Hope and Despair
By Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
This time last week I had already attended a Shabbat morning service, and was back home in the flat Jess and I rented from the World Union of Progressive Judaism on Jerusalem’s King David Street – just ten yards away from the King David Hotel; yes, for 48 hours President Bush was our next door neighbour – but that’s another story… Anyway, everything starts very early in Jerusalem – and ends very, very late in Tel Aviv – which more or less sums up the contrasting cultures of Israel’s two principal cities, just 30 miles apart; one on the shores of the Mediterranean, facing Europe and the West; the other high in the Judean hills, spread over the ‘green line’ that marked the border between Jordan and Israel following the war in 1948, facing East.
But I’m not going to talk about the differences between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem today – nor focus directly on the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the conflict over the border between Israel and the Palestinian territories, which becomes most intense and uncompromising in the holy ‘city of peace’. Instead, I want to spend a few minutes exploring another binary trap that, in my view, helps to explain, at least in part, the incredible ‘oppositions’ manifest, both, in Israel, and between Israel and nascent Palestine, and may – just may – hold the key to understanding, and even unlocking, the deadly embrace between these two peoples.
As many of you will be aware, Israel’s National Anthem is called Ha-Tikvah – ‘The Hope’. What is The Hope? Lih’yot am chofshi b’artzeinu, b’eretz tzion virushalayim – ‘To be a free people in our own land, in the land of Zion and Jerusalem’. The key phrase from Ha-Tikvah doesn’t just express The Hope, between the words spelt out so clearly and intensely, we can sense the despair that fuelled it – the despair of an oppressed people, persecuted for centuries in other people’s lands. Hope and Despair: two sides of the same existential dilemma. When, as an angst-ridden seventeen year-old, I first became passionately indignant about injustice – particularly, about the injustice of racism and poverty – I wrote a short poem that encapsulates the hope-despair dilemma:
You say that I do not see
‘the grey’
I do
But
it is not the fanciful mingling of
‘black and white’
it is the
chasm
between them
the bleak void of
despair.
For me at that time – in some ways, still – the only alternative to despair was hope, or rather: to be belligerently, desperately hopeful was the only way I found of muzzling my despair.
I wasn’t – I’m not – unique. The early Zionist pioneers, who immigrated to the land of their ancestors in flight from persecution were belligerently, desperately hopeful. They were determined to create a new Jewish culture, centred on working the land, and a new Jew: physically strong, forthright, fearless, and adamantly in control of his or her destiny. The new Jew did not flinch from challenges; or cower in the face of danger; and for the new Jew, inspired by the vision of being ‘a free people in our own land’, every obstacle could be overcome.
That was then: the new Jew has become somewhat older, a little worn out from all the exertions involved in becoming ‘a free people in our own land’. But it’s not just that youthful vigour has given way to less agile middle-age, the simple quest articulated by Ha-Tikvah has become much more complicated. Realising The Hope hasn’t just involved building a new society and seeing off hostile aggressors round about. If that had been the case, Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of June 1967 should have meant that the enemies of the Jewish state had finally been defeated – and The Hope could henceforth have been fully realised in earnest.
Instead, with the occupation of the West Bank, Israel was forced to confront the other people in the land. Until 1967, the Palestinians were the unacknowledged victims of Israel’s victory in the 1948 War of Independence against the Arab nations that had attacked the nascent Jewish state. After 1967, with the development of Palestinian militancy, initially, in the form of deadly assaults in the 1970s, through the Intifada, the first uprising of the Palestinian people, in 1987-88, through the initial attempts at brokering peace between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s, through the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000 and the escalation of terrorist attacks, Israel became aware that another people also nurtures the hope of being ‘a free people in our own land’ – the same desperate hope; the same small piece of land.
Two peoples; one land: But if that were the only problem, perhaps reaching an agreement to share it would probably be easier. One of the huge obstacles in the way of an agreement – and there are many – is the hope-despair trap that both peoples are caught up in. Living in Israel for fifteen weeks last year – and returning again for nineteen days at the beginning of this year – it seems that fewer and fewer people – Israeli or Palestinian – seem to be hoping for anything much anymore. A new Peace initiative, supported by the Israeli Prime Minister, the Palestinian President, and the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is underway. But not more than a dozen spectators – mostly in black hats and side-curls, curiously – bothered to stand around King David Street, waiting for a glimpse of President Bush as he dashed around on his recent peace mission – and only about thirty protesters turned up outside the American consulate. Talking to friends, acquaintances and family – not one of them expects anything meaningful at all to emerge.
It’s not just that it’s hard to feel hopeful while hundreds of rockets are being fired from Gaza into Israel, and the Israeli army is busy retaliating hard. It’s not just that it’s almost impossible not to become cynical about the prospects of a mutually agreed peace settlement, while the Israeli government continues to allow Jewish neighbourhoods in Palestinian East Jerusalem to expand, and is tardy in dismantling new illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories. Listening to what people I talked with had to say, reading the Jerusalem Post and the English edition of Haaretz, and watching the various TV news channels, it feels that despair is becoming the prevailing mood.
The despair comes in very different guises: For some, there is simply no way out, so there is little point in trying: both peoples are now trapped in an unbreakable cycle of conflict over their irreconcilable claims. For some, inured to the violence, it’s just a question of patience: waiting, for however long it will take for the other side to give up – or be defeated. For some, flight is the only option: The numbers of Israelis leaving Israel each year now exceeds the numbers making Aliyah – and among the Palestinians, too – especially Christian Palestinians – thousands are fleeing, mostly to the West. In addition to physical flight, people are also fleeing on a psychological level. One of our friends – a seventh generation Israeli – told us that she simply doesn’t think about what’s going on. She just can’t – if she did, she couldn’t continue to live in Israel; it would be too unbearable.
It is unbearable: for many, hope has given way to despair. But that is not the whole story. Somehow, some people manage not to be despairing; perhaps, that’s because their hopes are much more modest. The hope-despair trap seems to hinge on the colossal weight of The Hope – so heavy and huge that when it plummets, it creates an abyss of despair. At the Shabbat morning service I attended last week at Moreshet Yisrael, a conservative synagogue close to where we were staying, there was a Bat Mitzvah. After the Bat Mitzvah girl had chanted the ‘Song of the Sea’ (Exodus 15:1-18) from the parashah B’Shallach – her mother also reading the scroll, before and after her – one of her grandmother’s addressed her in English. Talking about Miriam, and the mid-wives, Shifra and Puah, the older woman concluded her remarks about the important female role-models in the Exodus stories, by reminding her granddaughter about what the Torah says when the daughter of Pharaoh rescues Moses from the bull-rushes: ‘She saw the ark in the midst of the reeds… and she opened it, and saw the child, and, behold, the boy was crying’ (Exodus 2:5-6). She saw – Va-teire: ‘Crying babies make a lot of noise. Wouldn’t you expect it to say that she heard the baby crying first, and then saw the ark?’ the grandmother asked her granddaughter. ‘The Torah is teaching us’, she continued, ‘how important it is to see small things, to pay attention, to notice. Pharaoh’s daughter noticed the ark even though it was hidden in the bull-rushes. That’s what we all have to do – pay attention to what is going on around us, even the little things, and do what needs to be done there and then.’
Fortunately, it seems that that grandmother’s Torah-inspired counsel for her granddaughter is also shared by those engaged in the various co-existence projects, which, although they are mainly small and localised, nevertheless make a significant difference to the lives of the Israelis and Palestinians involved. Unlike the early Zionists who crafted the great Hope of being ‘a free people in our own land’, and unlike those for whom hope has been overtaken by despair, the people who focus on doing daily deeds of justice, have exchanged lofty visions and goals, for the hard, but rewarding task of actually transforming aspects of reality on the ground. Perhaps in this way, piece by piece, they will contribute to creating the context for real peace – for a peaceful and just settlement – so that we may yet see two secure sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, thriving and working co-operatively together. Bimheirah b’yameinu – Speedily in our own day. And Let us say: Amen.
Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue Adat Shalom Verei’ut
26th January 2008/19th Sh’vat 5768
|
