Beyond Occupation and Terror - an interfaith dialogue on Israel/Palestine
I recently returned from a ten-day trip to Israel/Palestine, as part of an interfaith dialogue program between Christian seminarians and Jewish rabbinic students organized by Auburn Seminary and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The partner organization in Israel was the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI)’s Center for Interreligious Encounter with Israel. Our cohort was made up on the Christian side of Presbyterians, evangelical/charismatics, Baptists, Methodists and nondenominational (that latter category would be me, the semi-Semitic Jesus follower); the Jewish side were Modern Orthodox, Reform, Conservative and non-affiliated. So, right away you can see that some pretty interesting discussions were bound to surface. The schools represented were Union Theological Seminary, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, Yeshivat Maharat, Princeton Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, Boston University, Duke Divinity School and Jewish Theological Seminary. The group was evenly split with all of the Jewish students having lived in or visited Israel before and all of the Christians going to the Holy Land for the first time; this dynamic was to have a marked effect on the nature of our dialogue throughout the trip.
The program was a heady mix of the religious, the communal and the political; here I’ll focus mostly on the political and the religious, with some reflection on the group dialogue process as it pertains to the conflict.
Day 1: We arrived at Ben Gurion, piled into our minibus and immediately set out for Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. Our route took us on Route 6, a new highway that has been highly controversial because of ecological concerns; Route 6 also hugs the Green Line at points and we got our first glimpse of the Separation Barrier / Wall. OK - seems like we’re going to hit the ground running, politically speaking. Most of the group napped on the bus, but I was so excited and anxious that jet lag and lack of sleep couldn’t compete. As the sun set in a blaze of purples and pinks we passed Har Tavor (Mount Tabor), where the transfiguration of Jesus was said to have occured (the disciples had a holy vision of Jesus standing alongside Moses and Elijah). We arrived near Tiberias and stopped at a lookout point to expressly acknowledge our arrival together to Israel/Palestine; as we looked out to the Sea of Galilee we read from Psalms in Hebrew and English and prayed together. As if to emphasize the point that the political is never separate from the spiritual in the Holy Land, the lookout point is a memorial to the Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah in the second Lebanese War. In Tiberias we also went to the tombs of Maimonides and Yohanan ben Zakai, and some of the students spoke about the significance of those two figures to Jewish thought.
Day 2: I woke up to this view from my hotel room’s terrace:
As I looked out on the Galilee and listened to one of our coordinators daven on the adjoining terrace, I thought for the first time “Wow - I’m in Israel.” After breakfast we traveled to Capernaum, where Jesus is often recounted in the Gospels as having healed the sick and the lame; here we saw the ruins of a synagogue where Jesus may have spoken. We went to the Sea of Galilee and we Christians all dipped our feet in the water. At both locations a Christian read to the group from the Gospels to acknowledge the Christian significance of those places. At the Mount of Beatitudes we read from Matthew 5 and I talked about the Beatitudes as a framework for social justice, juxtaposing Matthew’s “blessed are the poor in spirit” with Luke’s more literal “blessed are the poor”. Who are the blessed - the humble in spirit or the materially poor?
We then went on to Nazareth, where we visited the Church of the Synagogue (where according to Luke Jesus was said to have preached) and met with Archimandrite Emil Shoufani, a Palestinian Israeli priest who has been very involved in promoting interreligious cooperation between Christians, Jews and Muslims in Israel/Palestine. He spoke eloquently about the need for the religious groups in the region to understand each other’s histories, but maintained that peace must be focused on the future rather than the past. In 2003, Father Shoufani led a large multifaith delegation to Auschwitz to learn about the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish people. In Nazareth we visited the Church of the Annunciation and went to the White Mosque, the oldest mosque in Nazareth and generally known as one of the most open and inviting mosques in the region. We observed the ‘Asr afternoon prayer and met with Atif al-Fahoum, whose family has been caretakers of the mosque since the early 19th century.
Before leaving Nazareth we convened in one of the main plazas that has been ground zero for a major religious conflict in the community. In 1997 the plaza site, a place believed to hold the tomb of Saladin’s nephew and the site of a projected mosque, was designated for construction in preparation for the Pope’s arrival; Muslims occupied the site in protest and even today continue to hold weekly prayer services on the plaza in open protest of the Chrsitian construction. Above the plaza is a large billboard that quotes a verse from the Qu’ran: “And whosoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the hereafter he will be one of the losers”. As the sun set in the hills, we talked in the plaza about the impact of the shifting religious demographic in Nazareth, as Muslims have become the majority in a city that was once predominantly Christian. I also presented a section of a paper I had written, in which I suggested that one of the biggest barriers to the peace process in Israel/Palestine is the idea of objective truth - that is, that there is one ironclad narrative about the history, responsibility and guilt of the conflict. Afterwards one of the Orthodox Jewish students challenged me to consider that there are truths in the pursuit of justice - it is the conclusions that we draw from those truths that are multifaceted and subjective. This was real food for thought, and I could see that this trip was going to push back on many of my assumptions in ways that I could only begin to imagine.
We ended our day back in Tiberias, where we met with Mohammed Darawshe of the Abraham Fund, a not-for-profit organization that promotes peaceful coexistence between Israeli Jews and Arabs through education, advocacy and other social justice initiatives. Darawshe, an Israeli Arab and a leading specialist on Jewish-Arab relations, offered a unique look into an intra-community conflict between Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens; we understood that the West Bank and Gaza aside, there are also deep economic and political inequalities, in addition to religious and cultural differences, that divide Jews and Arabs within the state of Israel as well.
Next post - days 3 and 4, with the Golan Heights, Jerusalem and Shabbat in the Holy City!
