for peace. We spoke with the Palestinian Suleiman al-Hamri. He contrasted big dreams with small hopes. “There’s a difference between us and some who work for similar goals. You can either work for the Great Dream or for small hopes. The Palestinians who work for ‘the Great Dream’ – like Hamas – want to open their eyes one day and see not one Israeli still in the Holy Land. Likewise with Israelis – people like Lieberman (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs in Israel who advocates transferring Israeli Arab citizens to neighboring Arab countries) – their ‘Great Dream’ is to see the total elimination of all Palestinians. But we have chosen to work for what I call the small hopes: that Israelis and Palestinians will be able to live together in peace, and with mutual respect and understanding. We are ready to cooperate with all people and groups. To get there we are starting to work not only on the military issues we started with, but on social problems, on educational problems as well.”

At Wi’am, the Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem, its Director Zoughbi al-Zoughbi writes: “As a Christian, I am always hopeful… Hope is a matter of choice. Hope is not only an emotional thing but also a reasonable approach to fight against hopelessness and frustration, which will lead only to hate. Hope is the nonviolent approach to struggle that will not demonize the other but will invite the other to join. Hope is an oasis of interactions of people from different backgrounds and walks of life to see new possibilities. Hope allows people to adopt different approaches to create a healthy atmosphere. Hope is the gift of uplifting the spirits of the people who are paying a heavy price in pain. Hope is to walk with them, to share with them, and of course to help them see the possibility of a different reality. Through the work of Wi’am and through our partners, we see that hope truly soars even in the midst of trauma and injustice.” (Mission Study, p. 162)

On the second Sunday of Easter, the Psalm for morning prayer proclaims Suleiman’s “small hope”: “He has established peace on your borders; he satisfies you with the finest wheat” (147:5).

VII. Encounter

We spent our last night and morning in Israel at Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam, set up as a joint model village in 1972 by a group of Jewish and Arab Israelis. In the United States studies of Black and White racial identity have shown that the identity of a person of one race is constructed in the significant encounter of oneself through the meaningful engagement with those of the other race. In 1972, a group of Arabs and Jews decided to conduct an ongoing encounter by living together, and so Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam (“Oasis of Peace”) was born. It is a lived response to a history of division.

In 1976, this community formed the School for Peace. The youth encounters alone bring one thousand Jews and Arabs to the School each year. The School accepts young people aged sixteen and seventeen which is the age when they begin shaping their social and political identities. The School is affiliated with Hebrew University. One wall of the “Clubhouse” is a one way mirror through which, unseen, social psychologists may observe the group processes taking place. The School makes extensive use of Social Identity Theory which has grown from Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport’s “contact hypothesis” posited in his classic work, The Nature of Prejudice. The aspiration of the School is “to unravel and then reconstruct participants’ identities because only an encounter between confident identities can lead to a genuine meeting of equals and permit the option of building a more humane and just society” (Identities, p. 8).

The scripture reading for Tuesday morning before we left captured much of what our delegation had been about in this Easter Week and following. In First Peter 1: 22, I read:
“Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth
so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.”

VIII. Conclusion

The experience of violence and peace-making in Israel holds potential lessons for us here in Philadelphia. Certainly in both places there are political and systemic issues to be addressed. In Philadelphia these would include hand guns and public safety, job creation (that pays a living wage), and training.

I was struck by the importance of encounter between people with differences, particularly at the age of adolescence when political and social identity is being shaped. We see this through the sharing by members of the Bereaved Parents’ Circle in schools, peace camps and “schools for peace.”

There is clearly a spiritual dimension to peace-making, that includes listening with empathy that validates the other person, gives a degree of justice and shifts future behavior; dialogue that risks meeting the other whose position is diametrically opposed to one’s own; recognition of the energy of anger for creative difference-making; the transformative power of forgiveness; and the hope that takes small steps and includes people whose differences might otherwise divide them.

IX. Bibliography

Anderson, Elijah, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner
City, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999.

Gobodo-Midikizela, Pumla, A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Woman
Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
2003.

Goldstein, Stephen, Israel-Palestine: A Mission Study for 2007-2008, Women’s
Division, General Board of Global Ministries, The United Methodist
Church, 2007.

Halabi, Rabah, Editor, Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue: The School for Peace
Approach, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Tillich, Paul, Love, Power and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1954.