A group gathered last month to reflect on how to navigate our fiercely polarised culture. We each had blank pages on which we wrote different binaries we were encountering in our varied contexts. My Body My Choice/Iceland aims to eradicate Down’s Syndrome. Western society is institutionally racist/Critical Race Theory has created a culture of oppressive orthodoxy. The vaccine mandate served the common good/Restrictions for the unvaccinated infringed human rights. Hate speech must be outlawed because it causes harm/Without free speech our democracy is in peril.
We stood in the round and each put our different pages on the floor between us, speaking out the separatist positions we had chosen to draw attention to. I was taken aback at how uncomfortable this exercise was, and how exposed I felt. We gazed awkwardly at the pages at our feet, mindful of all the stories of real people contained in the brief outlines, conscious of the pain in the room represented by the bald phrases. We longed for solutions and strategies that would lead to consensus and understanding but there were none. All we could do was hold these entrenched positions respectfully before God, and offer them up in prayer.
My friend Franceska remarked afterwards how she had been wondering what the point of union between black and white is. Just to achieve some sort of grey? Franceska (autistic and proud) doesn’t like grey and she imagined the diversity of stripes, spilling over into each other, coming from and heading in all different directions.
I am put in mind of Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, a New York Zionist who made aliyah to Israel in the 1970s and became a settler in the West Bank (Judea/Samaria for him). He tells how he had friends from the States visiting, and how they picked up a couple of hitch-hikers one afternoon. One of his American visitors commented how no-one in the States picks up hitch-hikers any more. Schlesinger replied “Here in Israel, we pick up any person who puts out their finger for a ride”.
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As soon as these words had left his mouth, Schlesinger knew that he was not speaking the truth. He realised that he would never give an Arab a lift, only a Jew. Could this mean that he didn’t consider Palestinians to be persons? It dawned on him that he didn’t actually know a single Palestinian personally, other than as employees where he lived, escorted daily in and out under armed guard. So he set out to rectify this.
Finding a Palestinian whom he could get to know was enormously difficult. They shared the same land and lived right next to each other but their lives were absolutely segregated. At last a meeting was arranged, and for the very first time he was exposed first-hand to the Palestinian experience of the founding of the state of Israel. He listened to the story of how his people’s homecoming to the sanctuary of their ancestral land had meant the suffering and exile of the Palestinian people, their separation from the land in which they, too, had deep and passionate roots. It utterly changed the way he saw his world, and he went on to have his own story honoured and believed. Navigating this deep listening is precarious and costly, not least because the balance of power (like most situations of conflict) is not equal.
One land, two peoples, two fully overlapping stories, both true. In partnership with Ali Abu Awwad, a prominent Palestinian peace activist whose brother had been killed by the Israeli military, Schlesinger founded Roots, a grass-roots community seeking to address the “hubris of exclusivity”, honouring and recognising instead the full identities of both Jews and Palestinians and their deep roots in the land of Israel/Palestine.
There is a Zen proverb: “Beneath all violent anger is fear. Beneath all fear is love.” Can we find ways to treasure what our enemy holds dear? Can we be the faithful guardians of our enemies’ stories?