What beautiful human beings I am encountering, guided by deeply spiritual ways of connecting everyday life to the universal imperative to seek justice in all matters and find God in all moments.

 

This week there was a bit of derailment on the planned itinerary. Who would have imagined that a rather intense snow storm would blow in and plunk us in the midst of one beautiful winter fairy land?  Unfortunately, the Dead Sea and Qumran as well as a visit to Sabeel International Center for Liberation Theology had to be put on hold until this coming week. So, the photo you are seeing is taken from the window of the work room where I spend much of time researching and writing about the impact of intergenerational trauma on women’s spirituality (this week’s research topic).

 

With torrential rain and 35 mph winds announcing the arrival of the storm, there was no opportunity to be traveling around Jerusalem’s beautiful outdoor venues, so five of us headed to the Yad VaShem, meaning, “a memorial and a name.” Yad VaShem memorializes the Holocaust (Shoah, in Hebrew) and the six million Jewish people who lost their lives. It was like going to the wake service of a very dear friend—both inspired and uplifted by hers’ or his’ journey while deeply grieving hers’ or his’ passing—a tangle of emotions and questions.

 

The architecture is striking and haunting—and truly a most appropriately crafted building—an experience in itself. 

As best I can describe it, one passes through a visitor’s center to a tent where one’s belongings are screened by Israeli security. A long walk on a plank-like bridge leads to the door of the prism-shaped gray cement building. Upon entering, one looks down the center of the structure and it’s immediately obvious that the central cavity of the building is obstructed with a labyrinth of iron roping, pits filled with possessions (like books, clothes, and photographs--piles upon piles) etc. belonging to the victims, and other haunting collections. We moved from one end of the building to the other by going into every room of the museum. It gives the impression of one’s spirit being “trapped” and engaged for the arduous “trip” through other people’s heartache, chaos, suffering and death. The only sign of hope comes from the light streaming through a sliver of glass running across the top of the building and joining the cement walls—and the amazing stories of strength, compassion, and rage that sometimes is the only spark of energy left in the human spirit.

 

One German Jewish family’s living room is recreated—several pieces were the same furniture that was in my grandparent’s house! I recognized it immediately. One wall after another bearing the smiling, trusting faces of those who were led to ghettos and eventually to ovens—children’s drawings about their lives are displayed everywhere—astonishingly dismissive letters from world leaders who could not see the possibility of taking in Jewish refugees when immigration quotas were already running so high—the story of a Jewish musician interrupted during a performance by a German officer who had come to arrest him, and the completion of the performance many years later after having escaped death at Auschwitz—chilling accounts of survivors who miraculously survived after being thrown into pits and everyone around them shot—and there are tributes to the many who tried to help the Jews. A large rotunda-shaped room at the end of the journey awaits visitors. The room has hundreds and hundreds of photos of victims. The only way to view them is to look up and walk around the room—so disorienting and jarring—I was quite dizzy, actually. (See the website link above.) Beneath the photos, there is a stone pit as deep as the eye can see. The walls around the room are lined with books where already two million murdered Jews’ names and faces have been entered (the goal of course is to have one page for each Jew who lost hers or his life in the Holocaust).   

 

Every theologian has particular theologians to whom they are drawn—in my work, there are two that stand out because of their ties to the Holocaust: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Johannes Metz. Their lives have gone quite different ways, but their theologies have merged into an important movement in Christian thought and practice. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister who aligned himself squarely with the resistance movement in Germany, wrote that "cheap grace — allowing Christians to believe themselves forgiven and justified even if they did not fight injustice in a world around them—is not satisfactory. Grace is always costly, to the believer and to God.” This 1937 insight was followed by two actions for which he would eventually lose his life. When his psychic could no longer tolerate the deafening silence of Christianity about Hitler’s corrupt and unjust government, he became a central figure in creating the Confessing Church. To this point, the Nazi-sponsored German Christian Church, or Reichskirche, spewed hateful “theology” about the Jews as “enemies of Jesus.” Bonhoeffer had spent time in the US studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York. There he had met and befriended numerous African-American ministers who taught him about the importance of a theology that preaches liberation. Bonhoeffer preached this “liberation” approach to the community of Christ in his weekly radio broadcasts—and used this powerful media pulpit to challenge the whole notion of “Fuhrer,” commenting that “a leader who makes himself an idol is a ‘misleader.’” It was his last broadcasted statement.

 

Unmoved by his eventual imprisonment in 1943 and again in 1944, Bonhoeffer refused to change his position and participated in a plan to assassinate Hitler, for which he was hung in April of 1945. It is certainly true that the ethics of such a plot were high stake for any Christian to fully embrace—but the alternative, for Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators, seemed less holy. In his papers, (interestingly) protected by guards at the prison and returned to his parents after his hanging, Bonhoeffer laid out a vision for Christianity shaping the ethical foundations of any community of faith:

…the church has three possible ways it can act against the state. First, it can ask the state if its actions are legitimate. Second, it can aid the victims of the state action. The church has the unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society even if they do not belong to the Christian society. The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.

 

Johannes Metz, a German Catholic theologian born in 1928, became an emphatic proponent of merging theology with praxis so that the suffering of others would compel humans to demonstrate compassion in all situations. Metz was sixteen when conscripted into the German military. The story is told that he was sent on a mission to deliver a message by a commanding officer. Upon his return, he found his entire unit of young companions murdered. “I found only the dead. I could see only the dead and empty faces where the day before I had shared fears and youthful laughter. I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day, and behind this memory all my childhood dreams crumbled away.” (Johnson, 54)

 

God’s grace is available to us—even in the circumstances of the outrageous and unacceptable bondage and extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany, but we must actualize God’s grace by holding close to the dynamic “dangerous memory” of other’s suffering. We must not become victimized by the passing of history which can inflict us with amnesia. Christians are morally obligated by the memory of the cross to lovingly liberate those who are unjustly bound to the misery of this world. God’s grace must be brought to life by our efforts to right-practice of faith. So as a Catholic, my communion has a vertical dimension to it in that the Living God enters fully into my being. But communion also has a horizontal dimension that connects my life completely to every other life on the planet. Communion cannot be conceived as merely a personal or private encounter with the Risen Christ. Fullness of communion is realized in the right action toward all the earth. The powerful witness of Metz’s theology flows from his own spiritual journey which placed him in the horrors of Germany during the Jewish extermination programs—and he was fully awakened by the loss of all the young men with whom he had been living and dreaming. Dangerous memory keeps alive the hope that all genocide (and one might include ecocide) will never happen again. (Even as I write, I am very aware of the many human and non-human lives on this earth needing to be touched by the redemptive power of God through our right action. I am reminded also of the late Monika Hellwig and other theologians who use the metaphor, “Guests of God.” Are we not being welcomed and hosted in this adventure of living? Would not it be wise for us to examine the many ways our behaviors reflect our attitudes and biases toward others, whom God is graciously hosting?)     

 

As you can imagine, this was not the day I could think much about whether or not the Zionists ought to have their own nation. It was a day to re-member and reflect. A dark day—even the heavens cried down on us and the winds howled across the desert. Old Jerusalem holds in her mystique the stories and potentialities of survivors. It is a city of lament, as well it should be. For all of us who pass through this stony center of spiritual memory, one final commandment guides one’s footsteps: Choose life, not death. (Deuteronomy)  

 

In the midst of a good snow storm in Jerusalem, we found out human rights lawyers have a difficult time traveling from one place to another-and it might be the only time my ambitious colleagues are sidelined. Our Tantur community was able to take advantage of the opportunity and have a conversation with Jonathan Khuttab, an international human rights attorney who is a member of the bar in New York, Israel and Palestine. He is the author of the book, The West Bank and the Rule of Law. He is an Arab Christian.

 

He covered a brief history of the region, framing some of the key issues that challenge the basic notion of “nationalism” for Israel today. What follows is a very brief snapshot of the situation. At the turn of the twentieth century, 15-20% of the population was Arab Christian, Jews comprised 5% of Palestine and most of the remaining Arabs were Muslims. The Zionist Movement, inspired by Theodore Herzl’s vision to create a Jewish home in Palestine (about 1896), began to gain momentum. In the words of Herzl, I consider the Jewish question neither a social nor a religious one, even though it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, and to solve it we must first of all establish it as an international political problem to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council. We are a people - one people.

 

40,000 Russian Jews, long oppressed under the rule of Tsar Alexander and Tsar Nicholas, had arrived in Palestine by 1914. They established a network of armed groups to defend their growing farm collectives and small towns. Hebrew songs of nationalism were composed and sung with vigor. Tel Aviv was built into an urban district. And, perhaps of lasting importance for the region, most historians agree that Jews were initially welcomed by the Palestinians. With time, however, many Palestinians were displaced and when the horrifying genocide of the Holocaust in Europe occurred, most sympathies around the world turned toward Jews. Integration of Jews into Palestine as a way to safeguard against future ethnic genocide, was at first acceptable to many Palestinians who, like the rest of the world, saw no future in genocide or ethnic cleansing programs. But, the combination of two dynamics eventually changed the region forever: 1) the displacement of Palestinians, and 2) Palestinian resistance movements that had been fairly well organized by the late 1950’s and early 1960’s fueled by deep resentment over who could live on what land in Israel and the feeling that the new power brokers, the Israeli government, was heavy handed, sometimes corrupt, and intolerant of Palestinians. Non-Jewish Arabs found themselves to be refugees on their own land. “The world, with its guilt for the Holocaust, accepted the concept of a Jewish State and what has followed for non-Jewish citizens is also horrifying.”

 

There are too many interventions, wars, peace agreements, and private tragedies that accompany this story to recount in this posting, but as was discussed with Jonathan, “Israel has found itself living in the 21^st century with international law, which firmly states that taking land from others is illegal and immoral.” One of the critical dilemmas, as humanitarian organizations working in the region have expressed it, is how to exercise facets of international law with a country, unlike any other in the modern world, committed to a form of nationalism that has strategically evolved every social institution into a vehicle that excludes many of its own citizens from having access? Traveling through the various territories, it is quite obvious that Jews and Palestinians are separated, as well as whole Palestinian communities from one another, by walls and checkpoints. At first glance one might ask, “Well isn’t everyone happy to just have a place to be?” But freedom of movement is greatly restricted and this makes everything from worship and work, to childcare and shopping, to fully participating in ventures of free enterprise impossible for some and completely controlled by others.

 

Today, Israel is about 2.5% Christian, 80% Jewish, and 16% Islam. The land reformation has resulted primarily in the relocation (mostly to refugee camps and occupied territories) of non-Jewish Palestinian citizens. (Such is the case of those living in Bethlehem—on the other side of the wall that runs up against the property to Tantur. See the photo.) Non-Jewish Arabs generally do not want an Islamic state. Many Jews are secular Jews and aren’t proposing a state held together by religion. Arab Christians are just trying to hang on to something here, not so much for religious reasons, but because this is their home—for centuries. (Some of the oldest Christian churches in the world are in occupied territories.) What unites and divides people here is one-and-the-same: LAND. In 1948 when David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, proclaimed the founding of the State of Israel, he carefully chose these words: “In the Land of Israel the Jewish people came into being.”

 

And in my lifetime, almost nightly on the news, we have been reminded of those Arabs who were left behind in this spirited emergence of national pride and energy: the non-Jewish Palestinians. It is interesting to reflect back on that in my life and realize that rarely if ever did US media cover the anguishing cries coming from Palestinian refugee camps or the struggle of pacifist Palestinian Christians to remain here. I do remember the excessive violence of the PLO and the terrible murders at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich (and my Grandma Grace turning off the television so we wouldn’t see.) I was curious then as I am now: what could be gained from violence? I have not watched an Olympics since that I don’t remember those horrible events. Ironically, the most impressive lesson of the Holocaust engrained in me is that the only ethical way for the world to move forward is to never forget that every speck of human dignity is precious and every unnecessary bit of human suffering needs the world’s immediate attention! Rage and violence in humans comes from some deep, dark place of oppression and suffering that the goodness and compassion of others has not been able to reach. And it’s even in our own backyards! But one continues to try to “reach and touch” those dark centers of hatred simply because that’s what Jesus most tried to do by his life and death. Last week I wrote about the challenges of being a woman in this very patriarchal world. Being a pacifist may in fact eclipse that reality completely in terms of my own personhood—the challenges presented by patriarchy-saturated-relationships are deeply painful for men and women who seek peace at all cost.

 

My worldview continues to expand while I am here regarding the “ordinary” Palestinian. I ride the Palestinian bus into Old Jerusalem. Everyone getting on and off has a life, a family waiting for them, a job that gives them meaning. They do not carry weapons (only Jewish citizens can serve in the military—and one consequence of not doing service in the army is that one cannot get a service number. A service number is the only way to get most government funded benefits.). What Arab Palestinians do carry is telling: their children, their groceries, their books, their cell phones, their brief cases. Arab Palestinians are in fact taking care of all my needs here at the Center—amazing cooks, laundresses, drivers, caregivers who are keeping me alive. They are the first persons and the last persons I see each day.

 

If you are in the region for even a few days, quickly it becomes clear that the question on everyone’s mind is whether or not the “solution” is a “two-nation solution” or a “one- nation solution?” I am listening.