Emily Welty
October 23, 2005
Those of use who have spent significant time living and working in Israel/Palestine carry both a blessing and a curse with us. The blessing is that we can hear and visualize Biblical stories with striking clarity. The curse is that we have a responsibility to continually tell the story of what we have seen and experienced there.
This is hard. Its hard to know how many facts to tell you and how much of my own story needs to be included. So what I have to offer you today is a reflection on stones; on the Holy Land and what it might mean to love your neighbor.
Love your neighbor like yourself. I love the fact that Jesus chooses "neighbor" to sum up all the toughest people to love. The gospel seems to indicate that some people might have trouble loving their neighbor – now I know that you folks in Takoma Park might not be able to relate to this but – when I hear this text, I want to cry out, Jesus – are you aware of who my neighbor is? And how unlovable I sometimes find them?"
My neighbor at the moment is a drummer who had the uncanny ability to choose to practice his drums precisely in the moments when I was most stressed out about completing my thesis. My neighbor last year sometimes engaged in some sort of yogic, atonal yodeling at night just as I was trying to go to sleep. My neighbor in one of my college dorms blew her nose in the sink.
For me, these are not easily lovable people. They are those who distract us, who scare us and who disgust us. Yet these are exactly the people we are commanded to love. And perhaps one of the best case studies of the difficulty of loving your neighbor comes to us from the Holy Land – from our brothers and sisters in Israel and in Palestine.
I was living in Israel/Palestine when the second intifada broke out in 2000. I had lived in Israel before during a study abroad program but this time I was there on my own and living on the Green Line. My apartment was quite close to Bethlehem and it is there that I saw most of the violence firsthand. Its impossible to predict how you, as an individual, will respond to violence no matter how much you have studied it, read about it or thought about it before. For me personally, I find that a strange sense of calm sets in and I am filled with a resolve to do something.
One day shortly after the intifada began, I encountered a violent battle between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers in the road – blocking the road even. The Palestinians were throwing rocks and the soldiers were firing rubber bullets. I stood frozen on the sidelines feeling full of frustration and anger. At one point, I remember that one of the stones that had been thrown came skidding to a stop a few feet away from me. I bent down, picked it up and carried it home with me. When I was asked at a checkpoint at the airport, if I was carrying any weapons, I thought about this souvenir of conflict and I did not know what to say.
So, one of the things that rocks remind me of is the perverse power differential between the Israeli army and the Palestinian people. While it is true that some Palestinians have weapons, it is also true that this is a conflict in which a modern, wealthy, first world army is fighting a largely impoverished, besieged civilian population. Guns and tanks and grenades vs. rocks and bottles and burning tires.
Where is God is all of this? I once read an essay that said that if Jesus came back today he’d be a Palestinian. I don’t know how I feel about this. On some level, it resonates with me. I believe absolutely in God’s special love for the most poor and oppressed in society and having seen the socio-economic conditions in Palestine, the oppression of the Palestinian people is undeniable. However, I think it is dangerous to identify Jesus or God too closely with any one group, ethnicity, race or nation – including our own incidentally!
So I prefer to think of Jesus as a third party. I imagine Jesus would have taken action when he saw the violent exchange that I witnessed between the Israelis and Palestinians – that he would have intervened in a way that I didn’t know how to in that moment.
It is this belief in Jesus as an intermediary that led me to my involvement with the Christian Peacemaker Team in the summer of 2003. CPT’s motto is “getting in the way” and they live the belief that it is the duty of Christians to intervene in violent situations – often placing themselves physically in a way that prevents violence. There are currently active CPT teams in Iraq, Colombia and Israel/Palestine. In Israel/Palestine, CPT works to prevent home demolitions, monitors checkpoints, escorts Palestinian kids to school to avoid settler intimidation and actively works to diffuse outbreaks of violence. We don’t carry weapons like UN peacekeepers to and we are neither pro-Israeli nor pro-Palestinian. What we are is pro-peace and anti-occupation. We believe that occupation of Palestine is not beneficial for the Israeli or the Palestinian people.
During my time working with CPT, I was challenged to think about loving my neighbor in a more intense way. I had to be passionately committed to nonviolence and to know my own heart and faith well enough that I could trust myself to intervene in a situation if I was called to do so. In this context, loving my neighbor meant being willing to step in the middle, to get in the way.
One afternoon I was at a woman named Zleeha’s house in Hebron in the West Bank. We were having tea and talking about the harassment that Palestinian children in Hebron face from Israeli settlers while walking to and from school. All at once, a child ran into the room crying that Israeli soldiers were on a foot patrol in the neighborhood and wanted to come in the house. Before Zleeha could get to the door, it had been forcibly opened and three soldiers bolted in. They lined us all up against the wall while they searched the house. There was a little girl about eight or nine years old standing next to me and trembling with fear. I reached down and held her hand and I promised her that we were going to be ok. When I looked at her and saw that she believed me, I knew that I could get in the way on her behalf if it was necessary. I asked one of the soldiers to please stop waving his gun around and I asked him for permission to kneel and hold the girl in my arms. That was one of the moments in my life that I have felt like I have truly been present and loving to my neighbor.
Because so much of the time I fail. I blame, I make excuses, I belittle or judge or mock. Loving your neighbor is a full time job and I only do it well about 1% of the time. In the context of Israel/Palestine, it is the Israeli soldiers and Israeli army that I find it most difficult to love.
I should mention here that I think the kind of love Jesus is talking about is not hearts and flowers and fuzziness. I think love here means a willingness to bear with each other, to expect the best from each other, to be open and willing to be changed by other people. In a protracted conflict, this becomes especially difficult. There are deeply conflicting narratives about the past and each side has collectively held memories that re-tell and re-affirm their own group identity to the exclusion of all others. We tend to collect and remember information that supports and reinforces our opinions about the world. We tend to ignore or dismiss information that challenges our worldview. Our memories are inherently selective.
Some days I am terribly jealous of Moses. I need to see the Promised Land. I am impatient. I want it now. I want it here and in Israel/Palestine and in Colombia and in Liberia and in Sudan and in Brazil and EVERYWHERE. And where is it? Where is it?
God brings Moses to the edge of a new world. Moses – Moses was God’s friend, one of the few people in the Bible that actually sees God. And God doesn’t even bring Moses into the Promised Land. But Moses gets to see it. And I think God hasn’t changed much in the last thousand years….because God still gives us glimpses of the beloved community. God still lets us see what peace will look like even if we haven’t achieved it yet.
Here are three signs of hope that I see in the Holy Land today:
The other sign of hope that I see is the willingness of people worldwide to live out the gospel – a gospel that calls us to radical love.
We must be the change we want to see in the world. We must be it. We’re the glimpse of what is possible. We are the promised land. We are the beloved community. And not just us here at the Takoma Park Presbyterian Church. Not just the red states or the blue states. Not just the United States. All of us – Iraqis and Kurds, Israelis and Palestinians, Pakistanis and Indians, Syrians and Lebanese – Asians and Africans and Europeans and Latino/as. We are the beloved community together.
And what if that’s true?
Are you living in a way that shines forth Christ’s peace? Is the reign of God announced in the way you live?
Because that’s the charge. At the end of the day, that’s all we’re asked to do – love God with all of your heart and mind and spirit and love our neighbor as ourselves.
Alleluia, Amen.
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