Oświęcim

[New political poem, from my visit to Oświęcim/Auschwitz in June. The parallels between early-stage Nazi concentration camps in Poland and what is happening in American right now are eerie and disturbing. Oświęcim is pronounced something like Ósh-vye(n)-shim, with an initial long O and a nasal „e”; transliterated into German as Auschwitz. ]

 

1.  Entry

 

Shh – all those „sh” sounds –

You are on holy ground,

But transformed into something wholly evil.

 

The guide says, take off your headphones

(You’ve only just put them on),

So you can hear the litany of the names

Of those who died in this place.

 

You’re familiar with many of these:

Jewish names, recognizably, the family names

Of friends and scholars you’ve learned from:

Strauss, Novak, Fisher, Goldstein.

 

Auschwitz is not the true or original name

Of this place, but is instead the German version

Of the Polish original,

Seemingly impossible to pronounce,

But: Slow… it… down: Ósh- vye(n)’- shim,

Now say it again, twice:

Ósh-vye(n)’-shim, Oświęcim.

The town was named centuries ago,

Possibly meaning, “sanctified place”.

 

Eventually, the Polish army built a base here:

Solid military buildings, built to last.

When Poland fell it became

The first of three concentration camps:

Followed by Birkenau and Monowitz,

All part of the nightmare Auschwitz system.

 

 

2. Descent

 

This human hell was manufactured by people

Not so different from you or me;

No external, metaphysical demons need apply.

 

Overseen by watch towers

And double rows of barbed wire,

You learn it now:

How the Nazis graduated step by step

Through successive rings of hell:

 

It started in the usual way:

The construction of enmities,

The consolidation of unearned power.

 

The concentration and internment

Of the designated scapegoats,

Immigrants, dreamers, asylum seekers:

We ourselves in America have previously gone this far,

Putting our Japanese-American neighbors

In the internment camps of World War Two.

 

Ideology following practice,

Do you see how easy it was, step by step?

They decided rebels, Jews and Roma people

Were subhuman, not meriting empathy or humanity.

 

When they found this insufficient

They progressed to death by firing squad

Beginning with the Polish elite,

But this was too messy, too slow, too personal:

It traumatized the soldiers.

 

After that, the SS began to dream large,

Imagining powerful possibilities for killing.

They practiced murder, seeking perfection,

A final solution, a seamless system,

A human machine of brutal efficiency

And petty profit.

 

At this point, an insight came to them:

The insecticide already used to kill

Lice and like vermin, could also be used

To kill human vermin: Just Increase the dose!

 

So they put down the rebellious local Poles,

And moved on to Jews and Roma people.

The Slavs, seen as slightly less subhuman,

Were in the interim to be saved to do the work,

But eventually would be sterilized into extinction.

 

For hours you walk among and through

The silent buildings and imagine the prisoners,

Some crowded immediately into the single

Gas chamber, cleverly designed to use

Body heat to free the poison gas.

 

Others had their deaths delayed a month

Or two or six, worked and eventually

Starved to death or died from typhus

(One fifth died every month);

Who can say if they were lucky or unlucky?

 

You see the rooms of abandoned suitcases:

Twenty-five kilos each allowed;

To concentrate the plunder;

A heart-breaking collection of artificial limbs;

Dishes and children’s toys; a room of eye glasses.

 

But most ghastly is the vast store of women’s hair,

Seven tons, ready to be woven into textiles.

 

Finally, you learn that even with all

This diabolic cleverness, the process failed:

It took too long to incinerate the dead,

Too slow to implement the Final Solution.

 

And so: they decreed an even larger place

Of death: Auschwitz 2 aka Birkenau,

Meaning the place of white birches,

Although no trees, or flowers

Or even grass, existed there, only bare earth.

 

Instead of Oświęcim’s 20 barracks,

At Birkenau they built 174

And would have built more

If the war had gone on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Choice is Ours

 

On a cloudy summer’s afternoon, you see

The remaining gas chamber and crematorium.

Collapsing in on itself, in the process

Of becoming an ancient ruin, global warming

And climate change acting here as executioner.

 

Maybe you wish you could forget

What you’ve seen here this afternoon;

You might sleep better if you did.

 

You fear you might forget what you’ve seen

Here in your mind’s eye

Augmented by empathy and imagination.

You fear your own forgetfulness and denial

Could blind you to the possibility

Of this happening again,

Could blind you to the fact

That it is happening again,

In Gaza and the West Bank,

And in America to trans people

And undocumented workers

And other enemies and critics of the regime.

 

Maybe not yet with firing squad or gas chamber,

But already with starvation, deprivation, terror.

 

Remember: When the people got off the train

And were sorted, casually, with flick of a wrist,

All were sentenced to die:

Some immediately in the gas chambers,

But the rest to be killed just as dead by

Starvation, overwork, deprivation and terror.

The fact that some survived of spite of all that,

Was not part of the plan,

But just a mischance of history.

 

So: Whenever we (and I do mean we)

See ourselves locked in Darwinian competition

With others who differ from us,

Even in tiny ways, real or invented;

Whenever we throw out empathy and compassion

For those who differ from us and make us uncomfortable;

Whenever we dehumanize those we fear or distrust:

 

All these times, places, and ways put us

On the road from Oświęcim, a sanctified place

Of white birchtrees and rushing waters,

To Auschwitz, a bleak place, where human ashes

Are in the air we breathe, in the water we drink,

And beneath our feet in the ground where we stand.

 

 

But we don’t have to take those steps,

We don’t have to walk that road,

To human hell.

Are we wise enough to learn from what

Happened here in Auschwitz?

Is there a road back to Oświęcim,

To the white birches and the Vistula’s rushing waters,

To the sanctity of all human lives?

 

This is the choice in front of us.

But it starts with remembering what happened here.

Let us choose wisely.

 

                        -June-Aug 202

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

The Dark, Long Night

Note: This poem is my first political poem after over 50 years of poetry-writing about personal and psychological processes. It is an attempt to face and address our current political polarization through an act of radical empathy. The opening image of the poem came to me in a dream, which then seeded the rest of the poem, with the two sides portrayed like opposing choruses in an ancient Greek play or in two dialoguing aspects of a person in a piece of psychotherapeutic two-chair work.

  

1. Blow it Up!

In my dream we are milling around

In the torch-lit night,

Full of crowds of people chanting his name,

Playing dice with dictatorship.

 

Democracy is a distant abstraction

Dying a death of despair,

Heedless, unhearing,

Its promises bankrupted by greed

Broken by promises not kept

By wrongs, ancient and modern,

Allowed to fester,

Shot up with the heroin of false hopes.

 

But the people in this party are celebrating,

A carnival atmosphere,

Exciting, full of lights and illusions.

And the people cry out,

In furious jubilation:

 

We have this feeling that

We used to be the center

Of the universe.

But we’ve lost so much;

It hurts so much.

If this is how things are going to be, then:

Blow it up!

 

We’re sick all those fancy people

Looking down on us,

They think they know better than us;

But they know nothing.

Blow it up!

 

He gets us, when no one else does.

He cares about us, when no one does.

He makes us feel good, when no one else does,

And everything else in our life feels like crap.

Blow it up!

 

When everyone hates him

And thinks he’s a dangerous fool,

An autocrat or a narcissist,

We know how he feels.

We are his, and he is ours:

When everyone else looks down on us for loving him,

Blow it up!

 

All I know is: Every year

Is worse than the last.

We’ll never get out of this ever-deepening pit,

And our children: It will be worse for them.

Blow it up!

 

At least he will do something, anything;

He’s going to break things that need to be broken.

So we can rejoice in the chaos and carnage,

Because we have no illusions:

What could be worse than how things have been?

Blow it up!

 

Our only hope of getting

Where we need to be

Is going to be

To keep our faith in him

And to fight his enemies, who are our enemies,

To force the new dawn of OUR new day.

But to get there: First, we must:

Blow it up!

 

 

2. Let’s Raise Each Other Up!

 

This is bad enough,

But I can’t seem to wake up

From this bad dream.

And I have a feeling that

It is going to be

A dark, long night.

 

Yet there is one thing I do know:

I need to look around me,

For friends, for company

To get me through the dark, long night.

And there they are,

In a chorus of still, small voices,

Singing this:

 

We have no illusions:

We know this night is just beginning

And will be dark and long. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

For so long, we’ve lived in the margins

We didn’t have much,

But we did have hope

That things were finally

Turning for the better,

When everyone could say,

Let’s raise each other up!

 

So we look out and see

All these other lonely, different,

Marginalized people, looking back at us,

Hoping for a friend.

Lost and confused,

We don’t know everything,

But at least we know this:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

They get me, and I get them.

They want to know about me

And I want to know about them;

We can care about each other

And help each other feel good

When things feel like crap. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

When the people who are

Going to run things now

Despise us for being woke, or gay, or trans,

Or different, or foreign or undocumented,

And for loving each other,

Wise, each in our own ways,

Let’s raise each other up!

 

It’s scary and painful,

With every year likely

To be worse than the last

In this ever-deepening pit. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

And the other-Others,

Our siblings in pain:

Even those who sing his praises

And hope for their special dawn,

It will be worse for them, also. So:

Let’s raise them up, too!

 

If we join together,

And don’t give in to despair or hate,

And don’t other, each other,

At least we can do something

To raise each other up!

 

Our only hope of getting through this,

Is going to be holding on

To our faith in each other

Through this dark, long night,

Believing in the possibility of dawn,

Where things can be better for all of us,

Than they are now,

If only we don’t forget:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

                                                            (version: November 2024, Pleasanton)

Controversy over Epiphany Quran Reading at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral

Entry for 24 Jan 2017:

TRIGGER WARNING: If you are disturbed by controversy and an open-minded view of religious diversity, please read no further.

St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, my church in Glasgow, has been engulfed in controversy over a reading from the Quran given by a young Islamic woman named Madinah Javed, at the ecumenical Epiphany service on Friday evening, 6 Jan.  Apparently, her proud father posted a video on YouTube of her singing part of the Sura of Maryam, which was reposted by various parties. 

1. Summary of how the controversy unfolded

If like me you are interested in such things and missed what happened, what follows is a summary:

Her 9-minute performance, which is gorgeous, can be found at: http://freewestmedia.com/2017/01/10/quran-reading-in-st-marys-cathedral-in-glasgow/

In response, on 9 Jan, the retired bishop of Rochester (England), Michael Nazir-Ali, posted a statement advising that:

“The authorities of the Scottish Episcopal Church should immediately repudiate this ill-advised invitation and exercise appropriate discipline for those involved.” (http://michaelnazirali.com/articles/app/archive/01-2017/title/in-response-to-the-qur-an-recitation-in-st-mary-s-cathedral-glasgow)

Bishop Nazir-Ali’s posting was then picked up by Christianity Today:

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/bishop.michael.nazir.ali.condemns.koran.reading.at.anglican.cathedral.epiphany.service/103716.htm

And from there, it ended up on the arch-conservative Breitbart News website (previously run by white nationalist Steve Bannon, now chief strategist to Donald Trump), which has since made it a cause celebre: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/01/11/koran-verse-denying-divinity-christ-sung-aloud-scottish-cathedral-service/

The result is that the church’s Facebook page and email accounts have been inundated with thousands of postings, most of them critical, many of them nasty, and few ominously threatening enough to traumatise the staff and to alarm the police.  The church is now being regularly patrolled by the police, who are investigating the threats.

To make matters worse, the Primus (=head bishop) of the Scottish Episcopal Church, David Chillingworth, posted a rather confusing blog entry on 14 Jan, which has been taken as by many as critical of the Quran reading and St Mary’s Provost, Kelvin Holdsworth: “the Scottish Episcopal Church is deeply distressed at the widespread offence which has been caused” (http://www.bishopdavid.net/2017/01/the-koran-reading-in-st-marys-cathedral-glasgow-pisky-anglican/ ).  This posting was also followed by a storm of further abuse.

 

2. The Verses In Question

When we returned to Glasgow and arrived at church on the 15^th, we were startled by the Kelvin’s sermon about the effect these attacks have: http://thurible.net/2017/01/15/sermon-epiphanies-midst-storm/

 

So St Mary’s finds itself at the centre of a controversy over an act of reaching out in friendship to our Muslim brothers and sisters.  How do we understand what has happened here?   I feel particularly touched by this, because I have had a number of Muslim students in and have felt very concerned about the level of cultural disapprobation they have had to deal with.  For example, after 9/11 in the USA, they were doubly traumatised: first, by the terrorists, and, second, by their fellow citizens and even at times by their government. 

Therefore, I began by learning what the Quran actually says about Mary and about Jesus in the passage that was read, Sura 19, verses 16 – 36, and elsewhere (https://quran.com/19 ).

The two verses that have been mentioned as offensive in some news sources are at the end of this selection:

35: It is not [befitting] for Allah to take a son; exalted is He! When He decrees an affair, He only says to it, "Be," and it is. 

36: [Jesus said], "And indeed, Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him. That is a straight path."

Conservative Christians such as Bishop Nazir-Ali have read these verses as denying the divinity of Christ.  However, I don’t think that this is the only possible reading, and it appears than Islamic scholars over the centuries have debated their interpretation. It should also be noted that Christian theologians have argued for 2000 years over the nature of the relationship between Jesus and God; there is a whole field of theology called Christology, after all! 

I’m obviously neither a theologian nor a scholar of Islam, but Bishop Nazir-Ali does point out rather confusingly in passing that what the Quran is denying here actually the need for God to adopt Jesus as his son.  Thus, it seems to me that verse 35 could be read simply as objecting to the whole father-son metaphor: First, God can’t be the biological father of Jesus, because then Mary wouldn’t have been virgin; second, it also doesn’t make sense to think of Jesus as God’s adopted son, because according to Islamic thought, God simply brought Jesus into being in Mary’s womb.  And this doctrine sounds to be like an affirmation that Jesus was of divine origin, being directly created by God.

As for verse 36, isn’t it just a paraphrase of the first part of Jesus’ summary of the Law in Matthew 22:37?:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

Christians don’t read Jesus as saying here that people should worship God instead of him, so why do we have to read the Quran in this way?

Thus, it seems to me that the controversy over this reading has been whipped up on the basis of a particularly slanted view of the text, as if one were looking for any possible offense.

                    

3. Explaining the Controversy

How then do we explain the controversy that has arisen on such a fragile basis?  Here’s what I think:

From the biographical information about Bishop Nazir-Ali (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nazir-Ali ), he appears to be a conservative Anglican who has directly experienced persecution and has previously tangled with the Islamic community in the UK (as well as being publicly opposed to the ordination of actively gay clergy).  It is also clear that he took offense not so much at the content of the reading as the fact that it was read as part of an Epiphany service.  

However, this implies that just the reading of the Quran as part of any Christian service is somehow sacrilegious, which in retrospect appears to be the general position of most of the critics. It is as if the sacred texts of other religions are somehow contaminating or unclean, and would pollute or corrupt Christian worship.  I for one feel that an ecumenical Epiphany service of readings and prayer is more robust than that! 

As for the others who have whipped up this controversy, I think that their interest has little to with St Mary's and a lot to do with trying to induce fear and self-righteous anger in their audience.

4. A Personal View

I think that my real sadness at this outcome stems from the fact that I had hoped that somehow we were past this sort of thing.  Alas, it appears that we are not.

From where I stand, I see all sacred texts as transcribed by inspired but fallible human beings doing their best to hear the still, small Voice of God. God is in there somewhere, but incommensurate with our ability to understand or fully express, so what we get is metaphor and story.  Jesus and his followers found the metaphor of Father and Son to be particularly cogent and useful in their particular context.  However, others at the time found the metaphor to be sacrilegious and crucified Jesus for it.  Later, the Prophet and his followers found it to be confusing and not very useful, and so they found other metaphors.  Instead of the Three Names of the Trinity, they produced lists of Allah’s 99 Names.  Interestingly, the 97^th of these is Al-Warith, The Heir, or The Inheritor of All.

Personally, I want all sacred texts and traditions to be treated with respect when they point toward universal truths and recommend love and understanding of others, as Jesus commanded in the second part of the Summary of the Law: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  This means that they should be carefully and thoughtfully read and discussed in Church, Synagogue, or Mosque, or wherever people gather to contemplate the Ultimate.

At the same time, I want to find the grace in my heart to gently but compassionately pass over them when these same sacred texts and their adherents fall into divisiveness and mean-spirited denigration of other paths toward God. Sometimes when we listen for and think we hear God, what we actually hear is our own hurt and anger speaking. This is applies to my own spiritual tradition as much as it does anybody else’s.  If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I too have my share of judgment and anger with those who hurt me and those I love with their sharp words and actions.  As we used to say in the 1960’s, “God isn't finished with me yet.” 

Focusing on the 2016 US Election Results

Entry for 10 November 2016

Ann Weiser Cornell's latest piece (https://focusingresources.com/2016/11/09/finding-potential-possibility/), which my friend and former student Catherine Cowie has also picked up and commented on, has moved me to try to put into words my experience of this week's US election:

When it finally became clear early yesterday morning (UK time) that Donald Trump was going to be the next US president, against all apparent reason or sense, it took a while to even begin to process my feelings.  Over the next few hours I was able to mostly distract myself as I attended graduation for the recent cohort of our counselling students, proudly applauding them as they walked across the stage in front of me and later posing for photos (me in my garish American academic cap and gown) with the happy graduates.  I welcomed the distraction because it left a part of me free to continue processing what had happened.  What gradually emerged was in Focusing terms a bodily sense of physical injury, as if I had been punched in the middle of my chest. Then, as I stayed with the feeling and talked about it with supportive colleagues, who were also struggling but still able to give me space, I was able to really feel the anger in the blow that had left me feeling wounded. 

Immediately, I recognised this as the same feeling that 9/11 had left me with, and the whole thing began to open up for me:  I felt the anger in this vote, and then I was able to contact the sense of hurt, despair, and longing to be understood behind that anger.  As a therapist I have often accompanied my clients as they explored past their secondary reactive anger to the primary pain and sadness underneath it, and learned from them that even urge to strike out, to gain revenge, hides a longing for empathy: “I am going to hurt you, even if it injures me in the process, because that’s the only way you will ever understand how bad I hurt.”

So I am in mourning this week, like many of us in the privileged, educated elite, because Donald Trump has won and we have lost.  Nevertheless, as much as it pains me to write this, he has earned it, for better or worse: I could even go so far as to say that he deserved to win, because he was the only one who most understand the sense of hurt, brokenness, anger, and, yes, even longing for true understanding that is the core pain of the new minority of poor, struggling, working class people (especially older white males but not just them).  They recognised in him their own sense of injury and anger, understood and reflected back to them, and, grateful, they rewarded him by electing him President. 

Facing this reality is going to require a lot of us: Saying hello to and accepting the parts of us that are scared of what will happen next; supporting each other in honest, positive ways that move us beyond outrage and simply disparaging those with whom we disagree; accessing our hope, creativity and resilience in facing new challenges; and most of all listening to and offering empathy to our hurt, angry brothers and sisters.

Pilgrimage 5: An Emotion-Focused Therapy Interpretation of the Conflict between Israel and Palestine

--> Entry for 18-22 May 2015:

This is a continuation of my previous entry on the history of military occupation in Israel.

During the time we’ve been on pilgrimage in Israel, we’ve learned a lot about its ancient and recent history.  As part of this, I’ve reflected on my many Jewish friends and colleagues, whom I’ve known and loved over the years.  I’ve also read up on the history of the 1967 and 1973 wars here.

And I’ve been mindful of the many parallels between the history of Israel and that of the United States and the British Empire, their relationship to native/indigenous peoples, and my part in that as someone who lives within the privilege of a majority culture. For example, I’m aware of the claim (made in 2008 by the SNP) that in East Glasgow, not far from my office, the average life expectancy for men is lower than it is in Gaza (Channel 4 News, 2008). 

What I’m left with about all this is a sense of mutual tragedy and sadness.  My understanding of the psychological basis for this tragedy has several other sources:

• My work as a psychotherapist for many people with trauma histories, especially over the past 30 years of my practice as an EFT therapist;

• My work with people with social anxiety over the past 8 years;

• The study that my PhD student Robin Hinson and I did in the 1990’s on working with prejudice, which we carried using an experimental one-session EFT protocol for working with “difficult people”;

• Charles Eisenstein’s analysis of the ultimately self-defeating nature of what he calls the agenda of control in Ascent of Humanity (2007); and

• Psychotherapist Al Pesso’s analysis of the roots of terrorism in childhood exposure to narratives of injustice and cultural trauma (which I talked with him about last year in Berlin) (Pesso has developed a form of Empty Chair/Self-Soothing Work for addressing this.)

All of these have given me an acute sense that in some way the Tragedy of Israel and Palestine is something shared and deeply intertwined. 

Here is what is emerging for me: The peoples of Israel and Palestine are locked together in a deep, shared history of mutual trauma and injustice, leaving them feeling broken, violated, distrustful, afraid and angry.   Over millennia, each has suffered repeatedly at the other’s hands; and these events have been lovingly preserved and rehearsed from generation unto generation, without understanding or forgiveness. 

For example, in the case of Israel, there is very much a sense of national trauma going back for thousands of years, but reawakened in the 20^th century, first by the Holocaust and then strongly reinforced by the 1967 and 1973 wars.  Human beings are powerfully evolved to learn rapidly and often rigidly from situations in which their very existence is threatened.  One-trial learning is generally sufficient in this case to lead us to put strong protective measures in place so that such threats will “never again” happen.  In the case of Israel, such learning has happened repeatedly in living memory.

These traumatic events and the associated vulnerability have resulted in victims becoming perpetrators, over and over again (as I noted in my previous entry), thus creating a cycle of abuse, which I am hypothesising may have led to a deep sense of emotional and spiritual impurity, whose source is a vague sense of guilt that has been pushed out of awareness.

Instead, eternal vigilance and readiness to take offense have been the rule.  Each feels threatened at an existential level by the other, and seeks to both make themselves safe and to claim and control what they feel is theirs.  The more they seek to do this, the more they threaten the Other, causing them to become more vigilant and to try to gain more control over the Other.  It is this constant guarding and seeking control that is the heart of the problem, because it continually makes the problem worse by threatening the Other. 

In Emotion-Focused Therapy, with both individual and couples, such negative cycles between partners or between parts of the self are common and feel wholly intractable to those involved (and often to the therapist).  However, according to EFT “the only way out is through”:

• First, we offer a situation in which all parts of the self (or both members of the couple) feel deeply and credibly understood and validated. 

• Second, this enables the person or persons to slow down and become more deeply aware of their core painful, stuck emotions.  In this case, we have among other emotions, lingering anger at old injuries and fear of the Other as dangerous.  These emotions have to be understood and accepted, but by itself this is not enough to change anything. 

• Third, with seemingly intractable problems, it appears to be important to spend time developing an appreciation for the cost that maintaining a stand based on these emotions has had for the person. (I thank Laco Timulak for making this point explicit.) 

• Fourth, for emotional transformation to take place, there must be another step, to identify alternative, more adaptive emotions.  In this case, these include: curiosity about the Other and what they may have to offer; sadness at disconnection and separation; realistic fear at the long term consequences of one’s own intransigence; genuine empathy and compassion for the Other’s suffering; and perhaps even appropriate, motivating guilt for the role that one has played in the bringing about or allowing the Other’s suffering. 

• Fifth, by creating an atmosphere of mutual openness, this emotional transformation makes it possible to begin a process of negotiation and resolution. 

I’m not saying that such a process is easy; it isn’t.  But I’m not sure that I see any alternative other than despair and giving in to a continuing cycle of traumatising interactions, which only perpetuate and deepen the problem.

Wall Art, Wall of Separation, Bethlehem

References

Channel 4 News. (2008).  FactCheck: Glasgow worse than Gaza?  Retrieved 21 May 2015, from: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/health/factcheck+glasgow+worse+than+gaza/2320267.html

            Eisenstein, C. (2007). The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self.  Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Pilgrimage 4: Military Occupation in Israel: Ancient and Modern

--> Entry for 17-20 May 2015:

Military conquest and occupation is a constant theme on this pilgrimage: It’s easiest to start with the Romans, safely removed by a couple of millennia. There were other military conquerors before the Romans: Babylonians, Persians, Greeks among them; and others came later, including early Moslem invaders, Christian Crusaders, Ottoman Turks, and the British. 

However, it’s the Roman presence that we can see most clearly today. We see this everywhere in both classical Roman and later Byzantine incarnations: Lots of ruins with their architecture and mosaics; and in place names, like Tiberius, where we stayed for four days.  We see the heavy Roman footprint strikingly at Masada, where the Romans successfully besieged a group of Hebrew Zealots holed up in Herod’s fortified desert palace, and also in Jerusalem itself, where the Herod the Great's Second Temple is conspicuous by its absence on the Temple Mount, having been torn down by the Romans in 70 CE.  

The Roman military occupation created a whole set of complex dynamics for Jewish people of that time, especially around how much and in what ways they should collaborate/ cooperate in the face of overwhelming force, as opposed to rebelling.  In Sepphoris we saw evidence of many centuries of hellenisation and living peacefully under Roman rule, even while rebellion raged elsewhere in Judea.  And of course several Jewish rebellions were put down brutally and decisively by the Romans, eventually leading to the diaspora of the Jewish people.

But the Jewish nation has also repeatedly played the role of military conqueror and occupier. In the first instance, they originally conquered the even more ancient Canaanite peoples who preceded them in what is today Israel, the West Bank and Jordan.  For example, last week we visited Tel Dan, the ruins of the city of Dan, far in the north, near Mount Hermon.  As described in the Bible, this was  a peaceful, prosperous place, known variously as either Laish or Leshem, before the Israelites conquered and burned it to the ground and then built their own city on the spot. 

Checkpoint, Wall of Separation, Bethlehem

As we’ve travelled through modern Israel over the past week we’ve passed through the occupied West Bank three times, visiting Jericho, Nablus and Bethany.  Along the way we’ve passed through military checkpoints, seen roadblocks, following the course of the Wall of Separation, as well as the incursion of settlements into the disputed territory.   We’ve seen the Bedouin shanty towns in the South and followed recent news stories about whether Palestinians were going to be forced to travel on segregated buses to and from the West Bank.  We’ve talked with Palestinian Christians and heard how difficult it is for them to live and to maintain hope in the face of the intractable difficulties they and their children face.

Over the years, I’ve worked with many people who were traumatised or bullied earlier in their lives.  As a result, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the worst, most morally corrosive things that can happen to someone who has been badly mistreated is for them to find themselves in the roll of the perpetrator of similar abuse on others.  And yet it seems to me that this is exactly the situation with Israel today, and has to be as harmful to the Jewish people of Israel as it is to the Palestinians, in or out of the West Bank and Gaza.

Pilgrimage 2: It’s All About the Water

--> Entry for 13 May 2015:

We don’t start in Jerusalem:  That’s where the story ends. 

Instead, we find ourselves in the middle of the Wilderness, or in this case the modern Israeli city of Arad, not far from the Dead Sea, an old stopping place or encampment.  We arrive in the middle of the night, after a long journey, as if landing on new planet.  The rooms are plain, almost Spartan.  Black Ethiopean jews, or jet-lagged American teenaged tourists, sit outside looking at their smartphones as we collect our luggage.  There are tuna sandwiches in our room.  Another 4 hour night.

We spend the next 2 days exploring parts of this Wilderness: 

We begin at Ein Avdat, descending by switch-backs into a stunning canyon of light-coloured rock. There we imagine Moses facing insurrection and striking one of these rocks with his staff to produce a spring of life-giving water.  Water becomes the main theme for these two days, as we are shown ancient water water systems for channelling run-off from rare rainstorms and flash floods into underground cisterns in Be’ersheva (on the southern border of ancient Israel near the Negev desert) and Masada (Herod’s towering hill-fortress in the Judean desert, overlooking the Dead Sea).  Along the way on the first day we visit the ancient Nabatean city of Avdat (which didn’t have enough water), before having lunch at a kibbutz, which has its own pond of water out front like an advertisement of plenty for all to see.  On the second day we also visit Jericho, touted as the world’s oldest city, founded next to natural spring.  Water is power.

Ritual Bath, Qumran

But the water issue really comes home for us at Qumran, the site of the ancient ascetic Essene community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.  This whole community was organised around twice-daily purification rituals, involving full immersion in water, so we see 6 or 8 different purification pools, water channels feeding them from multiple underground cisterns.  It’s as if the rarity of water eventually led to a kind of obsession with washing and by extension purification of all evil thoughts. 

We know where such obsessions end: The more you clean, the more your skin itches, making you feel dirtier, and thus the more you have to clean. Maybe you even pick up a skin disease from the communal bath.  Next perhaps you start hoarding water, or stealing it from others.  People notice the conspicuous consumption of water; there are water shortages and maybe even “water wars”. Or maybe you are prone to allergies because your house was too clean or you weren’t allowed to play in the dirt, so that your immune system didn’t develop properly.  Or your excessive use of antibiotics leads to a C diff infection.  Ultimately, your hunger for physical or ideological purity isolates you from others or narrows your repertoire of adaptive emotional and behavioural reactions, which leads to fundamentalism and more bad things.

Floating in the Dead Sea

To cleanse ourselves of this cleaning obsession we instead go down to Dead Sea for a swim.  We initially were quite leery of the idea of doing this, because the Dead Sea is where all the raw sewage from the Palestinian-controlled West Bank goes.  On the other hand, the Dead Sea is so salty that it’s hard to know what sort of bug might be able to survive that, so we allow ourselves to be swept up in a wave of general enthusiasm, and go cavorting around in the black mud and super-buoyant waters.  I guess that we are not cut out to be Essenes, but we are left feeling itchy and in need of a good shower…