Where we live, there is pain. We
are stunned by unspeakable violent acts and resulting hopelessness.
Before our faces is the
obsolete, assertive way of force and terror by both sides that cannot -- will
not -- work.
Many are fearing in their
depths that we cannot extract our selves and our people from these primitive,
tribal instincts. But we can.
At
It was
Niki says: "Hisham approached me, handed me a tissue and said: "I
lost a friend." "I lost a friend too," I said. And there
we were, facing each other, Palestinian and Jew, each of us trapped in our own
tragedy. And Hisham said, "Then you and I
have to make peace. Because if we can't make peace, how can we expect others
to?"
Niki's story will stay on
the Web at http://traubman.igc.org/roshniki.htm.
We hope it helps.
-- L&L
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Jewish High Holidays in
Listen to Palestinians, to everyone
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When Rabbi Bielfeld
asked me to do the Dvar Torah on the second day of
Rosh Hashanah, I was surprised.
First of all, I had no idea what a Dvar Torah was. I am not exactly what you would call a
devout Jew. I would call myself a confused Jew. I am one of those people the
Rabbi was speaking about on Friday night -- the congregant who only come once a year to shul and
doesn't even know why.
So how does a confused Jew come to
stand before all of you today and deliver the Dvar
Torah? Good question.
I think the answer, strangely
enough, lies in the Torah portion -- Genesis, Chapter 1, Creation. The Rabbi
told me that I should be able to at least mention the Torah portion in my
speech because, and I quote, "it's an easy one".
So I pulled out my personal Torah,
dusted it off, and looked up Genesis, Chapter 1. It begins in a familiar way:
"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth -- the earth being
unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from
God sweeping over the water -- God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was
light."
The Torah talks about Creation. I
would like to talk about Re-Creation. Only once in my life did I get the chance
to start from the very beginning, and I was too young to make much of the
opportunity. But here we are, standing on the edge of another year, on the very
edge of a New Millenium, and still it seems that the
more things change, the more they stay the same. So I think it's a good time to
talk about Re-Creation.
Re-Creation means that we aren't
starting fresh. Whether we like it or not, when we step into the future, our
past will tag along.
We Jews know something about
Re-Creation. We've re-created ourselves over and over, leaving old unfriendly
countries, starting new again in promising lands.
And still our past catches up with
us. New situations seem to bring the same old issues -- anti-semitism, spiritual divisions, moral dilemmas.
And maybe it's like that for us as
individuals, too. No matter how promising the new year
looks, somehow the old issues resurface again and again.
So if our past is going to keep
walking with us, maybe it's time to embrace it as a friend.
With this in mind, I turned back to
the Torah, to the opening sentence of Genesis, Chapter 1, "In the
beginning...". The first image that strikes me is
the image of the void. I can relate to that. I've had sadness in my life, I've
had lonliness, but there is only one time that I have
felt such a profound emptiness, such a sudden darkness in my life, that I knew
I'd found my version of the void.
Nine years ago, I lost a friend, Marnie Kimelman, in a terrorist
attack on a Tel Aviv beach. I'm sure many of you have heard of Marnie. She lived just a few streets away from here, on my
street,
Suffice it to say that nothing in my
childhood prepared me for what happened in
My father said that, sooner or
later, I was probably going to have to come to terms with some of the realities
of the world -- what is commonly termed "growing up" -- but that it
was usually a slow erosion over time, not a sudden
explosion. I think that, regardless of how you lose your faith in the world,
whether it comes from the sudden loss of a loved one, or whether it comes
slowly, as a gradual compromise you make with Life -- regardless, it is hard to
live in this world without faith. And I don't necessarily mean religious faith, I mean any faith, faith in humans, in our
institutions, our governments, our leaders. Faith in our
relationships, in the promise of commitment. Faith
that the world is getting better and not worse, faith in the potential of
change, faith in ourselves.
Sometimes in life we lose faith in
one area, say a business venture doesn't succeed or someone we believed in
disappoints us, and we hold on tighter to our other areas -- our family, our
religion, our friends -- to get us through the
re-building time.
And sometimes, we lose faith in
something so fundamental that everything else just seems to come crashing down.
Then we are alone, and we face such a great emptiness, such a void, that the
thought of re-building seems like an impossible task. How do you fill such an emptiness?
I met an Israeli man named Dr.
Yitzhak Mendolson. He's a psychologist who
specializes in working with Holocaust survivors and victims of terrorist
attacks.
A few years ago, Yitzhak was himself
a victim of what he calls "a very mild terrorist attack". He was shot
while sitting in an outdoor cafe.
What's interesting to me about Dr. Mendolson is that, after the attack, he became even more
actively involved in creating peace.
He began regularly meeting and
talking with Palestinians in order to listen to their stories and further
mutual understanding. It would make sense to me, after being shot, if Dr. Mendolson was more interested in security and less trustful
of peace.
But Dr. Mendolson,
or Yitzhak, didn't see it that way. He decided that the best way to beat
terrorism was to refuse to become, as he puts it, a self-terrorist. Rather than
live in fear, he would make a conscious effort to "humanize" the
enemy. He would use the opportunity of re-creation to widen his understanding
of the world and achieve an even greater inner strength.
Someone said to me once that
"you can't change what other people do but you can change your response to
it". It took me nine years to change my response of grief and anger and
emptiness.
But this year I decided that I was
ready, and not only ready but responsible for the re-creation of my world. And
this realization, for me, was the real growing up, and it can happen at any
age.
This year, I returned to
And not only was our purpose to
listen, but to listen compassionately. Which means listening
without judgement, without deciding whether someone
is right or wrong -- listening only for the person's story.
One particularly hard day, in
Afterwards, when I was recovering in
the hallway, I was approached by Hisham, our
Palestinian guide in
Hisham
approached me, handed me a tissue and said: "I lost a friend."
"I lost a friend too," I said.
And there we were, facing each
other, Palestinian and Jew, each of us trapped in our own tragedy.
And Hisham
said, "Then you and I have to make peace. Because if we can't make peace,
how can we expect others to?"
Small steps.
Small steps in faith. Small steps in
re-building. It helped me to discover that the world is filled with
people who have experienced a void in their lives and are trying desperately to
re-create, any way they can.
Some are using anger, or bitterness,
or violence, because these are the tools they believe are necessary to survive
in this world. And some are using faith because, like it or not, that is what
it takes to believe in the possibilities of this world.
I've decided to use compassion. It
seems to me that compassion is the only human response to a world that is more
and more dehumanizing.
In being compassionate, I was
greeted with compassion. And that changed the way I saw the world.
When I hear the term
"Palestinian terrorists", I now know that I have met many
Palestinians who not only were not terrorists, but who welcomed me -- despite
their own history of suffering -- welcomed me, a Jew, into their homes and
called me "family".
When the newspapers say, "Four
boatloads of Chinese migrants" -- I imagine boarding one of those boats
and sitting down with one of those people, and hearing his or her own story.
That is my new way of understanding
my world and re-creating my beliefs. That is the way I'm filling my void.
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Niki Landau in
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The Compassionate Listening Project of MidEast
Citizen Diplomacy is described on the Web at http://www.mideastdiplomacy.org.
niki.JPG
