Pentecost, May 15 2016
Genesis 11.1-9; Acts 2.1-21; John 14.8-17, 25-27
St Andrew’s Scots Memorial, Jerusalem
“Did you hear the gunfire?” Vivien asked me on Wednesday evening. It wasn’t gunfire, although it easily could have been. It was fireworks in the night, to celebrate Israel’s Day of Independence; but not everyone in the land or out of it was celebrating.
We live, all of us, in the space between Babel and Pentecost. We live between the cities we build with human hands, and the new Jerusalem that comes down resplendent from heaven, as ready for God as a bride for her husband. What we build, we mostly build crooked and wrong, and God must come down to set it straight.
In his commentary on Genesis, Isaac Bashevis Singer speaks of those who built the tower of Babel as “hoping to ascend to heaven and perhaps take over God’s kingdom”. In reality, God must come down from heaven and take over our kingdoms. God must come down and transform the kingdoms of this world into the kingdom of heaven.
*
The week that “begins with Holocaust Memorial Day, followed by Memorial Day and capped by Independence Day,” says Haaretz columnist Nehemia Shtrasler, “is the most Israeli week there is. … It sums up our entire modern history – that of a persecuted and humiliated nation that shook off its past and managed to establish a state, to build a society and an economy and to maintain an army that doesn’t allow anyone to even dream about another Final Solution.”
And yet – and here’s the point – Shtrasler entitles his commentary, “In the darkness of Israeli society, a few rays of light are shining through.”
“I know,” says Shtrasler ruefully, “that it’s possible to paint the entire reality that we have created here in the blackest of colours … and not to find even a small ray of light. I am proposing another possibility: grasping those rays of light, enhancing them and hoping that with their help, “Our hope is not yet lost,” as our anthem states.”
That he should quote from Hatikvah is quite extraordinary. The poem that became Israel’s anthem was written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from Zolochiv in what is now Ukraine. The hope of which he speaks is the hope of the return to Zion.
As long as in the heart, within,
A Jewish soul still yearns,
And onward, towards the ends of the east,
An eye still looks toward Zion;
Our hope is not yet lost,
The ancient hope,
To return to the land of our fathers,
The city where David encamped.
The Jews of Israel have been returning to Zion now for well over a century; and yet for Shtrasler, it seems, they are still in exile.
Shtrasler is not the only Israeli commentator in recent weeks to speak of darkness. “This was not a good year for Israeliness,” said Haaretz in its Independence Day editorial. “… Whether it was relations between Jews and Arabs, between religious and secular, between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim or between leftists and rightists, every element that comprises what is ultimately supposed to be known as ‘Israeli’ seemed to be trying to tear itself away from its fellows and go off on its own.”
Of all these divisions, it is the division between Jew and Arab, in and beyond the land that stretches from the river to the sea, that is most fundamental.
*
Vivien and I spent Israel’s Day of Independence not far from route 60, at the Tent of Nations farm owned by the Nassar family, including our own Mary Musallam. They were celebrating the centenary of their purchase of the farm. For four generations of Nassars, this is their land. They have farmed it under four different regimes: the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, Jordan after 1948, and Israel after 1967. Only the fourth of these has tried to take their land away.
And that, in microcosm, is the core of the problem we face today.
In 1955, the African National Congress opened its Freedom Charter with these ringing words: “We, the people of South Africa, declare … that South Africa belongs to all who live in it … [and] that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood…”
The first problem we face in appropriating these words for this country is that we don’t even have a common name for it. For some, this land is Israel; for others, it is Palestine. I prefer to speak of Israel/Palestine, with a slash between the two, because this name captures better than most the reality of a society that is fragmented every which way: not just between Jews and Arabs, but in all the other ways mentioned by Haaretz and many more beside.
*
“Zionism,” says the Israeli psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi in his book Original Sins, “is a dream that cannot fail to move and thrill anybody who knows anything of the tragic history of the Jews.” Indeed. The Jews of Christian Europe were treated shamefully by Christians, and the Jews of post-Christian Europe – the Europe of Enlightenment and emancipation – were treated more shamefully still.
But the tragedy of Zionism is that the return to Zion as envisaged by Theodor Herzl and his followers was begun for the wrong reasons and carried out in the wrong way. It was begun in the belief that “they will always hate us” and carried out in a way that gave the Arab inhabitants of Palestine every reason to hate.
Remarkably, many Palestinians refuse to do that. Daoud Nassar at the Tent of Nations will fight to the last lawyer to keep his land, but he says flatly, “We refuse to be enemies”. And in that refusal lies our true hope.
*
“Enter through the narrow gate,” says Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount; “for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
Babel or Pentecost; exclusion or inclusion; life or death: the choice is ours, as it always is.
Last night we held a concert in aid of Musicians without Borders. In the guesthouse afterwards we drank wine from the Cremisan monastery that lies just the other side of the wall near Bethlehem. That section of the wall dividing the Cremisan Valley has now been completed. Ancient olive groves, orchards and terraces have been bulldozed. 58 Palestinian Christian families are now unable to access their land. More than 400 families can now only access their land with permits and with difficulty. Many will be forced to leave – and that, one suspects, is the whole point.
This is the road that leads to destruction – not just the destruction of the lives and livelihoods of these Christian families, but destruction of our whole society – and all around us we see its effects.
*
Haaretz offers an alternative route: “This Independence Day underscores the need to repair the rents in the blue-and-white flag and to bring under its protection all the groups that make up Israeliness – including those minorities that have trouble identifying with the Star of David in the flag’s centre or the ‘yearning Jewish soul’ of the national anthem.”
This intends to talk of inclusion, but it talks exclusively, in Israeli terms. We need a language that is both Israeli and Palestinian, both Hebrew and Arabic; and the Day of Pentecost is perhaps a good day to seek one.
Also in Haaretz last week, Avraham Burg and Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, a religious Jew and a secular Muslim, helped us to see what that language might look like.
“We are two,” they wrote. “Partners who are still unequal. … One, a man from the majority society that has it all, the other a woman from a minority that was left with almost nothing. And yet we are together, for the sake of a humane, just and fair future, for us and our children.”
“Together, we promise to turn away from the bad and to do good, to each fight fanaticism in his and her own camp and to together create a third group, of the many thousands who are loyal to faith in the daring human spirit.”
And, we may add, in the audacity of the Holy Spirit.
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi concludes his book with these words: “Facing Zionism now… is the defiance of the indigenous population, sharing sunshine, blue skies and historical destiny with the [Jewish] Israelis”.
In the 21st century, the Jewish question in 19th-century Europe has become the Israeli question; and, as Burg and Zoabi suggest, it is a question we can answer only together.
*
Eastertide, with the three great festivals of Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, is a season of triumph, but look back, and you will see that over the last 50 days we have tried hard not to be triumphalist.
For the victory in question is not our victory: it is the victory of God, and our proper response is to circumcise our hearts. Our calling, on this Day of Pentecost and every day, is to turn again to God and be saved and to call on our land – the land we must learn to share – to turn again and be saved.
And when that day comes, there will be fireworks all day long.
Hymns
We sing a love that sets all people free (CH4 622)
Like fireworks in the night the Holy Spirit came (CH4 584)
Father eternal, ruler of creation (CH4 261)
Spirit of truth and grace (CH4 608)
All my hope on God is founded (CH4 192 i)
Sources
African National Congress, The Freedom Charter, June 26 1955
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins (New York: Olive Branch, 1993)
Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace (Austin, TX: Synergy, 2010)
Avraham Burg, Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, “Israel and Palestine without absolutes”, Haaretz May 12 2016
Drew Christiansen, Ra’fat Aldajani, “Land grab in the Cremisan Valley” National Catholic Reporter September 8 2015
“Cremisan Valley”
“Hatikvah”
Independent Catholic News, “Holy Land: Separation Barrier completed in Cremisan”, May 12 2016
“Israel must fix its fragmented flag to include all Israelis”, Haaretz May 11 2016
Nehemia Shtrasler, “In the darkness of Israeli society, a few rays of light are shining through”, Haaretz May 10 2016
Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Genesis”, in David Rosenberg ed., Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible (San Diego/New York/London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987)