First Parish Bedford UU

“Please! No Explanations Inside the Church!”

A Sermon by Rev. John Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, November 9, 2008

at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts



Two weeks ago, when we settled into our tour bus at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, our guide asked us if we knew the meaning of the name Israel.  Many visitors do not, she said, but being a group of 18 clergy, at least a few of us recalled the 23rd Chapter of Genesis – in which Jacob wrestles with an angel:



Now Jacob was left alone all night; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.  And when he saw that he prevailed not against Jacob, he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh.  And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.  And he said unto him, What is thy name?  And he said, Jacob.  And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for thou hast striven with God and with men, and hast prevailed.  And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.  And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?  And he blessed him there.



When independence was declared in 1948, there were other possible names for the land known as Palestine but it was David Ben Gurion’s choice that the land be known as Israel for he knew that Israel would always be a striving and a struggle.



I have already told you that a researcher spent a week in Israel and when he returned home, he wrote a book.  Later he spent a month in Israel and when he returned he wrote an article.  And still later he spent a year in Israel and, when he returned, he wrote nothing at all. 



You see, on the cover of your order of service, the sign I photographed outside the Church of All Nations in Jerusalem:  Please: No explanations inside the church!  The sign was intended to promote quiet and deter guides from their noisy explanations but it also suggests that many aspects of Israel’s multi-layered past and present defy easy analysis and are nearly inexplicable: what one believes and understands to be true is altogether dependent upon what one sees, the angle and lens of observation.



Twenty years ago, for example, I first visited Israel and, especially, the West Bank and Gaza.   My perspective was significantly Palestinian: I spent a lot of time in hospitals with children and adults maimed by Israeli attacks.  I slept in refugee camps in Gaza and met with parents of “martyrs.”  I saw children’s drawings of street battles and Israeli helicopter gunships, of death and mayhem.  I witnessed the brutality of occupation.  To this day, when I see the circular water reservoir off Route 2 on Prospect Street in Arlington I think of the cement IDF fortifications that watched my movements as I inspected Palestinian schools.  If today I see debris on an overhead telephone wire, I recall the debris that hung on wires after street-fighting rock-and-bullet exchanges between Palestinians and Israelis.  I know only three Arabic phrases:  inshallah: if God wills it; ya-la, let’s go; and jaysh (said usually in apprehension) – soldiers!  My visit in 1989 was the time of the first intifada, and a few of you may recall Dr. Ahmed Baker, the Palestinian child psychologist from Ramallah and Bir Zeit University who spoke here, describing the trauma of war, soon after I returned from that first pilgrimage to the Holy Land.



To understand Israel from that perspective, I think, is a lot like understanding the United States after visiting Guantanamo.  The oppression and the human rights abuses are undeniable, they are an outrage, and they are not the entire story.   



This time, by Rabbi Howard Jaffe of Lexington’s Temple Isaiah, I was invited to join a delegation of 17 clergy – a group that also included Maggie Herzig, whom some of you may recall from the Public Conversations Project, an effort that promotes dialogue among people with conflicting views, on topics ranging from abortion to Arab-Israeli conflict.



Most of the delegation came from Lexington, with a few interlopers from Arlington, Concord and Bedford.   We were Catholic, evangelical Christian, Baptist, Congregational and UU.  Richard and Dori Rhodes, down-to-earth and gracious pastors at Lexington’s Grace Chapel, were the only other Bedford participants.  I confess that it took going all the way to Israel to get to know some people who live very close to home; and it’s possible that those strengthened relationships are our trip’s most important outcome.   Though I have been outspoken in defense of Palestinian human rights for 20 years now, I was invited because Rabbi Jaffe knew of our congregation’s sponsorship of the annual Kristallnacht remembrance we observe tonight.



I will return to this, but I believe that our ability to be effective peace-makers is entirely dependent on our willingness to simultaneously affirm underlying values, such as universal human rights and, as well, to condemn underlying evils such as anti-Semitism and hate, wherever they occur.



I don’t know how to capsulize my experiences – please, no explanations inside the church - and so for today I’ll share but fragmentary vignettes.



On our first day, en route to Haifa, we visited the Roman city of Caesarea.  As usual in Israel, you’ve got layers-upon-layers of antiquity: Philistine, Muslim, Roman, Crusader, Jew…cheek-to-jowl.  At sunset on the Mediterranean, I appreciated the Roman aqueducts but what I’ll remember is that there they had horse races and, while theretofore they had declared 1st-place winners, at Caesarea they came up with the idea of 2nd and 3rd place finishers.  If ever you’ve come in 2nd or 3rd, you owe the honor to Caesarea!



In Haifa, we visited Congregation Or Hadash, a reform synagogue partnered with Temple Isaiah in Lexington.  I will not repeat what is in our newsletter and local newspaper, but I was moved by the inclusion of children and soldiers in the Shabbat services.  Out of uniform, the soldiers and the children were nearly indistinguishable.  In our culture, soldiers are more isolated and, I believe, this aggravates the trauma and PTSD of military service.  Here at a workshop this Thursday we will welcome vets, clergy, caregivers and families.  Military service is invariably traumatic: my observation is that this is more fully acknowledged in Israel than it is in America.



Haifa is known as a city where Jews and Arabs peacefully co-exist.  After services, we had a potluck supper and I sat with a lovely Jewish family, their military-age daughter and young son.  I asked if they had Arab acquaintances or friends.  “Oh yes,” the wife said,  “Our maid is Arab and she is our friend.”  Recalling our own history, I cringed: when I was young, I heard some of my parent’s friends use the exact same words to describe their relationship with African-American maids and housekeepers.  And while, of course, racism remains in American life, we know as well that things have indeed changed.



Haifa is close to Lebanon and the city has periodically been shelled by Ketusha rockets.  Like every hotel in Israel, the temple has its own bomb shelter with an air filtration system in case of gas attacks.  Day-care children regularly take their naps in the shelter to lessen the trauma in case of actual attack.



After Haifa, we went to Acre (also known as Akko), a UNESCO heritage site with an immense renovated Crusader’s City.  Acre, too, is known as a place where Israeli Jews and Arabs live peaceably; and yet, on Yom Kippur, an Arab driver inadvertently disrupted religious observances and rioting ensued.  Tensions are always a tinderbox.



Nearby we visited the Golan Heights.  With the Jordan River as the border, one hillside was Israel’s and the other Syria’s, until Israel seized the territory in 1967.  Syrian bunkers and anti-tank obstacles remain in evidence.  The Golan remains at issue in the peace negotiations and, interestingly, technological advances in satellite and other surveillance make it less vital that Israel retain these lands and likelier that they may be returned to Syria.



For two nights we stayed in a kibbutz near Tiberias.  If you imagine a small pioneering back-to-the-land commune this was more like a small city where we stayed at a hotel with 200 rooms.  Waiting for our rooms to be ready, Concord’s UU minister Gary Smith and I had a beer at the bar where the bartender wore a sidearm and the fellow on the next stool packed an Uzi. 



Still there is a proud socialist ambience.  Our group was welcomed by an 80-something woman whose bubbliness closely resembled that of Dr. Ruth as she enthusiastically described the Children’s Houses where children live apart from their parents and where “each contributes according to their abilities and each receives according to their needs.”  If you think that life at First Parish requires a high toleration for committee meetings, kibbutz life requires much much more.



While there is agriculture at the kibbutz, its principal income is from furniture-making.  Half of the pews and furniture at modern synagogues worldwide is made at that kibbutz.



Nearby are the Sea of Galilee and many points of interest, particularly to the Christians in our group.  Some took off shoes and socks and waded in the Jordan River and we did take a boat ride on the sea, amidst bad jokes about walking on water.   The Christians were deeply moved by the experience; the Unitarian Universalists enjoyed a very pleasant boat ride.  



One indelible impression is of the crowds of Christian pilgrims from all over the world: African, Asian, European, all colors and languages, nuns in flowing habits as of old.  Pilgrimage is also an industry with its share of theme park schlock, mixed in with spontaneous beautiful singing and profound devotion.  Culturally, religiously and politically, there is sensory-overload everywhere in Israel.  As was said by Mark Twain in the quotation in your order of service, written following his travels in the Holy Land, “Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most cherished traditions of childhood.”



Finally we spent three nights in Jerusalem – visiting sites holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians: the Temple Mount, site of the First and Second Temples, now the third holiest place to Islam – the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque.  We prayed at the Western “wailing” Wall.  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the traditional Catholic site of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial and resurrection (though, in fairness, we also visited the Garden Tomb which Protestants claim as the site of Calvary).   



Twain’s iconoclasm again rang true: “When one stands where the Saviour was crucified,” Twain writes of the Church of Holy Sepulchre, “he finds it all he can do to keep it strictly before his mind that Christ was not crucified in a Catholic Church. He must remind himself every now and then that the great event transpired in the open air, and not in a gloomy, candle-lighted cell in a little corner of a vast church, up-stairs – a small cell all bejeweled and

bespangled with flashy ornamentation, in execrable taste.”



For centuries, the church has been uncomfortably shared by competing orthodox Christians, each controlling a separate alcove: Greeks, Syrians, Romans, Armenians, Copts.  Untrusting of one another, they have entrusted the church keys to a Muslim who sits by the door, opening it in the morning and locking it at night. (Note: a few days after we visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, fist-fights broke out among the squabbling monks, quelled by authorities!)



Throughout our trip we met with Muslims, Christians, and Jews as well as a Druze former member of the Knesset, secular academics, military advisers – including the designer of the oft-infamous security barrier, the wall that divides Israel from the occupied territories, as well as with Palestinians both in Israel and on the West Bank and Bethlehem.   No one was optimistic.  Palestinians, in particular, are – as they were when I was there 20 years ago - embittered and very nearly hopeless. No one spoke of conflict resolution; some spoke of conflict management. 



One of the more hopeful places we visited was the Tantur Institute, an ecumenical Catholic center for research and dialogue.  Often operating in secret and at high levels, the Institute brings together parties in conflict.  Its staff is mixed religiously and ethnically; and its employees are told that they will be fired for only three reasons: sexual harassment, theft, or treating any other person as anything less than a worthy child of God. 



The Institute’s director, an American priest, cautioned us that Americans tend to be a fix-it people.   “If one is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.”  “Not every problem,” he cautioned, “has a solution.”



We spent the first part of our final day in Israel at Yad Vashem, the museum of the Holocaust (more properly called the Shoah…”holocaust” meaning “a complete burning” while Shoah means, more accurately, “an utter catastrophe.”  In an irony of linguistics, the Israeli War of Independence is, in Arabic, referred to as “the Nakba,” the catastrophe.)



Yad Vashem, appropriately, is overwhelming and it would be an injustice to summarize it.  The memorial to the 1.6 million murdered children is framed by rows of unfinished pillars of varied heights, arrayed like the rows of pupils in the class graduation photos that were never to be.



It may seem strange to our ears, but there has been lingering shame among many Jews about the victims and the survivors of the Shoah, a blaming of the victim.  Typically, Jewish heroes have been the resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish paratroopers behind enemy lines and the partisans in the forest.   While there was heroism in the concentration camps, there was also betrayal and cruelty and impossible moral choices forced by terror and fear.  There is a new generation of historians who document the entirety of the many awful truths. 



One of the major exhibits at Yad Vashem documents Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” – 70 years ago tonight – when thousands of Jewish synagogues and businesses were looted and burned by rampaging Nazi mobs across Germany – and nothing was done to stop it and the way was laid for the Shoah to come.  Tonight, in the brief ceremony at 7:00 on our front steps, I will recall the lessons of Kristallnacht that indeed there are four kinds of victims of Kristallnacht: the Jewish victims, of course; but also the perpetrators who themselves were also victims of hate; and the by-standers, those who watched and did nothing; and, last, those who closed their windows and refused to see.  Kristallnacht calls upon all of us to see, to speak up and to act for justice – a call all the more poignant as Bedford continues to experience – and to address - acts of hate and anti-Semitism and prejudice.



Our final stop on our last day in Israel was a hopeful place: Neve Shalom (Oasis of Peace), a mixed Arab-Jewish community outside of Jerusalem where a school was established for children to learn both Hebrew and Arabic and where Arab and Jewish families live side by side, and where skills of dialogue are not only practiced but exported to other parts of Israel.  While we were there, for example, a team from Neve Shalom went to Akko to establish community dialogues where, as I mentioned, there had been recent rioting.  Despite all evidence of its impossibility, there are those Jews and Palestinians, Arabs and Israelis, who are practice hopefulness and are committed to peace and reconciliation.



It all reminds me of a Hasidic story from the Shoah with which I’ll conclude.   It’s said that, somewhere in the Ukraine there was a concentration camp where, one day, all the Jews were summoned to the side of a large pit filled with dead bodies.  The guards instructed the Jews to jump across the impossibly wide mouth of the pit.   Those who could safely leap to the other side, they were told, would be allowed to live while those who fell in would get what they deserved.



Among the thousands of Jews was Rabbi Israel Spira and his free-thinking skeptical friend.  “Spira, your effort to jump over the pit will be in vain.  We only entertain the guards.”  The Rabbi responded, saying, “No, we cannot give in to death.  If we die, God will welcome us a second later; and so, my friend, we must jump.  It is a sin not to try.” 



At the edge of the abyss, the Rabbi closed his eyes and whispered, “We are jumping!”  And when they opened their eyes, the found themselves standing on the other side of the pit.  “Spira, we are here, we are here, we are alive!” the friend repeated, tears streaming down his face.  “Tell me, Rebbe, how did you do it?”



“I was holding on to the coattails of my father and grand-father and all my ancestors,” said the Rabbi. “But now tell me, my friend, how did you reach the other side of the pit?”  The Rabbi’s friend replied, “I was holding on to you.”



Jews, Muslims and Christians share common ancestors in the land of Palestine, the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob whose name was changed to Israel, the land of struggle.  Together today we and all the world stand again at the edge of an abyss.



To seek peace is to leap across a vast pit filled by broken promises, broken lives and dreams dashed.  The circumstances are nearly inexplicably tragic (please, no explanations inside the church); a hopeful outcome is nearly incomprehensible.



The dream of peace, we nonetheless know, must never die.  There can be – don’t we know this? – almost inexplicably hopeful and unanticipated outcomes.   It is a sin, thus, not to try.