Humanity and Hope

Last Saturday night, like the spies sent by Moses, I boarded a plane to scout out the land of Israel. I have been to Israel more times than I can count and I have lived there on and off during my life. I have been there with our congregation three times in the past two years and I was actually there just two weeks ago to visit my in-laws. But this trip was a first. This trip, organized by my esteemed colleague Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, was an interfaith trip of senior religious leadership from New York congregations. Rabbis, ministers and imams of different stripes were sent to see Israel and the Palestinian territories first hand, meet with senior leadership, model an example of interfaith cooperation for all to see, and return to New York energized to share our experiences with our own congregations and the wider New York community. We met with journalists, politicians and regular folk and with religious leaders in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim community. We met with Knesset members; we met with Natan Sharansky; we met with the Mayors of Bethlehem, Haifa and Sederot. We met with Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. Best of all, we met with the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, which I have to say was just about the coolest thing I have ever done. To sit in dialogue with a living legend was high on my bucket list, and while I imagine meeting with me was not high on his list, that experience alone made the trip worthwhile.

So what did we discover? Are we returning with a good report or a bad report? While I cannot speak for my colleagues, for me the answer is a little of both. Over the course of the few days there were moments of deep hopelessness as we heard leaders who professed two vastly different historical narratives, narratives that cannot be reconciled. We stood on an outlook on the border of Gaza instructed by our guide where to go should we hear a siren signaling an incoming rocket. We walked around the Kotel and onto the Temple Mount, humbled not only by the palpable feeling of God’s nearness, but also by the overwhelming distance to cross to arrive at a territorial compromise. We heard about the toxic politics of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the present reality that precludes the possibility of grand Begin or Sadat-like gestures towards peace. There is a bitter irony that this place that gave birth to the aspirations of so many in the past, has come to serve as the site of the stillborn dreams of the present.

But we also saw hope. And while distant, we felt the possibility of peace. Interestingly, we felt it most in places that are left off typical Israel trip itineraries. We visited the Rabin Medical Center in Petach Tikvah – a first class hospital that is the envy of the international medical community. We met there with a Palestinian doctor from the West Bank, a woman who treats Jew and Arab alike. We heard about her relationships with the Gazan community and how patients are brought in to Israel for treatment. Think about that: a West Bank doctor, working in an Israeli hospital treating patients from Gaza.

We saw hope in Haifa at a cultural center called Beit Hagefen. Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, producing art, music and theatre together. We went to Jaffa and met with Jewish and Muslim businessmen and women working together for profit and by extension for peace. I spoke to Rabbi Roberto Arbiv, a friend of our congregation, who runs a “Children of Abraham” study group bringing together a rotation of teachers for learning and dialogue amongst the three Abrahamic faiths. In each of these places, and there were others, we could see the flicker of peace, the possibility of reconciliation.

If I had to posit a theory on the distinction between hope and hopelessness, peace and strife, it boils down to one thing – human contact. The places with the most promise were the places where Jews and Arabs, no matter what their differences – political, territorial, religious or otherwise – knew the other, and understood that the other is a fellow human being. It was not that the residents of Jaffa or Haifa or the hospitals are any closer to a solution to the conflict, but rather that they have the same starting point – the common hope of a human being for self-determination, mutual recognition and equality. The places that lacked hope were the places where there was no semblance of co-existence, no contact with the other, no recognition of the other’s humanity. The space between the Mediterranean and the Jordan is tiny, smaller than New Jersey, but it is subdivided and balkanized like no other place in the world – increasingly so. When you don’t have contact with the other, then you don’t see the other as a human being, and then the odds of achieving understanding and peace drop precipitously.

Think about this week’s Torah reading – it is a case study in the relationship between humanity and hope. The moments of hope occur when the primary figures recognize another’s humanity; strife occurs when that humanity is overlooked. Why were the Israelites enslaved? Because a new king arose who did not know Joseph. In other words, the Israelites were enslaved when they became faceless ethnic interlopers. “Throw all the male Hebrew children into the Nile,” orders Pharoah. And the first act of civil disobedience occurs when two midwives, Shifra and Puah – not Hebrews but Egyptians – see that these children… are children, and they resist the inhumanity of Pharaoh’s decree. Surely Pharaoh’s daughter of all people knew of her father’s command. She happens upon Moses in the very Nile in which Hebrew children were being drowned. But she saw what Pharoah did not or could not see…a child; and it was there that redemption began. At the dramatic moment when Moses steps into his own, he sees an Egyptian man (ish mitzri) strike a Hebrew man (ish ivri), and Moses looks hither and hither and sees that there was no man, ish. There is a poetry to the verse, as if it is saying that in the eyes of the Egyptian, the Hebrew man did not posses enoshiyut, human attributes. He was a faceless Hebrew and thus to strike him was no crime at all.

It is such an obvious insight into human nature, but one that can never be emphasized enough. The most consistent predictor of hatred of any kind is the degree to which we are sheltered from contact with those whom we have been raised to hate. Homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious hatred of any kind, the roots of which are manifold, are given to fester in the air of ignorance. On this weekend especially, we are keenly aware of Martin Luther King Jr’s comment:

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated. (Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958).

God’s plan for a diverse humanity only comes by way of a first principle – that we all share a common humanity, created equally in the divine image. The leader of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem’s Old City shared with us the story of the tourist who went to heaven and was being shown around by St. Peter. They went from cloud to cloud arriving at various doors which St. Peter would open. He opened one room to see a large group rolling on the floor and talking in tongues. “Our Pentecostals,” St. Peter said. Next he opened the door to a room filled with men dancing the hora. “Our Jews,” said St. Peter. At the next cloud, he didn't open the door but instead put his forefinger to his lips in the hush motion and they both tiptoed past. Once past, the tourist asked, “What was that was all about!?” “Those are the Catholics,” St. Peter explained. “They think they are the only ones here.” The priest’s point was clear. It is a short and slippery path from segregating yourself from others to believing that the other is lesser in humanity than you.

My take home message, the message I share with you and look to act on in the years ahead, is that if we truly love Israel, then we will work passionately towards Israeli-Arab co-existence. I don’t know if there will ever be a day when the Palestinians and Israelis agree on the history of the region. I am skeptical that the governments will muster the political will to make peace. I see no easy solution to the territorial disputes and I certainly have my doubts as to whether religions are capable of turning on a dime. But I do think people are people. And I think that the only hope for the region is to plant more and more seeds of peace, points of contact between human beings, cultural, economic, educational and otherwise. Peace will not arrive top down, neither by way of divine intervention nor from governments. It will come from the ground up, from enough people on both sides saying, “Enough, I know the other, and though we may differ, they are people too and they have a right to exist.” We are told that we can only express our support for Israel by being on the political right or left. That is a false choice. Whatever our political differences may be, we can support Israel by supporting co-existence. Walls are important for Israel’s security, but so are bridges, bridges of understanding, bridges to peace. Our tradition teaches Adonai oz l’amo yiten, Adonai y’varekh et amo va-shalom. Just as God bestows strength and peace to Israel in a single verse, so we too must see strength and peace as values capable of being spoken and embraced at one and the same time.

In his must read book, The Prime Ministers, Yehuda Avner tells the story of the months following the 1979 Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt. Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat met in El Arish to begin the implementation of the Peace Treaty. At Begin’s instigation and with Sadat’s concurrence, they were accompanied by buses filled with disabled veterans of the two armies: soldiers maimed in the wars of 1948, ‘56, ‘67, ‘70 and ‘73. As the leaders left to go about their negotiations, the busloads emptied out into the meeting hall. First came about 70 Egyptians of various rank and insignia. Some in wheelchairs, their legs amputated; a number grotesquely disfigured; many entering with the assistance of medical orderlies. Then the Israelis arrived, likewise disfigured, some paralyzed, others blind, hobbling into the hall on the opposite side from the Egyptians.

In the silence, the eyes of the two sides locked in a palpable maelstorm of conflicting emotions. “Which one,” writes Avner, “had pressed the trigger, pulled the pin, pushed the button?” Nobody it seemed, had thought through the next step, how exactly they were expected to cross the room, a distance of only a few yards, an impassable no-man’s land. Some began to motion to leave the room.
It was precisely at that moment, Avner continues, that a blind Israeli bent over to his young son at his side and whispered to him, “Kach oti eleihem [take me to them],” to which the child responded pleadingly “Ani m’fached mihem, [I am scared of them.]” Gently the father nudged his child to lead him to the middle of the room; upon his very first step, an Egyptian officer in a wheelchair, legless, began to roll himself towards them. Meeting in the middle, the officer placed the blind man’s palm into his own and shook it. A Jew began to clap, then joined by an Arab, the sprinkle of claps swelling into a boisterous applause as the two groups moved towards each other into a huddle of embraces, handshakes and backslapping. It was at this point that the leaders of the two countries entered and the applause rose to an even higher pitch and the leaders circulated amongst the men, asked them where they had fought, many in the crowd weeping and calling to each other in Hebrew, Arabic and English Lechayim, Lihayot, To Life.

In the midst of it all, the child clung to his blind father, bewildered, looking at the animated faces of Arab and Jew. As long as he could remember, he had played escort to his father who would never see because he had been made blind by the Arabs. To him, they would always be the enemy and by definition, bad. Sensing his son’s apprehension, the blind man lifted his child into his arms, kissed him gently and said. “Al tefached b’ni. Ha’Aravim ha’eyle tovim. [Don’t be afraid my son. These Arabs are good.]” (Adapted from Y. Avner, The Prime Ministers)

There are those who believe that peace between Israelis and Palestinians is a dream that can never be reached, a fool’s errand, a delusion in a region filled only with hatred. I think the delusional ones are not those seeking peace but the other way around. It is those who shoot rockets into Israel thinking that Israelis will pack up and leave who are not only delusional but undercutting their own people’s dreams for sovereignty and self determination. It is those who build and build thinking that nobody recognizes that these actions are in direct conflict with Israel’s stated policy of a two-state solution who are delusional. I may be a dreamer, but I would take my dreams over their delusions any day of the week, not just because I like my dreams more, but because I think they have more of a chance of becoming a reality. It won’t happen overnight; it will take years and years of tireless effort towards co-existence. We can be part of that effort, encouraging and supporting those committed to doing the same; and we can, here in the New York community, serve as a model for others, through dialogue, through friendship and through courageous acts of bridge building in this fractured world in such desperate need of repair.