Seeing Both Sides of the Holy Land – Forward.com.

 

This is a great article in-depth on our success in creating a new for profit way to generate peace and prosperity, especially for our peace partners and honest businesses committed to equality of Israelis and Palestinians.

 

A group drives up to the Mount of Olives and takes in the vista below: the Old City of Jerusalem; the Dome of the Rock in the near distance; the modern city a bit farther off.

An Israeli tour guide begins to explain the importance of this spot to the Jewish people. “King David,” he might say, “walked here.” He will explain where Jews could go, and where they could not, before 1967, and what the city’s unification meant for Jews the world over.

And then he will step aside and a Palestinian tour guide will step forward and explain how his people see this spot, what this view means to them. “You see that flag in the distance?” he might say. “That is a small settlement.” And he will explain what that settlement means to the Palestinians, and how it got there; he will talk about how a family was removed from their home — tricked or forced into giving up their land.

The Israeli will interject and provide the settler perspective. But they will not argue. They will simply show the two narratives, running parallel but in competition, rarely intersecting. They will ask the group how to resolve the moment.

The following day, the group will go to Yad Vashem and then Ammunition Hill. They will learn about the origins of the State, they will travel to a village at the edge of Jerusalem that was once Palestinian and they will hear from soldiers who served on both sides of the 1948 War of Independence.

This is a dual narrative tour, run by a unique tour company called MEJDI (Middle East Justice and Development Initiative). The company’s founders work at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution, at George Mason University in Virginia, which is dedicated to promoting peace and understanding in the Middle East. MEJDI was founded, fittingly, by a Palestinian — columnist and peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah — and two Jews — Marc Gopin, a rabbi and professor at George Mason, and Scott Cooper. The group takes school groups, synagogues, churches, social organizations and individuals on tours around Israel and the West Bank, challenging travelers and students to gain a deeper understanding of the underpinnings of the conflict.

At a moment when the peace process has frozen, MEJDI offers hope, if not an easy answer. It also provides a chance for Americans to study with Palestinians and Israelis together, something that has become increasingly rare since the second intifada, when Palestinians from the West Bank all but completely stopped working in Israel proper. Groups are taken into the West Bank, students see where tour guides from each side are allowed to go and where they aren’t; they meet real people, living in real places, under real conditions, from the settlers of Gush Etzion to the Palestinians in Hebron.

“The idea of MEJDI is that every person on our staff has to be in some way committed to recognizing the dual narrative-ness of this region,” said Shira Nesher, 24, one of the Israeli guides in Jerusalem. Nesher, whose grandparents are all Holocaust survivors, served as a military guide in the army. She now studies political science and history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “One guide cannot be the whole Israeli narrative, and one guide cannot be the whole Palestinian narrative,” she said, explaining how the groups meet dozens of representatives from both worlds, something she had never done in her own youth. “People leave the tour very confused, and not pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, but pro-justice.”

Dave Schimdgall, 30, a pastor based in Washington, D.C., who has taken two tours with MEDJI, echoed those sentiments. “It’s kind of an alternative pilgrimage,” he said. “The goal is to get into the mess, embrace the tension and really learn about the conflict both past and present.”

Abu Sarah himself is a case study in the region’s complexities. When he was 9, the first intifada began, and his older brother was arrested and accused of stone throwing. His brother, Abu Sarah explained, was tortured and, eventually, confessed. He never came home. He was released from detention directly to the hospital, where he died of internal bleeding. Abu Sarah became radicalized, joining the youth wing of Fatah, the Palestinian political party. He was throwing stones at age 11 and distributing political pamphlets by 16, refusing to learn Hebrew as he studied. But at 18, he graduated from high school and realized life in Jerusalem without Hebrew was impossible.

So he enrolled in ulpan, or Hebrew language school. “That was my transformation moment.… I met Israelis for the first time in my life who talked about Palestinians’ freedom. When I grew up, I never saw Peace Now or any lefty Jewish organization. It was only when I was studying Hebrew that suddenly I realized there are Israelis who are not supportive of the occupation.”

Abu Sarah formed a Palestinian branch of the Israeli Bereaved Families Forum and began walking a path of nonviolence. He studied tourism and then religion and conflict resolution. “It started a process, a process of what to do with my anger about my brother’s death…. Working for peace became part of my mission,” he said. He worked on a joint Israeli-Palestinian radio show and began training Palestinian youth in nonviolent social action. Then, in 2008, he met Cooper, who invited him to meet the director of George Mason’s conflict resolution department, Gopin.

With Abu Sarah’s expertise in tourism in mind, the three formed MEJDI. Students eager to earn college credit and expand their understanding of regional problems quickly signed up, as did church and synagogue groups. The program has become so popular that today MEJDI also operates in Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, with the aim of expanding to Greece, Armenia, South Africa and Ireland.

So far 20 groups have gone on MEDJI tours to Israel and Palestine, and at least another 10 are planned for 2012 (two already left in January). It is not, the group emphasizes, just about left-wing groups; AIPAC hired MEJDI to spend a day with its youth leaders. They strive to be neither left nor right on the spectrum. Most trips are 8 to 10 days, but they are tailored to fit each group.

“It is difficult to see injustice, and it is also difficult to see blaming of those carrying out injustice. It is challenging to hold all the perspectives together. This trip has strengthened my intention to be able to support both peoples, and to be a dedicated Jew,” wrote Melanie Malka Landau, a lecturer at Monash University in Australia, on her blog after her experience with MEJDI.

Kathryn House, 30, a Ph.D. candidate in theology at Boston University, went on a MEJDI tour offered through the school the first week of January. “They really do a great job of complicating even the dual narrative,” she said. “We were left to say, ‘What will we do with those narratives?’”

In 2011, the group won the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations Intercultural Innovations Award in Doha, and Abu Sarah was named an “emerging explorer” by National Geographic, which now uses MEJDI as its tour operator in the region, with Abu Sarah as the host.

MEJDI has another mission: to pump money into the economies on either side. “We… realized that tourism was a potent force in the Holy Land… but that the conflict was hampering the access and even the enthusiasm for visiting the Holy Land, or Israel and Palestine. We figured that we could invite people into two narratives, the Jewish one and the Palestinian one, as a positive way to engage in tourism,” said Gopin.

Cooper agreed. “We thought it was an opportunity [to] make positive change and… do it in a sustainable way,” he said. “Many of our speakers are in the peace-building community; we pay them well. It’s a nice way to encourage collaboration.”

 

 

 

I remember sitting very peacefully in the synagogue on Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, just five days after my disastrous Yom Kippur fast day, which fortunately I completed despite serious exhaustion. Fasts, as anyone who does them knows, are deeply personal affairs, struggles that pull you right into yourself and away from global concerns. But following the rhythms of life, Sukkot takes you right back from the exalted and highly personal inner reality of Yom Kippur. Sukkot pulls you into reality, into identity, human identity and Jewish identity, and the tension between them.

 

In the ancient world, Jerusalem was apparently a place where people of many nationalities gathered around the holiday of Sukkot, and it seems for that reason that the question of ‘Israel and the nations’, for lack of a better phrase, seems to come up quite a bit in the ancient rabbinic liturgy, the choices especially for Haftorah (Prophetic) reading. Those readings have references to non-Jewish saints like Koresh of Persia, but also a great deal of resentment of surrounding nations, and some very nasty predictions, some so nasty that it is very hard to take after you spent such sacred time on the High Holy Days making peace with yourself and the world. But it is inescapable that the destruction of the Temples by outside forces was massively traumatic to ancient Judaism, and that is reflected in the liturgy, in the choice of angry Haftorah’s on the holiday of Sukkot where the Temple had been so central.

 

The rabbinic prayers and liturgy as they were transmitted, however, have some pretty intense contradictions that get very uncomfortable. Opposites can make you a little crazy, and they go along way to explaining oppositional Jewish politics. The two opposites I get from the Holiday liturgies taken as a whole: Everything is our fault and we are cursed forever; Nothing is our fault and everyone else is cursed forever! Gives me a headache just boiling it down to a few words.

 

The prophetic visions have some horrible predictions for the gentiles, but the rabbis clearly open up the most important standing prayer with exactly the opposite voice. The Musaf encapsulated the Temple Service, the Temple that was destroyed, and Musaf opens with the unforgettable words, spoken my entire childhood and utterly internalized: Mipne hato’einu galinu me-artzeinu, Due to our sins were we exiled from our land. There it is, enough to make you crazy. Which is the true voice? And is that even the right question?

 

The ancient Temple is ground zero for violence, shefichus damim,  in Jewish history. It was the place that was the most contested throughout history. It was supposed to be the locus of monotheistic religion, but through much of the years of Jewish kingdoms it became a corrupted place of idolatry against which the Jewish prophets railed and predicted destruction. It was indeed destroyed, twice, and the human toll each time, the hurban, was so horrific that those memories were seared into the Jewish consciousness.

 

Today it bears reminding that those who want to rebuild the Temple include those who want to rebuild it by necessarily destroying the Al Aqsa Mosque, something that would not only be the deepest violation possible of the Palestinian people and Muslims worldwide, it also would cause an international war like nothing Israel has ever seen before. And yet, in an utterly paradoxical way, it is hard to not understand why religious Jews yearn for the Temple to be rebuilt, as was predicted and prayed for throughout a 2000 year exile. Pretty strange and painful paradoxes.

 

There is unity and sacredness in the mystery of opposites. This is what Jewish spirituality has understood for thousands of years. Yichud, Unity from opposites means fixing what is impossible, and it is what we human beings are always called upon to do.

 

The Lubavitcher Rebbe once pointed out that it was Solomon who was charged with building the Temple, not King David. David had blood on his hands from so much conquest and killing, but it was Solomon, Shlomo, whose name exemplifies peace and wholeness, Shalom, who is the only one capable of building Temples with everlasting sanctity.

There is great mystical reality in drawing from the strength and beautiful sides of all opposites. Only in the mysterious capacity to draw strength and beauty from all beings does the unity of heaven and earth appear on and through the contested land.

Nonviolence is the crown in the jewel of the unity of opposites. Violence destroys all coexisting opposites that epitomize human life, but nonviolence holds contradiction in its essence. Nonviolence expresses the paradoxical strength and power of not acting upon the very real realities of rage, injury and memory, whereas rage, ka’as, is the essential loss of prophetic and mystical reality. Ka’as, rage, drives the sacred from this world. But nonviolence, especially as it is expressed by hesed, loving kindness, gives birth to the sacred word, which gives birth to apologies and forgiveness, which in turn mystically create the union and reunion of opposites. The nonviolence of hesed is waiting to be born inside the Jewish and gentile hearts that beat in and around the Temple, and with that birth will come the healing of the world.

 

 

This is a poem that I wrote in honor of my daughter Lexi’s Bat Mitsvah. Many who heard me recite it at the Bat Mitsvah wanted me to make it available. Here it is. 

SWEPT BY VISION

August 31, 2011

 

Wrapped in blankets,

And swept by vision,

Her eyes on fire with dramas unseen,

She told a tale,

Like ancient bards and mystics.

She breathed in her words,

And her eyes spoke of places

Far away and never conjured before,

Her massive shock of little curls

Dramatizing the contours of her serious face.

She was four.

She was in the middle of telling a story

To me in her bunk bed,

At darkened bed-time.

Without warning she jumped to the end of the bed,

Curled up in a ball.

There was a rainbow,

And it was in the room.

 

Years later I saw a thick rainbow,

In Arlington,

Stretching audaciously across the entire Virginia skyline,

After a brutal thunderstorm.

I walked in the rain staring,

It filled me with wonder and hope

That this rainbow would somehow change

The degenerative politics of the nation,

Embedded in the Washington skyline.

And I blessed it with the blessing of our tradition,

And hoped that the Flood of water,

globally warmed water,

would never again

Overtake the earth.

My heart raced at the sight.

 

But for Lexi her rainbow was far more real and true,

For she had created it,

Down to its every color,

And that was so new and terrifying

At four.

 

The power of vision.

 

A few years later

A windstorm

Beckoned her spirit,

She ran outside,

Beneath our trees,

The clouds churning madly,

the wind whistling,

The loosened leaves swinging like dervishes.

And there she was,

Her face directly to the wind,

her eyes squinting and gleaming all at once,

Her curls wafting wildly in the breeze,

Her hands slightly outstretched to either side,

Palms open, of course.

Her back was as erect as it could be,

As if she were about to graduate at a college ceremony,

As if she were about to receive an award,

The moment just before the Dean of students shakes her hand.

But it was the wind that shook her hand,

It was God that shook her hand,

And she was glad.

 

And I, spying on her private moment

From the kitchen window,

Heart raced,

Eyes water-filled,

As proud as I have ever been,

Because I knew

That she and the earth

Were one,

And the rest of life would be,

Commentary.

 

When a human being conjures rainbows in her bedroom

And receives wind as a reward of highest honor,

The gifts to the world then flow,

Arduously and mysteriously,

But they flow,

One year after another,

And the Divine Spirit,

Within and beyond,

is nourished,

and the Spirit survives the cold insensitivities

of human unconsciousness.

 

Bouncing balloons and balls,

Flying off heads and noses,

Bring on her hysterical laughter,

A belly laugh,

And a smile that lights up

All of God’s worlds.

I watched her hysteria in wonder,

Mystified.

And then I saw it one day.

Electrons dance like silly balloons.

In every atom in our bodies,

In all of this world,

And billions of other worlds,

They Laugh and dance,

So wildly that no scientist

Will ever see the electron,

But only probably,

And with uncertainty,

Will they see it,

Because the electron is too busy dancing and laughing.

 

The bouncing balloon

is the flower of our universe,

and so how could you not laugh?

 

Dance and laugh, Lexi,

Defy, defy, defy,

Un-captured and exuberant,

Capture the wind.

Sing its song,

And embrace us,

Flailing humanity,

In your passion for existence.

 

For we need your rainbows,

And your winds,

And your dancing electrons,

To set us free,

With the love of life,

That fills,

your mysterious

and boundless

Heart.

I grew up in a world of blessings and curses, and I mean a world of radically elaborate blessings and curses. I speak of course of the Yiddish world, the world of Jews from Eastern Europe. It surrounded me and was in the air all the time. The incredible creativity in describing problematic people attests to the chief complaints about women and men. The sheer number of names for a useless person, a shlemiel, a shlemazel, a shmendrik, a pisk malocheh, and much worse, all very colorful. Jews never held anything back in their criticism of each other, which naturally psychologists might see as internalized persecution.

 

Some people I knew had a very hard life with bitter disappointments and losses. They used to call many people “chaleria”, which later I would learn meant roughly, “a piece of Cholera”. Many people were requested to ‘plotz’, explode, but only after they had gone to ‘kakin afen yam’, relieve themselves in the ocean. On the other hand, I had other old people in my life who felt very fortunate, who lost so many relatives in the Holocaust but were blessed with good husbands and large families. They blessed us children abundantly. I remember always hearing about mazel and glick, good fortune and good luck, but I was quite confused because I thought they were always telling me about some family named ‘Glick’, because there actually was a butcher named Glick. Go figure. I was a bit eber botult, mixed up in the head.

 

There is something about blessings and curses that are both a very weighty matter, taken with the utmost seriousness by the Torah and the Talmud. But there is also something about cursing that you just have to laugh at, especially because it seems to be borne out of a profound sense of absurdity, powerlessness, and endless fighting between people that goes nowhere, what we call in conflict analysis ‘intractable conflict’.

 

Numbers 22-25, the portion of the Torah called Balak, does not disappoint in this regard. It is an absurd and odd tale for many reasons. It has great and fearsome enemies of Israel, Moab and Midian, reduced to hiring a professional curser, Bilaam, against the Israelites, but who just can’t seem to get it right. Every time he tries to curse a blessing comes out of his mouth, and a curse on the very people who hired him. And let’s not even talk about the fact that divine prophecy is coming out of the mouth of an ass? What is this, a Mel Brooks routine? Something is strange about this episode.

 

This portion also ends quite badly. Just as you think that Israel has the upper hand because Bilaam simply ends up blessing them with victory, they end up really screwing up behaviorally, so badly that their own leader, Moses, brings upon them the very kind of plague that Moab and Midian could not have been more pleased about.

 

I started to sense that this is a very violent portion, filled with adversarial relations, endless hatred and wishes of ill will, triumphalism, and a very male psychology of win/lose, defeat or be defeated, be cursed or be blessed—and take no prisoners.

 

I asked myself a basic question about this portion, why put blessings into the mouth of those who want to curse? And why are we treated to such a profound look into the psychology of malignant enemies, Moab, Midian, Balak? I started to realize that the portion is really dealing with Israel at the apex of its power against its enemies. Its reputation for victory has spread to many peoples, and they have become afraid and desperate, so afraid and desperate that they are relying on cursing for hire. Even more, the portion ends with a plague in fact coming on Israel. Why end this way?

 

There is a strange principle in the Torah, especially as it is refracted by the rabbis. It is best encapsulated by an enigmatic phrase in Ecclesiastes, Kohelet (3:15). Kohelet states: ve’ha’elokim yevakesh et a ha’nirdaf, The Divine desires (seeks after, embraces, longs for, sides with) the one that is pursued (persecuted). Later commentaries will emphasize that it does not matter whether the persecuted are guilty, are the criminals. It is in the nature of the universe that the Divine will balance out persecution with devotion, dedication and protection.

 

This makes the business of cursing very problematic indeed. It means that whatever happens, whoever has the upper hand, they had better watch out, because a balance is coming to fate and to the universe. It will make victory and blessings at the expense of someone else being cursed into a very dubious way to flourish. In effect, once cursing is afoot, once the curses are flying, no one is going to do very well in a Divine world.

 

This portion begins with the complete impotence of Israel’s enemies in the art of cursing, and blessings flow for Israel to crush and bloody its enemies. Yet the end of the portion has Israel bloodied in the worst way, by its own deeds, and by the curses or words of indictment of their own leader, Moses, as well as radically violent acts against their own leadership. What is divine wrath in this portion? Plagues and your own leaders turning against you and commanding a civil war, turning brother against brother. This is a true curse.

 

What is the remedy within the portion? Go with the best of the blessings of Bilaam, the one about brothers living as one together, the one about tents of peace. And yet everything at the end undermines the comfort of those victorious blessings, these anti-curses in defiance of Midian and Moab, and certainly the bloody predictions of a slaughterhouse where your enemies will be eaten by you. Something is unsatisfying here, which is why the rabbis made the deepest commentary on this troubled portion of curses through the words of the immortal prophet, Micah. Micah is salvation here.

 

 

The happier note of this entirely strange portion is not to be found in the Torah portion at all, but in the rabbinic choice of Micah 5 and 6 for the Haftorah, the prophetic portion that is meant to accompany (in this case redeem) the portion from the Five Books of Moses.

 

The Haftorah is the answer to everything, and here is how it goes. In an adversarial universe everyone dies by God’s ruthless might and revenge. God’s might is expressed by the violence of warfare and revenge. Micah effectively says that people can continue to fantasize about a primitive god that will be appeased by bulls and blood and sacrifice, the re-creation of bloody warfare in the slaughterhouse of the Temple. But where the deepest answer lies is not in blood and sacrifice. The true answer to the mysteries of enemy systems, of endless cycles of curses and blessings and reversals, and curses again, is something that is at once utterly nonviolent, utterly compassionate, and utterly beyond war. It is something utterly beyond demonization and particularist jingoism.

 

The answer lies inside the human soul, every human soul. It is in the intra-psychic discipline and choice of making three things the locus of our longing and pleasure. It is the key for the human being and the human community to discover union with the God that inhabits ever quanta of the universe, every quanta in which there can be no cursed and no blessed, where all of life is inter-dependent, sacred and part of the body of God. The secret to God is in the quanta, and the true way to discover the blessings of the quanta of God in all of life is through three very hard spiritual practices: the pursuit of social justice, the pursuit of love and kindness, and the practice of humility. It is these practices–and these practices only–that allow the human being and the human community to pass through the mysterious God-intoxicated universe, in safety, in peace and in prosperity.

 

“He has told you, human being, what is good, and what Eternal Being is searching for in you: the practice of justice, the love of kindness, and a humble journey with the God.”

 

Coming soon on this site: Marc’s second blog, which will be called Compassionate Judaism and be about exactly that. Check back!