First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Of Wars and Crimes

Like most people who at one time or another find themselves in the role, I was not cut out to be a prophet. Conflict makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I really, really hate being the target of disapproval. I was not drawn to the ministry for the opportunity to make arguable moral pronouncements. Ideally, I would aspire to be like Calvin Coolidge’s minister, whose generic topic, according to the president’s famously terse description, was "sin," and whose message was that he was "agin’ it." I would much rather spend my time creating experiences of community and connection, than denouncing things. Yet the duties of authentic ministry call upon us, as I once promised in my ordinations vows, "to speak the truth in love, without obligation to persons or position." I did not say, explicitly, "to speak the truth in love, as powerfully as the craft of language enables me," but I think that was implied. In addition, as I have had occasion to ponder this week, it may be important to distinguish between having a reaction, and having a position. What happened to me at Yad Vashem, as I described last Sunday, was an event, over which I exercised very little conscious control. My choice lies only in whether or not to share it, with you or anyone, and I suppose that this congregation enabled and blessed my journey with the expectation that I would tell you the truth about the experiences I had along the way. Sifting the deepest genuine meaning of those experiences is a process that will unfold over time, in part through the act of seeking to describe and interpret them. That process will also include the urge to learn more about the history and context of what I saw – it already has, – and most importantly, it will also include conversation, with you and with others, as I endeavor to sort out and make sense of what this journey in faith has really taught me. As I said last week, there is more to tell; so return with me once again to the last few hours we spent, in yet another interpretation of the Holy Land.

This has, to say the least, not been a relaxed trip. Intense, exhilarating, wonderful, painful, amazing – but packed tight with events, experiences, encounters. We had no time to waste; all of us wanted to get the most out of it, even if each of us had moments of longing for some unprogrammed time, for pursuing personal interests, for reading, writing, walking, shopping, or for simple rest. Our final hours are no less constrained; we have a plane to catch this evening, but we are on our way, through rush hour traffic, to experience one last glimmer of hope in this troubled, tumultuous land. The village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam – Oasis of Peace, in English – lies in the outer suburbs of Jerusalem, on land owned by a Trappist monastery. There families of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, in carefully balanced equal numbers, live together in mutual respect and fragile trust, running the village, and educating 150 children in a school where most classes are taught by two teachers, an Arab and an Israeli, in two languages. What is astonishing to me is that this is astonishing; residents speak of their friends and families from outside the village coming to visit, and standing in jaw-dropped amazement at the sight of Jewish and Palestinian youngsters playing soccer together. What seems obvious to me is an unthinkable reality for so many people.

In a way, it is an artificial construct, this Oasis of Peace. There is an application process, and a waiting list of families who ask to be part of this delicate loom of understanding and care; here the most committed and willing can just about stand to live with one another, their personal affections always at risk from the forces of politics, the events of history, the impulsive acts of either fools or calculated cynicism. It is a useful model only in the very long run; the example is not likely to inspire much acclaim in the wider culture any time soon. Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam is an act of faith; a confession that only by some quixotic change of hearts will there be a lasting resolution for this unyielding conflict, and hearts in this land are hard with the rage and despair, the fears and losses of many years. And yet, in this tiny corner, in the shelter of the church that once dispatched the crusaders, the desert trembles into blossom, and hope, the essential ingredient for any future, flutters an experimental wing.

We were late to arrive, we cannot stay beyond the appointed hour lest we have some problem with security at the airport, and miss our flight. We call down good wishes upon these courageous, dedicated souls, and begin the long processes of our departure. At the airport, I discover that even after the purchase of water beyond the security scanning, I have some $30 worth of bills still in shekels, and no energy to seek out the means of exchange. It occurs to me that when I get home, I will drop them in an envelope and mail it to Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam, together with a benediction based on the words of Bonaro Overstreet:

You say the little efforts that I make will do no good:

they never will prevail

to tip the hovering scale

where justice hangs in balance.

I don't know that I ever thought they would.

But my mind is set forever and beyond debate

in favor of my right to choose which side

shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

Our delightful guide, Shmulech, an articulate raconteur whose eye for historical detail goes back 4,000 years, when pressed says of his role as an Israeli soldier in taking the old city of Jerusalem in 1967 only, "It was war; it was bad." Like soldiers in all times everywhere, he does not want to relive those days and those deeds. His only other comment about that time is the wistful observation that when it was over, they were happy to think their children would never have to do such things. Yet his son spent three years as a soldier, fighting, and now he watches sadly as his grandson prepares to enter the military. Of his later service in the reserve as a check point guard, he recounts that what were to him simple good manners made a difference. "I would say to the driver, ‘Please; I have a job to do. May I look in your trunk? Thank you.’" Astonished and grateful at this courtesy, the Palestinians complied willingly, wished him well as they drove away. He thinks that it is immaturity and ignorance that make the younger soldiers bark out orders, speak rudely, behave in ways that reduce the human dignity of all concerned. Of course it is, I think; so it must have been for the German teenagers assigned to guard the concentration camps; so it must be for our own young men and women at Guantanamo Bay. Few of them are bad people; they are doing the best they can summon from the instruction of instinct, example, fear. It is not their fault, and yet even here, tiny roots of a better way could penetrate, if anyone dared.

Dearly beloved, truly there are no clean hands. Driving away from Yad Vashem, I was well aware that any American citizen of European descent who presumes to criticize the actions of the Israeli government had better have walked the perimeters of some of the tribal reservations allotted to descendants of the indigenous peoples of this land; had better know the stories of the massacres, the land grabs, the smallpox blankets, that disfigure and define our own national history. In the desperate, haunted, uncertain years of British colonialism during and after the Second World War, Jewish insurgent forces blew up hotels with bombs, killed innocent people to make a political point. If only the righteous may speak, we are all condemned to silence.

And silence, in the end, will kill us all. For if there is to be any kind of hope for a future different from the waste and misery of what has happened and is happening now – in Israel, or anywhere else for that matter – it surely begins with listening. And listening is precisely what is not happening, at a level of intentional refusal that I personally find hard to fathom. I was stunned by the blank incomprehension that consistently met my question to the people we talked with about the role of religious leaders in working for peace, how they were educated to understand one another’s faith traditions. Not only was the answer that they weren’t, the question itself was barely intelligible; it seemed never to have occurred to anyone that this might be an important, or useful process. How does anyone expect anything to get better, if people will not listen to one another, hear the stories of pain, humiliation, unbearable loss? I don’t know a lot, and there’s a lot I don’t know, about how to solve the problems of the world, but I’m pretty sure about this part; that until someone finds the patience, and humility, and compassion to say, "Tell me how it is for you; I want to know," the only other escape from the endless cycles of violence and fear is some larger, common catastrophe – which is something no one ought to wish for.

Right at the heart of the most aching struggle for hope that we saw, in the midst of Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam, this silence does its toxic work. Recall I said that most of the classes for children and young people of this community’s schools are taught by teams of Arab and Israeli teachers, so that the kids grow up speaking both languages, seeing models of authority, wisdom, affection in both cultures. What is the one tragic, inevitable exception? It comes in high school history, when the children of Israel learn from Jewish teachers the stirring story of their nation’s war of independence, and the Palestinian children are taught by Arab teachers about the poignant years of the Nakba, the disaster, when their homeland was lost. It is the best they can do, among those who are trying the hardest to find a way out. I think, perhaps, despite all my anguish at Yad Vashem, that this was the saddest thing I learned in Israel.

And who are we to stand in judgment? Where is the charter immersion school where Caucasian children are speaking Mohawk, the lingua franca of the Iroquois confederacy that once coordinated activities among the six nations of tribes that roamed the vast wilderness of this continent? A hundred and fifty, two hundred years later, we begin to get the message that our Thanksgiving is an ambiguous holiday for someone with Native American ancestry. You couldn’t exactly call that being quick on the uptake.

There is so much pain to be heard and acknowledged – so much pain, in Israel and everywhere. The older I get, the more I see, the more overwhelmed I am by the depth and power of the pain in the world. If we all sat down and shut up right now, and began to listen, it would take generations for all the stories to be told, for all the tears to be shed, to clear the ground for the foundation of some new structure of right human relationships. It’s an unimaginable accomplishment, maybe; we can’t wrap our minds and hearts and hopes around what it would mean to do this, to really acknowledge and grieve all the wrong, all the stupidity and cruelty and inhumanity of the history we share. It would be overwhelming, more than we could manage. And yet, it seems to me that however dark and deep the hole you’re in, however impossible it might be to imagine what it would mean to climb out, surely the first step, always, is to put down the shovel and stop digging. And it seems to me too, that there has never been, and will never be, any wall high enough to protect any of us from the ones we have wronged.

As I contemplate what I saw in Bethlehem, what I heard in Israel, what I read on the internet, I am inclined to think that Jimmy Carter is wrong to use the word apartheid. That term, taken from the experience of colonial South Africa, describes the system by which the descendants of Dutch settlers strove to maintain their position of privilege and control over the indigenous inhabitants of the country, who vastly outnumbered the white governors, and always would. Apartheid, unjust and unstable and violent as it was, was intended to be a sustainable arrangement, to create a structure that would endure over a long term. It doesn’t look to me as though the current situation in Israel is meant by those who are creating it to last. What it looks like to me is more a kind of economic ethnic cleansing; an attempt to make conditions so intolerably isolated and discouraging for the Palestinians who remain within Israeli control, that they will ultimately have no choice, if they want any kind of a future, but to leave. Now I want to be perfectly clear that this is better than ethnic cleansing by extermination – way, way better. And it is not unlike the experience that the Jews of Europe and the Jews of the middle east have been subjected to over generations; the oppression that brought many of them to Israel in search of their own secure future. It even has conceptual roots in the proposals that were floated repeatedly in various forms by the British occupation government, that there should be some sort of orderly, equitable, voluntary exchange of properties within the Arab world that would enable a Jewish majority state to be formed. Personally, if I were a Palestinian, I suspect I would be out of there; I would think there was far more to be gained by starting over in Australia or America or wherever I could go, than by blowing myself up on a bus in Jerusalem, and murdering innocent children. But the point is, it’s not my call – and in any case, all of these judgments are fatuous when handed down from a position of privileged observation with no skin in the game. Nevertheless, all these reservations not withstanding, I cannot help but conclude for myself, from everything that I have seen and heard and read, that what is currently happening to the occupants of the Israeli occupied territories of Palestine is morally indefensible, and does not deserve my support. I tell you this not to solicit your agreement, but to be forthright about the consequences of this experience for my own thinking.

Let me share with you two other meditations that relate to this issue, and grow out of this journey, and then I will have done for the moment. The first is the source of my title for this sermon; I think we have reached a point in world history when it is becoming increasingly complicated to make a sensible distinction between wars and crimes. I know that I grew up believing that wars were what armies did on battlefields; that soldiers were good people doing difficult things with great courage and risk in order to protect the rest of us, while crimes were hurtful things done by bad people who didn’t respect the rights of others. It wasn’t until I was an adult, for instance, that I got that what my history teachers always called the Boston tea party was in fact an act of politically motivated vandalism, and it was only the victory of the Colonies in the subsequent war that painted it in the rosy colors of revolutionary high jinx. If the authorities of the time had caught them, these protestors would have been labeled ‘rebels’ – because they weren’t using the term ‘terrorist’ at that point – and punished as enemies of the state and threats to civil order. One can certainly resort to a cynical historical fatalism, and maintain that what the winners do are noble acts of war, and what the losers do are despicable crimes – and there’s some truth in that, but I find it morally unsatisfying. It is equally easy but unhelpful to announce that all wars and acts of war are crimes; this may be true in its way as well, but it still leaves us without any useful sense of the difference between the police and the army. Here’s the crux of the issue, in my thinking at the moment. When a war ends, the losing survivors go home, and everybody starts over in the new geo-political reality; in normal circumstances, you don’t keep enemy soldiers locked up forever. When a crime has been committed, you put the guilty individual in jail; you don’t intentionally punish the perpetrator’s family, neighborhood, church, or bridge club. One of the issues with our own Guantanamo Bay is the Bush administration’s deliberate ambiguity about whether the captives there are to be regarded as criminals or soldiers, and unwillingness to afford them the established rights of either set of people. In war, individuals are asked to do things that in any other circumstance would be crimes, and for the most part are urged not to take personal responsibility for the suffering that results; except for the risk of being victims of an act of war themselves, they are not held accountable for that suffering. When a Palestinian teenager straps on explosives, and kills himself and a dozen Israeli citizens, is that a crime, or an act of war? When Israeli forces bulldoze an Arab village, is that a crime, or an act of war? As long as we have no consensus about the answer to these kinds of questions, I fear that progress toward an end to the cycle of violence will be elusive.

At the last, I come back to religion. This impulse of our human nature, to ascribe our own preferences and prejudices to divine authority, has certainly given our history some of its most dismally painful chapters, it is true. And yet, within the spiritual teachings of wise people in every tradition, there are enduring testimonies to the possibilities of peace, and insight into the fundamental requirements for peace to be established. The Jewish faith itself has a precious heritage in this regard; it understands, richly and deeply, the practice of repentance. Teshuva, they call it, the act of turning around; the recognition that we are, either personally or collectively, headed down the wrong path; that we have made an error in the way to get where we wanted to go. It is the gesture of throwing down the shovel, the painful acknowledgement that more digging will only make matters worse; the giving up of pride and stubbornness, like stopping to ask for directions when you are lost. It is perhaps the willingness to admit that we don’t know, even to begin to listen to someone else’s appraisal of the situation. Every year, for ten days, observant Jews are especially summoned to perform the four elements of Teshuva; to cease, to regret, to confess, and to resolve better. We are all called to this wisdom by our better natures, whatever we may name it in our own faith; to do teshuvah, to turn around, to remember what is holy, to begin again as partners in tikkun olam, the healing of the world.

"Let us turn toward you once again, Oh Holy One, and we shall return.

Renew us as in the ancient days." So says the classic prayer of teshuvah.

As long as someone still remembers how to repent, there is hope. If we could learn to listen to one another, to hear the pain, to recognize what our own story looks like in someone else’s eyes, that hope might grow. On a sandy field in the suburbs of Jerusalem this afternoon, in an improbable, bi-lingual village, two little boys are practicing soccer together. They do not know how precious they are; that where their footsteps cross in the sunny dust is the only real holy land. They do not know that the future of the world is in their hands.