A Journey, Part 6. The Human Spirit

Having obtained visas for Eritrea in Cairo, arriving back in Jordan we applied for Saudi transit visas in Amman and were told the application could take up to a month to be processed. We’d heard that we could cross into Israel at the King Hussein bridge without getting our passports stamped by either country, so we decided to use the opportunity to spend a few weeks in Israel.

I’ve always loved crowd watching and I loved watching the pilgrims in Israel. No doubt there’s a fine line one has to keep when mixing the profit motives of commerce with the earnestness of religion, but the guides and merchants of the Holy Land have had centuries to perfect their craft. Our travels in Israel started at the Sea of Galilee and as I watched the guides, I imagined the first guides, telling stories and inventing places as they went, for the benefit of the first pilgrims. Nowhere is the commercial aspect more blatant than in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem, where the gaudiness of the wares has to be seen to be believed. Of all the artifacts, my favourite was a holographic picture of Christ’s face with closed eyes, but if you stood directly in front of him, his eyes would open. I found that if I stood in exactly the right place, I could get him to give me a conspiratorial wink.

All through my school years, Christianity was part of the program and we said prayers, had readings from the Bible, and sang hymns at school every day. As a child I can remember wondering about the Jews. Who were these people and how was it that they came to be the chosen ones, rather than us or anyone else? As I’ve grown older, although naivety has lessened, the underlying interest has never waned.

So many of my icons hail from this scattered and disparate group of people. Einstein, Sagan, and Bohr. Bizet, Mendelssohnn, and Mahler. And that’s just the start of physics and music. Wherever I look to human endeavours, especially in the humanities and sciences, I am astounded by the contributions that Jewish people have made. How can it be that such a small and dispersed cultural group that has faced such adversity could have had such a profound effect on getting us to where we are?

Although it’s human nature to go about life skirting difficulty on the path of least resistance, I think it’s an irony that as people we’re often defined by the adversity we’ve faced. It’s through adversity, perhaps more than anything else, that we grow. When facing the most difficult of circumstances, we dream, and dreams are the wind to the embers of the soul. What person enslaved doesn’t dream of freedom? Are there vanquished who don’t dream of vindication? What alchemy starts when we combine dreams with the appetite for risk and opportunism that adversity encourages?

In a recent interview, jazz legend Hugh Masekela was asked what it was like as a young black man growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, he responsed;

What people don’t know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

Through the ages, it seems that the Jews have always faced adversity. From their Biblical enslavement by the Egyptians to diaspora following conquests by the Babylonians and then the Romans, and from the ghettos of Europe and North Africa to the formation of Israel and to the present time, Jewish history has never been without struggle for survival. More than any other group of people, they have survived everything that has been thrown at them and somehow come out stronger.

I still have such vivid memories of the holocaust museum in former Jewish ghetto in Prague that I’d visited a few years earlier, where the weight of the experience overwhelmed me. We’re all too familiar with shocking images from that dark chapter in human history, but it wasn’t that. Instead, I was caught off guard by the drawings of the children. In those places of death and deprivation, facing their worst nightmares, they drew pictures of rainbows and flowers and butterflies. They dreamed of freedom.

Standing amid the ruins of the hilltop fortress at Masada, I experienced a similar feeling. It was to there, after the fall of the second temple in 70AD, that about a thousand Jewish rebels retreated, refusing to surrender to Rome. In the two year siege that followed, the Romans spared no effort to bring about the downfall of this last pocket of Jewish resistance. By the time that the massive ramp up the side of the mountain was completed, the besieged Jews, now close to starvation, chose to take their own lives rather than surrender to slavery.

To me, more than any other group of people, the Jews represent the indomitable nature of the human spirit. Their history, more than that of any other group, shows the futility of oppression and persecution. In the terrible conditions of the ghettos of Europe and North Africa, they never lost faith in themselves. Facing pogroms and persistent insecurity of their physical possessions, they developed intellect and culture, the things that nobody could take from them. Confronted with hostility, they took strength from each other and developed their deep sense of belonging. A people without a country, they never stopped believing that their dream of returning to the promised land would one day become reality. I believe that it’s this sense of belonging that so many Jews have, that draws them in numbers to Israel despite generations spent in exile. If ever a group of people deserved first nation status, surely it would be them.

When I look to the situation in Israel today, and despite the affinity that I have always felt for the Jews and their plight, I can’t but be astounded by the incongruity of what is being played out in the occupied territories. Entire Palestinian communities are fenced and walled off. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in a recent letter to student leaders at the University of California – Berkeley;

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.

For me though, it’s not in the parallels to South Africa that I see incongruity, but rather to those in Jewish history itself. In essence, the very systems that were used against them for centuries, and which they should have pledged to outlaw forever, they now use against the Palestinian people. But the Israelis of all people should know that the oppression wrought on these people will ultimately only make them stronger. I can’t help wondering where it will all stop and whether it will escalate into madness as it did in Europe. Isn’t it obvious that peace and reconciliation is the only long term solution?

Most people would agree that suicide bombing is a crime against humanity, but I can’t help asking myself what would make, for instance, a well educated twenty year old girl from a stable family, strap herself with explosives? What threshold of desperation has to be breached? At that level, I think there is little difference between her actions and those of the Sicarii at Masada, who might have done the same thing had the option existed when they took their lives.

And as with almost all modern conflicts, the situation persists despite the tragic reality that the vast majority of people on both sides want peace and would be prepared to compromise to get it. I recently came across a quote that stopped me in my tracks;

Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

Fittingly, it was said by Herman Göring at the Nuremberg trials, and I believe that it applies not only to Israel and it’s antagonists, but universally. War breeds war. Where are the peacemakers among our leaders? By this, I mean the true peacemakers, not those who talk about peace while increasing military spending. Why should we have war when we know that peace is the only answer? I fear that as long as ordinary people remain silent and allow the hawks to lead, peace will remain forever elusive.

What would Christ, that Jew and greatest of teachers and peacemakers, say of the reality that most of today’s weapons of war come from supposedly Christian countries run by openly Christian leaders? Or of the wars carried out by those same countries, in His name? In truth, it is impossible to reconcile war with Christ’s teachings in any way and many Christians have lost the true meaning of Christianity; It’s not about greed and power and war, but about faith and hope and love.