First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Holy Land

How to begin? There are those who say, like my colleague Tim Hart-Andersen at Westminster Presbyterian, that it begins with a journey, our journey, and that’s true. Yet like all the events of any one mortal life, it begins before we arrive on the scene – long before. As William Faulkner has said, the past is not dead; it is not even past. And so, if we would speak of these matters with either intelligence or compassion, we must begin with history.

Perhaps it begins in ancient times, with the first conquest of the land, when the tribes of Israel, escaped from Egyptian captivity and wandering in the desert, recorded these instructions from their god:

Or perhaps it begins elsewhere, in France, say, at the Council of Clermont in 1095, with Pope Urban the second calling upon Christians to join in military crusades against what was then Muslim-controlled Jerusalem:

You could say it begins with the Christian reformer Martin Luther in 1543, and the subsequent centuries of pogroms he inspired by instructing his followers to relate to their Jewish neighbors in these ways:

Perhaps it begins in modern times with the opening of the Suez canal by a French investment consortium in 1869, suddenly making colonial control of Egypt and Palestine a matter of intense economic interest and rivalry between France and Britain. In 1882, a revolt of Egyptian army officers and civil servants against the corrupt Khedive government caused the British army to seize control of the entire area, a position which it relinquished reluctantly in gradual stages, and not completely until after the end of the second world war.

Some would say it begins in Basle, with the vision of Theodor Herzl, a European Jewish author, who in 1897 organized a conference of Jews to explore the possibility of creating an actual national home for European Jews in the traditional holy lands. Herzl saw western cultural anti-semitism as an intractable force, and pictured a Jewish social utopia in Palestine. It would be a pluralist, technologically advanced, secular society with equality for Arabs. Inspired by this image, organizations sprang up to advocate Zionism and assist the emigration of European Jews to form this community, in farming villages and building what would become the city of Tel Aviv. By 1914, the total population of Palestine stood at about 700,000. About 600,000 were Arabs, and 85,000 to 100,000 were Jews

It appears that as the end of the first world war approached, England’s diplomats made a number of mutually contradictory promises to France and the allied powers, as well as to Egyptian and Arab leaders, about the disposition of lands then under British control in the middle east. Also, in 1917, at the urging of the British Zionist movement, including Baron Rothschild, the British government issued a statement which became known as the Balfour Declaration, supporting the idea of creating of a Jewish national home land in Palestine. Pressured by international opinion to lead their colonial protectorates toward independence, British authorities endeavored to set up institutions of self-government in the areas of their middle eastern mandate These efforts were resisted both by Jews, who feared an Arab majority, and by Arabs, who refused to cooperate either with the English occupation government or with Jewish participants, leading William Ormsby-Gore, British undersecretary of state for the colonies, to declare in exasperation that "Palestine is a place largely inhabited by unreasonable people."

Persistent unrest, resistance, and periodic revolts among the indigenous Arabs created continuing difficulties for the British, and these often took the form of pogroms against the Jewish residents and immigrants. Jewish militant groups reacted with violent measures of their own, including bombings of civilian targets. In 1939, under pressure from King Saud, who threatened to throw Arab support to the German/Italian axis powers, the British government issued a white paper, or directive to the colonial administrators of the region, instructing that Jewish immigration to Palestine was to be limited to 15,000 families per year. Enforcement of this decree led directly and indirectly to the loss of hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives in the holocaust and the second world war.

Or perhaps it begins during the anguish of that war, in April 1944, when Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of deporting Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz, proposed that the Nazis would release up to one million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks and other goods from the Western Allies. Baron Moyne, the British Resident Minister of State in Cairo, with authority over Africa and the Middle East, an outspoken opponent of Jewish migration to Palestine, is reported to have responded to this offer, "What would I do with these million Jews? Where can I put them?" Between mid-May and early July of that year, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz, where most of them were gassed upon arrival. On November 6, two members of the Jewish underground group Lehi fatally shot Lord Moyne; they were sentenced to death by the British government, and hanged in March of the following year.

Others might say that it begins after the end of the world war, in 1948, with what Arabs call al Nakba, the disaster, and Jewish citizens of Israel call the war of liberation. On May 14, one day before the British colonial mandate was scheduled to expire, Jewish resistance leader David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel a sovereign, independent nation. The new nation was quickly recognized by the United States and many other countries, and immediately invaded by troops from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt, as well as volunteers from Libya, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. The ensuing war lasted until spring of the following year, when between February and July, Israel concluded separate armistices with the five combatant nations. During this time, according to United Nations statistics, some 720,000 Palestinian Arabs fled from their homes in the war zone, becoming refugees in several of the neighboring states. In the ten years that followed, between 1948 and 1958, more than 800,000 Jews residing in the enemy Arab states of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt, as well as Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, and Bahrain, fled from those nations, often stripped of their original citizenship and forced by persecution to abandon their homes and property. Roughly 600,000 of them emigrated into Israel, where they were received in tent camps called Maaborot, and eventually integrated into Israeli society.

By 1967 tensions in the region again reached the boiling point, when Egypt ended the United Nations protection of the Suez Canal, and in June fighting broke out in what became known as the Six-Day war. Israel’s military victory in this instance included gaining control over the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Estimates vary, but it is thought that somewhere between 200,000 to 250,000 Palestinians fled from the Gaza Strip during this fighting, and an additional 80,000 Syrians were driven from the Golan Heights. From June to July Israeli authorities offered free bus transportation from East Jerusalem to the Allenby bridge across the river into the Kingdom of Jordan for Arabs who would state that they wished to depart voluntarily, and thousands availed themselves of the offer.

Nevertheless, communities of indigenous Arabs, who understood themselves to be Palestinians, remained in the city of Jerusalem, in west bank cities such as Bethlehem, and in the Gaza strip. As the decades passed, members of these communities became increasingly frustrated with their perceived status as second-class non-citizens in Israel, and insurgent groups among them continued to sponsor attacks, including suicide bombings, against domestic and civilian Jewish targets. The Israeli government by turns overtly sponsored or turned a blind eye to groups of Jews who from either ideological or economic motivations began building permanent settlements within what were understood to be Arab territories.

Or perhaps – perhaps it all begins as recently as 2002, when the Israeli government started to construct a concrete and barbed wire barrier, allegedly intended to cut off access by would-be Palestinian terrorists, and prevent bombs and explosives from being brought into Jewish Israeli areas. While it can be argued that the wall has succeeded in this effort, it is apparent that it has also had the effect of isolating Palestinian Arabs into small enclaves, cutting them off from the larger community and in many cases from their own farm lands, businesses, and other property, as well as access to water, jobs, travel, and medical care and other essential services.

Or, perhaps Tim is right, and it does begin with a journey, after all. I have been honored that so many of you followed the course of my trip, together with eleven of my interfaith clergy colleagues, to Jerusalem, Galilee, and Bethlehem earlier this month. It was fun for us to have the weblog site, to be able to share our experiences and impressions with those holding us in your hearts back home, though it was a challenge to make it all happen with just one computer among the twelve of us! We went, of course, not only for the sake of friendship, and the opportunity to experience one another’s holy places – the city of David, the temple of Solomon, the sites of the ministry and execution of Jesus, the place of Mohammed’s ascension – but also to see for ourselves together whatever we could see of this vexed and aching question in the world community of today.

Many of you have read, and those here this morning have just heard, how I experienced our visit to Bethlehem. I came away somewhat stunned, unsure what to think, overwhelmed with images and stories. It was not until the following morning, the final day of our trip, that a sense of meaning fell into place for me. I have not yet posted my reflections on that day, because I wanted to share them first with you, and with my colleague and friend, Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman, before I made them public. Marcy and I have had our conversation – or rather, what is no doubt the first of many conversations – and now I invite you to return with me to those culminating hours of my own personal journey in faith.

It is our last day in Israel; our last day together; a day of painful revelation at that temple to the human capacity for both evil and endurance, Yad Vashem. I am slightly prepared for what it might be like by a recent visit to the holocaust museum in Washington DC, but of course there is really no such thing as preparation for this kind of experience. And I have no suspicion at all of the urgent, devastating clarity that will dawn in me this morning.

As we alight from the bus, we pass troops of Israeli soldiers, young men and women together in uniform. Our guide tells us that every one in the armed services is brought here with their units, that they may know what it is they are fighting for. It occurs to me to wonder exactly what the lessons are that they take away together from this place.

As we make our way toward the entrance, it crosses my mind, almost idly, that this is where the memorial to Martha and Waitstill Sharp took place last June. Waitstill Sharp was a Unitarian minister, who together with his wife Martha spent two years in Italy and Lisbon working to help those endangered by the Nazi regime. As I recall the stories, at the time of her return from Italy after the first year, Martha brought with her a group of some 20 or so young girls, many of them Jewish, whose parents had asked her to take them to America for safety. Some of them were later reunited with their parents, but some were their families’ only survivors. While Martha was working on issues of children’s well-being, such as importing train car loads of powdered milk, Waitstill was visiting embassies and consulates in various European capitals, making personal contacts and learning the intricacies of documents necessary to help people in particular danger from the Nazis to depart the continent and escape Hitler’s grasp. The following year, the Sharps opened an office in Lisbon from which they escorted artists, political activists, and others across the Pyrenees, and got them onto ships headed to America. I did not know these remarkable people – they are dead now – but I have visited the paneled offices in Boston where their work was planned, and I have preached from pulpits in which they once stood as guests, asking for money to support their controversial operations.

For many years now, the Sharp’s granddaughter, together with one of the young Jewish women from Martha’s convey, have worked to document their activities, and have them recognized as "righteous gentiles," who at risk to themselves helped to rescue Jews during the holocaust. What began as the Avenue of the Righteous, with a living tree planted for each such gentile rescuer, now ends in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, where more recent recognitions are engraved on stone plaques. There is one American only with a tree at Yad Vashem; Waitstill and Martha Sharp were the second and third US citizens to be so honored, and their plaque in the garden was dedicated just months ago. Perhaps if there is time, I think, I might look for it.

We enter the courtyard dedicated to the memory of the Warsaw ghetto, where there are two stylized relief sculptures, one of the Jews being deported from their homes in Warsaw, and one of the ghetto resistance fighters in their doomed, heroic effort to defend their lives and families. And there, suddenly, in a great wave of grief and rage, the images of yesterday’s visit to Bethlehem come flooding over me. I am filled with the ancient prophets’ indignant amazement – how can one have eyes, and be so blind? How can these people of such historic, exquisite faith – how can anyone – possibly stand in this place, and not see how what has been done, and is being done day by day to people whose only crime is that they are Palestinian, is word for word and line for line what was once done to the Jews of Europe? How can this nation, of all nations, bear to issue people identity papers, and tell them whether and where they may travel? How can this nation possibly make laws about what races may ride in a car with what other races?

By now I cannot look inward in the circle of our group as Shmulech, our wonderful guide, continues to speak, for someone will surely see my distress, and it isn’t fair to impose this strong reaction on everyone. Instead, I turn my gaze outward from the height of Yad Vashem to the glowing hills outside Jerusalem, and wonder – in fifty years’ time, where will the spare and lovely, sadly grand museum stand, bearing its testimony to the lost lives and sufferings and vanished cities and temples of Palestine? What reconstructed humble homes that stand no longer in Bethlehem, what pathetic children’s playthings, will it hold? How many people will come there to recognize, with solemn hearts, our power for evil, and be solaced by our capacity for beauty? What fragments of defiant, graffiti-laden concrete walls; what maps of vanished olive groves; what samples of identity papers and travel passes, allowing the bearer to walk the streets of Jerusalem at certain hours; what martyrs’ role call; what candles for the perished Arab children, will they see? Must we as homo sapiens, even yet after all these millennia, still establish our most profound and powerful temples always upon the ashes of human sacrifice?

By the time we enter the darkness of the Hall of Remembrance, my tears are falling freely. It is splendidly right, Yad Vashem; it touches exactly the necessary chords of pity, indignation, sorrow, nobility, resolve. How can anyone stand in this place, and not see? How can this nation, of all nations, endure the bulldozing of houses? How dare they build a wall around a city? What does Never Again mean? And the gospel of orthodox Humanism, so tempered to understanding on this journey of diversity, arises raw in my soul, crying out, What is this wretched nonsense called faith, that allegedly gives god’s permission for human beings to do these things to one another, and not content with one tragedy, to enact them over and over again?

We should have come here first, I think – then I could have seen what Yad Vashem has to show with a single mind. Now I cannot shut off the stereoscopic vision which sees the parallels. I wanted to believe what Marcy has earnestly insisted; that the situation is complicated, that there are reasons for everything that make sense – we have come here to learn these reasons, to see for ourselves. Instead, I am confronted by this stark clarity: They said it was a complicated situation in Germany in 1936, but that wasn’t true – it wasn’t complicated, it was simply wrong. It isn’t complicated today, either; it’s still, again, simply wrong. It would have been better for Israel’s argument if I had stayed home. How, I wonder, can I ever bear to say any of this to my colleagues – my brothers and sisters on this journey – and yet if I do not, everything that has gone before becomes false.

By now I am crying visibly – my friends are concerned but discreet; they will let me manage alone if I ask it, and I do. In the Children’s Shrine the infinitely reflected flame of one candle evokes the souls of more than a million children murdered by the evil that was Nazism. My anger mounts. By what right does any government anywhere, ever, take bread from the mouth of a child, destroy a child’s home, condemn a child to untreated fevers, to ignorance and rags and want? Any child, anywhere, ever? By what right?

And suddenly I am desperate to find the place where the names of Martha and Waitstill Sharp are engraved in honor. I need this as I need my next breath. Perforce I must make my way through the museum’s whole exhibit in order to get back to the information desk at the entrance and ask my urgent question. I stumble through it, halted from moment to moment by the crowds, catching scattered glimpses of the unspeakable images, a kaleidoscope of evil and suffering that is hard enough in itself, and utterly unbearable in the knowledge that many of the same things are happening today.

At length I reach the lobby, calm myself with a few deep, shaken breaths, and ask where I can find the stone that was dedicated in June. The compassionate lady behind the counter informs me in broken English that the engraving may not actually be there – usually the dedications take place before the permanent installation is complete, using a temporary plaque. I am sick with unreasonable disappointment, but I want to go there anyway, find the place where the names will be. I may never come here again in my life; I will take this opportunity to get as close as I can. It seems a long way down the Avenue to the Garden of the Righteous, a ten minute walk at least, steep, and I am half blind with tears. I am aware that I must allow time for the return trip, to gather with the rest of the group for our departure. The garden is a peaceful place when I find it, and I am alone there, free to weep openly as I wander among the shoulder-high monuments – Poland, Austria, Germany, France... Finally I come to it, on the lower edge in a back corner, and the names are there, as I had hoped they would be: USA, followed by one simple line of letters, Waitstill and Martha Sharp. Here, at last, after all the mosques and synagogues and churches and shrines, is holy space in Jerusalem that is specifically mine. I sink to the brick pavement, once again sobbing, and trace the sharp incisions, as if the answer were somehow here in a Braille that my fingertips could uncode; as if they could send me part of their strength from beyond the dust.

Silently around me, the garden does its healing task, absorbing my passionate protest and helpless grief, ministering to my spent soul with brief trills of bird song and dappled light. I do not want to leave; I think I could have sat there, stunned and held, for a very long time. I realize with a pang that there will not be time to bring the others here; if I had known to tell them, they would have come willingly, but these things are discovered in the going. Another time, I would know how much this matters.

Reluctantly, I climb the winding path back to the bright courtyard where we are to gather, and there find JJ, our photojournalist. Insistent and breathless, I tow him back to the garden with me; we have just time enough, if we hurry – at least I will be able to share this revelation in pictures eventually.

It is hard to believe that this is the same bus from which I descended only a few hours ago; hard to believe, too, that we will leave Israel tonight, tomorrow sleep in our own beds, return to our separate lives. As we drive away from Yad Vashem, I ponder what I know now in the deepest places of my spirit, and question whether the bonds of friendship that we have nurtured in the course of this trip will be strong enough to hold in the face of that knowing. What I am sure of is that the two-fold mission of this journey has been fulfilled for me. I have a new and difficult clarity about what is happening in the middle east, and I have completed the pilgrimage to a holy place in my religious tradition.

Dearly beloved, I tax your patience, and you are ever so kind to support me with your hearing. There is more to be said, much more, and I will return to my more considered reflections on these events next week, but I could find no way to make this first telling any less intense or extensive. I know that I will be processing these experiences for a long time to come, and that I will hear the news headlines differently, and read the books differently, forever because of them. One final caution before I invite the choir to end with our choral benediction. Another of my colleagues, Jim Gertmenian at Plymouth Congregational Church, reminds us of author Chris Hedge’s warning against "the seductiveness of moral disgust," and I want to affirm that admonition, for myself and for all of us. From what I have seen, what is happening to the Palestinians in the occupied territories of Israel is not okay, by any standard of humane reason or decency. But I do not take this to mean that all the right is on one side, or all the wrong on the other, or that easy answers are available. There are no clean hands in this tragedy, not even our own; there are no parties without partial responsibility for creating a way forward. It is of that way forward – delicate, difficult, even sacrificial – that I shall endeavor to speak next Sunday.