Witness in Jerusalem: A hand and a name

Witness in Jerusalem

A hand and a name

Posted on January 29, 2015

I first visited Jerusalem in March 1992. I’d just become convener of the Middle East and North Africa committee of the Board of World Mission and Unity, not long before the Kirk divided the board – an irony that seemed lost on most people – and as a reward I had been stiffed with writing a report on Messianic Jews in Israel.

I spent a week visiting Messianic Jewish congregations and, in the capable hands of committee secretary Robin Ross, I also toured our own institutions and met a wide range of Palestinian Christians.

The Palestinians I liked best ran a rapprochement centre in the Christian village of Beit Sahour, to the east of Bethlehem and, like Bethlehem, in the territories occupied by the state of Israel after the six-day war in 1967. They worked closely with similar initiatives in Israel proper. But they had also been active in the leadership of the tax revolt during the first intifada and gone to prison for their pains.

They told me they saw themselves as Christian Muslims. After picking my jaw up from the ground, I saw the sense of this: they were Christians, but living in a predominantly Muslim society and culture.

In an action-packed week, I also took in many of the Christian holy places, bought a Jerusalem stole from Carol Morton at Craftaid that I wear religiously, and visited Yad Vashem.

Tuesday this week was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet forces.  I marked the day by looking up a sermon I preached in several pulpits after my return to Scotland.

I’m pleased to find I still agree with what I said almost a quarter of a century ago – although I’m not convinced I have the details of the Shlomo Knobel story exactly right.

To be sure, I now have a slightly deeper understanding of the history and causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I am now less sanguine than the Church of Scotland was then that the solution to the conflict lies in two states – an outcome that seems increasingly unlikely to happen or to resolve the deep injustices in the conflict even if it did.

But it’s reassuring to find I’m less inconsistent than I often fear.

Here’s what I said.

A hand and a name
Sixth Sunday before Christmas
Is 65.17-25; Luke 21.5-19
University of St Andrews, November 15 1992

The date was August 6 1984 and the place was East Jerusalem. It all happened very quickly. In less than half an hour the house on the outskirts of the city in which Salman Salim Arab had lived for half a century was levelled to the ground. Early in the morning a group of men arrived with a bulldozer. They were carrying guns and claimed to be the police. They evicted Salman and his son Muhanna, threw everything out of the two-storey house, and proceeded to destroy their home and uproot the ancient olive trees around it.

They were not the police. They were the agents of an Israeli property developer who claimed the land was really his.

Muhanna Salman Arab was one of the first people I met when I visited Israel and Palestine in March this year. He showed me a letter regarding the incident that Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, had written to the Rev Donald Nicholl, rector of the Tantur Institute.

“We realize,” said Mayor Kollek, “that the contractor employed by the person who claims to own the property acted without authorization, either from the court or from the municipality… As soon as the matter came to our attention, the municipality took legal action against the contractor for illegal demolition of a house and the illega1 uprooting of the trees. My colleague, Mr Cheshin, is doing his best to provide a housing solution for the family and help them in any way he can.”

The courts found that the contractor had indeed acted illegally, hut Muhanna and his father received no compensation, nor were they allowed to rebuild their house. The old man died some years ago, hut today, eight years after the destruction of their home, Muhanna is still living in an old converted bus parked on their land. Donald Nicholl found him a simple sewing machine, and he ekes out a precarious living as a tailor, supported in part by Craftaid and other charities.

All around him is the thriving Jewish settlement of Gilo, built after East Jerusalem fell into Israeli hands during the six-day war. But Muhanna is not thriving. As his name indicates, Muhanna is not Jewish. He is a Palestinian Arab.

Every sermon, even a University chapel sermon, should have a loose connection with the readings that come before, and I suspect my train of thought for this one was sparked off by the words we heard from Isaiah: “I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and be glad in my people; no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of distress… They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.”

But alongside those ancient words from the Holy Land, I want to put other more recent words, words that may he familiar to some of you from the ecumenical prayer cycle – the words of a Palestinian Christian today: “Pray not for Arab or Jew, for Palestinian or Israeli, but pray rather for yourselves, that you may not divide them in your prayers, but keep them both together in your hearts.”

A few days after I met Muhanna I went to Yad Vashem, the memorial in Jerusalem to the Jews who died in Hitler’s Holocaust. Yad Vashem means a monument and a name – literally a hand and a name – and the title comes from a verse a little earlier in the book of Isaiah: “[to those] who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name… I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” (Is 56.4-5).

I spent just over an hour at Yad Vashem. Just over an hour was all I could take. Most of the time I spent in a guided tour of the Art Museum – in the company, ironically, of a young German student.

It’s not like other art museums, the Art Museum at Yad Vashem. Art produced after the holocaust, post-war art, is accepted only if it is good; but when it comes to art produced during the holocaust itself, the art of the ghettoes and the camps, the question of artistic merit is not raised. From this period the museum accepts everything, because its purpose, like the purpose of Yad Vashem itself, is to document what was done to the Jews just half a century ago – to document it and to say to the world, “Never again.”

One of the most powerful exhibits at Yad Vashem is a post-war painting by Samuel Bak, who was born in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power. It’s a painting in two parts. The top part shows the two stone tablets of the ten commandments breaking into bits.

The bottom part shows the fragments falling into two ruined walled chambers. In one chamber is all that is left of the opening sentence: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” All we see is the single word “Adonai”, or “Lord”, because the Lord did not bring them out of Auschwitz.

“Now Bak has only a little faith,’ said our Jewish Israeli guide, ‘but it is there, something is there.”

In the other chamber, we see what is left of the commandment “Thou shaft not kill”. The Hebrew word that means “thou shall not” is in pieces, piled up against the wall, and on the ground in front of it, repeated over and over again, is the word “kill”.

Because that is what they did in Auschwitz and the other death camps and elsewhere, over and over again. They killed and they killed and they killed, until they had killed six million Jews.

One of those who died is commemorated by a miniature Bible hand-bound in leather. This Bible was made by Shlomo Knobel in the ghetto of Lodz as a gift for Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Jewish council, the Judenrat. Every month 10,000 Jews were shipped out of Lodz to die, and Rumkowski had the unenviable task of deciding who should go and who should stay. Knobel made him the Bible as a gift in the hope that it would save his little son.

Later the Bible was found and put in the Art Museum. The newspapers that reported it said that Knobel was dead, but he was not dead. He was living in Jerusalem, and when he saw the reports, he came to the museum and looked at his Bible and wept. He had survived, hut his child had not.

I have only one more story from Yad Vashem, because there is a limit also to how much you can take. There is a picture there produced by a boy in the model camp of Theresienstadt. It is called “The Dream”, and it shows him lying in his bunk at night, and dreaming that his father will come and take him by the hand and lead him to a palm tree.

“Where is that?” our Israeli guide asked us.

My German student companion was intelligent and obviously well read but suffered from an overdose of Lutheran piety. He said, “Paradise”. But the palm tree wasn’t paradise, it was Palestine. The boy in the camp was dreaming of a Jewish home in Palestine where he could be safe and free. For him, so far as we know, the dream was unfulfilled. But for many who survived, it was a dream that came true: “I create Jerusalem rejoicing, and her people a joy.”

But that brings us back to where we started.

For the crowning irony in all of this is that the dream was fulfilled only at the expense of the Arabs who already lived in Palestine, and so long as that fact is not addressed, so long as the conflict between Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab continues to fester, the Jews of Israel are not safe neither are they truly free. The sins of the fathers are visited on the children, say the scriptures. The evils suffered in one generation create the evils of the next.

All of this may seem a little remote from us, perhaps even a little exotic. What have Palestinians and Israelis to do with us, or we with them? And Hitler is long dead.

But anti-Semitism and a self-regarding nationalism are neither dead nor buried. And the evils and injustices that infect the lives of societies and peoples, the vicious circles that are found at the wider social level, are also found within our own lives.

Where is God in all this? Is God in it? Or are we obliged to believe, with Samuel Bak, that our God is a broken God, or no God at all?

Maybe so. But I am inclined to think not.

William Temple, perhaps the greatest Archbishop of Canterbury this century has known, once put it like this: “People sometimes say, ‘There can’t be a God of love, because if there were, and he looked at this world, his heart would break.’ Christians point to the cross of Jesus Christ and say, ‘His heart does break.’ People sometimes say, ‘God made the world – he’s responsible – he should bear the load.’ Christians point to the cross and say: ‘He does bear it.'”

It is our own inhumanity that makes God unbelievable, and it is from that inhumanity, from our failure to love one another as we love ourselves, that God sends his Son to save us. God gives his Son to die for us so that, like Abraham on Mount Moriah, we may stop sacrificing our own children on altars of our own devising.

Jesus is sent from the Father and anointed by the Spirit to put an end to evil and injustice. He is sent to suffer on our behalf, and, by suffering for us, to put an end to the suffering we endlessly inflict on each other.

“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not he remembered or come into mind… The wolf and the lamb shall feed together… They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.”

This is the Christian faith, the Christian hope. But a faith and a hope that do not show themselves in works are a dead faith and a bogus hope, a counterfeit of true belief, a pale imitation of the real thing.

The real question before us is not whether, in the face of human inhumanity, we can any longer believe in God. The real question is whether we will show our faith by responding in repentance, by responding in love.

- See more at: http://cos.churchofscotland.org.uk/blogs/witness-in-jerusalem/2015/01/29/a-hand-and-a-name/#sthash.0iumlZz5.dpuf