Once again, proof that it’s always dangerous to stereotype. Pope Benedict XVI, the conservative Roman Catholic pontiff I was about to blast for Vatican inquisitions against American sisters (nuns if you will) for activities as mainstream as practicing Reiki, came out this week with an encyclical on the world economy that is literally earth shaking. The radically progressive declaration was the biggest news story of the week, maybe of the year, and almost no one covered it.
Titled Charity in Truth, the encyclical was so radical in its renunciation of prevailing economic wisdom that it made Bush vs. Obama and Olbermann vs. O’Reilly look like locker room squabbles between Ivy League teammates. And almost no one covered it or gave it the weight it deserved.
What did the Pope have to say? The catchphrase of the 144-page document is ethical capitalism and in the words of economics professor Stefano Zamagni, a consultant on the encyclical, the phrase is more than the kind of “sentimental” porridge fed to business school students. According to Zamagni, as reported online by Time/CNN, the Pope believes “that capitalism as such is now effectively ‘obsolete’ and must be replaced by a new form of market economy whose driving force is not the maximization of profits.”
Quoting Benedict directly, the idea most Americans were fed from childhood — that the pursuit of individual profit magically works to the benefit of all — is a falsehood. It is not “ethically neutral,” Benedict writes. “Profit is useful if it serves as a means toward an end. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”
Introducing the long-awaited encyclical on behalf of the Pope, economist Zamagni says, “Capitalism is an old idea, where the market was supposedly morally neutral … where efficiency became an ethos. … If we can instead incorporate the idea of the social element into the economy, the market itself becomes a force for civility.”
So the Pope, the leader of the world’s largest Christian body, has declared our current economic system “obsolete,” and not “ethically” or “morally neutral.” Praise God! How long have we waited for someone from the spiritual realm, someone charged as a truth teller — someone outside the sphere of politics, economics or government — to step forward and speak with forthright courage. Now it has come from one of the most conservative religious leaders we have known, which I suppose gives it even more weight. It is the most dramatic challenge to economic powerbrokers at least since FDR’s New Deal. The Pope steps up and says for the sake of social justice the rule of world capitalism as we know it must end. It’s time for a radically different economic system.
The entire Christian church, itself in danger of becoming obsolete, has needed this moment. Now we should run with it. Jesus never shied away from telling the truth, but the church has. Is it not obvious why this is so? And when Benedict stepped out and declared the emperor naked, isn’t it just as obvious why the mainstream media on both the left and right ignored him and refused to cover the story?
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
By This They Will Know You Are My Disciples
Some six months ago I launched a Friday night coffee house called The Spirit Café. Our tag line is “where all paths come together,” and my desire was to attract people who are spiritually thirsty, whether or not they have a practice of faith. We all know people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” and it was my plan to give them a place to feel spiritual without hitting them between the eyes with whatever it was that drove them away from organized religion, usually sometime in their youth.
I had—and still have—a vision of bringing together people who know there is something beyond us, what many faiths call God and theologian Marcus Borg calls the dimension of “More.” Every practice of religion or spirituality, east or west, recognizes this dimension beyond our mortal limits. That common thread is what separates faith from simple philosophy.
It’s my experience that most people who claim an affinity with Taoism or Buddhism—the two most popular among the eastern faiths admired by westerners—don’t actually practice their faith in an active way. Of course, that’s also true of many Christians. But being the social creatures we humans are, I counted on an innate desire to validate “truth” by sharing it with others. And so I opened the doors of the Spirit Café to any and all who wanted a place to express their sense of spirituality, to say, “Yes, I feel the force of goodness that flows through the universe and it’s flowing in me.” I knew that bringing together individuals in whom a spiritual force was present would increases the flow for all, and each would benefit from the strength of the other.
Not surprisingly, most of the people who come to the Spirit Café are Christians, but they are Christians who feel comfortable sitting next to someone who honors Jesus as a great prophet but sees the Buddha the same way. As I said, the Spirit Café is a place where all paths come together.
I have a purpose in telling this tale beyond describing the Spirit Café experience. When I first launched the Café I sponsored a thorough publicity campaign that included visits to many local churches and news releases to local media outlets. Among those were Christian radio stations. A day before the Café was to open I received a call from a pastor who hosts an interview show on our most conservative Christian radio station. Along with our “all paths” tag line the press release had included words like “inclusive” that tipped him off I was dealing from the same Christian deck he usually played with. He called, purportedly to determine if I might make a good guest for his show, but I think he already had his answer on that. What he wanted was a debate. “Do you mind if we talk awhile?” he asked, “I get lots of opportunities to talk with people who agree with me but not many to talk with someone who doesn’t.”
And so we talked for maybe two hours. He pressed me the whole time with his literalist understanding of scripture and I responded with my comprehensive context approach. “What do you do with this scripture,” he would ask, quoting some stalwart text in his literalist lexicon, and I would respond by trying to help him understand it in the context of Jesus’ mission to open doors to the kingdom and not to close them—especially for those most in need of God’s love.
Finally I began to tire of it all and said, “Pastor Mel, if you decide to have me on your show I promise I won’t come on and deliberately say anything to make your listeners uncomfortable. On the other hand, if you feel I’m not the right messenger for your show, I won’t judge you, I won’t feel you have the love of Jesus in your heart any less than me.” For the first time in two hours I had caught him off guard. That wasn’t my intention, but I could tell he didn’t know how to respond. Finally he said, “Well, that’s big of you.” “Not really,” I replied. “That’s just me doing what Christ calls me to do: opening my arms in love to my brothers and sisters. God bless you pastor,” I concluded. He was quiet for a moment and then replied, “God bless you.” We said goodbye and the conversation ended.
I tell this story because there’s so much pain in the world and so much hunger for spiritual healing. Some, in their honest desire to get it right, will follow paths that by their very exclusiveness run outside of God’s intentions. We should smile on them and assume their good will. My own pastor recently wrote in her column for our local newspaper that God casts the net of love wide enough to take in all of creation, wide enough to take in all people regardless of any of the particulars by which we humans in our limited understanding might define them, such as sexual orientation.
Many churches, denominations and individual Christians in their blindness to God’s true nature still struggle with this issue. Another pastor, at a more conservative church, wrote the newspaper asserting that God’s net had some limitations and one of those is homosexuals. How do we respond? By condemning the condemner? No, God’s net reaches every corner of creation. We respond by opening our arms in love to all our brothers and sisters. “By this,” Jesus said, “they will know you are my disciples.”
I had—and still have—a vision of bringing together people who know there is something beyond us, what many faiths call God and theologian Marcus Borg calls the dimension of “More.” Every practice of religion or spirituality, east or west, recognizes this dimension beyond our mortal limits. That common thread is what separates faith from simple philosophy.
It’s my experience that most people who claim an affinity with Taoism or Buddhism—the two most popular among the eastern faiths admired by westerners—don’t actually practice their faith in an active way. Of course, that’s also true of many Christians. But being the social creatures we humans are, I counted on an innate desire to validate “truth” by sharing it with others. And so I opened the doors of the Spirit Café to any and all who wanted a place to express their sense of spirituality, to say, “Yes, I feel the force of goodness that flows through the universe and it’s flowing in me.” I knew that bringing together individuals in whom a spiritual force was present would increases the flow for all, and each would benefit from the strength of the other.
Not surprisingly, most of the people who come to the Spirit Café are Christians, but they are Christians who feel comfortable sitting next to someone who honors Jesus as a great prophet but sees the Buddha the same way. As I said, the Spirit Café is a place where all paths come together.
I have a purpose in telling this tale beyond describing the Spirit Café experience. When I first launched the Café I sponsored a thorough publicity campaign that included visits to many local churches and news releases to local media outlets. Among those were Christian radio stations. A day before the Café was to open I received a call from a pastor who hosts an interview show on our most conservative Christian radio station. Along with our “all paths” tag line the press release had included words like “inclusive” that tipped him off I was dealing from the same Christian deck he usually played with. He called, purportedly to determine if I might make a good guest for his show, but I think he already had his answer on that. What he wanted was a debate. “Do you mind if we talk awhile?” he asked, “I get lots of opportunities to talk with people who agree with me but not many to talk with someone who doesn’t.”
And so we talked for maybe two hours. He pressed me the whole time with his literalist understanding of scripture and I responded with my comprehensive context approach. “What do you do with this scripture,” he would ask, quoting some stalwart text in his literalist lexicon, and I would respond by trying to help him understand it in the context of Jesus’ mission to open doors to the kingdom and not to close them—especially for those most in need of God’s love.
Finally I began to tire of it all and said, “Pastor Mel, if you decide to have me on your show I promise I won’t come on and deliberately say anything to make your listeners uncomfortable. On the other hand, if you feel I’m not the right messenger for your show, I won’t judge you, I won’t feel you have the love of Jesus in your heart any less than me.” For the first time in two hours I had caught him off guard. That wasn’t my intention, but I could tell he didn’t know how to respond. Finally he said, “Well, that’s big of you.” “Not really,” I replied. “That’s just me doing what Christ calls me to do: opening my arms in love to my brothers and sisters. God bless you pastor,” I concluded. He was quiet for a moment and then replied, “God bless you.” We said goodbye and the conversation ended.
I tell this story because there’s so much pain in the world and so much hunger for spiritual healing. Some, in their honest desire to get it right, will follow paths that by their very exclusiveness run outside of God’s intentions. We should smile on them and assume their good will. My own pastor recently wrote in her column for our local newspaper that God casts the net of love wide enough to take in all of creation, wide enough to take in all people regardless of any of the particulars by which we humans in our limited understanding might define them, such as sexual orientation.
Many churches, denominations and individual Christians in their blindness to God’s true nature still struggle with this issue. Another pastor, at a more conservative church, wrote the newspaper asserting that God’s net had some limitations and one of those is homosexuals. How do we respond? By condemning the condemner? No, God’s net reaches every corner of creation. We respond by opening our arms in love to all our brothers and sisters. “By this,” Jesus said, “they will know you are my disciples.”
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Peace Within Us, Peace Among Us
Imagine this if you will: The Jesus we call Christ could have chosen not to follow a radical path. He could have put on the Parasitic robes, found himself a nice seat in his local synagogue and grown old opening the scriptures to his people. In his village, maybe for a generation or two, people would have recalled what a wonderful Rabbi he had been, so wise, so caring. But we who now call ourselves Christians would have no inkling of who he was. History would show no trace of him. Jesus—just another small town Rabbi who served his people well, then died.
Imagine who we would be. Maybe we would practice some kind of pantheism, worshipping nature. Some might ask “what’s wrong with that?” Maybe we’d all be agnostics. Maybe we’d be chanting “Allah Akbar,” although I’m not sure there’d be an Islam if there hadn’t been Christianity. The God shared by the three great Semitic faiths may have remained the God of the Jews.
Fortunately, Jesus was a man of courage who rejected the conventional for a radical path. He confronted the authorities of his time in the name of the poor and oppressed, in the name of God’s true way of selfless mercy and compassion, and he was killed for his efforts. In his death we found inspiration for a way of life.
Imagine this: The Buddha decided not to forego the life of luxury he knew as a member of his culture’s aristocratic elite, decided not to make a radical change, decided he would instead try to influence the “system” from within. In his father’s kingdom, maybe for a generation or two, people would have said, “Oh that Prince Siddhartha, wasn’t he a kind man? So much more understanding and selfless than most of the wealthy.” It’s true; he might have helped make things marginally better for awhile, but he would not have left behind the path to meaning we know today as Buddhism.
For all their differences—one a poor boy, the other a prince—Jesus and the Buddha shared this in common: they both felt the breath of the great beyond, the eternal more, God’s breath if you will, blowing on their necks. And they didn’t run from it. They didn’t try to convince themselves God was just trying to cool them off when in fact God was trying to fire them up. They accepted the challenge, radical as it was, and each in his own way set out to make God’s will known in the world.
Radical. For some it’s a frightening word, but it works well to describe either Jesus or the Buddha. Both call us to radical change. Many times people ask or even debate whether the goal of peace is best reached by promoting a peace within each of us or a peace among all of us. Do we project a world of peace, love and compassion by first building such a world within our own hearts, or do we follow the existential path of publicly demanding peace and compassion and then find peace for ourselves in knowing we’ve done what God asks? How people answer often influences which of the two prophets is most appealing. My answer is that the paths are parallel, if not the same path. Choosing between the two is a false choice. We build the worlds of peace within us and peace around us together. Jesus, who in his ministry confronted the power structure in the name of peace and fairness, also taught a simple love between neighbors and the solitude of prayer, a form of meditation. The Buddha, who we think of as encouraging meditation as a path to enlightenment, broke radically from his class and culture after he was exposed to the terrible suffering of the masses. Despite their differences in style, both prophets call for radical departure in the quest to become one with God.
Each of us must decide for ourselves how to begin the journey to peace. What is required is that we journey with radical intentions. And along the way we must nurture both the peace within and the peace among us or our journey will be fruitless.
I was inspired to write about radical intentions by two articles I read this week, the first from the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestine who sent an open letter to President Obama which reads in part: “On Tuesday June 15th, you said of the protests in Iran, ‘When I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, whenever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it is of concern to the American people.’ For the last 13 years, Christian Peacemaker Teams have witnessed the brutal suppression of peaceful dissent here in Palestine. … Every day, Palestinians hold nonviolent demonstrations and defy curfews and closed military zones. They rebuild demolished homes and work their land despite the threat of arrest and attack. Though their struggle is largely ignored by the media, we find inspiration in the way Palestinians are working for justice and peace. …”
The second article was a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times warning that the eager-to-compromise approach of the Obama team on health care reform would likely lead to a measure so watered down as to be useless. Now is the time to do the job once and for all, Krugman argues, and that means showing the courage to act with radical will.
What is the purpose of faith? Why do we seek enlightenment? Is it so we can rest easy in our own cocoons? Study the lives and teachings of Jesus called the Christ and Siddhartha Gautama called the Buddha, and you will see that the purpose is radical change and nothing less than a restoration of a world stripped of its glory by humankind.
Imagine who we would be. Maybe we would practice some kind of pantheism, worshipping nature. Some might ask “what’s wrong with that?” Maybe we’d all be agnostics. Maybe we’d be chanting “Allah Akbar,” although I’m not sure there’d be an Islam if there hadn’t been Christianity. The God shared by the three great Semitic faiths may have remained the God of the Jews.
Fortunately, Jesus was a man of courage who rejected the conventional for a radical path. He confronted the authorities of his time in the name of the poor and oppressed, in the name of God’s true way of selfless mercy and compassion, and he was killed for his efforts. In his death we found inspiration for a way of life.
Imagine this: The Buddha decided not to forego the life of luxury he knew as a member of his culture’s aristocratic elite, decided not to make a radical change, decided he would instead try to influence the “system” from within. In his father’s kingdom, maybe for a generation or two, people would have said, “Oh that Prince Siddhartha, wasn’t he a kind man? So much more understanding and selfless than most of the wealthy.” It’s true; he might have helped make things marginally better for awhile, but he would not have left behind the path to meaning we know today as Buddhism.
For all their differences—one a poor boy, the other a prince—Jesus and the Buddha shared this in common: they both felt the breath of the great beyond, the eternal more, God’s breath if you will, blowing on their necks. And they didn’t run from it. They didn’t try to convince themselves God was just trying to cool them off when in fact God was trying to fire them up. They accepted the challenge, radical as it was, and each in his own way set out to make God’s will known in the world.
Radical. For some it’s a frightening word, but it works well to describe either Jesus or the Buddha. Both call us to radical change. Many times people ask or even debate whether the goal of peace is best reached by promoting a peace within each of us or a peace among all of us. Do we project a world of peace, love and compassion by first building such a world within our own hearts, or do we follow the existential path of publicly demanding peace and compassion and then find peace for ourselves in knowing we’ve done what God asks? How people answer often influences which of the two prophets is most appealing. My answer is that the paths are parallel, if not the same path. Choosing between the two is a false choice. We build the worlds of peace within us and peace around us together. Jesus, who in his ministry confronted the power structure in the name of peace and fairness, also taught a simple love between neighbors and the solitude of prayer, a form of meditation. The Buddha, who we think of as encouraging meditation as a path to enlightenment, broke radically from his class and culture after he was exposed to the terrible suffering of the masses. Despite their differences in style, both prophets call for radical departure in the quest to become one with God.
Each of us must decide for ourselves how to begin the journey to peace. What is required is that we journey with radical intentions. And along the way we must nurture both the peace within and the peace among us or our journey will be fruitless.
I was inspired to write about radical intentions by two articles I read this week, the first from the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestine who sent an open letter to President Obama which reads in part: “On Tuesday June 15th, you said of the protests in Iran, ‘When I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, whenever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it is of concern to the American people.’ For the last 13 years, Christian Peacemaker Teams have witnessed the brutal suppression of peaceful dissent here in Palestine. … Every day, Palestinians hold nonviolent demonstrations and defy curfews and closed military zones. They rebuild demolished homes and work their land despite the threat of arrest and attack. Though their struggle is largely ignored by the media, we find inspiration in the way Palestinians are working for justice and peace. …”
The second article was a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times warning that the eager-to-compromise approach of the Obama team on health care reform would likely lead to a measure so watered down as to be useless. Now is the time to do the job once and for all, Krugman argues, and that means showing the courage to act with radical will.
What is the purpose of faith? Why do we seek enlightenment? Is it so we can rest easy in our own cocoons? Study the lives and teachings of Jesus called the Christ and Siddhartha Gautama called the Buddha, and you will see that the purpose is radical change and nothing less than a restoration of a world stripped of its glory by humankind.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
If We Must Imagine, Why Not Dare to Dream?
Imagine. “… you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.” -- John Lennon. Imagine.
Maybe I am a dreamer. I’ve been accused of it more than once. Maybe those who mock my dream of a better world are the wise ones after all. Maybe. But whether you believe faith can make the world a place of harmony where we “live as one,” or think that dog-eat-dog is human destiny, you can’t escape imagining what the future will bring. If we must plan for the future, why not look toward the light? If we anticipate darkness, darkness surely is what we’ll get.
Last Sunday on Meet the Press former congressman David Bonoir, now a professor of labor studies at Wayne State University, asked the panel and viewers to imagine what the world will look like when we emerge from our current shakeout. It seems certain, with our financial institutions failing and government absorbing unthinkable debt, that radical structural change is coming. We have no choice but to imagine what it will be. If we don’t imagine, others will impose their imagination on us. We people of faith have been letting self-interested unbelievers do this throughout history. This may be our last, best chance to take the wheel.
So I ask you to indulge yourself for an hour or two and do some imagining. If you were “king” or “queen” and could create a new realm, what would it look like? Don’t be fanciful. Be realistic, but don’t be a quitter. Don’t assume powerful interests can stop you. Assume that we live in a genuine democracy where the people are entitled to a society that benefits the majority and not just the elite few. Here’s what I imagine …
Imagine … that contentment prevailed for all people. Imagine anger, jealousy, depression and resentment replaced by feelings of completeness and personal fulfillment; imagine our ability to love the people in our lives unfettered by constant comparisons in which we always seem second best. Imagine the concept of superiority and inferiority, of black hats and white hats, being replaced by the confidence that each has become all we can be in mind, body and spirit. Imagine the relationships that could blossom between people who welcomed each other as equals. It brings a smile to my face.
Imagine … unlearning the habits of subservience and recognizing our ability to connect directly to God’s creative urge. We would no longer, as Jeremiah wrote, need to study religion. Why would we, when we hold in our hearts the intuitive understanding of spiritual truth? And being bathed in creative power, we would feel free to recognize and admire the creative expressions of others. We would all be living in a creative free trade zone. Sorry Hollywood.
Imagine … that all material poverty and scarcity have disappeared. In truth, the scarcity of basic resources we see today is a deliberately created condition. The world holds sufficient resources to clothe, house and feed its people, and to provide medical treatment as needed. Scarcity results from hoarding by some whose insecurity leaves them fearful of not having enough or of being personally insufficient. That fear of inadequacy, perhaps biological or sexual in origin, causes us to hoard material items as a measure of our adequacy. Others, in their desire to be “winners,” feel they must push the majority of men and women into an inferior status. “How can there be winners,” they ask, “if there are no losers?”
Imagine … removing all the guilt and second-guessing from pleasure, and accepting that God built us for pleasure -- ears for the song of the nightingale, eyes for the colors of fall, a nose for the scent of the rose, other parts for … well, you know about those other parts. They are the ones we feel most guilty about, and yet they are no better or worse than any of the pleasures God designed for us. As with all our pleasures, our capacity for sexual pleasure becomes a problem only when transformed from natural gift to object of commerce. Imagine the pleasure Adam and Eve knew in the garden, enjoying the birds and flowers, enjoying each other, walking naked before anyone convinced them they had no right to enjoy life so much. Imagine all that was lost … imagine
Maybe I am a dreamer. I’ve been accused of it more than once. Maybe those who mock my dream of a better world are the wise ones after all. Maybe. But whether you believe faith can make the world a place of harmony where we “live as one,” or think that dog-eat-dog is human destiny, you can’t escape imagining what the future will bring. If we must plan for the future, why not look toward the light? If we anticipate darkness, darkness surely is what we’ll get.
Last Sunday on Meet the Press former congressman David Bonoir, now a professor of labor studies at Wayne State University, asked the panel and viewers to imagine what the world will look like when we emerge from our current shakeout. It seems certain, with our financial institutions failing and government absorbing unthinkable debt, that radical structural change is coming. We have no choice but to imagine what it will be. If we don’t imagine, others will impose their imagination on us. We people of faith have been letting self-interested unbelievers do this throughout history. This may be our last, best chance to take the wheel.
So I ask you to indulge yourself for an hour or two and do some imagining. If you were “king” or “queen” and could create a new realm, what would it look like? Don’t be fanciful. Be realistic, but don’t be a quitter. Don’t assume powerful interests can stop you. Assume that we live in a genuine democracy where the people are entitled to a society that benefits the majority and not just the elite few. Here’s what I imagine …
Imagine … that contentment prevailed for all people. Imagine anger, jealousy, depression and resentment replaced by feelings of completeness and personal fulfillment; imagine our ability to love the people in our lives unfettered by constant comparisons in which we always seem second best. Imagine the concept of superiority and inferiority, of black hats and white hats, being replaced by the confidence that each has become all we can be in mind, body and spirit. Imagine the relationships that could blossom between people who welcomed each other as equals. It brings a smile to my face.
Imagine … unlearning the habits of subservience and recognizing our ability to connect directly to God’s creative urge. We would no longer, as Jeremiah wrote, need to study religion. Why would we, when we hold in our hearts the intuitive understanding of spiritual truth? And being bathed in creative power, we would feel free to recognize and admire the creative expressions of others. We would all be living in a creative free trade zone. Sorry Hollywood.
Imagine … that all material poverty and scarcity have disappeared. In truth, the scarcity of basic resources we see today is a deliberately created condition. The world holds sufficient resources to clothe, house and feed its people, and to provide medical treatment as needed. Scarcity results from hoarding by some whose insecurity leaves them fearful of not having enough or of being personally insufficient. That fear of inadequacy, perhaps biological or sexual in origin, causes us to hoard material items as a measure of our adequacy. Others, in their desire to be “winners,” feel they must push the majority of men and women into an inferior status. “How can there be winners,” they ask, “if there are no losers?”
Imagine … removing all the guilt and second-guessing from pleasure, and accepting that God built us for pleasure -- ears for the song of the nightingale, eyes for the colors of fall, a nose for the scent of the rose, other parts for … well, you know about those other parts. They are the ones we feel most guilty about, and yet they are no better or worse than any of the pleasures God designed for us. As with all our pleasures, our capacity for sexual pleasure becomes a problem only when transformed from natural gift to object of commerce. Imagine the pleasure Adam and Eve knew in the garden, enjoying the birds and flowers, enjoying each other, walking naked before anyone convinced them they had no right to enjoy life so much. Imagine all that was lost … imagine
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Angel Words and the Search for Optimism
We drew angel words on the way out of church last Sunday. Without looking, each of us drew a single word to guide us in the coming year. Funny how it works, everyone seemed to get a word that met their needs. For instance, a young single mother recently laid off from her job received the word “support.” A blind draw, but a perfect match -- you might want to call it a “God thing.”
My word was “contentment.” Strangely enough, I was already telling myself I needed to work on finding more contentment. My recent columns have been confrontational if not pessimistic. Although I prefer to think of them as calls to action, some might picture me as cynical about the state of the world. “Next time you sit down to write,” I told myself, “write something intentionally optimistic.” And then I drew the word contentment. That seals it, I thought, let’s bang out something upbeat about this old world of ours.
So I started racking my mind for an optimistic perspective. Well, we have the new president coming in. Everyone seems real hopeful he’ll turn things around. The news media is pumping up the atmospherics, making comparisons to the Kennedy era with the young children in the White House and all. Smiles all around. Nice pictures. Happy Days. You almost expect to spot Richie and Fonzy rounding the corner. But as soon as those pictures roll off the screen, here comes footage of the Gaza invasion, or more on how Bernie Madoff made off with everyone’s money, or worse yet, our general financial collapse, or housing collapse, or manufacturing collapse and jobs collapse. The only healthy sector of the economy is medical care, and how are we supposed to feel good about having a lot of sick people?
But let’s not give up so easily. There has to be some news to encourage me. We did have a good turnout in church the other day -- I liked that. And those angel cards gave me faith there’s some order to the universe. At the very least, our pastors were taking a concrete step to keep everyone focused. In times like these it’s easy to get disoriented and run around helter-skelter. It wasn’t easy but I managed to come up with a few items that make me hopeful for the future. Here’s my list:
> Disappointment breeds citizen activism. With politics and economics both in disarray, fewer people are willing to sit by as usual and trust our leaders and systems to serve our interests. We should have been taking personal responsibility all along, but better late than never. A popular Democrat in the White House makes no different. We all need to keep standing up on issues of war and peace and economic justice. If we don’t demand it, we won’t get it.
> Worldwide conflicts down in last decade. It might seem hard to believe with all the news of the past eight years, but war historians say that armed conflicts worldwide began trending down in 1989 and continued down through the 1990s. Levels reached their lowest rate since the 1950s. Many long-running wars, including those in Latin America, finally came to an end. Some doubt we can maintain the trend. Maybe they’re right. Let’s hope not.
> Speaking the Truth. In Philip Jenkins’ article Recovering Church History, Christianity Today reported that the Iraq War has decimated Iraq’s Christian church and population. It seems Christians were prominent in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, preferring it because it was avowedly secular. Now, in a nation dominated by Muslim-aligned parties, Christians have found themselves “cleansed” or have been forced to flee the country. Why is this a cause for optimism? Well, Christianity Today is a conservative publication telling a story that has been suppressed by the media in general. Truth is the beginning of healing. Hats off to Christianity Today.
> The recovery package. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman keeps raising the ante. He now says our economic conditions are looking more and more like the beginning of the Great Depression. That may not sound like positive news, but it may take a total emergency to get our leaders to act quickly and decisively in the short term. Many are still refusing to admit the facts of what went wrong because that would argue for permanent changes to patterns of self-interest that caused the crisis.
Well I did my best. Finding causes for optimism is hard these days, but here’s the bottom line: as Christians we’re not allowed to be cynical or to lose hope. We can be honest and we can stand up forcefully for change, but faith requires that we are always hopeful God’s will for the world will prevail. We are called not to despair, but to believe it can happen, and then to go out and see that it does.
My word was “contentment.” Strangely enough, I was already telling myself I needed to work on finding more contentment. My recent columns have been confrontational if not pessimistic. Although I prefer to think of them as calls to action, some might picture me as cynical about the state of the world. “Next time you sit down to write,” I told myself, “write something intentionally optimistic.” And then I drew the word contentment. That seals it, I thought, let’s bang out something upbeat about this old world of ours.
So I started racking my mind for an optimistic perspective. Well, we have the new president coming in. Everyone seems real hopeful he’ll turn things around. The news media is pumping up the atmospherics, making comparisons to the Kennedy era with the young children in the White House and all. Smiles all around. Nice pictures. Happy Days. You almost expect to spot Richie and Fonzy rounding the corner. But as soon as those pictures roll off the screen, here comes footage of the Gaza invasion, or more on how Bernie Madoff made off with everyone’s money, or worse yet, our general financial collapse, or housing collapse, or manufacturing collapse and jobs collapse. The only healthy sector of the economy is medical care, and how are we supposed to feel good about having a lot of sick people?
But let’s not give up so easily. There has to be some news to encourage me. We did have a good turnout in church the other day -- I liked that. And those angel cards gave me faith there’s some order to the universe. At the very least, our pastors were taking a concrete step to keep everyone focused. In times like these it’s easy to get disoriented and run around helter-skelter. It wasn’t easy but I managed to come up with a few items that make me hopeful for the future. Here’s my list:
> Disappointment breeds citizen activism. With politics and economics both in disarray, fewer people are willing to sit by as usual and trust our leaders and systems to serve our interests. We should have been taking personal responsibility all along, but better late than never. A popular Democrat in the White House makes no different. We all need to keep standing up on issues of war and peace and economic justice. If we don’t demand it, we won’t get it.
> Worldwide conflicts down in last decade. It might seem hard to believe with all the news of the past eight years, but war historians say that armed conflicts worldwide began trending down in 1989 and continued down through the 1990s. Levels reached their lowest rate since the 1950s. Many long-running wars, including those in Latin America, finally came to an end. Some doubt we can maintain the trend. Maybe they’re right. Let’s hope not.
> Speaking the Truth. In Philip Jenkins’ article Recovering Church History, Christianity Today reported that the Iraq War has decimated Iraq’s Christian church and population. It seems Christians were prominent in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, preferring it because it was avowedly secular. Now, in a nation dominated by Muslim-aligned parties, Christians have found themselves “cleansed” or have been forced to flee the country. Why is this a cause for optimism? Well, Christianity Today is a conservative publication telling a story that has been suppressed by the media in general. Truth is the beginning of healing. Hats off to Christianity Today.
> The recovery package. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman keeps raising the ante. He now says our economic conditions are looking more and more like the beginning of the Great Depression. That may not sound like positive news, but it may take a total emergency to get our leaders to act quickly and decisively in the short term. Many are still refusing to admit the facts of what went wrong because that would argue for permanent changes to patterns of self-interest that caused the crisis.
Well I did my best. Finding causes for optimism is hard these days, but here’s the bottom line: as Christians we’re not allowed to be cynical or to lose hope. We can be honest and we can stand up forcefully for change, but faith requires that we are always hopeful God’s will for the world will prevail. We are called not to despair, but to believe it can happen, and then to go out and see that it does.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Getting Ready to be Radical in 2009
If you like chaos, if you thrive on wild emotional swings, if you love mind-boggling complexity, then you probably thought 2008 was some kind of fabulous year.
As I look back on the year past and the challenges ahead, I’m left to mumble Paul’s famous question, “What then can we say about these things?”
In a recent online message, the progressive evangelical magazine Sojourners asked its readers what they hope for in 2009, suggesting the following possibilities:
> Peace on earth?
> Spiritual renewal?
> A responsive new government?
> Unity in the church?
> The end of extreme global poverty?
The tone of their message was optimistic, and despite everything that has happened since early November, Sojourners clearly pins its hopes on changes they see coming from the last election:
“A post-election poll we (Sojourners) co-sponsored revealed that a clear majority of evangelicals and Catholics believe a broad political agenda best represents their values. This poll echoes what we hear from Christians across the nation - that we are exhausted by the limitations of having only one or two issues dominate the focus of our politics.”
Sojourners’ “Vote All Your Values” campaign did indeed resonate with many faith voters in the 2008 election and helped shift the balance in Washington, but as jazz singer Esther Phillips observed, “What a Difference a Day Makes.” Since November 4th we have realized the great issues debated in the campaign were not so great compared to those waiting just over the horizon. We've reached one of those moments seen infrequently in human history, a time of turmoil that could produce dramatic positive change, or throw us into a worldwide chaos of economic collapse and wars among people fighting for scarce resources. Just two months after the election, the promises that informed the winning campaign are being exposed as insufficient. Reactionary conservatives are seizing on the new president’s promise of a less virulent form of politics to suggest the failed ideas of the past eight years still have merit. They can’t be allowed to get away with it, and that means seeing the voters’ “call to change” as a sweeping agenda, not just a shift in atmospherics.
Yes, many Christians and Americans in general are exhausted by the political fights of the last several administrations. But under the emerging circumstances, believing we can bring change with a policy of polite mutual acceptance is like believing we can stop a forest fire with a garden hose. Of course, times like these lead many individuals to hunker down and try to protect their personal interests. That’s the garden hose approach. It won’t work and it’s unacceptable for people of faith. Here’s my prescription for how we must change our thinking:
Let the truth run free. Journalism as we once knew it, or think we did, is dead. That may not be bad, but it means we need to work harder to find the truth. The mainstream television media from which most people get their news is not only corporate owned and controlled, it is afraid to ruffle the feathers of powerful political groups. That’s not surprising, since corporate accountability is a fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, not to the facts. Take the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Don’t expect to hear TV interviewers ask Israel’s representatives how a year of closed borders and denying daily necessities to the Gaza Strip may have led the people to finally lash out in frustration. The information is out there on the internet, but you’ll have to look for it. The networks don’t want you to ask that question. The same is true of how Washington and New York insiders are lining up to make personal fortunes on the financial bailout. The New York Times, to its credit, did run a story on the subject, but treated it as nothing to be ashamed of -- just business as usual.
Stop following and start leading. Let’s be honest, our leadership has been a dismal failure. Many people who voted for Barack Obama want to trust him to make changes for the better. I agree he’s a good man, but our mistake is in thinking change should come from the top down. Significant change can come only when government and the culture is pushed to the tipping point by the populace. The civil rights and labor movements are prime examples. Don’t expect success to come easily, but we can start by changing the way we think and live. We may never be more than a small minority, but if we avoid being elitists or isolationists the nation may learn there’s an attractive, more spiritual, alternative to our materialistic me-first culture. And who knows, if people with resources reject the lure of ostentatious living, it may even impact Sojourners’ goal of ending extreme poverty.
Get ready to be radical. Most of us have stood in church or at a praise meeting and sung, “I have decided to follow Jesus,” but few of us have dared to be as radical as Jesus was. I’m not saying we should court martyrdom, and I’m certainly not suggesting the kind of violent revolutions that have often ushered in radical change. But change is coming and we can either steer it or be run over by it. In the discussions of our financial meltdown, some have reluctantly begun to note that we may be witnessing the collapse of economic principles we’ve trusted. This presents a time of both opportunity and of danger. As Christians we should be ready to push for an improved system more in line with God’s values. If we fail to do so, the void may be filled by people of ill intent as it was in Europe in the 1920s and 30s. As the status quo falls away, we must make sure that the arc of history continues to bend toward justice, compassion and equality.
As I look back on the year past and the challenges ahead, I’m left to mumble Paul’s famous question, “What then can we say about these things?”
In a recent online message, the progressive evangelical magazine Sojourners asked its readers what they hope for in 2009, suggesting the following possibilities:
> Peace on earth?
> Spiritual renewal?
> A responsive new government?
> Unity in the church?
> The end of extreme global poverty?
The tone of their message was optimistic, and despite everything that has happened since early November, Sojourners clearly pins its hopes on changes they see coming from the last election:
“A post-election poll we (Sojourners) co-sponsored revealed that a clear majority of evangelicals and Catholics believe a broad political agenda best represents their values. This poll echoes what we hear from Christians across the nation - that we are exhausted by the limitations of having only one or two issues dominate the focus of our politics.”
Sojourners’ “Vote All Your Values” campaign did indeed resonate with many faith voters in the 2008 election and helped shift the balance in Washington, but as jazz singer Esther Phillips observed, “What a Difference a Day Makes.” Since November 4th we have realized the great issues debated in the campaign were not so great compared to those waiting just over the horizon. We've reached one of those moments seen infrequently in human history, a time of turmoil that could produce dramatic positive change, or throw us into a worldwide chaos of economic collapse and wars among people fighting for scarce resources. Just two months after the election, the promises that informed the winning campaign are being exposed as insufficient. Reactionary conservatives are seizing on the new president’s promise of a less virulent form of politics to suggest the failed ideas of the past eight years still have merit. They can’t be allowed to get away with it, and that means seeing the voters’ “call to change” as a sweeping agenda, not just a shift in atmospherics.
Yes, many Christians and Americans in general are exhausted by the political fights of the last several administrations. But under the emerging circumstances, believing we can bring change with a policy of polite mutual acceptance is like believing we can stop a forest fire with a garden hose. Of course, times like these lead many individuals to hunker down and try to protect their personal interests. That’s the garden hose approach. It won’t work and it’s unacceptable for people of faith. Here’s my prescription for how we must change our thinking:
Let the truth run free. Journalism as we once knew it, or think we did, is dead. That may not be bad, but it means we need to work harder to find the truth. The mainstream television media from which most people get their news is not only corporate owned and controlled, it is afraid to ruffle the feathers of powerful political groups. That’s not surprising, since corporate accountability is a fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, not to the facts. Take the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Don’t expect to hear TV interviewers ask Israel’s representatives how a year of closed borders and denying daily necessities to the Gaza Strip may have led the people to finally lash out in frustration. The information is out there on the internet, but you’ll have to look for it. The networks don’t want you to ask that question. The same is true of how Washington and New York insiders are lining up to make personal fortunes on the financial bailout. The New York Times, to its credit, did run a story on the subject, but treated it as nothing to be ashamed of -- just business as usual.
Stop following and start leading. Let’s be honest, our leadership has been a dismal failure. Many people who voted for Barack Obama want to trust him to make changes for the better. I agree he’s a good man, but our mistake is in thinking change should come from the top down. Significant change can come only when government and the culture is pushed to the tipping point by the populace. The civil rights and labor movements are prime examples. Don’t expect success to come easily, but we can start by changing the way we think and live. We may never be more than a small minority, but if we avoid being elitists or isolationists the nation may learn there’s an attractive, more spiritual, alternative to our materialistic me-first culture. And who knows, if people with resources reject the lure of ostentatious living, it may even impact Sojourners’ goal of ending extreme poverty.
Get ready to be radical. Most of us have stood in church or at a praise meeting and sung, “I have decided to follow Jesus,” but few of us have dared to be as radical as Jesus was. I’m not saying we should court martyrdom, and I’m certainly not suggesting the kind of violent revolutions that have often ushered in radical change. But change is coming and we can either steer it or be run over by it. In the discussions of our financial meltdown, some have reluctantly begun to note that we may be witnessing the collapse of economic principles we’ve trusted. This presents a time of both opportunity and of danger. As Christians we should be ready to push for an improved system more in line with God’s values. If we fail to do so, the void may be filled by people of ill intent as it was in Europe in the 1920s and 30s. As the status quo falls away, we must make sure that the arc of history continues to bend toward justice, compassion and equality.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Hope Comes Riding a Pale Horse Called Truth
I intended to write something hopeful for Christmas, whether or not the times warrant it. Then I received the news story reprinted below and realized that if our hopes ever do arrive, they'll come riding on the back of truth. Without truth our hopes for a just world will remain a fairy tale.
I first told of this terrible incident in a blog published December 6. Here's the full story as told by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
Twilight Zone / Non-Jews need not apply
By Gideon Levy
The Israeli national flag flies high, defiant and arrogant over the Palestinian home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This flag has never looked as repulsive as it does in the heart of this Palestinian neighborhood, above the home of a Palestinian family that suddenly lost everything. The head of the house, Mohammed al-Kurd, died 11 days after the eviction. Now his widow lives in a tent. The house is reached via a narrow alley: Here Moshe and Avital Shoham and Emanuel and Yiska Dagan live happily. They are the settlers who managed to expel the Palestinian tenants and take over another outpost, in the heart of East Jerusalem. House after house, the transfer here is especially quiet: The media barely report on these houses of contention.
Israeli greed knows no bounds: It sends its tentacles into the homes of refugees who already experienced, in 1948, the taste of expulsion and evacuation and being left with nothing. Now they are refugees for a second time. Another 27 families here can expect a similar fate, and all under the aegis of the Israeli court system, the lighthouse of justice and the beacon of law, which approves, whitewashes and purifies deceptive and distorted ways of evicting these children of refugees from their homes for the second time. The family keeps, as an eternal souvenir, the keys to the house in Talbieh that was stolen from them and the banana warehouse in Musrara that was taken from them. Now they have another key that opens nothing: the key to the home in Sheikh Jarrah, which they received decades ago from the Jordanian government and the United Nations as compensation for their lost home.
The right of return: The original owners of those houses, the Sephardic Community Committee, has this right forever. There is no judge in Jerusalem who can explain this double standard, this racist right of return for Jews only. Why is the Sephardic Community Committee allowed, and the committee of Palestinians not? What are the tycoons and the politicians who stand behind this hostile takeover thinking to themselves? What is going through the minds of the judges who permitted it? And what about the policemen who violently evicted a sickly man in a wheelchair in the middle of the night, without even letting him remove the contents of his house? And what are the Jews now living in these stolen houses feeling?
White smoke rises from several corners of the empty lot a few steps from the American Colony Hotel. The lot was cleaned this week before Christmas. These are the twig bonfires on which they are baking pita with za'atar, heating coffee and preparing tea for the many guests who have come to visit the new refugee encampment. On Sunday several delegations of Israeli Arabs from the Galilee came to express identification with Fawziya and the 27 families who will probably soon join her in this tent. Israel does not like this encampment, the municipality has already tried to evacuate it. Photographs of refugee tents in the heart of the unified capital are not good for Israeli public relations. Such pictures, which have already been splashed across several international newspapers in recent weeks - of course not in the Israeli press, which turns a blind eye - remind their readers of similar tent camps, those of 1948.
The Arabic poster at the edge of the lot leaves no room for compromise: "Al-Quds [Jerusalem] is Arab, Muslim and Christian." The refreshment tables are full of the best Palestinian cuisine from the Galilee: labaneh, majadera of rice, lentils and onions, baked goods and more, including olive oil from the recent harvest. Guests mill around. Prof. Jamal Amro, former head of the architecture department at Birzeit University, attracts a crowd. The last time we met was in 1999, inside the American Colony. Amro told me then about his torture by Shin Bet security service interrogators, when "Captain Dvir" came to his home in the middle of the night and told him: "Say goodbye to your wife and children."
Amro underwent a terrifying, 25-day interrogation, including 15 consecutive days without sleep and a sack reeking of urine over his head. The Shin Bet tried to recruit him as a collaborator, and as usual all means were fair: "Suck, dog, suck," one of the interrogators told him, "many men are now doing the same thing to your wife." Captain "Martin" placed his foot on Amro's neck and told this professor and architect: "You're like a dog on the floor."
Amro, an impressive, refined man whose son died of cancer just a few days ago, compares Shin Bet scars on his arms with another visitor, a refugee from Lifta who was also tortured.
Print worker Nasser Ghawi, a native of Sheikh Jarrah, relates the story in literary Hebrew: He is 46 and was born in the house now scheduled for eviction. I was born in the house, he emphasizes, not in the hospital.
"The claim of the other side is that they came here 120 years ago, although our houses were built 52 years ago." Ghawi's family fled to Jerusalem from Sarafand (Tzrifin). In 1956 the Jordanian government and the UN Relief and Works Agency built these 28 homes of refuge in Sheikh Jarrah for the families of the new refugees, in exchange for waiving their refugee cards. Nobody can compare with Ghawi when it comes to telling their story in English, especially the events since 1972, five years after the capture of East Jerusalem, when the Israeli court declared them "protected tenants" in the houses that according to the court belong to the Sephardic Community Committee.
Because these families refused to pay rent to the Sephardic Community Committee and to the Committee of the Knesset of Israel - both religious bodies - which transferred the property to the Nahalat Shimon settler association, they were doomed to eviction. Just as with the more famous "House of Contention" in Hebron, there are suspicions of forged documents and biased judgments, Jewish tycoons and MKs who encourage disagreement, a nearby religious site (the grave of the Jewish saint Shimon Hatzadik, which Palestinians say is in fact the grave of a member of the Hijazi family) and nationalist motives - to "create a barrier" between Sheikh Jarrah and the northern Palestinian neighborhoods. But above all, the inequality in the discussion of the right of return conducted in the Israeli justice system cries out from afar.
Whatever the case, Ghawi's family was forced to leave its home in 2002 by court order. In 2006 they won the right to return to it, after drawn-out and expensive legal deliberations. Now they are once again facing eviction. Ghawi's father, Abd al-Fatah, 87, could be sent to prison, like the father of the neighboring Hanun family, who has already spent three months in jail for contempt of court.
The weather is deceptive, one moment sunny, the next moment the skies darken above the row of tents and a cold wind whips against your face. On November 9, the Kurds were evacuated from their home of 52 years, since it was built. Fawziya will never forget that night. "I wish nobody had seen it and nobody had ever experienced it, what I went through that night."
She is 56, a mother of five and grandmother of 16. She was born in the Old City, to which her family fled in 1948 from Talbieh, in West Jerusalem. In 1970 she married Mohammed, a refugee from Jaffa, and moved to his home in Sheikh Jarrah.
Their troubles also began in 1972. Since then she has seen everything. She says MK Benny Elon came to her house a few years ago, offering an enormous sum for the house. A pistol was placed in the yard in an effort to frame her. Dirty diapers were thrown at her doorway. The sewage pipe was blocked by her uninvited neighbors. She was forced to pay their electricity bills when they tapped into her meter. The settlers frequently held noisy parties in what had been her childrens' home. Fawziya says that since their eviction in 2001 there were new settlers every few months - Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia, Yemen, America, in her backyard.
The eviction: "Everything I had experienced until then was nothing compared to that night," Fawziya related. "They knew I had a sick and paralyzed husband." At 3:30 A.M. they heard knocking. She was holding a bedpan for her husband. Several dozen local police and Border Police officers burst in. "What are you doing?" she shouted, and then two police officers grabbed her arms from behind and dragged her outside. She says her husband slipped and fell off the bed. They took her by force into the street, far from the house, and dragged her husband to the neighbor's house.
Everything was left behind, all their belongings. Her husband in pajamas, she in a nightgown, that's all they had. "I asked a policewoman for water and she shouted: 'Shut up!' They were so violent, that's why I'll never forgive them. My husband was crying and they were laughing."
The next night they were already in the white tent. "Had you been in my husband's place, all his life in this house and suddenly in the street, what would you have said? What would you have felt? If you lost a cell phone - how angry you would be, and he lost his home. All his money and his entire life and suddenly he is thrown out into the street."
Mohammed stayed in the tent, but on the 11th day his strength ran out. He was rushed to the French Hospital in East Jerusalem, after refusing to be taken to an Israeli hospital.
"If they don't show any mercy to me in my home, they won't show any mercy in the hospital," he told his wife. A few hours before he died, Mohammed asked Fawziya: "If I'm discharged from the hospital, where will I go?" Fawziya says God took mercy on her husband and took him away. She says she would like to meet Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert, to look them in the eye and ask: "Why did you do this to us? Only because we're Palestinians."
"Close your eyes," she tells me quietly. "What do you see? Darkness. That's what I see." Since the eviction she has not dared to approach her house.
I first told of this terrible incident in a blog published December 6. Here's the full story as told by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
Twilight Zone / Non-Jews need not apply
By Gideon Levy
The Israeli national flag flies high, defiant and arrogant over the Palestinian home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This flag has never looked as repulsive as it does in the heart of this Palestinian neighborhood, above the home of a Palestinian family that suddenly lost everything. The head of the house, Mohammed al-Kurd, died 11 days after the eviction. Now his widow lives in a tent. The house is reached via a narrow alley: Here Moshe and Avital Shoham and Emanuel and Yiska Dagan live happily. They are the settlers who managed to expel the Palestinian tenants and take over another outpost, in the heart of East Jerusalem. House after house, the transfer here is especially quiet: The media barely report on these houses of contention.
Israeli greed knows no bounds: It sends its tentacles into the homes of refugees who already experienced, in 1948, the taste of expulsion and evacuation and being left with nothing. Now they are refugees for a second time. Another 27 families here can expect a similar fate, and all under the aegis of the Israeli court system, the lighthouse of justice and the beacon of law, which approves, whitewashes and purifies deceptive and distorted ways of evicting these children of refugees from their homes for the second time. The family keeps, as an eternal souvenir, the keys to the house in Talbieh that was stolen from them and the banana warehouse in Musrara that was taken from them. Now they have another key that opens nothing: the key to the home in Sheikh Jarrah, which they received decades ago from the Jordanian government and the United Nations as compensation for their lost home.
The right of return: The original owners of those houses, the Sephardic Community Committee, has this right forever. There is no judge in Jerusalem who can explain this double standard, this racist right of return for Jews only. Why is the Sephardic Community Committee allowed, and the committee of Palestinians not? What are the tycoons and the politicians who stand behind this hostile takeover thinking to themselves? What is going through the minds of the judges who permitted it? And what about the policemen who violently evicted a sickly man in a wheelchair in the middle of the night, without even letting him remove the contents of his house? And what are the Jews now living in these stolen houses feeling?
White smoke rises from several corners of the empty lot a few steps from the American Colony Hotel. The lot was cleaned this week before Christmas. These are the twig bonfires on which they are baking pita with za'atar, heating coffee and preparing tea for the many guests who have come to visit the new refugee encampment. On Sunday several delegations of Israeli Arabs from the Galilee came to express identification with Fawziya and the 27 families who will probably soon join her in this tent. Israel does not like this encampment, the municipality has already tried to evacuate it. Photographs of refugee tents in the heart of the unified capital are not good for Israeli public relations. Such pictures, which have already been splashed across several international newspapers in recent weeks - of course not in the Israeli press, which turns a blind eye - remind their readers of similar tent camps, those of 1948.
The Arabic poster at the edge of the lot leaves no room for compromise: "Al-Quds [Jerusalem] is Arab, Muslim and Christian." The refreshment tables are full of the best Palestinian cuisine from the Galilee: labaneh, majadera of rice, lentils and onions, baked goods and more, including olive oil from the recent harvest. Guests mill around. Prof. Jamal Amro, former head of the architecture department at Birzeit University, attracts a crowd. The last time we met was in 1999, inside the American Colony. Amro told me then about his torture by Shin Bet security service interrogators, when "Captain Dvir" came to his home in the middle of the night and told him: "Say goodbye to your wife and children."
Amro underwent a terrifying, 25-day interrogation, including 15 consecutive days without sleep and a sack reeking of urine over his head. The Shin Bet tried to recruit him as a collaborator, and as usual all means were fair: "Suck, dog, suck," one of the interrogators told him, "many men are now doing the same thing to your wife." Captain "Martin" placed his foot on Amro's neck and told this professor and architect: "You're like a dog on the floor."
Amro, an impressive, refined man whose son died of cancer just a few days ago, compares Shin Bet scars on his arms with another visitor, a refugee from Lifta who was also tortured.
Print worker Nasser Ghawi, a native of Sheikh Jarrah, relates the story in literary Hebrew: He is 46 and was born in the house now scheduled for eviction. I was born in the house, he emphasizes, not in the hospital.
"The claim of the other side is that they came here 120 years ago, although our houses were built 52 years ago." Ghawi's family fled to Jerusalem from Sarafand (Tzrifin). In 1956 the Jordanian government and the UN Relief and Works Agency built these 28 homes of refuge in Sheikh Jarrah for the families of the new refugees, in exchange for waiving their refugee cards. Nobody can compare with Ghawi when it comes to telling their story in English, especially the events since 1972, five years after the capture of East Jerusalem, when the Israeli court declared them "protected tenants" in the houses that according to the court belong to the Sephardic Community Committee.
Because these families refused to pay rent to the Sephardic Community Committee and to the Committee of the Knesset of Israel - both religious bodies - which transferred the property to the Nahalat Shimon settler association, they were doomed to eviction. Just as with the more famous "House of Contention" in Hebron, there are suspicions of forged documents and biased judgments, Jewish tycoons and MKs who encourage disagreement, a nearby religious site (the grave of the Jewish saint Shimon Hatzadik, which Palestinians say is in fact the grave of a member of the Hijazi family) and nationalist motives - to "create a barrier" between Sheikh Jarrah and the northern Palestinian neighborhoods. But above all, the inequality in the discussion of the right of return conducted in the Israeli justice system cries out from afar.
Whatever the case, Ghawi's family was forced to leave its home in 2002 by court order. In 2006 they won the right to return to it, after drawn-out and expensive legal deliberations. Now they are once again facing eviction. Ghawi's father, Abd al-Fatah, 87, could be sent to prison, like the father of the neighboring Hanun family, who has already spent three months in jail for contempt of court.
The weather is deceptive, one moment sunny, the next moment the skies darken above the row of tents and a cold wind whips against your face. On November 9, the Kurds were evacuated from their home of 52 years, since it was built. Fawziya will never forget that night. "I wish nobody had seen it and nobody had ever experienced it, what I went through that night."
She is 56, a mother of five and grandmother of 16. She was born in the Old City, to which her family fled in 1948 from Talbieh, in West Jerusalem. In 1970 she married Mohammed, a refugee from Jaffa, and moved to his home in Sheikh Jarrah.
Their troubles also began in 1972. Since then she has seen everything. She says MK Benny Elon came to her house a few years ago, offering an enormous sum for the house. A pistol was placed in the yard in an effort to frame her. Dirty diapers were thrown at her doorway. The sewage pipe was blocked by her uninvited neighbors. She was forced to pay their electricity bills when they tapped into her meter. The settlers frequently held noisy parties in what had been her childrens' home. Fawziya says that since their eviction in 2001 there were new settlers every few months - Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia, Yemen, America, in her backyard.
The eviction: "Everything I had experienced until then was nothing compared to that night," Fawziya related. "They knew I had a sick and paralyzed husband." At 3:30 A.M. they heard knocking. She was holding a bedpan for her husband. Several dozen local police and Border Police officers burst in. "What are you doing?" she shouted, and then two police officers grabbed her arms from behind and dragged her outside. She says her husband slipped and fell off the bed. They took her by force into the street, far from the house, and dragged her husband to the neighbor's house.
Everything was left behind, all their belongings. Her husband in pajamas, she in a nightgown, that's all they had. "I asked a policewoman for water and she shouted: 'Shut up!' They were so violent, that's why I'll never forgive them. My husband was crying and they were laughing."
The next night they were already in the white tent. "Had you been in my husband's place, all his life in this house and suddenly in the street, what would you have said? What would you have felt? If you lost a cell phone - how angry you would be, and he lost his home. All his money and his entire life and suddenly he is thrown out into the street."
Mohammed stayed in the tent, but on the 11th day his strength ran out. He was rushed to the French Hospital in East Jerusalem, after refusing to be taken to an Israeli hospital.
"If they don't show any mercy to me in my home, they won't show any mercy in the hospital," he told his wife. A few hours before he died, Mohammed asked Fawziya: "If I'm discharged from the hospital, where will I go?" Fawziya says God took mercy on her husband and took him away. She says she would like to meet Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert, to look them in the eye and ask: "Why did you do this to us? Only because we're Palestinians."
"Close your eyes," she tells me quietly. "What do you see? Darkness. That's what I see." Since the eviction she has not dared to approach her house.
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